All My Relations

All My Relations

Some years back someone found a shoebox with a lot of cards in it, each with the names and family of a Blackfeet. Instead of just throwing it out, this careful person kept the box until it was figured out that it was a record of commodities issued in 1907-08. Some cards had notes on the back about where members of the family were, what their marital status was, and sometimes where they lived. The cards were typed together into a book, “Blackfeet Heritage” which can be bought from the Blackfeet Heritage Center and Crafts Shop, (333 Central, Browning, MT 59417. Phone is 1-406-338-5661. Website: http://www.siyehdevelopment.com/heritage.html) I keep my copy of this genealogy reference right alongside my homemade time-line book.

The Europeans thought ownership of land (often that’s what defined citizenship) and provable descent (because that’s the definition of inheritance) were two of the most important order-keeping systems in the world. Native Americans didn’t value either principle, because no one “owned” land and what mattered was the personal allegiance you chose. But when food is the issue, if your membership in the tribe has to be proven, and then the government has allotted you a certain piece of land which is your only resource -- then it was necessary to pay attention.

Since then, everyone has been struggling with the problem of who’s IN and who’s OUT. Which counts? Being raised on the rez with rez ways or being a blood relation to the people in the original “tribe” as defined when the first Euros arrived? Recently I heard a way of defining who is an Indian that surprised me into new insight. This person -- at a NA language immersion school conference in Minneapolis (I wasn’t there -- this is second hand) -- said that in his tribe, all personally known older women were mother/aunts, all personally known older men were father/uncles, and all other familiar people were simply cousins. Others weren’t relations. The “tribe” is relations -- as in relationship. (Familiar from family.) What struck me was that this is a definition of being Indian that comes from INSIDE the Indian rather than being imposed from the outside by someone else’s criteria. It’s a self-determination issue.

When I’m teaching (only subbing now) or meeting new younger people around here, both red and white, I ask them, “Who are your grandmothers?” Indian kids and homesteader-descended kids can always tell me. (In fact, I’m a little chagrined at how often I taught the grandparents of the Indian kids.) It’s the kids who have moved here more recently who often have no idea who their grandparents are, have never met them, don’t know where they came from, might not know their names.

On this reservation and in this small village, families are the social structure . When you know someone’s family, you know quite a lot about them, including what their personality is likely to be. In the old days extended families were your connection to life itself. A person could not survive alone. (I kept hearing the principal in Red Rock saying “extended families” -- I think he meant broken families -- OVER-extended families -- rather than families that are a web of love, competence and support.) After a year or two of teaching, I began to recognize the physiognomies of families -- a characteristic nose shape, a forehead height, an eyebrow style.

In a tribe, family loyalty is an absolute rule -- it trumps any legal requirement, it cannot be put down without resigning membership, and it saves many a scalawag. It works great if the people involved are in a fairly stable environment and are pretty much the same kind of people. Rule of law becomes necessary as soon as the people involved are from different places, different customs, and have no genetic or affectional families present, which is the case with many reservation residents now.

From the affectional point of view, the most crucial question to ask is not “who’s your genetic grandmother?” but “Who loves ya, baby?” And the most important principle is to always act in a way that will cause people to love you, or at least feel that they want to be connected. But who will put “who loves you” on a commodity-issuing index card in a shoebox?

Many legal definitions of who is Indian depend on the source of the definition. Part of the reason the situation is so confusing is that the Indian Health Service law might define an Indian one way while an education program might define an Indian another way. Often the definitions were composed to suit some goal or limitation, so the definition can be adjusted if, for instance, defining “Indian” a particular way qualifies too many people for the money available for scholarships.

I suspect that the first time “one-quarter Indian blood” was set as a definition, it came from a white man thinking that if one of a person’s grandparents was a full-blood Indian, then that person was likely to feel at least partly Indian. “Half-breed” had to be included because often they were the link to the white world. One-eighth would be great-grandchildren -- surely close to assimilated. No one thought of what would happen if two half-breeds married -- wouldn’t they still have half-breed children?

The goal was that as time went on, people would feel less and less Indian -- they would be assimilated. There were some flaws in this reasoning. It didn’t allow for the strong affectional bonding of adoption, or for the cultural allegiance of white people raised as or in close proximity to Indians. And there was an unforeseen outcome of residential Indian schools: when students were of an age to fall in love, marriages often happened between people of different tribes -- full bloods, but not the same tribe.

Euros had a hard time with the concept of tribe, treating it like “nation” which is a land-based concept with physical boundaries. If you look at a tribe as a group unfolding out of family and out of people who know and defend each other, then one must grant that only a tribe can define itself and that the boundaries might be kind of flexible. Even overlapping. The point of law is to write things down so they won’t change, even though circumstances and desire might test the limits. The Euros wrote laws that assumed that tribes were always as they found them on first contact and would stay that way. But tribes are almost like religious denominations -- in a state of gradual but continuous transformation as they adapt to new times.

Indians who love Ward Churchill, clap your hands! Maybe you can save him yet!