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.
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Image: "Bracelet from John," by Karla Joy Huber, early 2000s; colored pencil
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.
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Image: “Archetypal Dreams” by Karla Joy Huber, 2008; Sumi ink, Prismacolor marker, Sharpie marker, metallic silver Sharpie marker, highlighter marker
