Monday, October 8, 2018

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 youthnot 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 questionsparticularly those based on common misconceptionswith 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.


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


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