MO5 Academic Blog Wilma Mankiller

I watched the video of Wilma Mankiller"s lecture and was impressed by her overall tone of optimism. She started out by mentioning how little the American public really knows about Tribal people, and proceeded to inform us in broads strokes about sovereignty, about Tribal governments and the different ways chiefs accede to their positions (through general consensus, through selection by the women of the tribe, etc... She states that context is everything and that historical context informs every aspect of contemporary Tribal life: The importance for all Americans to understand the past of native people cannot be understated, because the "lack of information leaves a void filled with misinformation"
Wilma Mankiller, who was chosen three times to serve as chief of the Cherokee Nation, emphasizes the importance of protecting the sovereignty of Tribal governments as "traditional ways are slipping away." To protect them is to reinforce the sense of community that is essential to Native people. She stresses the importance for people to maintaining a sense of responsibility, of reciprocity and of inter-dependency to each other and to Nature in order to preserve traditional ways. as a case in point, she describes a traditional ceremony whose purpose is to promote oneness and unity: people come to rekindle relations, to bury past offences and to clear their minds of negative thoughts. As they leave their homes to come to the ceremony, the Tribal members all put out their home fires and light them again from the communal fire, once the ceremony is over and they are unburdened from any hostile thought.
She speaks of appearances being deceptive and she uses the example of outsiders driving by a Native community and noticing only how run down and poverty-stricken it may look, while those living inside see things from a different point of view, colored by their Native beliefs and values that take strength from family and community rather than from manifestations of wealth. She tells of tribes using their gaming profits to take ownership of their social services by providing health care, schools, foster homes and adoption agencies run by Native people to better their community.
In the end, while she answers questions from her audience, she gives advice to young Native Americans: stay close to your people emotionally and traditionally; value education, take care of others and keep a positive mind. That attitude has helped Wilma Mankiller through many of life's ordeals, and has helped generations upon generations of Native American people survive in spite of overwhelming hardship. The message I liked the most was from a Mohawk proverb she used: " It is hard to see the future with tears in your eyes."

MO 3 Academic Journal Blog

Looking at our online resources for this module, I was struck by the long-lasting consequences of some U.S. policies regarding our First Nations. I started with the American Indian Film Institute website, and came to a short film about the Lakota people,  their impoverished lives on the Pine Ridge reservation, their efforts to keeps their traditions and language alive with their young people, and the amazing affinity they have with their horses. The film is called "Mitakuye Oyasin" (We are all related) I knew that horses were a central part of many Indian nations' lives, but I did not realize how sacred and beloved they were and how much the horses were a revered part of the family. The speaker in the movie talks about honoring the horses like " a mother, a father, a grandmother, a grandfather..." She states that the horse is part of the Lakota identity, that all Indian children can ride instinctively, and that when the horses were killed in droves by U.S policy, the Lakota lost their way of life. Horses had allowed them to hunt efficiently, to communicate with other groups, to move swiftly when necessary, to defend themselves, and their loss coincided with the Lakota's defeat and their settlement in reservations. That a people's loss of mobility equated to their loss of freedom and hope, was an efficient government policy allowing white settlement in areas otherwise invincible, but the consequences are heartbreaking. .Extreme poverty, very high unemployment, suicide rates for teenagers four times higher than those of the general population, disease and low life expectancy for the Lakota are all related to living on the reservation nowadays. There is concern that if conditions do not improve rapidly, the Lakota could disappear, and an effort is being done to reintroduce the wild horses to their lands. This  situation is a far cry from life on the Great Plains, where thousands of wild horses roamed freely and the Lakota had such a symbiotic relationship with them that the horses did not need to be fenced in. As white settlers started moving west, the US reneged on one treaty after another to make room for homesteaders and prospectors, and enacted harsh measures such as the extermination of horses and buffalo to force the Lakota's relocation;  The beautiful wild horses that were intrinsic to Lakota life were slaughtered in droves to handicap the Indians: "The Us Army killed or confiscated most of their horses as a matter of policy." (Nokotahorse.org) The grand scale extermination of horses and buffalo by the US government in order to facilitate white settlement shows a complete disregard for the long-term consequences of their actions.

Sources:
http://aifisf.com/best-of-the-american-indian-film-festival-presented-by-ak-chin-indian-community/
http://nokotahorse.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=46&Itemid=12
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m8pMmcEkSA
P.S. Now that I am citing my sources, I cannot find how I got from the film website to "Mitakuye Oyasin" but I am including a you tube link.

MO2 A2 Academic Journal Blog

The resource I chose was about the Tulalip tribes near Seattle, and because I had never heard of them, I was very interested in reading about their efforts to revitalize their culture. Tulalip is a large reservation established in 1855 in Washington state and it is home to the Snohomish, Snoqualmie, Skagit, Suiattle, Samish, Stillaguamish and the Skykomish. Because of the US government's policy of removing Native American children from their families and sending them to boarding schools to purge them of their Indian ways, their language, Lushootseed, and many of their traditions and crafts were on the verge of being lost forever.

In the past, these tribes had lived according to the change of seasons and the availability of game and fish: in the warm months, they moved around to where hunting and fishing were most plentiful, and built moveable houses out of cattails and tulle. I was curious to find out what tulle was, because the only tulle I knew about was the kind used in tutus or prom dresses, not practical for building material, but I couldn't find much information about it, other than it is some kind of grass that was made into mats.In the cold months, people lived together in long houses made out of cedar. The Tulalip tribes considered cedar trees sacred and used their logs to built houses and beautiful canoes. Clothes and baskets were waterproof and made out of cedar bark, and blankets were woven out of " goat wool, dog hair and firewood fluff". Now I became curious about the "dog fluff " part of the blankets ( I have two Huskies that shed a lot) and looked into another website, where I read an interesting article from The Historical Washington Quarterly of April 1918, titled;" The Dog's Hair Blankets of the Coast Salish. In it, the author states that the blankets were "typically made with the hair of their dogs, which are almost white and of the domestic kind."
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In order to reclaim their heritage, efforts have been made by tribe members to reintroduce ancient crafts and customs, and to teach the language in schools, from elementary through college levels. In 2007, Washington state changed its teacher certifications requirements, to allow tribes to certify language teachers. I was surprised to learn that there was a Federal Native American Language Act in effect, that addresses issues of language. I watched the videos about learning the language and saw the children in a Montessori school singing songs in Lushootseed with the guidance of an elder. I was interested to see that the teachers were not all native people, but the website states that there is a master language teacher that goes to the schools and that he is helped by several other teachers.

I followed the prompts to access the Lushootseed alphabet and spent quite a while learning about the sounds and repeating them as directed. This part of the website was very well done in my opinion ,because I could go back to a sound or a word several times before moving on. Some of the symbols looked complicated at first sight, a little like hieroglyphs, but they made more sense as they were described one by one. Some of the sounds are not found in the English language, and are made in the back of the throat, whispered, slurred, or clipped midway, so I found that very challenging, as I imagine the children being taught must also feel. But with mastery of the language they must feed pride in their heritage, and that is pretty cool, for lack of a better word.  I then followed an introduction language lesson, and had a great time watching the teacher's careful enunciation, and trying to follow her lead. I recommend it. I wrote down a quote that I can no longer trace to its origins, but it seems appropriate: " Traditional languages of Native Americans are an integral part of their cultures and identities." What a crime to deprive generations of Native Americans of their age-old ways of communication; the boarding school system altered countless more lives than those of the children it tried to reform....

Efforts are also made to find and restore archives, to have museums  and to keep up communal longhouses. Ceremonies help keep traditions aline and cement the bond between tribal members, and happen throughout the year: the Salmon Ceremony in Summer, for example, to bless fishermen before the salmon fishing season begins; Winter Dancing; Veterans" Pow Wow; and funeral ceremonies, to support the dead and those who helped them during their lifetime.

In all, I though the information was very interesting and well presented, although not extensive, but it prompted me to check out other websites and learn more about the people from Tulalip who have been here since the end of the Ice Age.

Sources:

http://ttculturalresources.org

If you are interested in more information, these websites were useful:

http://www.tulaliptribes-nsn.gov/Portals/0/pdf/departments/community_development/Comprehensive-Land-Use-Plan/Housing.pdf

http://content.lib.washington.edu/Cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/lctext&CISOPTR=1477&CISOSHOW=6318

http://crosscut.com/2010/05/06/tribes/19787/Preserving-Lushootseed-language-for-next-generation/

Immigration  Blog

I was born and grew up in Paris and moved to the States when I was eighteen to study modern dance. Coming to the US alone had a strong impact because I was leaving my family and friends for the first time, and I had some trouble adjusting to the different ways of life. I was nostalgic about the food I was used to and I missed the local markets. I found that supermarket fruit had no taste, but eventually I figured it out. I had some strange cultural adaptations; my daughter, who studies these things, tells me it is common for people from a different culture to do strange things with new ingredients: for example, I would put cream cheese on English muffins and top them with ketchup and salt and pepper, I guess because I didn't know how to use those things, I made them into an approximation of a pizza!
I am now studying history and I particularly love American history because it is still new to me.

The group I chose to study is the Dutch, who came to New York in the early 1600s. Because I live in the Hudson Valley, I see Dutch influence in the names of nearby towns like Peekskill, Catskill, Wallkill, all derived from the Dutch word "kils" meaning stream. I found a little bit of trivia in the fact that the colors of the old Dutch flag, the blue, white and orange are seen in the uniforms of the Ny Mets, Knicks and Islanders."
More importantly to the Native Americans of the Hudson valley, the Dutch were originally interested in trading fur pelts for kettles, linens, blankets and weapons, so it behooved them to keep the peace with the Iroquois Confederacy. But they brought with them disease and they altered the environment by causing Indians to hunt for commerce rather than sustenance, thereby killing considerably more beavers and muskrats than were needed for survival. The Dutch created a dependent relationship with the native people, whose priorities were changed. Eventually, as settlers followed traders, they needed more land and found that Indians were an obstacle to their development, and were no longer interested in peaceful cohabitation.
Around present day Kingston, Esopus Indians lived and farmed the land in close proximity to the Dutch, regular squirmishes between sides resulted in the building of a wooden stockade protecting houses that still stand today.
I was curious about the influence of Dutch food, so I looked up an article in the New York Times, titled: A Food Historian Works to Give the Dutch their Due. The author states that the Dutch contributed many sweet items, pancakes, waffles, and cookies (cookjes). He included a fun fact, that there was a ban in 17th Century New Netherlands, preventing "bartering bread and cookies with the native Indians for beaver pelts", indicating that a sufficient number of Native Americans must have been exposed to the baking of Dutch housewives, to have made a ban necessary!

Sources:
http://people.hofstra.edu/alan_j_singer/docket/docket/11.1.14_The_Dutch_Influence_in_New_York_City.pdf

http://www.hudsonrivervalley.com/NG_TheHudson/index.html

http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/kingston/colonization.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/13/garden/a-food-historian-works-to-give-the-dutch-their-due.html

MO1 Academic Journal Blog: Six Nations

Looking through the online resources, I was surprised to read that the Six Nations ( Mohawks, Oneida, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and later Tuscaroras ) had created the oldest living participatory democracy on Earth. (www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/) They influenced Ben Franklyn and Thomas Jefferson's views on democracy with principles such as governing "by reason and consent rather than coercion". For people coming from Europe, where kings and queens ruled and the masses had very little power, the idea of a democratic, well-balanced government, must have taken some getting used to; somehow along the way, those who learned from the Six Nations, conveniently forgot who introduced them to democracy,
As Bruce Johansen writes in Reaching the Grassroots: The Worldwide Diffusion of Iroquois Democratic Tradition, " Immigrants from Europe often have borrowed from Native peoples, embraced this knowledge as their own, and then forgotten its origins."

I was also surprised at how long ago the Six Nations had chosen a democratic rule for themselves: as far back as 1142 the Iroquois Confederacy was ratified by the Senecas, who were among the last to do so.  Europe at that time was hardly a bastion of democracy, and it took hundreds of years before Europeans came in contact with people who valued equality and respect. One of the ways the Confederacy remembered important events was through the use of Wampum belts, a process that took two or three years to complete.

I read an article that was very helpful in explaining the use and meaning of wampum belts. It was written in 1925, and reports on the Six Nations' representatives going to Washington to assert their right not to become American citizens. The article, by Howard Mc.Lellan, describes how the Wampum belts are made, (with hollowed out strips of clamshells) how the placement and color of the beads have special meaning to help the bearer recall the exact events being commemorated by the belt, and how, by their accuracy, they were a binding document for the Six Nations. Decoding the belt was time-consuming, as they were hundreds of beads and as "each Wampum piece had a meaning, every one must be counted and color and arrangement interpreted." I found it amazing that the oldest Wampum belt dated from 1550 and that it was still a record that could be interpreted in 1925, to describe historical events that had happened so long ago.

It is remarkable that the belts had survived at all in spite of the years of turmoil between the Nations and the Europeans; almost 400 years later, the belts still served their purpose as political storytellers. There is something mystical in the fact that with the Wampum belts, generations communicate with each other, the belt makers reaching out through their craft to their descendents, who extract their knowledge from the intricacies of the beads. I definitely want to learn more about the Six Nations after reading these articles, and I hope to continue blogging about them.

Thank you for reading this.

Introduction

Hi, my name is Bianca. I'm ridiculously late for this introduction because I just figured out today how to maneuver Blogger. Even though I haven't been able to follow other people's blogs, I have been enjoying everybody's discussion posts so far. 

I'm a history major who doesn't know much about American history - I grew up in France and didn't receive any instruction in American history. I'm particularly interested in learning about native cultures around the world, though. 

Happy blogging!

Bianca