A Daebaudjimowin for Native American Solidarity Sunday

Here is the text of a short talk I gave this past Sunday at the small Episcopal Church I attend. I dedicated my reflections to Michael Beasley and Ann Larimore, two Native American members of our congregation.

This is our annual Native American Solidarity Sunday at the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation. Rev. Joe Summers invited me to give the remarks today and frankly as the date approached I started to feel more and more anxious because I worried that it was presumptuous of me to talk about the spirituality of Native American people. After all, I’m not Native American, although I have spent a good deal of my life thinking about what it might mean to be Native American. Joe asked me to ground my reflections in my own experience, so this will be quite personal.

Before I begin, I’d like you to remember the etymology of the word religion. It comes from the latin re ligare. Ligare means to bind or to tie. Re means back. So the word religion means to bind back, which is an archaic way of saying to connect. Of course, there are many ways to be religious. First Nation cultures were wonderfully diverse in their religious expressions, but I believe they all shared a spiritual commitment to place or landscape, to the earth as our home.

I thought I’d briefly talk about Native ideas regarding where we fit into the universe. Some of these ideas are very different from our own. The Marxist anthropologist Stanley Diamond said that whenever we encounter people who do things differently than we do, it is an implicit critique of the way we do things. Diamond went on to say that the role of the engaged anthropologist is to make that critique explicit.

The Anishinaabe language is spoken by many of the indigenous people who live around here, and I recently came across the Anishinaabe word Daebaudjimowin, which means a kind of truth known from personal experience. This talk will be framed by my own experience. This is my Daebaudjimowin.

When I was a child we’d go for Sunday drives and occasionally my father would pull over to the side of the road, stop, and say,” Look at this, boys.” We’d crowd over to the window and look out at trash that was littering the road. “See that?” Dad would say. “That’s the grubby paws of the White Man.”

This happened back in the nineteen fifties.

In the 1930’s my father drove from Michigan to Montana and got a job working on roads on the Fort Belknap Reservation. Fort Belknap is in north central Montana, about 90 miles south of the border with Canada, which Native people called the Medicine Line. Medicine here is synonymous with spiritual power. Indian people had noticed that the U.S. Cavalry would not pursue them across the border with Canada.

The last battle of the Indian wars in the 19th century occurred at Fort Belknap when the U.S. Cavalry caught up to Chief Joseph, the great Nez Perce leader, and his band. They were on their way to join Sitting Bull who was just across the Medicine Line in Alberta.

Dad lived with the Chandlers, a Gros Ventre family on the reservation, who were wonderfully generous and hospitable. We have remained very close to them, and Fort Belknap has occupied a central place in the sacred geography of our family. When my grandson Gavin Morgan was baptized in this church he wore a pair of moccasins from Fort Belknap.

My father was not an anthropologist. He was a self-taught collector of Native American art. Most of the Great Plains and Great Lakes Indian art at the Detroit Institute of Arts is from his collection.

Our family went out west in the summertime. One summer we hit the pow-wow trail, traveling from one reservation to the next in the Great Plains to attend celebrations, camping with my dad’s Indian friends.

When we were young my dad told us stories in which animals could talk, especially Old Man Coyote, the Native American Trickster. For those of you who are familiar with these stories, I should explain that he told us the expurgated versions. Later, my father told me about Black Elk, the Oglala Lakota holy man, who spoke about the two-legged people and the four legged people and the winged people.

This implies a view that is very different from the way Europeans structure the world, which has been called the Great Chain of Being. You might think of the European structure as a vertical line with God at the top, followed by the angels and then human beings on down to animals, plants and the non-sentient world. Native people, on the other hand, saw all beings in the universe along a horizontal line as our brothers and sisters.

The ethical implications of this Native world view might be summed up by this old Winnebago saying: The grass under your feet and the birds in the trees above you know you for what you are.

I was so impressed by Black Elk that in my early twenties I drove out to Harney Peak in the Black Hills, which is where Black Elk had his vision. Indian people in the Great Plains believed that if you made a retreat to some isolated place and prayed and fasted for a vision—and if you were lucky—an animal would appear who would give you a song, which was your personal access to the spiritual power of the world. Sometimes they would pack mementos from this encounter with the spirit world into a medicine bundle. I’ve seen a photograph taken in the 19th century of a tepee with a tripod next to it which held a medicine bundle. It was explained to me that that particular bundle was considered so powerful that it shouldn’t be inside the tepee.

When I was a teenager I was present when a medicine bundle was opened. It was a clear day until the bundle was opened and from seemingly out of nowhere a thunder storm came up. I saw this but I don’t know what to say about it other than the world is undoubtedly more complex and interesting than we can imagine.

I brought along a reproduction of the rawhide case of a medicine bundle from the Great Plains which I’ve set on the altar here to indicate our solidarity with our Native American religious heritage.

In 1992 the National Gallery in Washington opened a show of my father’s collection of Native American art. This was the high point of dad’s career as a collector. The museum invited a Gros Ventre man named Baca, a traditional religious person from Ft. Belknap, to bless the show. The night the exhibit opened he spoke to a crowd in the National Gallery and said that after he’d been asked to bless the show he’d wondered if this was such a good idea. He said he’d prayed for some direction and that night he had a dream in which he saw what he described as the old time people spread out across the horizon on their horses. They were singing their blessing to him.

There were many times I felt my family was quite odd, but then everybody thinks their families are odd. In retrospect, I realize how extraordinarily lucky we were to be invited into this world given the shameful and bitter history of White/Indian relations.

One might conclude from these brief glimpses into our family that my father really wanted to be Native American, that he hated his whiteness. That wasn’t the case. He understood the boundaries. He did feel a profound aesthetic and spiritual affinity with the cultures of Native Americans. And as regards his whiteness, he just thought white people could do better than they had. After some reflection, I think he was right.

My father lived a very long life. He died 6 years ago at the age of 95. When his friends at Ft. Belknap heard that he’d passed away, they drove to Great Falls, Montana and flew to Michigan for the funeral. George Horse Capture brought along a hand drum and sang a traditional Gros Ventre song during the funeral service. Just before we closed my dad’s casket George gave me a box of hard tack biscuits—which was a food my dad was particularly fond of for some strange reason—and asked if I could put the box in the coffin. He explained that dad was about to take a journey to the Sand Hills, which was a long way from where we were. George was worried that he’d get hungry. I asked my mother and my brothers and, of course, it was fine.

Then George pulled out a sweet grass braid—this is a sweet grass braid—and asked me to put it in my father’s hand. He told me that when a person arrives in the Sand Hills, he or she should come bearing a sweet grass braid as a gift to the people living there. I lifted my father’s hand and bent his fingers so he wouldn’t lose his grip on the sweet grass braid and we closed his casket.

Two weeks before my father died, Dianne and I were having dinner with him when he turned to me with a puzzled look and asked, “Who are those people singing in the other room?” I told him there wasn’t anyone in the next room, but he asked me to get up and check for sure. Later that evening I remembered Baca’s dream of the old time people singing.

You could explain this moment in one of two ways. You could say that dad had a small cerebral event and he was experiencing an auditory hallucination.
Or you might say that the border between the realm of the living and the dead, which is usually opaque to us, became transparent to my father, and he heard the old time people singing him home.

Which explanation do you prefer?

So, in conclusion, of what value is the information contained in these stories? This is a legitimate question for an urban citizen living in this age of late capitalism. Maybe it is enough to just tell these stories because in telling them they become small ceremonies of healing.

I’ve always admired the beginning of John’s first letter in the New Testament. Let me quote verses one and three from the text:

1That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life;
3That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us.

This is an appeal to the authority of direct experience. It’s another way of talking about Daebaudjimowin, the kind of truth known from personal experience, and the point here, as John says, is to welcome others into the circle of fellowship.

Finally, I think we have an obligation to the next generation to nurture in them a sense of their connection and commitment to place. But how do we make these values fresh and meaningful to young people?

I’ve reached that stage in life where I’m now one of the old time people myself. On a good day I don’t normally see myself that way, but my grandchildren probably think of me as an old time person. From this vantage point I believe I can see the life cycle fairly clearly. Now I’m more aware of my obligations to the past and the future.

Over the summer my two year old grandson Gavin and I would often go for a stroll in the mornings, which usually meant that Gavin would walk about 50 feet and then he’d let me know he wanted me to carry him the rest of the way. As we walked into the park, often I’d notice that he was looking up at the trees, at the way the leaves scattered sunlight in constantly changing patterns.

I would stop and look at him in my arms. He would look back at me and say “Wow!” I’d say “Yes, wow!” Then we would move on to the playground in the park and then we’d go home.

I would argue that this was a ritual, our ritual, a kind of healing ceremony that connected us both to the landscape we live in, to our place in the world, our home.