Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Our Responsibility
Communication means different things to different people, but one thing they have in common is the transmission of information and ideas. Without getting into the judgment mode, I was thinking last night about how the Spanish governors of New Mexico forbade, among other things indigenous, the practice of running between the Indian pueblos scattered across hundreds of miles between the Grand Canyon and the Rio Grande.
Many are aware of various European colonizers forbidding Indian religion, dances, language, hair, and clothing, but actually forbidding the system of intertribal communication was one I hadn't heard of until reading The Pueblo Revolt by David Roberts. But in hindsight, it makes sense to prevent the aboriginal owners of the territory from discussing their common situation--even though they spoke different languages--in order to prevent riotous acts of unity or warfare against the occupation army.
And I thought about how at the time of the conquests the Native Americans did not think of themselves as comprising a unified ethnic group like they do today, but rather hundreds of individual and distinct nations and language groups and confederacies much like existed in Europe. That all changed, of course, with the incorporation of the United States and numerous congressional acts, but really only exploded in the public consciousness with the advent of the American Indian Movement. Privately, the National Congress of American Indians and other inter-national associations laid the groundwork for this dawning of awareness, but Alcatraz and Pine Ridge galvanized the movement for the return of self-determination.
So as I was pondering the meaning and method of blogworld as a means of connecting previously isolated groups and individuals across this land, I imagined the sixteenth and seventeenth century Indian runners delivering--at the risk of death--messages between the pueblo peoples struggling to endure the continuing trauma from ethnic cleansing that preceded their generations, and could only admire the determination behind such achievements as American Indian Radio On Satellite, and the blossoming satellite-supported distance learning network initiated by my friends at Northwest Indian College.
I also thought about this marvelous new tool called blogging, and the current message from Indian country asking for our help in curbing the anti-Indian movement in the US. And I remembered a speech by a Lummi elder I heard a decade ago, in which he admonished us that in order to keep our balance in the ongoing turmoil between our cultures, we need to let our intelligence guide our emotions--not the other way around.
Many are aware of various European colonizers forbidding Indian religion, dances, language, hair, and clothing, but actually forbidding the system of intertribal communication was one I hadn't heard of until reading The Pueblo Revolt by David Roberts. But in hindsight, it makes sense to prevent the aboriginal owners of the territory from discussing their common situation--even though they spoke different languages--in order to prevent riotous acts of unity or warfare against the occupation army.
And I thought about how at the time of the conquests the Native Americans did not think of themselves as comprising a unified ethnic group like they do today, but rather hundreds of individual and distinct nations and language groups and confederacies much like existed in Europe. That all changed, of course, with the incorporation of the United States and numerous congressional acts, but really only exploded in the public consciousness with the advent of the American Indian Movement. Privately, the National Congress of American Indians and other inter-national associations laid the groundwork for this dawning of awareness, but Alcatraz and Pine Ridge galvanized the movement for the return of self-determination.
So as I was pondering the meaning and method of blogworld as a means of connecting previously isolated groups and individuals across this land, I imagined the sixteenth and seventeenth century Indian runners delivering--at the risk of death--messages between the pueblo peoples struggling to endure the continuing trauma from ethnic cleansing that preceded their generations, and could only admire the determination behind such achievements as American Indian Radio On Satellite, and the blossoming satellite-supported distance learning network initiated by my friends at Northwest Indian College.
I also thought about this marvelous new tool called blogging, and the current message from Indian country asking for our help in curbing the anti-Indian movement in the US. And I remembered a speech by a Lummi elder I heard a decade ago, in which he admonished us that in order to keep our balance in the ongoing turmoil between our cultures, we need to let our intelligence guide our emotions--not the other way around.
