Where to find your answers to questions about Native Americans--Just in time for Indigenous People's Day (which hopefully one day will officially replace "Columbus Day" on the calendar)

Native American traditions and stories are a challenge for outsiders to learn in detail because most of them have been passed down orally within the Native community, primarily through storytelling by elders to the youth—not written down in books or on Web pages that can be Googled.

That being said, there are a few good books and articles I’ve come across that give some authentic narratives about Native American experience, if not a complete picture.

Two particular books I recommend are Donald Fixico’s The Urban Indian Experience in America and the Michigan State University School of Journalism’s guide 100 Questions, 500 Nations: A Guide to Native America, both of which provide authentic accounts of contemporary Native American experience.

Fixico’s book focuses primarily on the experience and challenges of Native people who have left the reservations to try and “make it” in the wild world of the mainstream United States. The MSU’s guide, published by Read the Spirit Books, features common questions—particularly those based on common misconceptions—with answers that the student-journalists got from Native Americans themselves.

Whatever books you decide to read, I do highly recommend you stay away from encyclopedia-style compilations and coffee-table books about Native Americans. Such books tend to be written by outsiders with little first-hand input from the people they are observing, and who don’t bother to submit their work to any cultural insiders for fact-checking and verification of if their presentation leaves the writer’s own cultural biases out of it.

A book about Native Americans as viewed and interpreted by, for example, a Catholic missionary or a mainstream white anthropologist who doesn’t even have so much as a single Native American friend, would be essentially useless, unless what you really want to know is how Catholic missionaries or white anthropologists view and think about Native Americans.

In addition to books, I’ve also come across some local news articles that are worth reading, such as this one and this one, both of which feature local Native community leader Sue Franklin as an interviewee. And, of course, no discussion of Native American contemporary experience is complete without the authoritative national powwow listing at www.Powwows.com.

Regardless of how authentic a book’s or article’s voices, however, the best way to develop a better understanding of people who are still alive and readily accessible to us in our communities—after all, the majority of Native Americans today live in the mainstream society, not on reservations—is to actually interact with them in person. The community-education programming of local intercultural and interfaith organizations such as the Interfaith Leadership Council, as well as local Native American organizations (some of which I list in my post here) are great resources for finding out where and how you can find opportunities for connecting with Native people.

I was fortunate to have one such opportunity last April at the IFLC’s “Ask A Native American” presentation at Unity of Royal Oak in April, where I learned some basics from presenters Sue and Chris Franklin from their specific tribes, as well as in general some of what makes Native religions and cultures distinctive from what the mainstream usually limits those two concepts to.

During the question-and-answer period following the Franklins’ presentations, Ric Beattie, Spiritual Leader & Pastor of Unity of Royal Oak, asked them for the most important lesson that mainstream (i.e., “white”) people need to learn to become better allies to Native American people.

Sue responded that her tribe’s Teachings of the Seven Grandfathers are a great place to start—particularly “respect,” she said.

The teachings of the Seven Grandfathers are bravery, humility, love, respect, wisdom, truth, and honesty—universal truths that are embedded in all religious traditions (regardless of the degree to which they are or are not currently practiced by people following those traditions).

Despite these ideas being common to all the major world religions, how individual cultures conceptualize and practice these virtues can vary, and sometimes may not even be recognizable as such from one culture to the next. For example, a lot of what people think is suitably “respectful,” “brave,” “wise,” “humble,” or “loving” in their own culture’s current practice can be perceived as less than or even opposite of that to another culture.

We see plenty of examples of this every day, from the mainstream news to private conversations in which some “good-intentioned” person asks a question that is just so ignorant or high-handed that it is incredibly offensive to the listener, when the speaker thought she or he was just being “honest” or that they were being “brave” in daring to ask such a question, and then is too defensive when called out on it to really be receptive to learning a more respectful, loving, or brave way to communicate with people whose ways are unlike their own.

Our concepts of virtues and what is socially and morally acceptable also varies when we take into account that some Native tribes are matriarchal (led by women), some patriarchal (led by men), and some more egalitarian (now if not historically). As we are all so painfully aware, what is considered good or just or moral in a misogynistically male-dominated, materialistic, militaristic culture like what the United States is struggling with so much right now is very different from what would be considered virtuous by a community in which women have half or most of the say in passing legal and moral judgment, and in determining how the society responds to threats of violence from outside its borders.

Speaking of militarism, I found it particularly fascinating that even military service has a different connotation and purpose for Native men than it does for mainstream North American men. Native Americans have always been heavily represented in the U.S. military, which for them more or less equates with the role of “warrior” in centuries past. To Native people, however, a “warrior” (or “soldier” in today’s language) is not someone who finds glory in being deployed on domestic or foreign soil to conquer some other people who are perceived as a threat or who have resources that they should be made to feel obligated to make available to the more powerful and high-maintenance nations. In Native custom, a warrior’s role, then as now, is to protect women and children, not to fight nation to nation for the sake of one side winning and the other side losing.

There is so much more I could say based on not just this presentation but on the years I was actively engaged with southeastern Michigan’s urban Native American community, and I may yet present more of this in the future. For now, I’m going to turn my spotlight next onto the contemporary Jewish community, based on my reading of Debra Darvick’s book This Jewish Life.


_____
Image: Native Dancer from Cirque du Soleil's "Totem," by Karla Joy Huber, 2012; Prismacolor marker, Sharpie marker, white gel pen

Please do not assume anything about the Native experience -- Even innocent assumptions can be incredibly harmful to disenfranchised communities that are struggling to have their real voices heard

Most of the mainstream attention on issues of race today revolves around immigrants and the African-American experience. While this is obviously understandable and necessary, there is still a great need for bringing the concerns, history, and voices of Native Americans into the current public discourse about race-related social justice in North America.

Previously, I explained what I learned from Sue and Chris Franklin about why Native people are still for the most part under the mainstream radar. After that, I described in more detail some of what these two community leaders shared about the contemporary traumatic experiences of Native people, as well as some basics regarding Native American culture, spirituality and worldviews.

Following up on that, the logical next point to make is that the plight of contemporary Native people is not as simple as just “blaming” mainstream North American society for what it did to them.

For twenty years, in many if not most of the social, faith, and work groups I’ve been part of, I have been the most Native person in the entire group. I thus became the “token” who was looked to for any answer I could give to their questions about Native Americans—ranging from the most respectfully innocent to the most stereotypically insulting.

While I appreciate that people want to know answers about Native people, and obviously not all such people are bigots who intentionally keep Native people out of their communities, I’ve always found this situation uncomfortable. It really says a lot about the social disenfranchisement of Native people that an ethnically mostly-white person, who was raised white, and who has ancestry and an affinity for Native culture that she has to date only explored through connection with the local Native community consisting of tribes that her ancestors did not come from, is the most exposure that these people have had to anything or anyone with any direct and authentic Native American influence in their life.

For anything other than the most basic inquiries, I have been transparent with such people that I am not actually the best or most appropriate person to answer such questions. That being the case, they then naturally ask, What about books?

There are a lot of books out there about Native Americans, most of which are written from outsider perspectives. One of the biggest challenges for learning about Native American teachings from authentic sources is that most of the social, cultural, and spiritual wisdom has been passed down orally, not compiled into books that would serve as the Native American equivalents of Scripture. The languages, too, are oral: most of them have never been written down in any form. 

This being the case, I tell people that the best way to learn about Native Americans and their cultures is and always has been from Native Americans themselves—through forming authentic friendships with Native people, through attending events hosted by tribal members that are open to visitors, and through programming such as the Interfaith Leadership Council’s “Ask A…” series event that Sue and Chris Franklin presented at in April.

In the absence of any immediate opportunities for such first-hand experiences, my advice to such information-seekers is to please not assume anything about the Native experience. Even innocent misconceptions can be incredibly harmful to disenfranchised communities that are struggling to have their real voices heard, and whose attempts are frequently strangled by people who think they are being inclusive or helpful simply because their “intentions are good.”

I wrote previously that, when it comes to removing obstacles to true diversity-and-inclusion-supporting dialogue, our intentions are often irrelevant compared with the impact our words and actions have on the people we think we are accommodating. 

Previously I stated that this was going to be a three-post series, and now I realize I do still have one more. Now that I’ve shared with you about some of the biggest challenges to social justice that Native Americans still face today, in my fourth and final post I’ll describe some examples of how Native culture is still very much alive and thriving today in many ways that predate (or have only been somewhat altered since) the influence of the dominant society that evolved out of the cultures of European settlers. 

_____
Image: "Fancy Shawl Dancer #9" by Karla Joy Huber, early 2000s; Marker, crayon, colored pencil

If we really think about what we usually mean when we say "primitive," Native Americans are far less primitive than what passes for normal in today's mainstream

Last week I wrote about some of the biggest challenges facing contemporary Native Americans, especially those living in urban communities in the midst of the larger North American mainstream.

At their “Ask a Native American” talk hosted by the Interfaith Leadership Council, Sue and Chris Franklin also gave some personal narratives and basic teachings of their tribes that help demonstrate why the heritage of Native people is worth fighting for and preserving despite these heartbreaking challenges.

One of the many fascinating takeaways I got from their presentation was the idea of “blood memory.” As Sue described it, tribal members inherit memory passed down through the generations, which can still be seen in the intuitive behaviors of youth in the Native community who do certain things without having to be taught—such as respecting and assisting elders.

Outside the Native community, any kind of blood memory has long since been bred out of most people. If a person represents two or more ethnicities, as I do, whose blood memory would we have? Probably no one’s, because there’s no way for potentially-conflicting teachings to not cancel each other out at some point.

This is why mainstream North Americans can’t relate to (and many have trouble believing) in this phenomenon, and why they don’t understand why trying to forcibly mainstream Native children is so traumatic. (Imagine a psychic, emotional, and spiritual equivalent of cutting off their feet and telling them to learn how to walk as well as before on just the bare ends of their ankles. Yes, it really is that bad; I’m not just being overly dramatic.)

There are a lot of “romantic” stereotypes about Native Americans, most of which include depictions of them as “primitive” and worshiping trees and animals as some form of nature-based paganism.

The truth is that Native people are monotheist, just in a different way than Christians, Muslims, and Jews are. Native people’s reverence for different aspects of the One Creator, by different names, is more comparable to how Hindus (another group often misunderstood to be pagan) worship. The traditional Anishinabek greeting “Boojoo”—which loosely translates as “Are you here?”—is even reminiscent of the concept of “Namaste,” which is acknowledging the presence of the divine in others we meet.

Native people view Creator more as The Ancestor, and humanity as Creator’s grandchildren. As I've always seen it, Native people's parental view of Creator seems to foster a more familial and love-based spirituality than the king-god of European monotheism that I've always been so ambivalent about.

Native traditions vary by tribe, and have always been far more sophisticated than history books and mainstream North American thinking have ever given them credit for. By comparison, in fact, much of our mainstream is actually far more primitive. While our modern society is based on profit, greed, getting ahead at the expense of other people, ruthless competition, the exploitation and derision of women, and having a sort of love-hate ambivalence toward the next generation, Native people start with a concept of power that equates with responsibility, not with stand-alone status or advantage over other people.

Wealth is also viewed as a source of great responsibility, not something to be hoarded and used to make us feel more important as human beings than those who have less material resources.

If you’d come to this continent “5,000 years ago,” Sue said, “children were the most precious resources, and women were held in very high regard,” compared with what we see now—“and you [mainstream society] have the nerve to call us savages.”

The subject of North America’s indigenous people is so dear to my heart that I want to do one more post on what I learned at this presentation, rather than try to cram it all in this one or cut a lot out. Thus, I’ll do a third post within the next week or two. This next post will go into more detail about spirituality, how the plight of contemporary Native people is not as simple as just “blaming” white people, and helping to clear up some more of the dumb misconceptions we amazingly still need to put effort into refuting even today.

Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.

_____
Image: "Bracelet from John," by Karla Joy Huber, early 2000s; colored pencil

Want to know more about Native Americans? Instead of asking “Who were they?,” the correct question to ask is “Who are they?”

When people want to know more about Native Americans, the question usually goes something like, “Who were they?”

While sounding like an honorable inquiry, this question itself demonstrates a huge part of the problem—by referring to indigenous Americans in the past tense.

The truth is that there are twelve alive and active federally-recognized tribes and reservations in Michigan alone, according to Sue Franklin, Executive Director of South Eastern Michigan Indians, Inc. (SEMII). At the invitation of the Interfaith Leadership Council’s “Ask a...” series, Sue Franklin and her husband Chris Franklin, Chair of the American Indian Veterans of Michigan, gave a great presentation about some basics of both the contemporary and historical context of Michigan’s indigenous people.

Hosted by Unity of Royal Oak, the purpose of the presentation was to answer the questions that people are actually asking, rather than give a cookie-cutter historical lesson about tribal customs or beliefs. While Sue and Chris Franklin speak from their tribal perspectives of Anishinaabe and Oneida, respectively, their biographical anecdotes and answers to our questions gave valuable insight into many of the shared aspects of the contemporary Native American experience, which too few people actually know or understand.

For starters, there is the misconception that Native Americans are either extinct, or too few in numbers to justify any cultural accommodations for them in current society and public policy.

The challenge, Sue pointed out, is that Native people aren’t accurately reflected in the census records because Native people have very valid historical reasons for not self-identifying on the census.

While these reasons are about self-protection, the downside is that since so many Native people have made themselves “invisible” to the government, the government sees no need to provide more funding or public policy consideration than it does to them and the organizations that serve them, such as SEMII, AIHFS, American Indian Services, and NAIA.

So why exactly are Native people still so secretive and so “angry”? I’ve heard many people ask—just as they do about black and brown people—why Native people don’t just “get over it” already and get with the mainstream times. The reason is that the historical trauma of Native people is not old history at all—The institutionalization of violence and cultural oppression against Native Americans didn’t even officially end until 1980, with the discontinuation of the government-sanctioned program of abducting Native children from their parents and sending them to “Indian Schools” designed to forcibly remove their culture (click here for an excellent documentary on the subject) and language and make them like mainstream white children.

(For an excellent personal narrative that touches on this dark period of American history from a Michigan Native perspective, I highly recommend Warren Petoskey’s Dancing My Dream, which I blogged about here.)

When you think about it that the last group of those children are in their 40s and 50s now, and still dealing with the PTSD of their traumatic early experiences, the Native community has a long way to go before such trauma can be considered healed and no longer an active part of the present generation.

According to Sue Franklin, such historical trauma takes seven generations to heal. Thus, Native people are still only one or two generations in, not several like people assume because they’re thinking only of what Native people endured hundreds of years ago.

Complicating the recovery process for people directly affected by the institutionalized violence and brainwashing attempts is the fact that, until 1978, Native spiritual practices were not even legal in the United States. Native people did not have the freedom to use their religious faith to help them heal, which is something that no Christian or “spiritual but not religious” person in this nation ever had to worry about, and thus can’t even adequately imagine.

(This is why I get so furious when I read about conservative Christians' calls for what they inappropriately call “religious liberty” reform—For a great critical analysis of that travesty of justice, click here.)

Since we can’t even imagine such experiences, or the time frames such healing takes, no one outside the Native community has any right to assume, suggest, or otherwise impose their ideas on Native people.

Just like I spent much of this year writing about black and brown people not wanting the white-dominated society around them telling them what their experience should be, Native Americans need to be allowed to do their healing and tell their stories how they see fit.

Next week, I’ll give more details from what Sue and Chris Franklin shared about their experiences of doing just that.


_____
Image: “Archetypal Dreams” by Karla Joy Huber, 2008; Sumi ink, Prismacolor marker, Sharpie marker, metallic silver Sharpie marker, highlighter marker