Mid-Term Pamphlet

Abstract

Final Presentation

Gail Small and Wilma Mankiller, Everyday is a Good Day

Gail Small and Wilma Mankiller, Everyday is a Good Day

Questions for consideration regarding the pamphlet:

· What role do these women have in the spirituality of their people?

· How do they define their spirituality?


· How is their spirituality and identity connected?


· How has Christianity affected their spiritual identities as women?

· In their view, where does the woman fit into the Native spiritual community?


· Does a Native woman have a place in the Christian spiritual community?

· Are the two spiritual communities separate?

Gail Small and Wilma Mankiller- Mid Term

My pdf document wouldn't upload, so here it is without the images...

The Journey Beyond
Spiritual Identities and Struggles of Native Women
Gail Small
Wilma Mankiller
Gail Small, Head Chief Woman, Northern Cheyenne
"In our language, Cheyenne means ‘beautiful people.’ There is a spiritual element to everything we do. Spirituality is the essence of Cheyenne people. Environment, culture, religion, and life are very much interrelated in the tribal way of life. Indeed they are often one and the same... There is a profound spiritual dimension to our natural environment, and without it, the war would not be worth fighting... Growing up with the land, one learns how everything is related. We look forward to the seasons and know what is coming into harvest or blooming, and we know and appreciate the beauty of the land."
"When I think of love, I think about the land. Cheyenne land is so strong, it strengthens us... Families have certain areas that are very special to them, where the spirits reside. They will take care of us and we will take care of them."
Gail Small: "Is our homeland going to be one big dump or a place we can live?" Photo by Mike Bichnell
Gail Small consideres her spirituality as one with her identity. She said she never had a choice in her law practice. She knew she would fight for her land. She served on her tribal council until motherhood called her away. She says supporting the children and family will help restore the balance. Northern Cheyenne involve the whole extended family in child rearing. She says it is important that they have a home to renew their strength and feel safe. The best thing she can giver her daughters is a sense of who they are and where they come from.
"...our identity as Indian women is very grounded in the land..."
Gail Small in Antarctica Photographer unknown
"A long time ago, there was a clear understanding of the responsibilities between men and women. Men and women knew they needed each other’s help to get things done. There was give and take in the relationships. Even in ceremonial life, the Sun Dance cannot go on without the women, though they do not actually do the Sun Dance."
Wilma Mankiller, Author, Activist,
Former Principle Chief, Cherokee Nation
"Spirituality is not exclusive, and I don’t have a label for it. I feel comfortable going to any place where people go to play. Where people are meditating, where they are going inside themselves to be quiet for a while and listen to life, or where they are being together to comfor one another in a sacred way."
Wilma’s tribe invited the Catholic Priests to their communities in the Mid- 1800s because their hunting grounds were being invaded by tribes being pushed there by the Suyapi (white Europeans), When her Aunt Ida was on her last journey, she called for the Priest and the medicine person to give her last rites and attend her bedside.
"Our people were seeking additional protective power--double indemnity insurance... it might be helpful to have and eagle feather in one hand and a Bible in the other. It can’t hurt."
"Each time...a Cherokee woman straps on terrapin shells and steps out onto the circle to dance. it is practically a revolutionary act, a miracle, a living testament to the enduring spiritual strength of the people... They each deal with a set of social and economical problems in their communities, nut they hold the poeple close to their hearts, praying, working, and drawing on their spiritual beliefs for sustenance and support. None of the women try to endlessly analyze or dissect spirituality. They express it through the way they live their lives. There is no separation between the secular and the sacred. Everything in life is sacred."
"Traditional indigenous knowledge systems and stories acknowledge that the rivers, rocks, trees, plant life, and celestial world are alive with spirit and meaning. When traditional indigenous people speak of their relatives, they are referring to every living thing, not just human kinship. The very identity of traditional tribal people is derived from the natural world, the land, and the community. They understand their own insignificance in the totality of things."
-Wilma Mankiller
Cherokee, Activist, Author, Mother
Wilma Mankiller served 10 years as the Principle Chief of the Cherokee Nation. She has recieved 18 honorary doctorates from Yale, Dartmouth and Smith among other universities. She has recieved many awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She has lived most of her life on the Mankiller family allotment in Oklahoma in the rural Mankiller Flats community of Adair County.
"There is a profound spiritual dimension to our natural environment, and without it, the war would not be worth fighting... We look forward to the seasons and know what is coming into harvest or blooming, and we know and appreciate the beauty of the land."
-Gail Small
Northern Cheyenne Nation, Head Chief Woman, Attorney, Activist, Mother
Gail Small directs Native Action, one of the oldest and most successful reservation-based nonprofit organizations. She has spent most of her adult life defending her homelands legally and politically against environmentally hazardous energy companies. She served on various boards and committies and as a counsilwoman on the Norther Cheyenne Tribal Counsil. She helped secure a high school on the reservation, organize a Rock the Vote concert, and has helped with several leadership programs for children and youth.

“there are people who have titles, and there are people who are leaders.”

“there are people who have titles, and there are people who are leaders.”

Strong Women Stories- Sylvia Maracle

In this essay, Sylvia Maracle investigates the difference between the two, the role colonization plays in the distinction, and where women are situated in the middle of it all.
“Some of our current notions of leadership were formed during the time that women were totally excluded from politics.”
She mentions how when the First Nations first began to meet with Westerners regarding treaties, the Natives brought their women leaders, but the Europeans brought only men. She said the Europeans were not interested in the women, and they maintain that position. This is evident in the Indian Act, which excluded women from the political processes.
She talks about how the women began gathering informally and discussing what to do about the problems within the urban social structures and ways of life of their people. These women began not only to advocate, but make things happen.
They created the early Friendship Centres.
“Sometimes Native women did it alone, and sometimes these centres were created through networks with other non-profit community groups or government agencies.”
These services, which originally started with tea and talk, eventually grew into instrumental community centers that would address housing, employment, addiction, etc.
Maracle calls these women ‘agents of change’. This is where the distinction between those with titles and leaders becomes clear. Many of these women didn’t have title but they were the one who got things done.
“Early in our development, it was these natural leaders who worked to change our communities, and these leaders were, in overwhelming numbers, women.”
Maracle talks about how the men were rushing to keep up, and many tried to take credit for what the women had done.
As a result the women have been working toward improving the political processes that dictate who become leaders in the government.
“Our development as peoples has been characterized by this tension between formal male leadership and informal female leadership, and there have been too few opportunities to recognize and celebrate what our women have done or to explore the distinct qualities of our women’s leadership.”
She later moves on to discuss the role that mentoring plays in keeping these processes moving forward. She talks about how the women who got things started not only fulfilled their responsibilities to the people as leaders, but they also made the time to involve the young people in the process so as to teach them to continue their work when the time came to hand over the reins to the next generation.
“We have to make time to talk with our young people, especially young women, and to help them reflect on and analyze the issues that shape our leadership role.”
Indeed.

"Native people disappear into dominant society through love, lies and ideology"

“In Canada, young Native people disappear into the dominant society through love, lies and ideology.”

Strong Women Stories- Shandra Spears

This article was very perplexing for me to read. There are some things that Shandra Spears addresses regarding adoption that I can and do agree with, but there is a problem with the reasoning surrounding her perspective on the whole experience. Throughout the entire essay she constantly breaks up the argument into two competing sides. I do not think that an experience as complex as adoption across cultural lines can be easily split down the middle.
She separates the ideology behind her life into two positions:
“One ideology states that colonization is a myth, that is no longer exists, that it wasn’t bad for indigenous people, and that it has had no lasting impact on our lives… the Native way of life is unrealistic, backward and has little value… any child would be grateful for the chance to be raised by loving, white, middle-class parents and have access to good health care, education and employment opportunities.
“another ideological position, is that I was robbed of a political, historical, spiritual, linguistic and cultural base which could have given me a great sense of self-esteem and strength… a large portion of Native people who ended up homeless, incarcerated, addicted or psychologically scarred were products of this ‘better life.’ I grew up within an ideology that said I did not exist, except as mascots or objects of desire.”
My questions regard what is not mentioned. Why does it have to be one or the other? I have a very good friend who was adopted following some very abusive and neglectful early years. I know that she is sometimes very torn between the two families, but she was saved from and robbed of her birth affiliations and culture; although she does not see the two as equal. She feels that there were elements of her ‘blackness’ that she was without growing up, but she understands why she was put up for adoption in the first place. She looks at her birth mother as a friend not a mother. However, she also had the good experience of having adoptive mom that not only loved her as her own, but encouraged her identity as a black woman. Her adoptive mom embraced her unique personality with patience and acceptance. I do not see Spears as having the same experience.
I know this situation is different because Spears was adopted at birth, and had an abusive adoptive family, and no knowledge of a birth family to compare the experience with.
Also, I can’t help but wonder how her experiences were contributed to by her personal approach. I don’t mean to be mean, but she seems a bit bi-polar. I know people who have endured experiences like hers and worse and they did not react so self-destructively (suicidal) and emotionally (multiple nervous breakdowns). They kept going and sought to rise above the turmoil. They took back their control by making conscious decisions regarding their welfare and surroundings. I am speaking of adult years fo course. As a child she did not have a lot of control in the situations she was in, and I can see how years of the trauma she experienced laid the foundation of self-destructive reactions to situations. Granted, my perspective is steeped in western culture and comes from a mother that values accountability above all else. She always said, “You cannot always control where you are or what happens to you, but you can always control how you choose to respond to things that are beyond your control.”
That said, I have to commend her determination to find her whole self. She pursued a whole new life as a young adult; one that she knew nothing about. To learn a new culture as an adult and then embrace it as your own is not easy. I know what it is like to be of one culture and another ethnicity, and try to fit into a new identity that contradicts the other. It is very internally and externally difficult to find the golden mean; especially when both cultures are pulling at you in opposite directions.
“I was angry at the loss of Native culture I had experienced as a child, and I was mourning the ‘white’ direction that I was rejecting as an adult. This choice connected me to my new community and identity, and separated me from everything I had ever known.”
After discussing this essay with my adopted friend, I can really see how difficult it would be for someone to move from one cultural identity to another. However, why does she have to abandon one in order to embrace the other? She says both conflict, and that when she is switching from one to another she gets headaches and has difficulty. Again, I can see this to an extent, but I think her difficulty has more to do with her hatred for her white identity than anything else. Would she feel as strongly about choosing one over the other if she’d had a non-dysfunctional experience growing up? Perhaps then, would she be able to embrace both and appreciate their differences? Or do the two contradict each other so much that she has to choose?
Throughout this essay I repeatedly am reminded of the golden mean. There doesn’t seem to be one present here. The ideologies presented here seem to move back and forth from one extreme to the other.
Although I do not see a lot of accountability here, I can see the strength and struggle in Spears’ journey. The recovery of her Indian identity has helped her build her inner strength.
“We are responsible for our own healing, and we are strong enough to achieve it… The colonizer can hurt us, but can only succeed if we change who we are.”