U & D

“My students most want to know why you are not angrier,” I asked at the April LD291 Best Practices – Native Studies conference. Not a very PC question. But I got an answer. [paraphrased] “For us, land is power. And we have always been here. So why should we be angry?”

This is THE key concept that non-Native teachers have to accept.

I have been wrestling with the concept since April. It turns the idea of Unequal Power on its head. We non-natives have always been taught, historically and even within our family structures, that power resides with those who have the economic upper hand, the physical upper hand, and the most allies.

But here is one Passamaquoddy elder telling me that he has real POWER that economic superiority, physical stength, and greater numbers can not take away, minimalize or overcome. A power of place and heritage.

I get close to understanding when I add up Native territories and people over 10,000 years. It is not a time frame that I am accustomed to, being from a family that can at best kind of, sort of, trace itself back to New Amsterdam, and that derives no strength or identity from a tenuous connection to Peter Stuyvesant. If you ask your students to imagine 10,000 pebbles in a line, and then to imagine 10,000 parallel lines of pebbles, and then to multiply this by 30,000 generations, you might be able to help them to see the power of this native heritage in the territory we call Maine. It is formidable.

This is one way in which we, as teachers, can answer the directive of Penobscot Elder Butch Phillips to “tell them who we are.” It helps me to accept that it is not possible to separate inherent Native power from land and resources.

It is also true that economic power can not be separated today from land and resources. Or from political power, which derives from law and from control of resources. From one way of looking at the power relationship, as it affects the Wabanakis, there is indeed unequal power. Refer to my previous post on Environmental Sovereignty & Unequal Power for a discussion of one aspect of this power relationship, and to my post Thoughts on Sovereignty for another.

On the other hand, the Native power of place and heritage, a power that some understand as “spiritual,” is far greater than any similar claims made by non-native individuals or governments. This is, it seems to me, recognized explicitly in the statements and documents quoted in the my previous posts.

The real power struggle is between the power of heritage rights and the power of contemporary ownership and law. For this to be a balanced struggle, in which Native defeat is not pre-ordained, there has to be an acceptance of the value of Native power. That must be a threatening thought to those who want to sit pretty with economic power and the political power to control land and resources development. Hence the danger of Unequal Power taken from the non-Native point of view – or the contentment with this point of view.

This acceptance of Native power should not be clouded by a false understanding of the contemporary tribal economies and political agendas. These are not naive hunter/gatherers. Teach your students the issues of today as well as the meaning of those 10,000 pebbles. Teach them that Native studies is historically about Us v. Them, but must be about working together for mutually beneficial, or at least mutually respectful, economic and political goals.