Indigeneity

When I started trying to understand Indigeneity, at first I felt that my questions to Indigenous people were not being answered. It took me a long time to learn how to listen, as they were indeed responding. I had to first understand the non-Indigenous people. My search led me to realize that our fundamental arrogance and assumptions were stopping me from seeing – and hearing. My book, Insatiable Hunger, is my exploration of that search. I saw that the first step to understanding was to clearly see how non-Indigenous values clashed so completely with Indigenous values.

I learned from Diana Beresford Kroeger that the Celtic people of Ireland, a family she discovered was hers when she was an eleven-year-old orphan, explained to her that one’s actions had to be considered seven generations forward – a concept expressed by the Indigenous people here. I learned that King Henry VIII of England stole the common land from the commoners and then declared that vagabonds were illegal. Were they the local Indigenous people? I learned that there are Indigenous people in many parts of the world who have maintained ancient wisdom, describing a human purpose in maintaining a balance with all the other creatures and spirits. It is certainly true in many of the peoples, the nations, that the Europeans found here.

Should we not wonder how and why our First Nations do not seek to fit into the constraints of our modern society? Where we search for meaning, they see purpose. Where we seek to possess, they belong. Most Immigrants who come to Canada bring with them cultures with similar values and understanding of property. They work to become financially independent, basically the way they learned in their homelands. They are often from a similar property-based culture as the original English and French colonizers. Indigenous people ‘came out of the ground’ as did their ancestors and would see something wrong with leaving that place. In the early times of colonization, many Europeans were absorbed into the Indigenous communities and into the value systems that were dominant here. Captured by Five Nations warriors, many Frenchmen did not want to leave them. The colonial women experienced a sense of equality that did not exist in their own culture. Their comfort scared the French administration; it was supposed to go the other way. Samuel de Champlain and his Catholic Récollet priests set up the first residential schools to show their Indigenous people how to become French. They wanted to separate the children from their birth culture in the process of achieving that goal, but the Indigenous children learned through their own culture, maintaining their priorities.

These cultural differences warrant a brief overview of Indigenous culture. First, we must acknowledge how ancient it is. They were here when the Pyramids were being built in Egypt and over ten to twelve millennia they had changed little compared to Eurasians. Europeans would say that they were still primitive, but that is not true. They are a part of a modern, healthy civilization. Most technical developments in Eurasian societies came through the development of weapons. Does that mean that progress is an attribute of a society’s capacity to kill other human beings? Even much of our modern technological change came through the military escalation of weaponry. We cannot begin to understand the ancient Indigenous value system if we do not know our own. What are the fundamental differences between the two? One is the differences between their concepts of social structure. Generally, Indigenous hierarchies are flatter. Kingdoms, and nobles owning regions, protecting and controlling the people who live in them, is a characteristic that defines a steep hierarchy. In Indigenous societies, the concept of that kind of ownership is absent. People belong to the world, not the other way around.

More fundamentally, while people form couples in both hierarchies, the male does not necessarily dominate in the flatter, Indigenous ones – the women do not lose control of their bodies or of their offspring. In the steeper non-Indigenous hierarchies, the concept of ownership devolves to the male and can, and in places still does, extend to the ownership of women. How can two systems be so different at such a fundamental level? In one, patriarchy is assumed to be natural, to be the general rule, while in the other the distinction does not come up. Each gender has distinct roles that are mutually respected, but they are not ranked hierarchically.

Many studies have explored the origins of patriarchy, indicating that it was a choice made through social evolution. One argument for its origin, through

herding cultures, can be found in a paper written by Dr. Anke Becker of Harvard University. In it, she describes how and why a herding culture, as distinct from cultures of farming and animal husbandry, favoured the evolution of male dominance. The males lived and slept with the herd, returning from time to time to the camp where the women looked after the children. Her study was focused on a male/female power imbalance, but we can take it further.

These men followed the herds, protecting them from their predators and taking from them the animals they would need for food. Through this close exposure, they were contaminated by cross-species disease and eventually the survivors themselves became the vectors of these diseases when they dealt with other people. Over time, they developed a sense of ownership of their herd. Protecting it initially from natural predators, their ownership evolved into protecting the herd from other men. This would put the onus on women to produce more men to help in the defence – a preference for male children and for larger families.

In Indigenous societies, there was no herding. All creatures were seen as a family and humans placed themselves in the role of the youngest sibling, the one who learned from all the elders. As with their respect for gender, they also respected the autonomy of these elders. They learned to see their role as keepers of a balance among the members of this family. This extended to making sure that they did not take more than their modest share of the resources, and coupled with the respect for gender, it favoured smaller families to maintain their proportion in the greater society of life.

I have come to believe that the steeper hierarchies broke away from a stable system, a form of what you find in Indigenous communities in many places in the world. What caused them to break away may never be known, and it may have varied in different places and times. In Martin Prechtel’s book The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic, he describes how an earthquake had isolated a traditional Mayan community, and how he worked hard to find a way to reach them with a truckload of food. He had to make several attempts, because other starving people on his route had to be fed before he and his team could get there. When he did, though, he was calmly welcomed into a community that had accepted their fate so completely that they were caring for each other as they starved. While he did not know this community, he spoke Mayan, and they explained to him that all things end. It took some skill and diplomacy to get them to understand that he had a truck loaded with food. When they did, and accepted to take it, they started, as good hosts, to make sure Prechtel and his team had eaten. In his case, he discovered a people accepting their fate. It does not always happen that way, and in some cases, rather than dying, the people have fought back, destroying whatever blocked their path and quickly developing a hierarchy of power and strength. I suspect that some of the mounds found by archeologists, where an old city lies covered in forest or under sand, may have been the residue of one of these cultures. They would have thought of themselves as exceptional, building monuments to their leaders, leaving behind only the mounds when their exceptionalism eventually failed them.

The steeper hierarchies were seen in some of the Algonquian people in their concept of the Windigo, a monster that did not respect the rules but preyed upon the Elders, and even upon other humans in difficult times. Some of the Algonquian peoples on the Atlantic coast first saw the small, weakened men arriving on their shores as needing their help. When they learned of the rapacious need these new people had to acquire, to possess, they came to see them as the Windigo.

Maybe it was a form of the Windigo that, through time, left these mounds, these abandoned monumental structures, for us to admire and to study, as if they were the beginnings of civilization. We must look, though, at the long, calm periods of time between them when people had no need to build mounds. Perhaps those periods are the real story of humanity, stories of people caring, with no thoughts of their exceptionalism, but with only a strong sense of their purpose in the family of life.