Seven Generations and keeping our traditions alive...
The world is forever changing and moves quickly especially in the native world. Change or charging of an old tradition can make people uncomfortable. How did our Mi’kmaw deal with change or changes in environment or when a tribe shared their traditions or ceremonies?
I have been only on this physical realm for a short time and have seen many changes from political, environmental and culturally. Native people, especially when they get older, dislike change to anything. The fear of the unknown or what ifs. I don’t blame them for a second, however what example are we setting for future generations. I see it all over Native country and most natives embrace change only after that the see it doesn’t cause harm.
Colonialism has affect our people with unwanted change from the mistrust of government and broken promises to the passing of traditional teachings and technology. Our people have embraced this technology and made all of Turtle Island a closer community. We now connect with all indigenous cultures from around the world. This technological change is prime example of change that our people have encompassed to communicate with each other.
2010 I realized this at the “Healing our Nations Worldwide in Oahu Hawaii. Without technology efforts, by our peoples, to organize the indigenous of world would have took a long time to organize and concentrate. There has only been a few times where before the late 1960’s that our people were able to come together for our causes. One particular time is when the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy hosted all our people to share their traditions and prophecy stories. They went to the United Nations to ask to take their place on the medicine wheel of the Earth.
This was denied and the prophecies of our people started in full effect. We wanted to warn the people of Mother Earth, that if you don’t change your ways and start living in the ways the creator gave us that we will disappear or we can change our ways help heal our mother. Can you image what it took to get all of these spiritual and Chiefs together to talk about this to the world?
We can look at Pine Ridge and the standoff at Wounded Knee. We had some of our people go out there and help them. I can safely say that this was most likely on the news and being native could relate to the cause and our people went there to help. Not without a loss of course. Anna Mae, a women from my community has lost her life supporting this cause and we are left to ask ourselves so many questions on why or how it happened.
Image if we had the means to gather back then like we do today… OKA crisis in 1991, the local golf course wanted to make their private nine hole course into a eighteen hole course. They wanted to expand on the Mohawks traditional burial grounds. The Mohawks said no way and stood up to the town and golf club. This ended up with the Canadian Military invading the compound. This told me as young man that the Governments are scared of our people when we get together.
At that time, the Gulf war was going on in the Middle East where they sent only 1500 Canadian to go fight there in Iraq. At the same time that this standoff at the Kanasake Reserve our Canadian government sent more than 2500 soldiers to help take control of this situation. A whole country is at war and they keep 1000 more soldiers to keep our people in check. Like I said, they get scared when we get together because they know the history and our battles. Our people are natural warriors.
Our history of all our people has not been fully told or taught in the school system, this is why it’s important that we take control of own destiny and starts with our own education systems. This allow us fully control to teach our traditions and cultural values. This will allow for us to keep us native, rather than trying to make us Nonnative and their value system. They have done a great job thus far, however, we need to re-educate our ways back to our future generations.
So with that I’ll leave you with this… Change interferes with autonomy and can make people feel that they’ve lost control over their territory or cultural ways. It’s not just political, as in who has the power and power meaning “influence”. Our sense of self-determination is often the first things to go when faced with a potential change coming from someone else. Smart leaders leave room for those affected by change to make choices. They invite others into the planning, giving them ownership.
Si
