Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
|
January
28,1996
[unpublished & incomplete]
There
has been a great amount of discussion and debate about
“family values” and “community” in the political arena, with each
political
party claiming that they know more about how to create a viable society
than
the other party.
From
the perspective of one who was raised in my formative
years in the Bear Dodem of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway, in an aboriginal
indigenous tradition, the current
“family values” debate seems a shallow farce: the policy-molders are
talking
only about the nuclear family, which is only a fragment of what
“family” means
in my tradition of egalitarian extended family and Dodem.
The
Indian boarding schools and other U.S. Indian policies
were created explicitly to take away the identities of the aboriginal
indigenous people of this continent, and destroy our language, culture,
and—most importantly—our egalitarian extended families and Dodems. At the time that I was a child, in the
1930’s, patrilineally and culturally white people who the U.S.
government
categorized as “Indians” were being supported by the government as
agents of
acculturation and social change in the remnants of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway community—which included
promoting fragmented nuclear
families. These dark-skinned,
black-haired “Indians” had Western European hierarchical values and
predominantly European/Moorish ancestry, but they were (and continue to
be)
presented to the American public, and to the world, as the “real”
indigenous
people.
The
egalitarian Dodems of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway are perceived by
policy-makers as a threat to the
hierarchical social structure of the Western European society, who
projected
onto us such erroneous labels as “primitive communism,” as well as
doing
blatant name-calling, calling us “savages” and “pagans” to our faces,
in our
own land—to have some foreigner invade one’s land and then call us
names is
disgusting and without good manners.
The
nuclear family of Western European society, and the
cultural conventions such as linear time which support the nuclear
family
context, are, from my Ahnishinahbæótjibway
perspective, a human rights violation and a blatant denial of the
humanity of
those who are caught up in this mutant and crippling social structure. In my understanding, all human beings have
an innate, biological drive to associate in egalitarian extended-family
groupings, which meet human needs for nurturing, cuddling, social
recognition
and identity, security and interaction, and generates the template for
living
in harmony with each other and the natural world. Western
European structure thwarts these natural human needs with
the nuclear family, and then maintains its fundamental hierarchical
institutions (including corporations, the Church, and Western European
ideologies) through sublimated redirection.
Such Western European institutions and conceptual structures
could
not—and cannot—coexist with intact and viable Dodems and
egalitarian
extended families.
The
human needs which are not met in the context of the
nuclear family, are—although unacknowledged in the languages of Western
Culture—nevertheless felt by its members as an “emptiness” or a “void,”
which
cries out for love and fulfillment. The
formation of ghetto gangs follows the same mechanisms as the formation
of corporations
or the cohesion of armies: the crippled members of nuclear families
adhere to
the pseudo-family group and will do almost anything to retain
acceptance within
the group and whatever semblance of “love” that they can get. Family violence, which reflects the
pathological nuclear-family structure, is carried over into the
pseudo-families
of the Western hierarchy in such ways as gang initiations and gang
fights, as
is the fundamentally misogynistic orientation of Western hierarchical
tradition.
The “here today and
gone tomorrow” nuclear family, which has neither continuity nor roots,
replaces
the functionally eternal continuity of the Dodem with a highly
mobile
“fly by night” mentality.
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