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.


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