Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World through Stories
446
Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World through Stories
446eBook
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| ISBN-13: | 9781609173531 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2013 |
| Series: | American Indian Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 446 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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CENTERING ANISHINAABEG STUDIES
Understanding the World through StoriesMichigan State University Press
Copyright © 2013 Michigan State UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-067-2
Chapter One
Eko-bezhig BagijiganStories as Roots
Anishinaabeg stories are roots; they are both the origins and the imaginings of what it means to be a participant in an ever-changing and vibrant culture in humanity. In the same vein, stories can serve as a foundation and framework for the field of Anishinaabeg Studies, providing both a methodological and theoretical approach to our scholarship. They embody ideas and systems that form the basis for law, values, and community. Stories are rich and complex creations that allow for the growth and vitality of diverse and disparate ways of understanding the world.
Basil Johnston outlines this in his essay "Is That All There Is? Tribal Literature." Seen by many as one of the roots and foundations of the field of Anishinaabeg Studies, it is fitting that we begin with one of our greatest intellectual elders—for he is cited by contributors throughout this collection and countless others for the stories he tells. Johnston delineates how stories hold deep knowledge about Anishinaabe perceptions, values, and worldviews. His essay is a call in response to a curious young boy who, having grown bored of studying Indian cultures, asks him: "Is that all there is to Indians?" Using examples in Anishinaabeg language and literature, Johnston argues that mainstream approaches ossify Anishinaabeg culture, and asks that critical lenses focus on the intricacies of expression to understand Anishinaabeg aesthetics, politics, and values. Like traditional creation stories and teachings, so too do Johnston's words not only teach us where we come from but also illuminate where we can go as a field.
Heid Erdrich, in her essay "Name': Literary Ancestry as Presence," also demonstrates that stories are foundational to the field of Anishinaabeg Studies. She claims the importance of understanding Anishinaabeg intellectual and literary history, arguing that stories serve as signs or marks of our presence, functioning much like landmarks on a map. Her essay demonstrates how stories can be seen both as persistence and continuance, "a presence that is at once new and at the same time based in an Ojibwe epistemology as old as petroglyphs." In doing so, Erdrich beautifully illustrates how contemporary storymaking is connected to the recovery of historic literary traditions. She unearths works that came before, extends the path with her footprints, and calls on others to take part in this literary motion as well. Erdrich's essay shows how story functions as an intellectual ancestry for the field, noting that "ancestry is everything to Ojibwe people."
Margret Noori's essay "Beshaabiiag G'gikenmaaigowag: Comets of Knowledge" recognizes that some roots of Anishinaabe story are contained within Anishinaabemowin, our ancestral language. She explains that action is the foundation of Anishinaabeg stories, and Anishinaabemowin, as a verb-based language, lends tremendous insight into the way these stories move and create. Much like Johnston, Noori outlines how literatures in Anishinaabemowin can serve as a window to Anishinaabe worldview, demonstrating how it contains subtle elements that reveal Anishinaabeg constructions of their relationship to all of creation. Noori's essay encourages us to consider how stories in Anishinaabemowin may be foundational to the field as they illuminate how we order our world.
Is That All There Is?
Tribal Literature
BASIL H. JOHNSTON
In the early sixties, Kahn-Tineta Horn, a young Mohawk model, got the attention of the Canadian press (media), not only because of her beauty, but because of her articulation of Indian grievances and her demands for justice. Soon after, Red Power was organized, threatening to use force. Academics and scholars, anxious and curious to know what provoked the Indians, organized a series of conferences and teach-ins to explore the issues. Even children wanted to know. So for their enlightenment, experts wrote dozens of books. Universities and colleges began Native studies courses. Ministries of education, advised by a battery of consultants, adjusted their curriculum guidelines to allow units of study on the Native peoples of this continent. And school projects were conducted for the benefit of children between ten and thirteen years of age.
One such project at the Churchill Avenue Public School in North York, Ontario, lasted six weeks, and the staff and students who had taken part mounted a display as a grand finale to their studies. And a fine display it was, in the school's library.
In front of a canvas tent that looked like a teepee stood a grim chief, face painted in warlike colors and arms folded. On his head he wore a headdress made of construction paper. A label pinned to his vest bore the name Blackfoot. I made straight for the chief.
"How!" I greeted the chief, holding up my hand at the same time as a gesture of friendship.
Instead of returning the greeting, the chief looked at me quizzically.
"How come you look so unhappy?" I asked him.
"Sir! I'm bored," the chief replied.
"How so, Chief?"
"Sir, don't tell anybody, but I'm bored. I'm tired of Indians. That's all we've studied for six weeks. I thought they'd be interesting when we started, because I always thought that Indians were neat. At the start of the course, we had to choose to do a special project from food preparation, transportation, dwellings, social organization, clothing, and hunting and fishing. I chose dwellings"—and here the chief exhaled in exasperation—"and that's all me and my team studied for six weeks: teepees, wigwams, longhouses, igloos. We read books, encyclopedias, went to the library to do research, looked at pictures, drew pictures. Then we had to make one. Sir, I'm bored."
"Didn't you learn anything else about Indians, Chief?"
"No sir, there was nothing else ... Sir? ... Is that all there is to Indians?"
Little has changed since that evening in 1973. Books still present Native peoples in terms of their physical existence, as if Indians were incapable of meditating upon or grasping the abstract. Courses of study in the public school system, without other sources of information, had to adhere to the format, pattern, and content set down in books. Students studied Kaw-lijas, wooden Indians who were incapable of love or laughter; or Tontos, if you will, whose sole skills were to make fires and to perform other servile duties for the Lone Ranger—an inarticulate Tonto, his speech limited to "Ugh!" "Kimo Sabe," and "How."
Despite all the research and the fieldwork conducted by anthropologists, ethnologists, and linguists, Indians remain "The Unknown Peoples," as Professor George E. Tait of the University of Toronto so aptly titled his book written in 1973.
Not even Indian Affairs of Canada, with its more than two centuries of experience with Natives, with its array of experts and consultants, with its unlimited funds, seems to have learned anything about its constituents, if we are to assess them by their latest publication, titled The Canadian Indian. One would think that the Honourable William McKnight, then minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, under whose authority the book was published in 1986, should know by now that the Indians who often come to Ottawa do not arrive on horseback, do not slay one of the RCMP mounts and cook it on the steps of the Parliament Buildings. Moreover, most Indians he has seen and met were not dressed in loincloths, nor did they sleep in teepees. Yet he authorized the publication of a book bereft of any originality or imagination, a book that perpetuated the notion and the image that the Indians had not advanced one step since contact, but are still living as they had 150, even 300 years ago. There was not a word about Native thought, literature, institutions, contributions in music, art, theatre. But that's to be expected of Indian Affairs—to know next to nothing about their constituents.
Where did the author or authors of this latest publication by Indian Affairs get their information? The selected readings listed at the back of the book provide a clue: Frances Densmore, Harold Driver, Philip Drucker, Frederick W. Hodge, Diamond Jenness, Reginald and Gladys Laubin, Frank G. Speck, Bruce G. Trigger, George Woodcock, Harold A. Innis, Calvin Martin, E. Palmer Patterson—eminent scholars, none of whom spoke or attempted to learn the language of any of the Indian nations about which they were writing. Modern scholars, because they are not required by their universities to learn, are no more proficient in a Native language than were their predecessors.
Herein, I submit, is the nub and the rub. Without the benefit of knowing the language of the Indian nation that they are investigating, scholars can never get into their minds the heart and soul and spirit of a culture and understand the Native's perceptions and interpretations. The scholar must confine his research and studies to the material, physical culture, subsistence patterns, and family relationships.
Without knowing the spiritual and the intellectual, aesthetic sides of Indian culture, the scholar cannot furnish what that little grade-five youngster and others like him wanted to know about Indians.
Admitting his boredom was that grade-five youngster's way of expressing his disappointment with the substance of the course that he and his colleagues had been made to endure. In another sense, it was a plea for other knowledge that would quench his curiosity and challenge his intellect.
Students such as he, as well as adults, are interested in the character, intellect, soul, spirit, heart of people of other races and cultures. They want to know what other people believe in; what they understand; what they expect and hope for in this life and in the next; how they keep law and order and harmony within the family and community; how and why they celebrated ceremonies; what made them proud, ashamed; what made them happy, what sad. Whether the young understand what they want to know and learn does not matter much; they still want to know in order to enrich their own insights and broaden their outlooks.
But unless scholars and writers know the literature of the peoples that they are studying or writing about, they cannot provide what their students and readers are seeking and deserving of.
There is, fortunately, enough literature, both oral and written, available for scholarly study, but it has for the most part been neglected. Myths, legends, and songs have not been regenerated and set in modern terms to earn immortalization in poetry, dramatization in plays, or romanticization in novels.
What has prevented the acceptance of Indian literature as a serious and legitimate expression of Native thought and experience has been indifferent and inferior translation, a lack of understanding and interest in the culture, and a notion that it has little of importance to offer to the larger white culture.
In offering you a brief sketch—no more than a glimpse, as it were—of my tribe's culture, I am doing no more than what any one of you would do were you to be asked, "What is your culture? Would you explain it?" I would expect you to reply, "Read my literature, and you will get to know something of my thoughts, my convictions, my aspirations, my feelings, sentiments, expectations, whatever I cherish or abominate."
First, let me offer you an observation about my language, for the simple reason that language and literature are inseparable, though they are too often taught as separate entities. They belong together.
In my tribal language, all words have three levels of meaning: There is the surface meaning that everyone instantly understands. Beneath this meaning is a more fundamental meaning derived from the prefixes and their combinations with other terms. Underlying both is the philosophical meaning.
Take the word "Anishinaubae." That is what the members of the nation, now known as Chippewa in the United States or Ojibway in Canada, called themselves. It referred to a member of the tribe. It was the answer given to the question "What are you?" But it was more than just a term of identification. It meant, "I am a person of good intent, a person of worth," and it reflected what the people thought of themselves, and of human nature: that all humans are essentially, fundamentally good. Let's separate that one word into its two terms—the first, Onishishih, meaning good, fine, beautiful, excellent; and the second, naubae, meaning being, male, human species. Even together they do not yield the meaning "good intention." It is only by examining the stories of Nanabush, the tribe's central and principal mythical figure who represents all men and all women, that the term Anishinaubae begins to make sense. Nanabush was always full of good intentions, ergo the people of the tribe. The Anishinaubae perceived themselves as people who intended good and therefore were of merit and worth. From this perception they drew a strong sense of pride, as well as a firm sense of place in the community. This influenced their notion of independence.
Let's take another word, the word for truth. When we say "w'daeb-awae," we mean he or she is telling the truth, is correct, is right. But the expression is not merely an affirmation of a speaker's veracity. It is as well a philosophical proposition, in the saying of which a speaker casts his words and his voice as far as his perception and his vocabulary will enable him or her; it is a denial that there is such a thing as absolute truth—that the best and most the speaker can achieve and a listener expect is the highest degree of accuracy. Somehow that one expression, w'daeb-awae, sets the limits to a single statement, as well as setting limits to truth and the scope and exercise of speech.
One other word: "to know." We say "w'kikaendaun" to convey the idea that he or she "knows." Without going into the etymological derivations, suffice it to say that when the speaker assures someone that he knows it, that person is saying that the notion, image, idea, fact that that person has in mind corresponds and is similar to what he or she has already seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled. That person's knowledge may not be exact, but similar to that which has been instilled and impressed in his or her mind and recalled from memory.
The stories that make up our tribal literature are no different from the words in our language. Both have many meanings and applications, as well as bearing tribal perceptions, values, and outlooks.
Let us begin at the beginning with the tribe's story of creation, which precedes all other stories in the natural order. Creation stories provide insights into what races and nations understand of human nature; ours is no different in this respect.
This is our creation story. Kitchi-manitou beheld a vision. From this vision, the Great Mystery—for that is the essential and fundamental meaning of Kitchi-manitou, and not spirit, as is often understood—created the sun and the stars, the land and the waters, and all the creatures and beings, seen and unseen, that inhabit the earth, the seas, and the skies. The Creation was devastated by a flood. Only the manitous, creatures, and beings who dwelt in the waters were spared. All others perished.
In the heavens dwelt a manitou, Geezhigo-quae (Sky-woman). During the cataclysm upon the earth, Geezhigo-quae became pregnant. The creatures adrift upon the seas prevailed upon the giant turtle to offer his back as a haven for Geezhigo-quae. They then invited her to come down.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CENTERING ANISHINAABEG STUDIES Copyright © 2013 by Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Maajitaadaa: Nanaboozhoo and the Flood, Part 2 John Borrows ix
Bagijige: Making an Offering Jill Doerfler Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark xv
Eko-Bezhig Bagijigan: Stories as Roots
Is That All There Is? Tribal Literature Basil H. Johnston 3
Name': Literary Ancestry as Presence Heid E. Erdrich 13
Beshaabiiag G'gikenmaaigowag: Comets of Knowledge Margaret Noori 35
Eko-Niizh Bagijigan: Stories as Relationships
The Story Is a Living Being: Companionship with Stories in Anishinaabeg Studies Eva Marie Garroutte Kathleen Delores Westcott 61
K'zatigin: Storying Ourselves into Life Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair 81
Teaching as Story Thomas Peacock 103
Eko-Niswi Bagijigan: Stories as Revelations
Every Dream Is a Prophecy: Rethinking Revitalization-Dreams, Prophets, and Routinized Cultural Evolution Cary Miller 119
Constitutional Narratives: A Conversation with Gerald Vizenor Gerald Vizenor James Mackay 133
And the Easter Bunny Dies: Old Traditions from New Stories Julie Pelletier 149
Eko-Niiwin Bagijigan: Stories as Resiliency
A Philosophy for Living: Ignatia Broker and Constitutional Reform among the White Earth Anishinaabeg Jill Doerfler 173
A Perfect Copy: Indian Culture and Tribal LAW Matthew L. M. Fletcher 191
The Hydromythology of the Anishinaabeg: Will Mishipizhu Survive Climate Change, or Is He Creating It? Melissa K. Nelson 213
Eko-Naanan Bagijigan: Stories as Resistance
Wild Rice Rights: Gerald Vizenor and an Affiliation of Story Kimberly Blaeser 237
Transforming the Trickster: Federal Indian LAW Encounters Anishinaabe Diplomacy Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark 259
Theorizing Resurgence from within Nishnaabeg Thought Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Edna Manitowabi 279
Eko-Ingodwaasi Bagijigan: Stories as Reclamation
Aadizookewininiwag and the Visual Arts: Story as Process and Principle in Twenty-First Century Anishinaabeg Painting David Stirrup 297
Stories as Mshkiki: Reflections on the Healing and Migratory Practices of Minwaajimo Dylan A. T. Miner 317
Horizon Lines, Medicine Painting, and Moose Calling: The Visual/Performative Storytelling of Three Anishinaabeg Artists Molly McGlennen 341
Eko-Niizhwaasi Bagijigan: Stories as Reflections
Anishinaabeg Studies: Creative, Critical, Ethical, and Reflexive Brock Pitawanakwat 363
Telling All of Our Stories: Reorienting the Legal and Political Events of the Anishinaabeg Keith Richotte 379
On the Road Home: Stories and Reflections from Neyaashiinigiming Lindsay Keegitah Borrows 397
About the Authors 409