Amanda Holmes
Indigenous Perspectives on Well-Being – LRC 595a
Prof. William Demmert & Prof. Leisy Wyman
December 12, 2006
Well-Being, Identity & Sense of Self -- Final Paper
“People used to say the hindag (culture) should be incorporated into the curriculum. Really, the curriculum needs to be incorporated into the hindag.” Tohono O’odham elder
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Audre Lourde
Well-being, identity and sense of self are critical issues for Native Peoples, both individually and collectively, tribally. Indian Nations continue to face the effects of colonization, repression and genocide. Native communities struggle under appalling conditions of poverty, homicide, suicide, drug and alcohol addiction, domestic and gang violence, police brutality, sexual abuse, elder abuse, prison, teenage pregnancy, family breakdown, diabetes, obesity, fetal alcohol syndrome, physical diseases, mental illness. Colonization, missionization, genocide, oppression, violation of Treaty rights and sovereignty are continue to be made into policy and put into practice by the United States federal government and individual states, and lie at the heart of the oppressive conditions Native people face.Indian youth are particularly vulnerable to these problems that plague Indian communities. Young Indian people are thus in a state of crisis. Educational institutions are uniquely placed to deal with these crises and act as a safety net, a way out. Yet they rarely do.
This paper will reflect on ways to concretely use our Indigenous teachings today, thinking about how to re-create and transform Indian education to create something more deeply relevant for Native youth. In this discussion, I will be making use of some of the literature we have read during this course in addition to outside readings and research pertaining to language, identity formation and resistance through one’s language and teachings. Acknowledging and incorporating knowledge that is community-based, from “non-degreed” cultural practitioners and experts is valuable. These are people who have much to say but, lacking the appropriate credentials, are often excluded from sharing their knowledge with those in the academy. I will attempt to draw on their insight as well.
I hope that some of these ideas, yet in their infancy, might be thought-provoking and useful to Indigenous communities in our continual collective attempt to figure out how it is that we need to respond and act in a movement of community transformation. I would hope that this small piece could be used to stimulate other communities to think about their own images and values, their own ways of framing their issues.
The Indian Nations at Risk Task Force found in 1991 that “a well-educated American Indian and Alaska Native citizenry and a renewal of the language and cultural base of the American native community will strengthen self-determination…” (Demmert iv). Yet the history of schooling in Indian Country is horrifying and brutal, and must be discussed to be able to identify what happened, how this history affects current attitudes of Indian communities toward schooling in an American system, and how that history might guide us to construct something different. As damaging as schooling has been for Native communities, fraught with deep-seated problems, we might be able to use it as a powerful example to define what we do not want, and how that leads us to creating something different. We can juxtapose it alongside what we do want as a way to clarify our thinking about what is essential.
Beginning with the Carlisle Indian School in 1879, a plethora of government and missionary boarding schools whose mission it was to solve the “Indian problem” through assimilative and abusive genocidal policies soon followed (In the White Man’s Image). These schools left their indelible mark on Native people and communities through their legacy of intergenerational, historic trauma. Tom Porter maintains in his efforts to create a Mohawk language revitalization program, that “we must do ‘Carlisle in Reverse’ and re-educate our people in their own languages and culture through immersion” (Tom Porter).
Indigenous people must reclaim our history by remaking our own education in our own ways on our own lands, in ways that make sense to us. Education has to be locally contextualized (Gonzalez 40). Radical problems demand “radical,” or root, solutions. Indian people need to get to the root of what we have inherited from ancient times. Our fundamental alienation from ourselves and our identities is a critical problem, our “big woods” to go into and find ourselves again. We need to tap into our own ways of thinking and knowing, our own community resources, to locate the gifts our ancestors left for us that will help us to survive.
This paper asserts that Indigenous people are at a point where we must move more deeply toward Indigenous/Indigenist research methodologies and praxis, those ways that place Indigenous insider knowing in the position of “expert.” This stands in opposition to the historical position of outsider “experts,” who promote themselves as holding the place of authority and being the real “knowers,” from their Western scientific perspective. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith asserts in her seminal work, Decolonizing Methodologies, “Telling our stories from the past, reclaiming the past, giving testimony to the injustices of the past are all strategies which are commonly employed by Indigenous peoples struggling for justice” (Smith 35).
We must reclaim and reframe our own knowing as Indigenous Peoples. I hope to draw upon images and teachings from one people, the Iroquois, in order to spark others to look within their own representations and stories, to locate maps within their respective cultures with which to create change and re-conceptualize education. Brian Brayboy posits, within his conception of a new TribalCrit or Tribal Critical Race Theory, a way of deconstructing and reconstructing theory, so that we can begin to re-frame our stories again, making meaning from them. Story and meaning would become the theory (Brayboy 427).
The foundational teachings held by Indigenous Peoples include instructions for health, for how to be a good human being, how to take care of all of life, how to walk this earth where we live. These are the fundamental teachings shared by Indigenous Peoples worldwide, teachings heard repeatedly throughout Indigenous territories. As Mohawk professor Taiaiake Alfred explains, “Indigenous worldview “balances respect for autonomy with recognition of a universal interdependency and promotes peaceful coexistence among all the elements of creation” (Alfred xvi).
Our languages hold the key to that ancestral knowledge, for they are a gift from the Creator at the beginning of time, and as such contain our spiritual connection to the rest of life. Our teachings and the ability to gather meaning from our teachings are the key to our well-being, health, self-esteem, identity, and ultimately our survival as individuals and Nations. They have the power to move us from a place of sickness to health, from disempowerment to empowerment, from survival to thriving, from stuck to adaptable, from victimized to agent. “Above all, the crisis we face is a crisis of the mind: a lack of conscience and consciousness. Material poverty and social dysfunction are merely the visible surface of a deep pool of internal suffering. The underlying cause of that suffering is alienation – separation from our heritage and from ourselves” (Alfred xv).
Living within the dominant society, Indigenous people must determine how to build that bridge to one of empowerment and centeredness within our teachings. We need to find the core of ourselves and center it not only within our places, but within a contemporary framework relevant and responsive to today’s reality. In this light, we must reconfigure the way we think about education and teaching our children. Fundamentally, contemporary Indigenous realities are calling for a re-imagining, a re-creating of education, one that centers language and culture through Indigenous pedagogy, methodology, research and praxis.
We must begin, as Norma Gonzalez asserts, by valuing our community “funds of knowledge and multivocality” (Gonzalez 43), our rich and varied experience, for they are the vibrant locus of student success. And “in addition to [the] literature are the stories, values, practices and ways of knowing which continue to inform indigenous pedagogies” (Smith 14). We must bring together, support, and encourage those community resources. We must begin to draw our own cultural maps, particular to the place and experience of each group.
We can begin to engage again with our own knowledge and experience by looking closely at the deep meanings of our symbols, cosmology and frames of reference. We can use them to demonstrate that there is a different way of talking about power than continually revolving in a Western model. We need not constantly engage, confront, challenge and counter the authority embodied by the dominant society, one that has generally refused even to acknowledge, much less respect Indigenous Peoples. We can create cultural maps to develop our own paradigms of survival, recognizing and validating our own power to continue. “The logic of our traditions has developed over countless generations of experience” (Alfred xvii). Thus is it that our traditional narratives hold meaning embedded within them, meanings that must be developed, contemporized, reflected upon, and used to face the realities of today.
A teaching that helps illustrate this contemporization of meaning for each coming generation, and perhaps might encourage others to look within their own stories for teachings, comes from the Haudenosaunee. The Iroquois say that each generation must be responsive to their times, and contribute to the survival of the Nations by “adding to the rafters” of the Longhouse. The “rafters” represent our ancestral teachings. The Longhouse is not only a physical place and spiritual center, it is also a location of Haudenosaunee teachings. The instruction is that someday we will be called to “add to the rafters” or add new parts to the Longhouse, depending on what is needed in that time. Taiaiake Alfred describes this teaching as well as our present-day mindset that can prevent us from accessing and actualizing our teachings. “We have the rafters – the traditions….There is an explicit instruction in the teachings that some day we will have to add to those rafters…[but] we’re afraid to change, to update…what we really need to do is embark on a creative rethinking of ourselves, rooted in tradition” (Alfred 7).
Indigenous people must decide whether the institution of education as it has taken shape is the structure we want embodied for young people. We need to think critically about how to create a system that will be aligned with what our communities feel is important. This decision will be highly contextual, located in particular places and within particular cultural realities and experiences. Maori educator and researcher Linda Tuhiwai Smith explains the reasoning behind the need for completely restructuring Western schooling into an Indigenous model of education, explaining it as, “The organization of school knowledge, the hidden curriculum and the representation of difference in texts and school practices all contain discourses which have serious implications for indigenous students…” (Smith 11).
The crisis of Indian education, the crisis of our youth, the crisis in our communities is so pervasive that a reconfiguration of our education focused on our ways, pedagogy and methodology is required and timely. We have been brought to a place within our communities and within the broader crisis of the natural world where it is not enough to simply find elements of culture and attempt to stick them into the existing Western curriculum and system.
Some educators and researchers feel that the solution to Indigenous educational alienation is to make the culture “fit” into a Western curriculum, to somehow make the two more “compatible.” Roland Tharp explains this view in his article Intergroup Differences Among Native Americans in Socialization and Child Cognition: An Ethnogenetic Analysis, by saying that in teaching Indian children, educators need to create “compatibilities of instructional practices with natal-cultural elements” [my italics] (Tharp 99). This view of creating cultural “compatibilities” presupposes that Native children are located in a foreign Western system of education. Perhaps this is the correct approach if we are to maintain Western education as the way of educating Indian children.
However, as Indigenous people must reclaim our languages, so too must we reclaim our education process from the system of the colonizer. If our focus is to make Indian children’s schooling in a Western framework simply incorporate “elements” of their “natal-culture” (which is to say, tribal cultural identity), then we may be missing a fundamentally radical or root approach to the health and survival of Native children. Indigenous communities must re-connect with an approach that reaches into the cultural roots of an education that encompasses who they are, with every bit of their identities acknowledged, encouraged, and supported. Native children are desperate for more than mere “elements” of their identity being “compatible with” a foreign system taught in a foreign language, using foreign methods and methodologies, holding foreign assumptions and viewpoints.
English is the language of hegemony and domination (Phillipson 20). English is “subtractive” (Wong Fillmore 203). American domination and world power uses English as the language and culture of oppression in a globalizing, assimilationist context, one that carries the extinction of “Other” languages and peoples along with it. It is within this reality of extinction that Indigenous peoples are located, and this reality must shape our views of our cultural priorities.
The focus in Indian education has seemed to be that of helping Native children to develop bi-lingualism/bi-culturalism, becoming fluent in both their tribal and dominant cultures simultaneously. Were both cultures, both languages, of an equal power status, this would not be problematic. The reality is, however, that Indigenous cultures and languages do not occupy the same status as English.
This concern with the subjugation of heritage languages and language shift to the dominant language is reflected in the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights. It states that “…the languages of some peoples which have attained sovereignty are consequently immersed in a process of language substitution as a result of a policy which favours the language of former colonial or imperial powers” (Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights). This ongoing history of language loss quickens the need for Indigenous re-framing of their educational processes and systems, creating those more in keeping with their own Indigenous ways of knowing.
Norma Gonzalez asserts that “the ultimate border -- the border between knowledge and power – can be crossed only when educational institutions no longer reify culture, when lived experiences become validated as a source of knowledge, and when the process of how knowledge is constructed and translated between groups located within nonsymmetrical relations of power is questioned” (Gonzalez 42). A re-evaluation of dominant education, where Indigenous languages are valued and prioritized, may catalyze thinking away from biculturalism and bilingualism to privileging Native languages and cultures.
Indigenous people find themselves in a grave predicament. In the words of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, “considering that invasion, colonization, occupation and other instances of political, economic or social subordination often involve the direct imposition of a foreign language or, at the very least, distort perceptions of the value of languages and give rise to hierarchical linguistic attitudes which undermine the language loyalty of speakers” (Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights), Indigenous communities are considering these issues and determining what makes sense to them.
The Mohawk Nation has had to make a radical and immediate shift in education, due to their location as Eastern people and that the language was close to extinction. A reorganization of thinking about language had to occur, and the status of Mohawk had to be elevated within the communities, creating a climate where language reclamation could occur. People’s views of the importance of English or French had to change so that they saw clearly the relative unimportance of the colonizers’ languages in relation to the cultural and linguistic importance of Mohawk. The colonial languages took a position of less importance while Kanyen’keha was privileged.
At this point in the colonizing and decolonizing process, we may be called to shift our focus away from where it has settled, on biculturalism/bilingualism, to one of centering Indigenous children’s acquisition of their own tribal identities first, prior to their acquisition of English. Later in their schooling, once they have been “thoroughly soaked,” in their own cultures again -- to reverse a concept borrowed from Captain Richard Pratt’s own words (In the White Man’s Image) -- English could be added, as students develop skills useful in a Western framework. Moreover, with a strong, intact cultural foundation, the skills students develop are likely to return and be used to nurture their communities.