Recently I took a class at the University of Maine on Gender
and Religion, which helped me to better understand why women are so angry about
the past. I learned that the women born into the “religions of the books
(the Bible, the Q’uran, the Torah) have clearly suffered more over the years as
a consequence of religion than have the indigenous women of North America.
This was certainly the case in China and India, as well. Pre-Christian North American indigenous
society was more flexible in gender relations than these other cultures. Women had more choices. There was not necessarily only one right way
to do things.
Contemporary aboriginal women are remembering the power and knowledge of their maternal ancestors.
For example, the words of a song, “Okisikôwak,” written and performed by
the indigenous women’s music trio, Asani, enunciates these memories:
Those very same hands
stroke the face of a child
Warrior within, not
meek or mild
Every step that she
takes is clearing the way
Inspiring a change,
for generations today.
Women were seen as warriors, every bit as much as men. During the worst periods of government
oppression of aboriginal people, Shalin Jobin tells how the women kept their
knowledge and power alive through the stories they carried and passed to future
generations (see Chapter 2, written about her Cree ancestors in Kermoal, N.,
Altamirano-Jiménez, I., & Altamirano-Jimenez, I. (2016). Living on the
land: Indigenous women's understanding of place. Edmonton, CA: Athabasca
University Press). Jobin writes how the
residential school system aimed to create a “double consciousness” in which the indigenous person could not help but look at himself or herself through the
eyes of the colonizers and that her ancestors resisted this double
consciousness through their commitment to the stories.
Raymond Bucko's book, The
Lakota Sweat Lodge was his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of
Nebraska, where he currently (unless he has recently moved) teaches (Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
Bucko’s book also speaks to the flexibility and lack of a hierarchy of
North American indigenous spirituality. Each family does things differently and
it’s always correct for those who do it that way in the place where it’s
done. However, were he to write this
book today, he would need a new title.
Elders tell us that we should not refer to this ceremony as a “sweat
lodge.” The word in Lakota is inipikaga, which is best translated as “revitalization
ceremony.” We hear that the Jesuits
called this ceremony a “sweat lodge” because they saw sweat. For the Lakota, this was not sweat, but was
toxins exiting the body in its process of revitalization. In Bucko’s book, he
discovered that no right way to do a sweat lodge exists. He discovered that no central authority
existed to say what should be done and that each family does things a little
differently, though some basic similarities are present. He similarly writes that no central authority
exists for deciding what Native American spirituality is. Felix Cohen is correct, I believe, in saying
that Native Americans in the United States are at the bottom of the pecking
order. What happens to Native Americans
will happen to other minorities eventually.
Bucko makes the point that this insanity of the governmental imposition
of Christianity began at least as early as the time of Thomas Jefferson's
presidency. It actually began much
earlier. An infamous community in Massachusetts
began to hang Indians who weren't Christians around 1640.
Bucko made another point that hit home -- that the
contemporary pan-Indian identity arose as a shared opposition to the European
invasion. The shared reality of the
oppression eventually led to a shared response, though not until the 20th
century. In the 19th century, tribes
were still working against each other with one tribe serving as scouts or
helpers to the U.S. Army in attacking their traditional enemies.
Before the Blood Quantum Act of 1904, no concept of being
half-Indian existed. One was either a
member of the Nation or not. During the
time of the forced march of the Cherokee to Oklahoma (The Trail of Tears and
Death), the head chief of the Cherokee, John Ross, would have been only 1/8
Cherokee by today's standards. By the
standards of that time, he was 100% Cherokee.
In 1904, the U.S. Congress invented Native Americans as a separate breed
in the same way that horses or dogs are considered as half this or half
that. The goal of the blood quantum
system was to eventually eliminate the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Here's how it works. If a Lakota person marries a Cree person,
then their children are only half Lakota.
They are also half Cree, but that doesn't make them 100% Indian. It leaves them half-Indian. Then if the child marries a Crow person,
their children are only 25% Lakota. One
more marriage to a non-Lakota and this person is removed from the BIA roles,
even though they have only married other Native Americans. It actually doesn't matter if they marry a
non-Indian; anyone outside the tribe counts toward diluting the percent Indian. What is amazing is that the numbers of Native
Americans are growing anyway. This is
because of young women having multiple children. Bucko quotes Marshall Sahlin as describing
the extended kinship Native American family, which is inclusive of everyone. That seemed entirely accurate to me, though
he left out the dogs.
O'Brien calls attention to the tremendous abuses of the
Franciscans, which virtually destroyed the tribes of California. Schooled by the Spanish Inquisition, the
methods of the Franciscans were brutal.
The Jesuits were more subtle, but ultimately equally destructive, for
they engaged in epistemological genocide, the destruction of people's ways of
seeing the world. The New England Protestants created towns for indigenous
people to shed all of their culture and religion and completely embrace the
ways of the colonizers.
However, indigenous North Americans had difficulty relating
to the religious ideas of Europeans. The
idea of a collection of rules that determined one's afterlife seemed absurd. In
all the traditions I know, everyone goes to the spirit world and no punishment
is inflicted there. Whatever evil one
accumulates in this life is left behind.
We are all so much better in the Spirit World. The conflicts and disharmonies of this world
are left behind. The emphasis on eternal
punishment would not fit within the Native American world view. I can remember my grandmother telling me, if
there were a hell, it would be here on earth.
The Creator wouldn't make such a thing, she said. The idea of a limited number of spirits
seemed strange as well. Everything has a
spirit. The Visibles have spirits and
the Invisibles are spirits. The idea of
limiting eligibility to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost seemed bizarre. Also, the idea that one needed a priestly intercessor
to speak to the spirits for one would have seemed equally bizarre. However, many people converted out of
necessity and continued their indigenous spirituality while tolerating the
religion of the colonizers. Others were
so hopeless and distraught that they accepted the beliefs of the conquerors
entirely.
The Indian Civilization Fund Act of 1819 provided money for
Christian clergy to proselytize indigenous people and to create boarding
schools to teach Native children English, the Christian faith, and European
methods of farming. Here was the government violating its own principals of
keeping church and state separate.
O'Brien describes Major John Chivington of the U.S. Army, who
orchestrated the Sand Hill Massacre, in which he killed almost 400 Cheyenne,
mostly women, and children, and then mutilated their sexual organs and scalped
them to display to cheering crowds in Denver.
He was chided by the Army but not punished. The Chief of the Cheyenne was in favor of
peace and was flying an American flag at the time he was killed.
The Cherokee had tried to emulate the Europeans in every way
but giving up their sovereignty, even to the point of changing their gender
relationships and becoming patriarchal, though this strategy did not succeed in
preventing the forced relocation to Oklahoma.
The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 established a large
reservation for the Lakota, which was progressively whittled down, especially
with the discovery of gold in the Black Hills.
Gold was the worst-case scenario for indigenous people in North
America. Once discovered, the rest is
downhill.
In the indigenous cultures of North America with which I am
familiar, Creator is genderless. Gender only enters later in the process
of elaboration of creation. Some versions of the Maine creation stories
have a male creator, but these have clearly been shown to be revisionist
stories influenced by Christianity. Some people think that the Lakota
have a male creator, because of the use of the word tunkashila, which
means grandfather. However, elders have explained to us that the elders
of the time of first contacts were trying to explain their concepts to the
Europeans and actually said, "your creator loves you as a grandfather
would love his grandchildren," which is a powerful concept in Lakota
kinship systems. They didn't mean to say that the creator was a
grandfather. They abandoned this attempt at an explanation when the
Europeans misinterpreted them. Now the word Dakuskanskan is used, which
is the proper term. Literally, it means that (plural) which is the
whitest. The best interpretation of this
is the spirit which is higher than the highest of the sky spirits. Similar,
some people misstate rocks as grandfathers. We hear people talking about
bringing the grandfathers into the inipi ceremony (the hot stones). They
are not actually grandfathers, either, for the proper word is inyan, which
means stone. Stones are considered to be masculine and are the oldest
inhabitants of our world, which is why perhaps the ancients thought to explain
to the Europeans that they were like grandfathers. The Europeans didn’t
understand that the Lakota were using metaphors, perhaps because they couldn’t
step away from their assumption that indigenous people were primitive and
stupid.
While rocks are male, the earth is considered feminine.
However, in Lakota, Dakuskanskan, has a male messenger Tate, or
the wind, and a female messenger, Wohpe, or the White Buffalo
Calf Woman. In a famous story about the creation of the four directions
and time itself, Wohpe is sent to the earth to tell Tate that
it is time to create the four directions because people are coming, and they will
need time and direction.
There is a famous women's song associated contemporarily
with Sissy Goodheart of Yates, North Dakota, that tells how women are sacred
for they give birth to the Nation through their hearts, minds, bodies, and
souls. The song says that they are the heart of the Nation and are asked,
therefore, to bring their highest selves to their task of being the heart and
soul of the people.
Paula Gunn has written about the respect which women
received and the sacredness of menstruation and of the power of menstrual blood.
In the Lakota language, one word is used to refer to things of power and
mystery, which is wakan. This word can be translated as
holy, sacred, or mysterious. There really isn't a word that corresponds
to the usage of the English word "taboo." The word wogluze refers
to something sacred or forbidden, a spiritual taboo or ceremonial restriction
(as a certain animal or animal part that cannot be eaten because of a vision
one has received or things that are forbidden to do during a pipe ceremony). The other word is wahtani, which means to
fail to perform a vow or to violate a tribal law. However, in my experience wogluze is never
absolute, but always subject to exceptions and alterations.
Problems are rampant in European translations of indigenous
languages as in North Dakota, where a word that meant "lake of the
spirits," was translated as "Devil's Lake," which is the current
name of that town and that lake. The general understanding is that one
doesn't mess with things or beings that are wakan, unless one
has a full understanding of how to use that medicine or power. The word for
power and the word for medicine are the same also. I know women elders
who have the power to work with menstrual blood and women with menstrual
disorders, and I know male elders who stand in awe of that power.
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