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Genealogy
The
Indian
The
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
Culture
and Identity
The
Métis
The
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
Ecological Infrastructure
The
Métis
The
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
Patterns of Interaction with Western
European Colonizers
The
Métis
The Ahnishinahbæótjibway
Language
The
Métis
The
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
Religion
The
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
The
Métis
Images of Indians as
pre-contact “natives” are so thoroughly ingrained in Western society
that the
significant differences between the vast majority of people officially
recognized as Red Lake Chippewa Indians by the United States
Government, and
the tiny minority who identify themselves as the autochthonous Ahnishinahbæótjibway
are blurred. However, these differences
encompass a wide range, including: history, genealogy, culture,
language,
religion, ecological infrastructure, and patterns of interaction with
the
Western European colonizers.
Wub-e-ke-niew
repeatedly emphasized that, “Indians are not the indigenous people of
this
continent.” The existence of these two
distinct groups is so important that I address it here at length:
Ultimately, Westerners use history as
a
political interpretation of process and a linearly organized
description of
selected events; but in the context of holistic non-linear Ahnishinahbæótjibway
time,[1]
it is
inseparable in countless ways from present reality, and has neither
beginning
nor end. In this sense, the history of
the people who became identified as Chippewa Indians at Red Lake is
closely
connected to the abstract languages, hierarchical social structures,
specialized priesthoods and ecological destruction which has been
associated
with Western Civilization since its inception.
One of the
characteristic patterns of Western society has been an episodic
hot-house
flowering of “High Civilization” based on exploitation of the
ecological
infrastructure, resulting in environmental degradation, resource
shortages and
pressure for penetration into and colonization of “virgin” territory. In support of this, Western society has
embedded within its languages, mythology, archetypes and
culture-variants a
series of fractals and ideologies which provide the boilerplate for
this
process: gaining entree (and establishing a base population of
mixed-blood
people rooted in colonial economies and values) through trade;
disrupting the
homeostatic balance of the indigenous permaculture through introduction
of
aggressive alien plants, more lethal-at-a-distance hunting technology,
ecologically destructive agricultural practices and domesticated
animals; introduction
of alien and virulent plagues and germ warfare; disruption of the
social
structure of the indigenous population and encouraging the formation of
factions (including through agent provocateurs); dehumanization and
demonization of the indigenous population in the eyes of those
colonizing
through stereotypes and mythology; military attack accompanied by rape
of
indigenous women and economic marginalization and/or enslavement of the
surviving men; colonization of the occupied territory by upwardly
mobile men
from the old center of civilization (a few of whom marry indigenous
women and
more of whom marry the mixed-blood daughters of traders and military
men) and
their entourages; and then the flowering of a new center of Western
civilization.
Colonizing processes
are ‘justified’ by religious dogma rationalizing genocide, i.e.
““we are
God’s chosen people,” and an “instrument of Divine Will.”
“God promised us this land,” is as old as
the Bible and more current than Manifest Destiny, but consideration of
who was
already living on the “promised land” is rarely within Western
paradigms.
Western
civilization has depended on maintaining their people’s allegiance to a
corporate body other than the grassroots community and the extended
family (eg.
the Church, the Brethren and the Nation-State); a mythological
structure
celebrating conflict, violently heroic masculine archetypes, rugged
individualism, disconnection from the land in an aboriginal sense; and
shifting
gender balance toward inherently violent male domination.
The “world religions” of Western
Civilization reflect this imbalance in religious dogma from which women
have
been almost eliminated, and in which the female lines of descent serve
mainly
to segregate colonizer from colonized, ineradicably [‘racially’]
marking the
colonized as among the “subject” classes.
“Racism” and most ‘identity politics’ serve as powerful forces
in
creating and maintaining colonial ‘caste’ systems and reducing
hegemonic
efforts necessary to retain colonial and post-colonial domination.
The social structure
of western civilization is hierarchical—which over time has led to an
artificially created, endogamous upper class and disruption of the
exogamous
marriage links between communities of peoples consigned to the lower
classes. The structure is maintained by
what Wub-e-ke-niew called “man-made behaviors and emotions” of anger,
hatred
and violence. He explains, “It has to
have chaos in it. When it starts
becoming stable, the status quo becomes alarmed, and so they
have to
send their agents and fifth columnists in there to destabilize it again. Non-violence is like the devil to them.”
By 1500, the expansion
of ‘Western Civilization’ had reached its limits in Eurasia and North
Africa:
the conflicts of the Middle Ages were internecine conflicts on
previously
colonized territory. As Wub-e-ke-niew,
who spent the end of World War II in Germany, tersely put it, “The
ecology was
a mess, plundered to the bedrock.”
Columbus’ voyages presented the opportunity for a reiteration of
old
patterns of Western expansion into previously unexploited land. As Wub-e-ke-niew described it, “It was the
plunder, sacking and destroying of what was a paradise.
Now, our continent is becoming like old
Europe—you can’t drink the water here anymore.
They’re doing the same thing here that they did over there.”
The people who
eventually became the Red Lake Métis were mostly coerced and
quasi-voluntary
emigrants from France; personae non grata shanghaied from the
lower
social classes, and included those of visibly Moorish descent. Both men and women were exported into the
serf and servant classes of seventeenth-century Quebec, and their
descendants
were recruited as voyageurs and other laborers in the hinterland of the
fur
trade, many of them settling in proximity to the fur posts. As J. Peterson writes,
By
the 1790’s, trading hamlets housing from a single extended family to
several
hundred persons had been established at Peoria, Cahokia, Chicago, Fort
Wayne,
Ouiatanon, Parc aux Vahes, Riviere Raisin, Sault Ste. Marie, Petit
Kaukalin,
Portage, La Pointe and elsewhere.
Perceived but dimly by the seaboard world, and largely ignored
between
1763 and 1816, the inhabitants of these towns, like those of La Baye,
were, as
it happens, people of primarily mixed race — Métis.[2]
The popular mythology is
that mixed-blood Indians were generated from
liaisons between European men and indigenous women, but the indigenous
population both male and female has been decimated by European diseases
in the
1500’s and 1600’s. After a handful of
aboriginal women married Europeans during the first generations of
European
occupation, most of the “White-Indian” intermarriages were with
mixed-blood
women, either from the Métis villages or from among those described as
“native women”
from “adjacent band villages.”[3]
These so-called Indian, Tribal and Band settlements associated with the
explicitly Métis villages were distinct from the aboriginal villages
quite
early in the history of Euro-American colonization, and received a
continual
influx of White patriliny through “Young Métis males and ‘White’
newcomers to
the trade [who] had ... usually ephemeral encounters with native women.”[4] According to Wub-e-ke-niew,[5]
the Métis also incorporated runaways from the European expeditions and
settlements: Spanish draftees, indentured servants and transportees
from the
British settlements, black slaves, and the dissatisfied from every walk
of
life. Just as significant populations
of feral four-legged European imports: Equus asini, cattle,
etc.,
established themselves in the interior of the continent, so did the
Eurasian/African varieties of Homo sapiens.
The history of the
Métis includes the history of those William W. Warren called “Ojibway,”
who he
describes as coming from “the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, about the
Gulf of
the St. Lawrence River.”[6] Among them were the professional hunters and
courier du bois of the fur trade.
According to Warren “In the early part of the century ... [they]
had
already commenced the custom of yearly visiting Quebec, and afterwards
Montreal, taking with them packs of beaver skins, and returning with
the
fire-arms, blankets, trinkets, and firewater of the Whites.”[7]
The European
colonization of this continent, and the associated fur trade, was an
intensely
and often violently competitive business, extending the wars of the
European
nation-state into their colonies. The
nearly four hundred years of “Indian Wars” which characterized early
American
history were in fact European and Métis wars.
Some of them were specifically fur trade conflicts, like that
described
by Wheeler-Vogelin and Hickerson (citing Tanner) as the
Conflict
between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North-West Company. [Tanner] was present in the interest of
[the] former company when its employees seized the latter’s trading
fort at
Pembina in June, 1816. Tanner states,
“In forty days after we left Rainy Lake, we arrived at Red River, and
took the
fort at the mouth of the Pembinah, without any difficulty, there being
few or
no persons there, except squaws and children, and a few old Frenchmen
...[8]
They also quote Tanner in
his discussion of the “Danger of attack by
North-West [Fur] Company employees, disguised as Indians.”[9] This Euro-American tactic in intra-immigrant
conflict also was used in the Boston Tea Party and some of the raids on
the
nineteenth-century wagon trains: people of European heritage dressing
up as
Indians to displace responsibility for their actions onto Indian
scapegoats.[10] In other cases, there is question as to
whether
or not the “wars” actually occurred. As
Wub-e-ke-niew points out, “They talk about wars, but they don’t talk
about the
cemeteries. Where are the bodies
buried?”
When France lost their
colonial empire to England in the French and Indian Wars, the French
Métis’
political and commercial superstructure was supplanted by the British
and
American fur empires that took over the French ones, in the case of
Hudson’s
Bay Company with a royal charter granting semi-sovereign status. Métis people continued to participate in the
British and American fur trade until it declined because of the
near-extermination of the fur-bearing animals, habitat destruction by
logging
companies, and agricultural settlement by northern Europeans in the
mid-nineteenth century. But, for more
than half a century, United States administration of the “Louisiana
Purchase”
was through the infrastructure established by the fur companies, and
was
largely directed toward the French and Métis who remained in the area. Aboriginal Indigenous people like the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
remained mostly beyond Euro-American paradigms.
As detailed above,
so-called Indian Treaties were founded on the “doctrine of discovery,”
and
rested on Western European concepts of property ownership and eminent
domain. Wub-e-ke-niew adds, “The Indian
Treaties
were a European concept, and had nothing to do with the aboriginal
indigenous
people.” The Treaties were negotiated
through the aegis of the United States military and the fur post
superintendents of the era, at Red Lake including C.H. Beaulieu and
William
Aitkin, in the English and pidgin Chippewa languages, but not in Ahnishinahbæótjibway. Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my genealogical research
backed up his assertions that that the Indian Chiefs whose X-marks
appear to be
forged on the original treaty documents at the National Archives were
Métis;
some of them were professional Indians who were recorded as having
agreed to
treaty after treaty. They were not Ahnishinahbæótjibway. [11]
As Wub-e-ke-niew puts in 1996, “Selling land, selling the bones of our
ancestors, was not something we would do.
Signing treaties is a part of the Western European paradigm, it
is not
part of the aboriginal paradigm.”
Louis Riel’s 1869-70
Rebellion among the Canadian Métis coincided with the forcible
relocation of
both Métis and aboriginal people onto Indian reservations in the United
States. On both sides of the border,
the Métis became more explicitly defined as conquered and occupied
peoples,
their lives more tightly constricted by increasing Northern European
logging
and settlement in the area, and by Euro-American (including
Anglo-Canadian)
political administration. In Northern
Minnesota, some Métis merged with the White population, some formed
enclaves
(such as those near Red Lake Falls) in the midst of northern European
immigrants’ settlements, and many became re-defined as Indians.
“Tribe” and “Band” are
Western European terms of social organization, and have no connection
to
indigenous Ahnishinahbæótjibway social
structure, which
was egalitarian and based on Dodems.
However, the United States Government used and continues to use
their
imposed tribal and band organization as the structural basis for their
administration of Indian, and for Public Law 638 “Indian Self
Determination”
administration through federally-established tribal councils.
Formal tribal
definition began, from the top down, with White descriptions of
territory
within clearly delineated borders, and continued with trading posts,
missionization and with the Indian treaty and annuity-payment process. Official tribal designation was at times
capricious—in some cases, for example instances where one brother was
officially classified as a “Sioux” while another was a “Chippewa.”[12]
On January 14, 1889,
the United States Congress passed the “Act for the Relief and
Civilization of
the Chippewa Indians in the State of Minnesota” (‘Nelson Act’), which
redefined
the “tribal” boundaries in the Treaties of 1837 and 1863 to conform to
Minnesota state boundaries as established at statehood in 1858, and
created a
new entity, now federally recognized as the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe
and the
Red Lake Band of Chippewa. Among the
consequences of that 1889 legislation was the taking of more than three
million
acres of land at Red Lake, and extensive logging. The
Nelson Act also mandated allotment:
Sec. 3. … all of said Chippewa Indians
in the State of Minnesota, except those on the
Red Lake Reservation, shall, under the direction of said commissioners,
be
removed to and take up their residence on the White Earth Reservation,
and
thereupon there shall, as soon as practicable, under the direction of
said
commissioners, be allotted lands in severalty to the Red Lake Indians
on Red
Lake Reservation, and to all the other
of said Indians on White Earth Reservation …”
In consequence of Indian
allotment and subsequent land sales, White
French Canadians, Scots, Irishmen, and Scandinavians became
incorporated into
the Métis communities that comprised the majority of those defined by
the
Whites as Chippewa Indians in Minnesota – even when enumerated by the
Minnesota
Chippewa Commission in 1889.
The Ahnishinahbæótjibway,
and other aboriginal indigenous people closely associated with them,
were the
autochthonous people in the Great Lakes watershed area, and in the
headwaters
regions of the Mississippi River and Red River of the North. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the vast
network of navigable waterways in this area were the primary means of
transportation for everybody, and influenced both aboriginal people’s
and
immigrants’ trade routes and settlement patterns. One
of main reasons that the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
at Red Lake survived was that Red Lake is at the headwaters. From an aboriginal perspective,[13]
it is at the “crossroads” of the three principal watersheds of this
continent;
but from the coastally oriented European perspective, it is upstream
from
everywhere and thus remote.
Wub-e-ke-niew,
referring to the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
ideographic
documents on birchbark, wood, parchment, and stone, writes, “According
to our
written traditions, this has been our land since human beings first
existed—through four ice ages and at least 36,000 generations. The bones of our ancestors, the living
beings upon the earth, and the earth itself are all one, inseparable
... I put
my hands into the Earth, and understand, ‘this is where I come from,
and this
is where I will return.’”[14]
For many millennia,
the history of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway was
one of
egalitarian and harmonious co-existence with other, inter-related
aboriginal
indigenous peoples and with Grandmother
Earth. The ecological infrastructure
was a sustainable permacultural one, and aboriginal indigenous societal
archetypes were not one of expansion and migration, but of dynamic
equilibrium
centered around the ancestral lands of the patrilineal Dodems,
within
the extensive network of kinship inter-relationships generated by Dodems
and
seventh-generation exogamy. Like other
species in the complex mature ecosystems at the foundation of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
permacultural subsistence, the focus was on maintaining vibrant harmony
rather
than aggressive competition. Genuinely
understanding the pre-Columbian history of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
necessitates a paradigm shift, a redefinition of “history” beyond the
Western
European historical orientation toward hierarchical leaders and violent
conflict, kings and wars.
Shortly after
Europeans in significant numbers made landfall on the continental
mainland,
Eurasian/African epidemics began raging through the indigenous
population. Violent Eurasian societal
patterns
engendered the kinds of unbalanced host populations that were favorable
for the
development of aggressive plagues.
There was also a degree of selective adaptation and even
co-evolution of
the Eurasian populations and social structures with these virulent
diseases. Reasonably high percentages
of the Europeans survived measles, tuberculosis and even smallpox and
the
bubonic plague. The aboriginal
indigenous peoples of this continent, on the other hand, had developed
an
ecological and sociological infrastructure that did not readily provide
vectors
for sustained epidemics of virulent Eurasian diseases, consequently had
neither
immunity nor plagues of their own to give the Europeans, and were
decimated.
The population crash
due to epidemics between the late fifteenth century and the
mid-sixteenth
century has been estimated by some authors, including Wub-e-ke-niew[15]
and Kirkpatrick Sale,[16]
to have exceeded 99%. Because the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
and other similar peoples had acephalous egalitarian societies, the
devastation
from these epidemics did not create the degree of social deconstruction
that an
analogous crash would have in hierarchical Eurasian societies, but it
still had
a profound impact on the surviving indigenous people here, whose
communities
were reeling from the impacts of devastating plagues, when they were
first
confronted by people who behaved in inconceivably violent ways.
Contact between
European and indigenous people was frequently characterized by violence
on the
part of the Europeans. Early European
records contain casual references to nearly random killings of
non-violent
indigenous peoples. The deeper
structural violence of Western Civilization is not usually recorded by
the
European chroniclers, because it was part of the “background” of their
culture,
but this pervasive background of violence made a profound impact on the
Ahnishinahbæótjibway. For
example, Wub-e-ke-niew describes his
youthful reaction to the ubiquitous Catholic images of crucifixion as
“traumatic and profound.”[17]
One of the principal
strategies of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway to the
influx of
the peoples of Western Civilization, which was also adopted by some
Métis in
response to the nineteenth-century influx of Anglo-Americans and their
cohorts,
for example, as described by Ignatia Broker in Night Flying Woman,[18]
was avoidance.
In his historical
retrospective of Catholic missionary activities at Red Lake, the Rev.
Alban
Fruth describes many hundreds of people “in the woods” near Red Lake in
1879.[19] As is apparent from a comparison of the 1879
Annuity records with the 1885 Indian Census, most of these people had
“disappeared” by the time the United States Government policy began
shifting
away from the bounty-hunting mentality of the mid-nineteenth century
and toward
the more subtle genocide of compulsory education: forced acculturation
and
differential policies in bureaucratic administration.[20]
The period between
1885 and the early twentieth century was one of military occupation of
what
Wub-e-ke-niew refers to as “concentration camps called Indian
reservations.” Métis, who were
considered by both themselves and the Anglo-Americans to be “conquered
“people,
as well as Ahnishinahbæótjibway, who had never
gone to
war and were not conquered, were confined to the reservations, although
the
Métis were more likely to be able to get a “pass” from the Indian agent
for
travel and to search for a spouse to whom one was not ‘too closely
related.’.
Genocide of the
remaining aboriginal people continued: including through murder. One of Wub-e-ke-niew’s great aunts,
Ah-zhe-day-be-nais-eke, was beaten to death.
That murder was recorded in the early twentieth-century Beltrami
County
death records as a “forest death”; through bureaucratic policies that
used the
demographics and cultural traits of the Métis to encourage their
survival at
the expense of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway; and
through
the forcible removal of children from their parents as a part of the
boarding
school system established on all reservations by the 1890s.
By 1996, there
remained only a few individuals with an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
Dodem, and most of them had some Métis ancestry on their
matriline. The community structure, the
culture as a
living culture, the language spoken as a native language of everyday
life, and
the extended families of these aboriginal indigenous people are gone. Although there are a handful of children who
still have a Dodem, as Wub-e-ke-niew put it during the spring
of 1996:
“Because of [our seven-generation avoidance of] incest, they do not
have
anybody to marry in the Dodems.
We are an extinct people. The
White man said he was going to exterminate us, and he has succeeded. He is using his Indians to hide his genocide
of my people.” From an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
perspective, the Métis/Indians and other European invaders who preceded
the
Anglo-American ones were pioneers in the military sense of the word, as
well as
being agents of genocide and complicit in the cover-up of that
holocaust.
According to
Wub-e-ke-niew and other Ahnishinahbæótjibway,
autochthonous identity is centered in the patrilineal Dodems
that formed
the basis of Ahnishinahbæótjibway social
infrastructure. Wub-e-ke-niew says,
The Indians’ identity
depends on their
matriline, and on being identified by the Federal Government as
‘Federally
Recognized Indians.’ They have a European
patriline, on both the male and female sides.
The Ahnishinahbæótjibway do not depend
on the
United States Government for our identity, although we were kidnapped
into the
boarding schools in an attempt to assimilate us into being Indians.[21]
The
several groups of Indians described above are somewhat endogamous along
social
class and ethnic lines, although there is also a tendency, encouraged
by the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, for women of all of groups to continue
“marrying out”
to White men to “create a better life for the children,” which
according to
Wub-e-ke-niew,
Never
happened. They are still locked into the
Indian
community, and the White man who ‘married in’ is becoming an Indian. Many of the Whites—who at that time were
called
‘squaw men—who married into the Indian community during the mid-1800’s
to the
early 1900’s were classified as ‘halfbreed Indians’ on the U.S.
Government
records. Their descendants try to
compensate for their mixed ancestry by being ‘real Indians’ and hating
White
people. They end up hating themselves
and even committing suicide, because they are White. The paradox is that Indian is a
pseudo-identity created by the White man.
The Chippewa Métis of
northern Minnesota include a fairly tightly inter-related group of
people with
relatives on all of the Minnesota Chippewa reservations as well as
having
relatives, many of whom do not acknowledge their existence, in the
White
communities. The Métis endogamous
intra-marriage
patterns are presently exacerbated by conscious decisions to marry
within the
local federally created “Indian Band” community to keep their
children’s Indian
blood quantum above the ¼ ‘degree of Indian blood’ cut-off for
eligibility for
many federally-funded Indian programs [and thus, in many
federally-recognized
Indian ‘tribes,’ for ‘tribal enrollment].
Wub-e-ke-niew also saw
a pattern of intentional “hybridization following the plant- and
animal-breeding patterns of Western Culture.
When the White man hybridized these people, he took away their Dodem
and their family structure, and if they ever had any aboriginal
ancestry it’s
being bred out of them, so that it’s no longer indigenous.
They are following Western Darwinian and
Spencerian concepts of ‘survival of the fittest,’ but they have become
so
tightly inbred that they are getting sick.”
The endogamy of the
Métis and other peoples of Western Civilization is described by
Wub-e-ke-niew
as being promoted by the Judeo-Christian Bible. He
points out that Adam’s sons apparently married their siblings
and the grandchildren of Noah allegedly married their own first cousins
without
repercussion, and then asks, “What about all of the animals on the ark? The White man’s stories are really promoting
incest.”
One of the
characteristic patterns of the Métis, encouraged by the Quebeçois
government
during the seventeenth century with bounty-payments for families having
many
children,[22]
advocated
by the Roman Catholic Church, and continuing at Red Lake into the
1940’s, is
big families: many couples having ten or more children, creating what
Wub-e-ke-niew describes as “Overpopulation.
The land was not intended to support that many people, just like
the
rivers were not intended to be dammed up.”
The demographic differential in reproduction rates increased the
Métis
majority in relation to the Ahnishinahbæótjibway,
who
intentionally spaced children and controlled reproduction to stay in
balance
with the environment.
Fur companies’
rotating tours of duty also had an enduring impact on Métis social
structure. The men who “overwintered”
in the interior were hired for a limited tour of duty at a particular
location,
after which the employee was usually transferred to another place. In adaptation to the limited tenure of these
men, there developed a kind of serial polygamy among the fur company
engagés
and the Métis women with whom they had families: the men moved through
geographical space and through a series of families, and the women
remained
associated with a particular outpost and were given, gambled or sold to
another
man when their husband’s tour of duty at that outpost was finished. This pattern of serial polygamy has
persisted among many of the Métis families at Red Lake.
Synchronous polygamy
also was a common form of marriage among French Métis men, [23]
a number of men in the Red Lake family trees having families with two
women or
more women simultaneously, and a number of wealthy men having children
with
eight or nine different women, and hundreds of descendants by the third
generation. Synchronous polygamy
reflected social status at a time when ability to support more than one
family
simultaneously marked a successful commercial hunter or shrewd trader,
and it
also reflected the buying and selling of women that is recorded[24]
to have occurred during the fur trade era.
Polygamy was a
hallmark of a colonization strategy with roots deep in Western
Civilization’s
tradition: eliminating indigenous patrilinies and supplanting them with
those
of the colonizers. Wub-e-ke-niew
frequently cited the Judeo-Christian biblical exhortation (Genesis
24:19):
And
thy seed shall be as
the dust of
the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east;
and to
the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the
families
of the earth be blessed
as an example of this
orientation.
Polygamy was an efficient use of the available men.
Both of these Métis forms of polygamy
contrast with the preferred form of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
marriage: monogamy in the context of the Dodem network of
extended
family.
According to Wub-e-ke-niew, Ahnishinahbæótjibway
regarded marrying one’s seventh cousin as “incest,” and before
confinement onto
Indian reservations in the last third of the nineteenth century,
maintained a
geographically vast network of extended family through in-married women.[25] Prior to the decimation of the population,
there were at least 32 Dodems.
There were only four Ahnishinahbæótjibway
Dodems
with living members remaining at Red Lake by 1996; two additional Dodems
there lost their last living representative in the mid-1990s.
The
near total annihilation of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
Dodems
is obscured by the Métis’ Indian Clans.
Some Métis Clans are derived on the matriline from Algonquian
Clans, and
inherited either matrilineally or patrilineally according to
circumstances; and
some of them are specifically non-Ahnishinahbæótjibway
Clans. At Red Lake, the Eagle is one
such Clan, according to oral history derived from the, “American eagle
on the
twenty-dollar gold piece,” as a part of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
efforts to integrate the Métis into indigenous systems of government
and
societal organization. Citing Quimby,[26]
Peterson[27]
writes of the historical depth of these creole clans,
By
the turn of the 18th century, Central Algonkian and Siouan bands were
being
forced to confront the ticklish problem of clan affiliation for
countless
abandoned Métis children. It is
suggestive, however, that whereas the Ojibway [sic] were
compelled to
create totemic clans for children of British and American fathers —
appropriately the “Lion” and “Eagle” clans — no such clan name has been
discovered for children of French-Canadian fathers of this period.
According to Ahnishinahbæótjibway at Red Lake, “Métis Clans” historically
included the Loon and Crane.
The destruction of the
Ahnishinahbæótjibway Dodems at Red Lake was
further
camouflaged by the Red Lake tribal council, in Wub-e-ke-niew’s
understanding as
a part of the ongoing discourse about “legitimacy” between the Métis
leaders
and the indigenous people at Red Lake.
After Wub-e-ke-niew began writing about the centrality of Dodems
to Ahnishinahbæótjibway identity – initially
using the
word “clans”[28]
– the
tribal council began emphasizing “Clans,” including commissioning
Johnson Loud,
Jr. to design a ‘flag’[29]
featuring seven ‘clans,’ and naming the casinos operated under the
aegis of the
Red Lake tribal council, the “Seven Clans Casinos.”
The license plates issued by the Red Lake tribal council,
1995-2003, offered local residents a choice of one of the “seven clans”
animals
as the background graphic.
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
definitions of incest precluded marriage or
any other sexual relationship between individuals who shared any common
ancestor within seven generations, who belonged to the same Dodem,
or
with anyone sharing a Dodem with an individual’s ancestors over
five
generations,[30]
i.e.
excluding as classificatory relatives the people of twenty-seven Dodems
as potential mates for any individual, as well as excluding thousands
of
closer-than-eighth-cousin blood relatives.
Ahnishinahbæótjibway perspectives on
incest, in
combination with patrilocal residence for men and a preference for
geographical
exogamy, resulted in each individual belonging to a vast constellation
of
relatives with whom sexual interaction was beyond the bounds of what
Chomsky
calls “thinkable thought.” Ahnishinahbæótjibway
exogamy is in distinct contrast to the nuclear family cross cousin
marriage
described to anthropologists including Landes[31]
by her Métis informants. Such nuclear
family structures consistently include what in Ahnishinahbæótjibway
terms is extreme incest: among Métis families marriages between second
cousins
are not unusual and even marriages between first cousins and
occasionally
half-siblings are tolerated.
An Ahnishinahbæótjibway
answer to the question, “Who are you?” was in terms of Dodem
and place,
with specific descriptions of kinship affiliation often extending
across two
centuries on the patriline, and through fourth and fifth cousins and
their
families. Although the birchbark
scrolls upon which extensive genealogies were once recorded no longer
exist within
the community, a wealth of genealogical information was retained as
oral
tradition. There was a pattern of
“relative-talking” which appears to have been fairly directly
transposed into
English vocabulary, in which details of biological and in-law
relationships are
quickly discussed and confirmed, and the disappointment of being told
by an
older person that an attractive member of the opposite gender is
“related” –
and therefore unavailable romantically – was not infrequently a topic
of
discussion among the young and unattached.
Wub-e-ke-niew and
other Ahnishinahbæótjibway had the
understanding that
“inbreeding” creates less robust offspring (i.e., if one is too
closely
related to one’s mate, the potential for matching recessive genes with
unpleasant consequences is far greater).
One of his more global statements is that “the French people
were so
short because they married their own relatives [they were short, and
they did
marry second or third cousins almost as a matter of preference, viz.
the
Chippewa ‘cross-cousin marriage’]; Ahnishinahbæótjibway
were tall.” This may seem to
verge on the politically “hot” arguments about “race” for which Western
society
is notorious, although the context and significance are quite different
in an
egalitarian and non-violent society, and the diverse gene pool that
would be
maintained by broadly-defined exogamy would be more likely to provide
for
long-term survival of any group.
The importance of the Dodem
and it centrality to Ahnishinahbæótjibway
being is
crucial to understanding what it meant to be Ahnishinahbæótjibway. The significance of extended family in an
egalitarian society is entirely different than in a hierarchical
one—and most
Westerners do not have the referents to fully comprehend the extensive
web of
relatives that was both normal and at the foundations of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
society.
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
Dodems are at the very core
of our autochthonous sense of the “meaning of life,” of community and
of
personal identity. Because Ahnishinahbæótjibway
awareness of “self” is without personal boundary—the connectedness
of
life is a constant part of Wub-e-ke-niew and others’ perceptual and
conceptual
field—sense of the meaning of “I” has at the very least a different
focus than
that of those whose formative years were spent in egocentric cultures. Ahnishinahbæótjibway
extended kinship seems, in deeper analysis, to be inseparable on some
level
from “ego.” Wub-e-ke-niew explained,
The
Dodems and extended family is the singular “I,” if it can be
translated
at all. The Dodem was
everything. It was ‘tightness’ and
organic intimacy.
He adds that one of the
reasons that both Whites and Indians grieve so
deeply at the funeral of a matriarch or patriarch is that, with the
death of
that elder,
They
are losing the glue that binds them together, and after they go home
from the
funeral, they will never be together at that family level again. But, that human need for closeness is still
there. Those needs are not being met in
Western European culture.
After
the funeral, when the patriarch or matriarch is gone, there is nothing
left to
connect them as a family. It’s a sad
moment. They know that they have lost
something that cannot be explained by their language, and they face the
black
void, an emptiness that is a part of Western culture.
So, the survivors will go looking at the churches or the bar to
fill that void, never realizing that what they’re looking for is right
in front
of them. They need to change their
nuclear families into extended families, and learn how to work them—and
that’s
going to take some time.
Wub-e-ke-niew also repeatedly emphasized that
White
people do not have any extended family structure, and Western
institutions
(such as the Catholic Church) depend on their members being deprived of
the
fundamental and natural human need for family.
In order to maintain the nuclear family, they need to keep
members of their society as children, and never let them grow up to
become
mature human beings. Their society is put
together so that people are emotionally dependent on institutions which
do not
actually meet their needs, so that they need to ask an artificial
patriarch,
who also is not connected or responsive to their basic needs, for
favors like a
job. They keep looking for deeper
meaning within their psyche, without ever filling that emptiness that
comes
from the destruction of their extended families. They
take calves and puppies and kittens away from their mothers
as a part of the domestication process, and they do the same thing to
themselves. In this way, they destroy
their own humanity. By separating an
individual from their extended family, they obliterate their inherent
identity
and give them another, artificial identity that’s under the hierarchy’s
control
and is used for the profit of the elite.
Westerners’ extended families [in the sense of Dodems]
have been
taken away from them as a part of the process of ‘domestication’ to
which they
have been subjected by Western Civilization.
If one understands some
aspects of social structure in terms of
fractals, then Wub-e-ke-niew was speaking of fractals of connection:
self in
terms of the interconnectedness of the Dodems, the Dodems
in
terms of the interlinked communities of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
and other human beings, humanity in terms of the interconnectedness of
all
communities of life. As an isolated
individual without deep connection, “I” is not only mortal, but because
of the
disconnection, is also relatively devoid of meaning.
As an interconnected part of a loving and egalitarian whole, “I”
becomes re-defined in the context of a relatively immortal
super-organism, with
referents on both sides of the transition called “death,” and with
access to a
much deeper dimensionality of meaning.
Exile brings a person
to a deep visceral understanding of the profound interconnections
between self
and community, of the surprisingly tenuous nature of “I” when
stripped
of the communities of “we” in which human beings are embedded. In indigenous contexts, the meaning of
“community”
as a part of Ahnishinahbæótjibway Dodems
transcends death. As Wub-e-ke-niew
explained,
The
Dodem continues, and each Ahnishinahbæótjibway
person is a part of it, so they live on despite their physical deaths. This can be compared with a President who
wants to be immortal, so he starts a war or something, but his family
drops
out. Everybody wants to be
somebody—rather than as a single unit, as a family, as the Dodem. That’s how I see it.
And, he stressed, “the
love and connectedness
which are
inherent in Ahnishinahbæótjibway extended family are a
normal and
natural requirement of all living beings.”[32]
Although we spent
thousands of hours recording oral history in conjunction with
genealogy, the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
family trees in our computerized databases[33]
are truncated in comparison to some of the Métis’ because the written
records
of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway were destroyed,
the oral
transmission of the depth of genealogical knowledge was interrupted by
the
incarceration of the young in boarding schools away from their elders
during
the early teen years when they would have mastered that knowledge, the
churches
did not keep records on the non-acculturated non-Christians, and the
B.I.A.
does not appear to have kept much genealogically useful information
regarding
the Ahnishinahbæótjibway at Red Lake prior to
1878.
Métis culture developed in close
association with the fur trade, through more than three centuries. The feudal infrastructure at its European
roots is still apparent, for example in the system of patronage
presently exercised by the federally-established tribal councils, whose
power
extends beyond the political and administrative, and includes handing
out jobs,
‘Indian housing’ and other largesse derived from federal programs
administered
by the tribal council, and allocation of casino revenues.
Details of Métis
history and their rich cultural heritage are beyond the scope of this
paper. What is at issue: the
interrelationships between the Métis majority at Red Lake, and the Ahnishinahbæótjibway,
and the ways in which Wub-e-ke-niew’s challenges to Métis
internalization of
federal Indian identity, and his assertions that Métis claims to being
“Indians” were manifestations of U.S. colonial hegemony, seem to have
been
perceived as profoundly threatening by the ‘Indian’ elite at Red Lake.
Wub-e-ke-niew’s
objections were to Métis claims of “Indian-ness” and thus by their
federal
recognition to ‘Indian’ identity: specifically including the ways in
which
Métis-as-Indians were, as he put it, “used and abused” as agents of
colonization against the Ahnishinahbæótjibway:
‘selling’ land and resources that did not belong to the Métis;
‘legitimizing’
federal occupation of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
land and
expropriation of Ahnishinahbæótjibway rights
and
resources; as direct agents in environmental destruction [clear-cutting
forests, hunting destructively, over-fishing, collaborating in toxic
waste
dumping, etc.]; and for their obscuring the genocide committed against
the Ahnishinahbæótjibway.
In 1994, he expressed his objections and
concerns in We Have The Right To Exist:[34]
Métis
people have their
own identity,
and the capability of realizing themselves as a people in their own
right, but
they cannot do it from within the Indian identity, because that’s owned
by the
White man. I can’t speak for anyone
else; it is up to each person to figure out who they are and chart
their own
destiny. The only thing that I will say
is that the Indians are not the Aboriginal Indigenous people of this
Continent,
and that they do neither themselves nor us any good by pretending they
are.
By the spring of 1996,
Wub-e-ke-niew’s objections to Métis
expropriation of Ahnishinahbæótjibway identity,
property, and sovereignty was more strongly expressed:
“the Métis, acting as Indians, don’t have a culture.
They have a sub-culture of Western
Civilization which was artificially created, and remains dependent on
White
projections, stereotypes, and financial support.” He
continued,
Indian
law, which they use, is nothing more than Roman and English law, and is
not
indigenous to this land. Indian
sovereignty, which is presently a word much bandied about in the media,
is a
form of segregation. It is a
hierarchical term out of Western European monarchies, applied to people
like
the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, who has charge of the Indians.
Wub-e-ke-niew was
emphatic that social identity of the Indians is defined by the White
man, and
has been since the first European explorers started projecting their
preconceptions onto the aboriginal people.
Wub-e-ke-niew described “the Indian identity” as a “Human rights
violation. It strips people of their
dignity, and while a few of the in-group make money, the rest of them
are stuck
in a degrading and dehumanizing stereotype.”
The people who have been defined as Indians have given up their
real
identity, and have taken on the projections of Western Civilization as
their
own, becoming, as Wub-e-ke-niew describes it, “a sacrificial goat.” The same process operates within the Negro,
Black, and/or African-American community, and in the outcaste
communities of
South Asia. It involves displacement of characteristics that are seen
by the
dominant group as undesirable, and possibly as threatening to their
social
class structure and position, onto a subjugated scapegoat group.
At Red Lake, one can
observe this process in action: People get into fights about who has
more
Indian blood quantum, and young men vie with each other to be the
biggest “real
Indian,” playing out what Wub-e-ke-niew called “Hollywood stereotypes …
drinking or wearing feathers and pounding on a drum.”
According to Wub-e-ke-niew, such public demonstrations of
‘Indian-ness’ have “nothing to do with the fundamental aboriginal
values of
keeping the ecosystem and the families intact.” He
continued,
Calling
the Indians the ‘first environmentalists’ and ‘ecologists’ is an
oxymoron and
an illusion—it is a big joke. The
Indians were going around signing treaties and selling land so that it
could be
destroyed—I don’t call that ‘environmentalist.’ Now,
the Indians at [Red Lake] are irresponsible hunters,
shooting everything that moves, leaving the carcasses to rot. They shoot a bear just for its claws and its
teeth, so that they can wear a necklace.
The White Indians are vital to the clear-cutting being done
here—they
are part of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act under which the
ecosystem is
being destroyed. [Red Lake], which was
once
full of fish, is now empty and polluted.
You don’t hear children laughing and swimming in the lake any
more.
The
really sad part about it is that they don’t speak the language. [Both at Red Lake and in the Cities,]
schools have to teach the children how to be Indian.
That’s pathetic. A
culture should be learned in the home.
Beyond
concepts of personal identity, cultural projections and stereotypes,
the
ultimate definer of the Indians at Red Lake is the United States
government,
which has authenticated and enrolled Indians for more than a hundred
years,
along with being, as Wub-e-ke-niew put it, “The Great White Father. Who fathered the Indians?
The White man.” The United States
government controls the official genealogies,
the tribal enrollment process, and the definitions of ‘Indian’ under
which
federal funding can be obtained. The
structure of the tribal council was created by the U.S. Congress under
the 1934
Indian Reorganization Act, and tribal governments are subject to
federal law,
and the goals and policies of tribal councils are heavily influenced by
the
federal government not only through the B.I.A., but also by federal
policies
and priorities in creating the federal programs that are administred by
tribal
councils under the “Indian Self-Determination Act.”[35] Wub-e-ke-niew pointedly described ‘Indian
tribal government’: “They are European Tribal Councils,” and concurred
with
Indian activists, that the U.S. Government “controls everything from
the womb
to the tomb.”
A part of Wub-e-ke-niew’s
point was that being a Federally Recognized Indian is a consequence of
political, historical and bureaucratic processes, and has very little
correlation with indigenous ancestry, community, cultural heritage, or
values. And, as both the genealogies and
nineteenth-century federal policy[36]
made clear, indigenous ancestry is not a requisite of being a
“federally-recognized Indian.”
Although the kinship
ties of the Métis may seem extensive in comparison to ‘middle-American’
whites
for whom “family” is somewhat stereotypically “nuclear,” in cultural
narratives
equated with a married couple, 2.5 children and “companion animals.” From an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
vantage, as Wub-e-ke-niew put it, “the
basic social unit of the Métis, as with their White relatives, is the
nuclear
family.” He explained, “This is the opposite of the aboriginal extended
familiesThe nuclear family consists of the mother and father, the
children, and
a dog and a cat. The Ahnishinahbæótjibway
did not keep domesticated animals as pets, whereas the Métis and the
Indians
do, as a substitute in providing the love and affection of aboriginal
indigenous peoples’ Dodems and extended family, which doesn’t
exist in
Western European culture.” He adds,
“Dogs and cats—you can either love them or you can beat them. Your dog will never leave you even when you
kick him.”
For contemporary
‘westerners,’ such nuclear families fit into the larger institutional
contexts
created by the Church, hierarchical political institutions, and,
presently,
multi-national corporations. Nuclear
families do not have the stability and connectedness that aboriginal
extended
families do. As Wub-e-ke-niew describes
Western nuclear families, “They are highly mobile, here one day and
gone the
next—no roots. To compensate for their
rootlessness, they have all kinds of slogans, like, ‘This land is your
land,
this land is my land,’ and ‘God Bless America,’ which do not meet the
needs of
the people.” He adds, “How can a people
treat the land they claim without respect, polluting it—this
contradicts their
slogans. They never took care of the
land that they came from—how can you expect them to take care of this
land
here? Their heritage shows what they
have done to the land, but their people can’t see it.
It’s invisible in their culture.”
Wub-e-ke-niew
describes the nuclear family structure of Western Civilization as
failing to
provide for the fundamental human needs of “Love, affection and
affiliation...
the female has an inherent, normal and natural instinct for building an
extended family, and she is disrupted and thwarted by the Western
patriarchy
from making her nest. There is no
language and no grammar to help her create a stable society.” He adds, “Witch-burning is one example of
Western attitudes toward women. Not
passing the Equal Rights Amendment is another one.”
Wub-e-ke-niew felt
strongly that the following quotation from Senator Dawes,[37]
who was also author of the General Allotment Act, clarifies the
relationships
between Métis and Ahnishinahbæótjibway:
The
census will, I think, reveal some startling facts in regard to the
Indians. We have been under the
impression for the last twenty-five years that the Indian has been
increasing. That, I think, will appear
not to be true for the last ten years.
The aggregate will fall, I am informed, considerably short of
what it
was in 1880. The loss is mostly
confined to the full bloods. Mixed
bloods hold their own better, and are increasing in this land.
The
Indian people will not remain as a separate race among us, as the black
race
must. The figures show where he is
going. He is to disappear in the midst
of our population, be absorbed in it, and be one of us and fade out of
sight
as an Indian. So you must administer
the Indian Bureau with that in mind.
... Their blood, their sinew, their strength are needed, and
will help
us.
“Violence and macho
behavior are hallmarks of Métis culture at Red Lake,”
Wub-e-ke-niew explained. “Indian men have to play that game,
because the English language is a homosexual language, and they are
always
struggling with the dichotomy of homosexuality and homophobia embedded
in the
English language. Violence is also a
part of their language, which molds their behavior.
Violence was a part of European society when the people who
became Indians left Europe. The Ahnishinahbæótjibway
were non-violent, and the Western Europeans needed a violent people so
that
they could say that they took the land ‘fair and square,’ rather than
‘taking
candy from a baby.’ Violence is a
necessary part of their paradigm of war-and-peace in their historical
process
of expansion.”
“There is a thread in
Indian culture of ‘stabbing in the back.’
This is a White projection, which has been internalized by many
of those
living out the Indian identity. Through
a process of definition by the Anglo-American elite, Indian culture has
been
molded to embody kinds of behavior which post facto justify
European
colonization and destruction of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
culture.”
“Indians’ society is
male-oriented, replete with images of Indian Warriors, and a
war-centered
culture complex,” although according to Ahnishinahbæótjibway
elders, this did not have anything to do with aboriginal culture. Wub-e-ke-niew adds, “The female does not have
much to say in the Indian community.
She is not on the tribal council, although she is allowed to
become the
matriarch of her matriline. As among
any conquered people, when the White man mates with her, her offspring
are
Indian, but the female does not really have any power.
The White man is trying to pacify the woman
because of the rape and humiliation, so he gave her the power to keep
her
offspring as Indians, rather than making them White.
The White man is walking away from his bloodline, and he retains
no connection to it. If he didn’t
pacify the women by saying that their children could be Indian, there
would
really be an outcry.”
Some of the cultural
traits that the Métis describe as being archetypical of their Indian
culture,
for example beadwork, are explicitly derived from the fur trade, and
reflect
values that are antithetical to the Ahnishinahbæótjibway.
Wub-e-ke-niew
comments, “The White man could have written the truth about the
aboriginal
indigenous people, instead of trying to create their own race, their
own
mythologies... instead of saying ‘We’re God, we can make this happen.’ But, they’re not God, and they can’t make it
happen.” He also observes, “When the
anthropologists study the Indians, they’re really studying themselves. They can’t go beyond the ‘glass wall’
created by their language.”
The center of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
society was the network of extended family through the Dodems,
and the Dodem
and between-Dodems-through-women inter-relationships were the
primary
archetypes of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway culture
and
world-view. Connection expressed in
terms of kinship was a crucial part of the deep structure of this
aboriginal
society. Harmony and non-violence were
among the core values of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway;
the
focus was on creating and maintaining harmony not only within the human
community but also with the natural world, living in a sustainable way
with all
of the environment. Non-violence, what
Wub-e-ke-niew terms “respect,” and cooperation are corollaries of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
all-things-are-connected perceptive reality/world-view, and are
consistent with
the overall patterns of indigenous culture.
The Métis economy and
relationship to the ecosystem at Red Lake is based on resource
extraction, and
has always been tied into Western European mercantile expansion onto
this
Continent. Their language and culture
do not provide them with readily accessible patterns toward either the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
values of harmonious relationship with the interconnected life of the
aboriginal forests, nor easily generate the aboriginal cultural
algorithms that
maintained the ecosystem as the abundant paradise described by both the
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
and early White explorers.
Métis origins are
inseparable from their role as commercial hunters for the fur trade. As a consequence of that European
resource-extraction business, in many areas the fur-bearing animals
were hunted
nearly to extinction and the ecology was damaged, sometimes quite
severely. The beaver population was
often destroyed to the point that flooding and often devastating
erosion
occurred, in turn damaging fish and waterfowl populations, as well as
nearly
obliterating the plant communities and habitat associated with beaver
ponds or
protected by their dams.
After the fur trade
ceased to be lucrative because the beaver, mink, and other fur-bearing
animals
had been “hunted out,” and because of changes in colonial policy (e.g.
the British army ceased subsidizing the fur trade through beaver hats
being a
part of their military uniforms), one of the mainstays of Indian
subsistence at
Red Lake and in northern Minnesota was ‘working in the woods,’ i.e.,
logging. From an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
perspective, this was a clear-cut case of destroying the ecological
capital and
infrastructure that these aboriginal people had deliberately maintained
for
millennia.
As Wub-e-ke-niew puts
it, the forests were “food, clothing and shelter for the indigenous
people. The White man and his Indians
destroy the forests for paper money, so that they can buy food,
clothing and
shelter, which doesn’t help any human being.
And, what about all of the animals that live there—what they’re
doing
doesn’t help them, either.”
Métis understanding of
the land is not the same as the Ahnishinahbæótjibway,
and it is worth noting that most of the so-called “Indian names” on the
maps in
the State of Minnesota are not aboriginal place names, but creole
descriptive
names: “Minne[water]-ha-ha[laughing],” “Lightening-Water [Whisky]
River,”
“Town,” etc. These are not the kinds of
indigenous names that people who have lived in the same place for
millennia
have. They are not Ahnishinahbæótjibway
names, reflecting a deep and multi-dimensional inter-relationship with
specific
places on the land over countless millennia.
This is not merely a matter of cultural orientation, but also
reflections descriptions-of-place of people who were relative strangers.
A degree of
transhumant subsistence along traveling by water, gardening, hunting
and
fishing were rational and efficient responses to the environment prior
to the
mid-twentieth century, and Whites as well as Métis and Ahnishinahbæótjibway
engaged in these activities. The
crucial difference is that the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
were deeply aware of their ecological capital and nurtured rather than
exploited it.
The Métis used plants
for medicine and crafts, and so did their European cousins. But, in the ethnographies written using
information from Métis and other Indian ‘informants’ by anthropologists
including Frances Densmore[38]
and W.J. Hoffman,[39]
European
plants are frequently recorded, instead of plants indigenous to this
continent
that have similar medicinal properties.
The plant names recorded by those authors are, like “Indian”
place-names, descriptive rather than chronologically deep.
The aboriginal indigenous
language, Dodem structure and
world-view had as their core value harmony both within the human
community and
with the natural environment. The basis
of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway economy was a
carefully
maintained permacultural ecological base, including: mahnomen,
maple
sugar, gardens, hunting, nuts and berries, and fishing.
Rather than viewing the environment as an
agglomeration of resources to be developed, exploited and sold, the
indigenous
people cherished the forests—for example referring to small maple trees
as “my
children.” Living lightly on the land
was stressed: taking only what is needed, leaving more than is taken. When picking berries, for example, the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
deliberately and explicitly leave some for the “bears and the birds.”
Similarly, there was a
cultural ethic of respect for the animals we hunted, rather than
“shooting
everything that moves,” as Ahnishinahbæótjibway
have
said that some Métis do. Ahnishinahbæótjibway
admired the magnificent deer-elders that a longtime hunter may be so
fortunate
as to meet in the forest, rather than killing them.
In the aboriginal understanding of hunting the purpose was
taking
what food one needed, not sport or ‘trophies.’
Wub-e-ke-niew
pointedly observed, “Catch-and-release is considered a sport by
Westerners. That’s disgusting, what
they’re doing, but they don’t see anything wrong with it.”[40] In Ahnishinahbæótjibway
paradigms, one does not kill anything without need, and would not
torment a
fish for recreation.
Aboriginal Indigenous
people contrast our own perspective with, for example, United States
Government
forestry personnel advising, “kill porcupines when you see them,
because they
ruin the pines.” Wub-e-ke-niew told one
such forester that it was the White people who were ruining the forest
by
cutting down the trees. Ahnishinahbæótjibway
have a cultural emphasis on harmony, seeing the patterns of
interaction, and
attending to all of the small details of the forest ecology... of
respecting
and caring about even the black flies and mosquitoes.
As Wub-e-ke-niew wrote, “Destroying the forests is beyond the
bounds of thinkable thought, in my language.”[41]
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
culture is internally consistent in its
conscious harmony with the natural environment, and thus structured in
a quite
different way than the cultural and linguistic predicates influencing
European
and associated Métis relationships to the environment.
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
are totally at ease in the forests, in harmony with the natural
environment,
and, as Wub-e-ke-niew put it, “do not get lost in the woods like those
Indians.”
The crux of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
relationships with the environment: in living harmony, in continuous
and
conscious interrelationship since the very beginning of aboriginal time. As Wub-e-ke-niew said, “When I pick up a
handful of earth, I am holding the bones of my ancestors.
My roots grow deep here, they grow deep.”
There is no boundary in aboriginal
understanding, between one’s self, the ecosystem, and the earth herself. Wub-e-ke-niew adds, “The Indian can’t do
that [touch their ancestral earth at Red Lake]. The
European can’t do that either.”
Métis culture
developed in close interaction with the Europeans who engendered them,
and
reflects historical client-patron relationships with fur companies. Interaction with European-derived social and
economic systems formed Métis’ identities and status in those colonial
contexts. Through the centuries that
the fur trade continued in commercial operation, the Métis remained
embedded in
the fur trade panoply of sub-cultures, and depended on the trading
posts for
what became physical and cultural necessities of life.
It is clear from
genealogies that there were consistent patterns, at least from the
eighteenth
century onwards, of women ‘marrying up’ – ‘whiter’ – in the
‘racially’-gradated
caste system that developed in the context of the fur trade, as men
married
‘down’ – in fur trade contexts, meaning women who were more ‘Indian’
than they
were. A detailed analysis of Métis
social structure and racialized caste systems is beyond the scope of
this
paper, however the systematic elimination of indigenous patrilines - Ahnishinahbæótjibway
Dodems – in conjunction with those Métis marriage patterns, is
relevant.
Early in their
history, Métis had clear allegiances to specific European groups,
fighting in
the numerous fur-trade conflicts and wars for their White pater-figures. Part of definition of self was in terms of
such loyalties to the British, the French, or ‘the Americans,’ and many
of the
nineteenth-century Métis “Indian names” recorded as a part of ‘Indian
treaties’
and annuity payrolls denote identities like “American Fox,”
“British-Canadian,”
and “Red Coat.”
Contemporary Indians
continue to define themselves in terms of Western concepts, sometimes
fighting
with each other over the details of that externally imposed
segmentation, like
allegiance to a specific Indian reservation describing that
post-colonial
concentration camp as an ‘Indian nation.’
There is an internalization of White stereotypes on both the
positive
and negative sides of this Western dichotomy: striving to be an “Indian
medicine man” with a red-painted pole by the highway; loading one’s
self down
with pan-Indian beadwork, hair-pipe chokers and turquoise on the
“positive”
side, and in the apparent conflation of “negative” and “real Indian”:
pooling
pocket change with other chronic alcoholics to buy one more bottle of
“Wild Eye”
in the sometimes-explicit apprehension that to “sober up and get a job”
is
“selling out,” and making them “less Indian.”
The European feudal
roots and centuries of colonial development of Métis and contemporary
Indian
client-cultures could be, I think, an interesting topic for further
study. How do the these definitions from
the
dominating society become internalized, lived out with conviction, and
defended
as being “real” Indian, Black or even female?
One example of this
process was the formation of images, with the consensus of both the
Indian and
White communities, of a “Radical Indian” identity.
Wub-e-ke-niew describes how, during the early years of the
American Indian Movement, certain A.I.M. ‘leaders’ interacted with
media to
come to a mutual image of what a “radical Indian leader” was supposed
to be
like:
When
I quit driving truck and helped found the American Indian Movement to
work for
social change, I left my truck driver identity and took on the White
Indian
identity of a militant, dressed in cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, an
Indian
bandanna, blue jeans, dark glasses, headband and long braids. Since Indian is a mythological identity, we
initially took our cues from Hollywood.
The news media defined us, a process of interaction in which the
people
who fit the White media’s preconceptions of what a Real Indian was
supposed to
be were the ones featured on the news.
We wanna-be’s played back into the stereotype, adopting the
images in
the media. The original goals of A.I.M.
got lost in the abstract.[42]
Images of ‘radical’ and
‘militant’ Indians developed fairly quickly and
were widely dispersed by the media, particularly during A.I.M.
occupation of
Wounded Knee[43]
and
subsequent protests, and are recognized as such by both Indians and
Whites. One young Ahnishinahbæótjibway
told me in 1996 that he had his hair cut quite short because he was
tired of
the hassles and “slammed doors” resulting from any resemblance in his
appearance to the militant Indian archetype.
The inter-relationship
between the Whites and those whom they have defined as ‘Indians’ is an
ongoing
dynamic, with the people living out the Indian identity caught as
proxies in
Western Civilization’s struggle to come to terms with (and avoid
confronting)
their history on this continent. As
Wub-e-ke-niew put it, the Whites “don’t want to let go of their
Indians, but
they don’t know anything about the Aboriginal people.”
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
remain outside of the Western paradigm.
In our understanding of history, many of the environmentally
devastating
practices (hunting into scarcity, damming rivers and destroying
wetlands,
clear-cutting and the subsequent degradation of lakes and fisheries) of
the
Euroamerica have been deliberately intended to destroy Ahnishinahbæótjibway
permacultural subsistence base and indigenous food supply, and to force
indigenous people into the Western market economy.
Wub-e-ke-niew pointed to hundreds of old-growth sugar-maple
trees
which were cut down “by Indians working for the White man” in the late
1950’s,
and left laying on the ground to rot,” and explained “they wanted to
destroy
our permaculture and bring us into their economic system—make us eat
their
store-food, so we’d get sick and have to go to the doctor, and buy
medicine...
everything they do is about making money.”
He added, “They’re like a spider, trying to draw us into their
web.”
Although both the
community structure and the ecological infrastructure have been
devastated, and
of necessity almost all aboriginal people participate at least
marginally in
the Western global economy, Ahnishinahbæótjibway
have
retained our sense of self outside the Western paradigm.
An aboriginal person draws self-definition
from within one’s own culture and from the Dodems, and does not
need
recognition or affirmation from the colonizer - in either positive or
negative
ways.
Indigenous elder Chris
Spotted
Eagle explained:
What's more and most important is to believe in
yourself, to enhance self reliance, trust yourself and not concern what
I and
others may think. ... State the positive, take a position with no
regrets.
... Do not look for approval or hope to hear compliments and
approval
from others. If it happens, it happens.[44]
Some linguists have
gotten angry at the suggestion that the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
language is different than the Chippewa language taught at
universities,
arguing vigorously that nobody has the prerogative to question the
authenticity
of their Indians. Such a position is
consistent with the historical and structural White-Indian dyad in
Euro-American culture. There is an
embedded political agenda: if the Indians are the “real”
aboriginal
people of this continent, then:
a) the Euro-Americans
need not confront such deeply troubling questions as near-total
genocide;
b) the lucrative
institutional structure of Indian Studies Departments, Bureau of Indian
Affairs
bureaucracies and professional Indians remains intact;
c) Euro-Americans need
not expand their paradigm to include the possibility of aboriginal
people here
who were non-violent, egalitarian, and outside of Western parameters of
reality;
d) Euroamerica is
spared the devastating collective guilt of having deliberately
annihilated
non-violent people; and
e) denying the
existence of egalitarian indigenous people like the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
enables avoid the inherent threat which
egalitarian people pose to the hierarchies of Western Civilization. As Wub-e-ke-niew explained it, “The United
States does not want to admit to the whole world that they committed
genocide
and land theft on a grand scale here on my aboriginal land. It’s a pretty clever scheme.”
The few Ahnishinahbæótjibway
who still spoke the old language in the mid-1990s, stated with
conviction that
their language is different than Chippewa.
As Wub-e-ke-niew put it in We Have The Right To Exist,
Chippewa
is a hierarchical Creole language, a hybrid language of the French
Métis, which
was worked over into a Christian language by the missionaries. The book which is mislabeled A Dictionary
of the Ojibway Language is really a Chippewa dictionary, and has
the tracks
of missionaries all over it. Their
pious linguistic and social engineering was intentional. ... Chippewa
began as
a barter and trade pidgin, used by the Europeans and Métis, and became
a
language of colonizers, commercial hunters and trappers, and fur
traders. Its structure reflects its French
feudal and
mercantile heritage, overlaid by the work of Baraga and his colleagues.
Chippewa has never been an Aboriginal
Indigenous language.[45]
Métis writer Ignatia Broker[46]concured
with Wub-e-ke-niew when she described the languages commonly spoken on
White
Earth Reservation in the late 1800’s as “three tongues — the English,
the
language of the voyageurs [Chippewa], and the good Ojibway.”
The deep structure of
the Chippewa [/Ojibwe/Anishinaabeg] language is hierarchical, with
the
inherent assumption of the possibility of controlling relationships
with the
world. According to people who
understand both languages, the Chippewa [/Ojibwe/Anishinaabeg]
language is
“like English in structure. It is a
different language than the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
language—it is all White.”
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
language is in a different space-time and a different set of
dimensions
than either English or Chippewa.
Wub-e-ke-niew addressed it at length in We Have The Right To
Exist:
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
language is more than words.
It is the totality of communication in several dimensions of
reality. Our language is in living time
with Grandmother Earth, rather than in a mechanical and abstract time.
...
Aboriginal Indigenous languages are the living past and present,
embodying the
values, the consensus harmony, and the meaning of life and death of
those
peoples whose ancient heritage these language are. ... The Ahnishinahbæótjibway
language is balanced, both male and female, non-violent, egalitarian.
... It is
a powerful tool for understanding the world, a guide for our behavior,
and an
interpretation of our harmonious inter-relationship with Grandmother
Earth and
Grandfather Midé. Ahnishinahbæótjibway
contains our eloquent oral history, our social structure expressed in
terms of Dodems
and family, and our holistic and balanced relationship to the universe. When a person fully understands another
language, they also can see into the heart, mind and spirit of its
native
speakers.[47]
The Ahnishinahbæótjibway
language, unlike the
Chippewa or Ojibwe language, is egalitarian, anti-hierarchical, and
non-violent. It does not have
intrinsically non-harmonious subject-verb-object grammar, and its deep
structure provides its native speakers with a blueprint for a
non-controlling,
non-violent and harmonious relationship to the universe.
Wub-e-ke-niew stressed that,
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
is both a male and a female language—at least that’s how it can be
interpreted
in human terms. We are making this
comparison because the Western European languages are hierarchical male
languages, which have all of their pathological man-made emotions and
behaviors
embedded in them, especially anger and violence. Anger
and hate and violence are juvenile emotions and behaviors
that manipulate people through their languages, and prevent their
becoming
adults. When you look at the White
man’s writing, it always focuses on the youth, and they never ask the
advice of
the elders—they warehouse those people and alienate them—they throw
them
away. By keeping people ‘youthful,’
they enable them to be irresponsible, and simultaneously take away
their
identity and their self-esteem.
Western
Civilization domesticates their people in the same way as they
domesticate
cattle, and dog obedience school and Head Start are equivalent. They keep telling their subject people, over
and over again, ‘You are Free,’ but they are trapped with that
language, and
are not free—as long as one’s only language is a Western European
language, they
are a prisoner of that language.
The
White man’s languages have no balance. As Indian Activist Russell Means
would
say, ‘I will fight no more forever.’ He
would wake up in the middle of the night and holler, ‘Hoka Hey! It’s a
good day
to die!’ But it was still night out—he
was using crooked English.”
According to Wub-e-ke-niew, Means did not ever
proclaim that
it was “a good day to die” in the daytime.
In We Have The Right To Exist,
Wub-e-ke-niew wrote that “The Ahnishinahbæótjibway
religious and philosophical tradition, the Midé, is holistic—there is
no
compartmentalization between religion, economics, science, philosophy,
and
politics.”[48]
The processes of stretching reality
into dichotomies, and of disconnecting from the real world and
retreating into
an artificial abstract, which in Western tradition translate into
concepts of
God and the Devil, were not a part of this aboriginal tradition. There was a seamless interconnection with
all aspects of life; no separation between the sacred and the profane. There remains on the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
land at Red Lake a palpable presence of those who are no longer in the
embodied
condition which Westerners call “living,” and two-way communication
with one’s
deceased ancestors is taken as a matter of course among the aboriginal
people.
In congruence with the
egalitarian deep structure of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
way of being, there was no “worship” in a hierarchical Christian sense,
but
rather respect and awareness of the connectedness of all things. Wub-e-ke-niew summarizes, “It was an
ideology and a philosophy that we lived here, if you want to call it a
‘religion,’ that’s O.K. The
spirituality was a part of the Dodem and the extended family
... it’s
hard to explain in English.”
Wub-e-ke-niew
addressed Ahnishinahbæótjibway religion and
spirituality at length in We Have The Right To Exist.
From an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
vantage, the ‘Indian religions’ practiced by the Métis at Red Lake:
cults
centered around charismatic Indian Medicine Men, the Chippewa
Midewiwin, the
Peyote cult, and revival Pentecostal – all extensions of Christianity,
the last
two explicitly so. In the first two,
the Indian Medicine Man and the ‘Shaman’ are equivalent to a Christian
priest,
according to Wub-e-ke-niew, who says, “Indian religions are
hierarchical
religions, and have good and evil in them.
When they talk about the Great Spirit, they are referring to the
Christian God and the Christian’s Devil.
They are caught in the dichotomies that are a part of Western
Civilization.” It is worth observing in
this context that the Indian-language words referring to “The Great
Spirit” are
compound words, e.g. Gitchi Manido and Wakan Tanka—and
that
compound words for such crucial core concepts as “God” in an ancient
and
purportedly deistic culture are unlikely.
The modern charismatic Medicine Man
‘Indian
Religion’ has the structure (and all of the problems of) Christian
cults. According to Wub-e-ke-niew, this
Indian
Religion became popular just after the Indian Freedom of Religion Act
was
passed in 1978. He and two other Ahnishinahbæótjibway
(with the observation that, “we are speaking in harmony”) added the
following
commentary to one of my academic papers written in the Spring of 1997:
Prior
to 1978, Indian Religion was outlawed by 19th-century U.S. statutes
enacted
because the Indian was supposed to exterminated or acculturated into
Judeo-Christianity. The irony is that
the modern Indian Religion is no different than any other sect of
Christianity. It comes out of the same
kind of thinking
demonstrated by the Catholic priest at [Red Lake] who wanted to put
beaded
buckskins at the Stations of the Cross and hold sweat-lodges.
What
your natural body needs is family and love, and neither mainstream
Christianity
nor Indian Religion meets those needs.
So, people keep on searching.
You see all kinds of people coming to the Reservation, looking
for
Indian religion. What they are really
looking for, is the extended family and love that are missing in their
culture. They hope that they will find
it in another religion, but with a nuclear family they will never find
it. They will also never find it in their
religions
(which destroyed the extended family to gain power), because
hierarchical religions
are ultimately about control, not about spirituality or connection. Only in Hollywood do these people find a
happy ending.
The
Pilgrims said they were looking for ‘Freedom of Religion,’ but that was
just an
excuse while they plundered the land. The
way the White man and his Indian use it, religion is merely a
justification for
abuse and a con job—it shouldn’t even be in a culture. You could do away with these man-made
religions. They don’t make you a better
person, and the way they wrecked everything here in the name of ‘God’
isn’t a
very good recommendation for Christianity.
Religion
is useless; it has no value, unless of course there’s an agenda of
control and
manipulation. Their abstract dichotomy
of good and evil does not allow things to be what they are, but
distorts and
perverts them into fallacies and delusions created by the culture—they
live out
the status quo’s fantasies and projections onto scapegoats. Their religion does not allow people to see
things for what they are—they have to place value judgments on anything
and
everything they come across. This way
of thinking disconnects them from seeing anything that’s real. It’s like any kind of rigid hierarchical
thinking—people see it as the ‘gospel truth,’ and they don’t know how
to get
out of it, they’re trapped by the words in their head.
They can’t get out of their language partly
because they’re afraid of the bogeymen they have created at the
boundaries of
their paradigm. The more they get hurt by their exploitive abstract
paradigms,
the more they cling to them, reacting violently and even killing people
over
them. If you were to get rid of
Religion, Capitalism, Communism and Democracy, it would be a great
advance in
the culture of the White man. People
might say, ‘there will be chaos’—but things are already chaos, and will
remain
that way until they start treating each other as human beings. As a matter of fact, the Western hierarchies
need chaos in order to govern—look at the banana republics in South
America: as
soon as things start to become stable, the patriarchy gets frightened
because
they’re going to lose their power. So,
they use military force to keep their power, and go into their banana
republic
to create more chaos by starting a revolution.
On a more local level, people in Euro-American cities don’t know
their
own neighbors, and instead of community they have drive-by shootings. They are caught in an endless, violent cycle
of war-and-peace—and their language and religion keeps them stuck there.
Religion
is a means of diverting hierarchical people who are seeking to fill the
wordless emptiness inside them. They
know that they have some kind of natural need, and they look at
religion, but
religion is not helping—it cannot help them.
Indian religion is a dead end. People
are attracted by the mystique of the unknown, by the ceremony, by the
‘sacredness’ that they project onto it.
They are lazy people looking for a ‘get well quick’ scheme. Sweat lodges are a part of that illusion, as
well as all of the chanting that goes with it.
They cannot find what they are really looking for in Indian
religion,
because it isn’t in there—but the Indians keep the Whites from
getting
too close to the Indian religion, and maintain the effectiveness of
this blind
alley. They use the mystique that the
Whites are projecting onto them, and keep the White people at such a
distance
that the illusion is preserved. This is
one of several kinds of abuse practiced by Indians in the context of
Indian Religion. Indian Medicine men keep
getting thrown in
jail for molesting their clients. How
many medicine men at [Red Lake] have gone to jail for sexual abuse? Most of it’s all hushed up.
(God, I’m glad I’m not a medicine man!) What
about the priests and ministers who do
the same thing? That’s all hushed up,
too.
Indian
religion is only useful to the patriarchy if the Whites are kept at the
fringes
of it—it’s designed to be an attractive mirage. If
the Indians welcomed all of the White people who want to be a
part of Indian Religion, then the United States government would break
it up
the same way as they broke up the Branch Davidians.
Indian
religion is a con job, maintaining the mystique of the Indians and
using it to
hide the genocide and the grand land theft committed by the Western
European
immigrants on this continent. Indian
Religion is playing the White man’s guilt to the hilt, but they are
also doing
a favor for the White hierarchy, by sending people off down the ‘Red
Road.’ Spirituality is something that each
individual is born with, but religion is something that is ‘given’ (or
imposed)
on people—and Western European religions prevent people from
understanding
their own spirituality. Organized
religion keeps people in a juvenile condition, dehumanizes people and
numbs
them to their own spirituality. It also
breaks the spirit of people who think for themselves, creates an
illusion of
‘belonging,’ and diverts people into a labyrinth of abstract dogma,
unresolvable metaphysics and intellectual denial. That’s
why people in this country are not free. The
way that the Western Civilization
dehumanizes people is terrible—it’s been going on for centuries and
it’s going
to get worse. The resources are going the
way of the dinosaurs, and they’re running out of lebensraum.
The
Indian religion is not in harmony, and it’s out of balance. We are debunking the Indian mythology, which
has been attributed to the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
for
long enough. We Ahnishinahbæótjibway
of the Dodems don’t want to take the blame for what the Indians
are
doing any more. We know what’s going
on—we didn’t fall off the turnip wagon yesterday.
