We, the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
are among the Aboriginal Indigenous peoples of this Continent. Our written history includes stone
inscriptions[i]
and
birchbark scrolls which are part of our Midé religion,
and describe our
origins on this Continent early in the Pleistocene geological age. Before the European invasions, the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
Nation was composed of inter-related communities which centered around
the
Great Lakes, and along the network of water routes of the Great Lakes
watershed,[ii]
the upper Mississippi watershed, and the upper Hudson's Bay watershed. Since the beginning of Aboriginal time, we
lived in harmony with our neighbors.
The Ahnishinahbæótjibway
are a
non-violent people who
lived by gardening in conjunction with a permacultural subsistence base
so
closely in harmony with nature that the Europeans thought that our
grain fields
and orchards, and most of our other crops were wild.
In the midst of carefully maintained abundance, we tended our
homes, our gardens and our forests, fished and hunted, developed a
profound oral
literature, and traveled to trade or just to visit.
The Ahnishinahbæótjibway
have always been here. The Western
Europeans have written many mythologies explaining their Indians: that
they
came over the Bering Strait, that they came from outer space, that they
came
from the East Coast, that they ate up all the Hairy Mastodons (and then
presumably went back to Europe to eat up the Hairy Mastodons there). The underlying assumption in even the most
culturally sensitive history textbooks that children are forced to read
in
compulsory-education schools is that Columbus, the Vikings, and
possibly Hwui
Shan the Chinese discovered America[iii],
although some books try to mollify their ethonocentricism with
disclaimers such
as, "many scholars believe that it was the Indians who discovered the
New
World."
Some textbooks portray their
mythological pre-Columbian Indians as living in extremely scattered
settlements. A map in one such book
shows 127 small Indian villages in the entire U.S., then the same books
adds, "warfare
had an important place ... there were great battles involving many men[iv]."
College science textbooks[v]
uncritically accept the unfounded assumption that "American Indian
populations migrated from Asia," discounting any evidence to the
contrary
with explanations like "we could interpret this to mean that the [type
B
blood] mutation arose after the ancestors of the American Indians had
left the
Asian mainland. Through these kinds of
analysis patterns of human migration and other anthropological
interpretations
have been made."[vi] Even acclaimed defender of Indians Jack
Weatherford has to have "... human flesh in many of the tacos, tamales,
and enchiladas,"[vii]
although in a 1992 telephone conversation with us, he denied having
written
this.
The Western Europeans created the
allegory of Indians, and whatever tall tales they want to tell in their
fictions are their business.
But--concealed behind the illusion of Indians is the archetype
of modern
ethnic cleansing: the near extinction of more than forty percent of the
world's[viii]
peoples; and these heinous crimes obscured by the nearly complete
extirpation
of the Aboriginal Indigenous peoples from the annals of Western
civilization. We are consigned to the terra
incognita of their linguistic maps: there is not a single word in
the
English language which means "the Aboriginal Indigenous peoples of this
Continent." Neither the
Euro-Americans nor their Indians know who the Aboriginal Indigenous
people
really are, and they will not say our real names. The
Indians know that they have a dishonest identity, and that
they are trying to steal what belongs to the Aboriginal Indigenous
people. Inescapable evidence of our very
real past
and present existence is masked by the Indian mythology, reinterpreted
to fit
the Indian stereotype, distorted, destroyed,[ix]
and denied. The Indians serve the
convenience of Western Civilization: by deliberately confusing the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
and other Aboriginal Indigenous people with their figment of Indians,
the
Euro-Americans hope to fill the void of exterminated peoples, deny the
genocide
of many millions of Aboriginal Indigenous peoples, evade the
responsibility
for the rape and plunder of our Continents, and justify their theft of
this
land.
The Ahnishinahbæótjibway
are among the peoples speaking an Aboriginal Indigenous language which
European
linguists have defined in their abstract taxonomy as Algonquin, which
is not
who we are. Anthropologists categorized
us and our relatives as Woodland or Algonquin people.
The Euro-Americans invented artificial Indian tribes, and gave
these tribes names: Potawatami, Menominee, Secotan, Salteur, Sauk and
Fox,
Cree, Blackfoot, Chippewa, Pillager, Pembina ... .
Then, they tried to force the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
into their abstract and artificial tribal structure.
Since time immemorial, the land of
the Ahnishinahbæótjibway and our close
relatives stretched
from the land now called North and South Dakota, to the Atlantic Ocean;
from
the sub-Arctic, south to where St. Louis is.
There were no sharp borders between one group of people and the
next. If a person's native language is
one of the languages misnamed Algonquin, they can understand their
relatives
who speak other such languages.
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
understanding of
space, place, and land is different from that of the Euro-Americans. We have a permanent relationship with
specific places, defined partly in terms of our permaculture. My people of the Bear Dodem had a
certain sugarbush, where we tapped our trees, made our sugar, and then
stored
everything we needed to make maple sugar from one year to the next. We harvested and processed our mahnomen
in the same place, century after century.
Our permanent residences--our community of longhouses--had been
in the
same place for millennia. There were
specific places where we fished, where our gardens were, where we
hunted, where
our fruits and nuts and medicines and everything else that we needed
were
maintained by our people. We did not go
roaming around stealing from others, and what we took from our land was
replaced. The Ahnishinahbæótjibway
have a very long-term, harmonious and balanced relationship with the
places and
being of this land. This land,
right here, is where my many-times-great-grandfather of the Bear Dodem
was born about 27,000 B.C., where he lived and died, and where he was
buried
and went back to Grandmother Earth.
This land is the land of his great-grandfathers back more than
40,000
more generations, and it is the land of his great-grandsons through
about 900
more generations to myself. This land
is the open, living textbook of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
history,
values, philosophy and religion, and my identity and my existence as Ahnishinahbæótjibway
is a part of it. The Ahnishinahbæótjibway
have a relationship to this land that the Euro-Americans do not
understand.
The Euro-Americans define land as
abstract, boxed into compartments of quarter-sections and town
lots; eminent
domain with militarily defended borders, survey grids, and property
taxes. Their cultural definition of land
is
hierarchical: those at the top of their artificial structure claim
ownership of
city blocks with skyscrapers, exurban estates, country homes, and
rental
properties; and those at the bottom are urban nomads renting tenements
or going
homeless. The Euro-Americans' culture
defines land by the abstract edges, as exploitable resources, space and
chattel
circumscribed by violently enforced lines.
The Ahnishinahbæótjibway
see land as life.
Rather than borders, we have always
had links connecting peoples. Ahnishinahbæótjibway
are born into the Dodem of their fathers. People
of a particular Dodem are close relatives, related
to all the other human beings of their Dodem and also related
to their Dodem
being. I am of the Bear Dodem,
related to every other Aboriginal Indigenous person of the Bear Dodem
(whether they are Ahnishinahbæótjibway
or not), and also
related to the Bears. The word Dodemian
or Dodem means "my relations." According
to Ahnishinahbæótjibway
values, a
person cannot marry anybody to whom they are even remotely related:
anyone of
the same Dodem, or anyone who is even distantly "somehow
related." The elders knew, and
some still know, back for quite a few generations, who is related. Ahnishinahbæótjibway
men
have always married women from outside their birth communities. The Red Lake Ahnishinahbæótjibway
genealogies include women who married into this community from the
so-called
Blackfoot, Cree, Inuit, Lakota, and other Aboriginal Indigenous
Nations, as
well as European and other immigrant women.
Aboriginal Indigenous exogamy is very different from the
in-breeding
encouraged by the U.S. Government's Indian blood quantum.[x]
A woman who marries an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
man comes into the Dodem of her husband (somewhat analogous to
an
European woman taking her husband's surname), and lives with him on the
land of
which he is a part. This creates a
network of relatives through each person's mother's side of the family
and
through the Dodems, which extended across the Continent in all
directions. (Inheritance of the Dodems
through
the male line is very different from patriarchy, which along with
patrilineal
heirship, is defined in the glossary.)
As a part of the process of
colonization, the United States turned the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
traditional social structure backwards for their Chippewa Indians, and
enforced
this reversal with U.S. Statutes.
Forcing occupied peoples into matrilineal definitions of
themselves is a
Lislakh colonizing strategy, expressed in Judeo-Christian Biblical
admonitions
such as, "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."[xi] Judeo-Christianity prescribes the
elimination
of all patrilines except that of Adam of Eden.
The technical anthropological terms
for Ahnishinahbæótjibway social
organization are patrilineal
and patrilocal. The geographic
power of the men was balanced by the political and social power of the
Clan
Mothers, the women elders. Everyone in
the family respected and listened to the wisdom of these Gi-ma-mâ-nan. We remain a matriarchal society. This kind of balance and linking of related
groups of people generated a very harmonious foundation for Aboriginal
Indigenous society as a whole. Because
of the continual movement of women in marriage, all of the Aboriginal
Indigenous people of this Continent are related.
Red Lake is at a crossroads, as can
be seen clearly from any topographic map.
The Continental Divide between the Hudson Bay watershed (Red
Lake is the
headwaters) and the Mississippi watershed is about twenty miles to the
south of
Red Lake: there is a lake on each side of the Divide, and a short
portage
between them. It is also easy to travel
by water into the Great Lakes watershed from here.
Red Lake is the junction of Aboriginal Indigenous trade routes
that went from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic, from the Atlantic
Ocean to the
Rocky Mountains and beyond.
The ecological base of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
was permaculture: agriculture based on perennial crops, so closely in
harmony
with natural systems that the European upper class was terrified of it. Such permacultural subsistence bases are
remarkably efficient. Very little labor
was required for subsistence in our intact ecology.[xii] Traditional Ahnishinahbæótjibway
crops include mahnomen, maple trees, fruits, nuts and berries,
fish and
game, along with annual garden crops.
We traded for salt, tropical shells (including migis
cowries),
and certain dye plants, among other things.
We made jewelry and some tools from copper; as well as stone
tools
sharper and more durable than the finest steel. We
had writing.
Our forests were pine and mixed
hardwoods, some of the trees thousands of years old, stretching as far
as a
person could travel in a month or more.
The ground soft like a carpet; the water so clean you could
drink it
anywhere. There was plenty of
everything a person might need right here in the lakes, forests and
meadows. Friends and relatives would
welcome a visitor with hospitality everywhere--this is what the land of
the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
and our relations was like. There were
deer and moose and wood-buffalo and caribou; there were passenger
pigeons and
turkeys and geese and so many ducks a person could hear the air rustle
through
their wings for miles, a whooshing sound that lasted long into the
night as
millions and millions of birds settled onto the lakes.
Early European explorers remarked on the
"abundance of game," which was an understatement considering the
impoverishment of their own plundered homeland. There
are a very few places on Red Lake Reservation and elsewhere
in Northern Minnesota where a person can still see the ancient trails
of the
deer: some are worn nearly two feet deep into the ground.
We were all part of a larger,
inter-connected whole. Our land was a
paradise.
Our elders, both male and female,
have always been deeply respected in the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
community. This is very different from
European culture, in which age and gender polarization makes families
more
amenable to state control, and creates discontinuity in oral
history. Our family relationships are
harmoniously
balanced, there is no authoritarian head of the family, and so there is
no need
for role reversal. The foundation of
our egalitarian family inter-relationships includes mutual respect and
a
language which is both male and female.
Because we have no hierarchy, there is no competition for
authority in
the family. We acknowledge each
person's interests, abilities, and knowledge; and as a person ages,
their
experience and broader perspective becomes increasingly valuable to the
community. Our elders were wise and
loving teachers who knew our history and genealogy, and who knew about
medicines and other herbs. They had
clear and useful understanding of community dynamics and practical
psychology. We did not warehouse our
old people, nor
segregate them away from the rest of their Dodemian.
The relationship between men and
women was complementary and based on respect for one another. The women have their own areas of expertise,
and it is not my place to write about them.
There are Aboriginal Indigenous women writers who will explain.
An Ahnishinahbæótjibway
is born into their father's Dodem, and a woman marries into her
husband's Dodem. The Dodems,
the Midé and Grandmother Earth are all part of a
totality which includes
religious philosophy, identity, values, life and death, and our
inter-relationship
with the land. The Midé
goes
beyond Western Civilization's definitions of religion and philosophy. It deals with harmony and reality, rather
than with abstractions. There are parts
of the Midé which are so profound that they are beyond
human comprehension,
and will always remain a Great Mystery.
The Midé also goes beyond Western Civilization's
Science. It cannot be explained in English. The Midé is so vast, it's
impossible
to describe how it makes me feel, but one of the words which comes to
mind is
humility. The Midé is a
compilation
of the wisdom of my people over the course of about a million years, as
well as
the tools for understanding reality. I
see nothing that I would want to change, even if I could.
I am just a translator for my people.
In the years when I was growing up,
anthropologists and other social scientists were studying the Indians. When they asked about Aboriginal Indigenous
religion, the Indians would say that "outsiders are not allowed" to
know about the Midé, because they would exploit and
commercialize
it. The Indians used this strategy to
hide their own ignorance of the Midé.
This was before Indian Religion was enacted by Congress. The so-called Indian religions established
under the Indian Freedom of Religion Act have nothing to do with the
Aboriginal
Indigenous religions, although policy-makers are pretending they are
the same
thing. The Midé is not
secret--but enculturation into Western European civilization usually
prevents
people from seeing or understanding it.
I have been present when Midé elders told
interested and
open-minded White people things about the Midé, in
English, and the
person to whom the elder was talking did not realize they were being
told
anything.
[i].These
have been referred to by an occasional White
writer as petroglyphs. For example, The
Minnesota Explorer, Spring, 1989, page 2, refers to the "Jeffers
Petroglyphs" on County Road 45, three miles east of Highway 71,
northeast
of Windom; where interpretative perspective is provided by the
Minnesota
Historical Society.
[ii].A
watershed was defined by W.M. Davis in 1899:
Although the river and the
hill-side do not resemble each other at first sight, they are only
extreme
members of a continuous series, and when this is appreciated,
one may fairly
extend the "river" all over the basin and up to its very
divides. Ordinarily treated, the river
is like the veins of a leaf; broadly viewed, it is like the entire leaf.
(Quoted
in The
Essential Whole Earth Catalog, The Point Foundation, Doubleday,
1986.) The shallow draft of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
canoes, and the deeper water in many waterways before the decimation of
beaver
populations, meant that even small streams were navigable for us. Maps of what remains of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
highways are available from the Map Department of the U.S. Geological
Survey,
which calls them topographic maps.
[iii].Of
many possible examples, Holt, Rinehart & Winston's Inquiring
About
American History.
[iv].Ibid,
page 61.
[v].For
one example, Charlotte J. Avers' Genetics, 1984.
[vi].Ibid,
page 536.
[vii].Jack
Weatherford, Indian Givers, How the Indians of the Americas
Transformed the
World, Fawcett Columbine, 1988, page 107.
[viii].From
about 30° W. longitude to 180°.
[ix].For
example, Theodore C. Blegen, in Minnesota, a History of the State,
Minnesota Historical Society, 1963 reprint, cites (pages 18-19) the
destruction
of about 10,000 known burial mounds and "effigy [sic] mounds,
shaped in the form of birds, buffaloes, bears or snakes, with ...
religious
meanings, but these unhappily have since [1880] been plowed under by
farmers
who cared more about crops than about archaeology."
[x].The
French Métis' genealogies show patterns of endogamy and marriage
of close
relatives back into the 1600's. This is
exacerbated by the way the U.S. Government has structured definition of
Indians
by blood quantum. The inbreeding of
Lislakh people who are defined as Indians and want to maintain their
blood
quantum identity, has become so pronounced that forensic scientist
Terry Laber
of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension mentioned in another
context:
Greater genetic similarity
among ethnic subpopulations, such as American Indians living on the
same
Reservation, would bring [previously cited 1 in 100 quadrillion odds
of DNA
fingerprints matching] down, ...
(reported
by the
Minneapolis Star Tribune, January 10, 1994, p. 8A.) Laber's colleague Dr. Jim Iverson explained
in a subsequent telephone conversation that the B.C.A.'s gene frequency
database was compiled largely from a commercial blood center in south
Minneapolis. The socio-economic conditions
are such that
there is a significantly higher ratio of Aboriginal Indigenous people
to
Indians among the population who frequently sells their blood, than in
the
Indian Reservation population in Minnesota, i.e. the inbreeding
among
Métis and Euro-Indians is even more pronounced than Dr. Laber
observed.
[xi].The
Holy Bible,
King James Version,
Genesis 29:14.
[xii].In
general, the farther the ecology has degenerated from natural harmony,
the more
labor is required per calorie of food produced. The
inefficiency of "modern" agriculture is masked by
the use of fossil fuels, but in fact much mechanized agriculture
requires
substantially more energy input than is produced by the crops
(including
the corn used for gasohol). Dr. John
Martin, of Arizona State University in Tempe, studied Indigenous
subsistence
bases extensively during the 1970's, and the reader is referred to his
work for
detailed information, and to Esther Boserup's meticulous measurements
of the
energy required for subsistence in a range of human inter-relationships
with
variously altered ecosystems.
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