Indigenous Communalism

Belonging, Healthy Communities, and Decolonizing the Collective

Carolyn Smith-Morris

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781978805453
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

From a grandmother's inter-generational care to the strategic and slow consensus work of elected tribal leaders, Indigenous community builders perform the daily work of culture and communalism. Indigenous Communalism conveys age-old lessons about culture, communalism, and the universal tension between the individual and the collective. It is also a critical ethnography challenging the moral and cultural assumptions of a hyper-individualist, twenty-first century global society.Told in vibrant detail, the narrative of the book conveys the importance of communalism as a value system present in all human groups and one at the center of Indigenous survival. Carolyn Smith-Morris draws on her work among the Akimel O'odham and the Wiradjuri to show how communal work and culture help these communities form distinctive Indigenous bonds. The results are not only a rich study of Indigenous relational lifeways, but a serious inquiry to the continuing acculturative atmosphere that Indigenous communities struggle to resist. Recognizing both positive and negative sides to the issue, she asks whether there is a global Indigenous communalism. And if so, what lessons does it teach about healthy communities, the universal human need for belonging, and the potential for the collective to do good?

CHAPTER 1

Belonging

Living and working within native communities, particularly in the unique space of a reservation setting, often brings with it a heavy sense of community. In everything from daily meals and tasks to large community gatherings, there seems to be more people around by whom one is known and to whom one is obligated. So to help keep peace and harmony in this atmosphere, emphasis is placed on cooperation while individual assertiveness and superiority are limited. Put simply, when you are more aware of the people around you, and they are aware of you, a greater expectation for sharing and fairness emerges. If you have a car, it becomes a taxi; if you have money, you either share it or are a deeply insensitive person to the lack around you; and if you have a funny story to tell, in a place like the reservation, you know you’ll always have people that want to hear it.

These are some of the first impressions of difference a Western, individualist observer might notice about native communities. The myriad quotidian ways that all community members add daily to the group’s peaceful coexistence are not accidental. High rituals are the more ostentatious symbols and events that denote broadly shared core values and marks of membership; but the everyday rituals and habits of practice, behavior, and thought serve to enculturate members into the group. Indeed, without everyday ways in which core values are learned and practiced, high rituals will become meaningless or hollow.¹

It is this quotidian element that makes communalism of endless interest to social scientists. Whether examining network bonds, altruistic behaviors, or larger questions of intergenerational cultural patterns, we have long studied individuals’ willingness to submit to community restraints. By focusing on Indigenous communalism, I emphasize how Indigenous peoples take a universal human capacity and use it to build relational bonds that span generations and now, in the postcolonial era, form a unique category of peoples. I outline four processes of communalism that are universally accessible by humans, but clarify how, for each one, Indigenous peoples enact their communalist and individualist values in unique ways. And while the intergenerational links connecting Indigenous people to their heritage by blood are part of the equation, autonomous engagements—such as choice, effort, and commitment—also play their role in each of the four processes.

In this chapter, the first of four describing key elements in Pima communalism, I consider three everyday rituals that serve as community touchstones or reminders. These are acts that have struck me as evocative of community yet almost nonchalant in their repetition. I have camouflaged the identities of persons as well as confidential information but have retained the structural elements and patterned speech to reveal how Pimas come to feel, and maintain, a sense of belonging in their unique, internally sovereign community.² To achieve a sense of belonging, Indigenous community members do far more than meet constitutional membership criteria. They both are born into a group and place and continuously assert this belonging. The blend of the everyday with more ritualized acts, of singular lives within an intergenerational community, will become clear.

INTRODUCTIONS

The first and one of the most regular aspects of fieldwork in Indian Country is attending meetings of the Tribal Council, so to begin where I myself began, I relate something of those gatherings. Whether explicitly seeking permission to conduct research or attending simply for the remarkable spectacle and process, Tribal Council meetings are a window into formal tribal relations and symbols, a moderately “high” ritual of community. These events are not awash in colors and smoke; in the contemporary era, they rarely involve either dance or song. These meetings have been drastically transformed over time, as one might imagine. At Gila River, the government offices look like office buildings in neighboring Phoenix. There is beautiful desert landscaping, a parking lot filled with cars, an entryway with metal detectors and uniformed officers, and inside the lobby a receptionist speaking English. The building and furniture, the names of the participants, and the language in which the proceedings occur have all changed since 1934 when the tribe established a constitution-based tribal government under the Indian Reorganization Act. But these outward signals can be misleading. There are both ritualized and hidden features in Tribal Council proceedings that remain quite foreign, decidedly private, and certainly unacculturated.

Take for example one recurrent event within this larger ritual: the moment in which each new speaker is introduced to the council and audience. In this unobtrusive and regular act, the distinctions between community members and non–community members are made clear to all who are present. The information contained in these ritualized introductions is conveyed before any other, indicating its importance as a referent for whatever is to follow. Tribal members will identify themselves by family—grandparents or more distant ancestors—location, and (if possible) clan and the traditional name of their community. Whether they speak in a traditional language or in the language of colonizers further situates their identity and their political and social values. All of these details have “deeper dimensions and reflect strong and spiritual connection to the land and other cultural traditions.”³ Here is a typical example of what one might hear when tribal members from different communities are gathered: “My name is John White Cloud Anderson and I’m an enrolled member of the Ojibwe Nation, born into the Bear Clan. I was born in Minocqua and raised on the Fond du Lac by my father, David the Fire Is Burning Anderson, and my mother Mary Day Anderson.” Mr. Anderson introduces himself, positioning his remarks within his family (his given tribal name, translated to English, is “White Cloud”), his nation, and several other markers of identity including his parents’ names and tribal affiliation. The structure of his introduction is common across all variety of meetings, both within a single group and across tribal communities. And many times this lineal and geographic placement is followed by a few details about the person’s experience and work for the community, such as having filled a leadership role, sought education, and returned to serve the community.⁴

Introductions like these have several material functions for communities of an oral tradition, in which knowledge is contained in one’s ability to remember rather than one’s ability to call upon written records. The detailed but efficient rehearsal of one’s lineage serves to allow broad groups of listeners maximum potential to establish some links to the speaker, in shared knowledge, some shared epistemological reference, or relational ties. These links also index not only political and material history but also relevant contemporary authority, functioning much like Western titles and curricula vitae.

But there is another, sometimes greater symbolic purpose to performing one’s tribal introduction—even when this information might be written down and available to the audience. The ritual of calling out one’s heritage in this way honors those who came before and demonstrates several things. First and foremost, it embodies a position of deference to persons outside of the room, oftentimes ancestors. Bernstein (1997) has described this as a practice of “identity as strategy” and offers a nondisruptive but culturally distinctive performance that itself can have a material influence on an event (Morgan 2007, 281).

Second, those familiar with identity making among Native Americans recognize the invocation of elders and ancestors as a sacrament indicative of an inward spiritual state. The proceedings surrounding any such performance are, thereby, transformed beyond their mundane and profane state into a process with moral gravity. Tribal members who may not have authority to organize or officiate a particular meeting can, through something as simple and brief as an introduction, transform that event into something more communal and reverent toward the past and elders.⁵

Finally, introductions that reference one’s kin place the speaker geo-relationally. One’s past and present filial relations as well as the residential and cultural choices made in support of those relations (e.g., Macdonald forthcoming, chap. 1) are profoundly informative about a speaker’s Indigenous identity. Whether prayerful invocations or simply testimonies, these verbal utterances declare Indigenous truths of relationship and place. Erasure of these linguistic forms would have corresponding ripples to the content they reference.

RELATIONSHIPS AND BEING PRESENT

It was in a similar realm of tribal committee meetings, introductions, and language that I was struck by a second community touchstone: the value of relationships in community decision making. In the storyline below, I play the main character, for it is the story of my first major test in the complex political effort that non-Indians must pass to work in tribal country. When, as a graduate student, I first started volunteering at the Diabetes Education Center, I worried endlessly about the inefficiencies and interruptions I met at every turn. I fretted over delays in hospital workflows and government workers, over the lack of professionalism in people who would not keep appointments with me, and over the inconvenience of endless referrals, new introductions, and “buck passing” by government and hospital employees who had authority to approve or reject my proposal for research.

Mine was a typical Mil-gan reaction, especially among those who fail to respect the quotidian presence of cultural difference: those expecting everything on the reservation to happen as it does in the fast-paced, commodity-driven, hyperefficient Fordist marketplace of dominant American society.⁶ The hammer of realization would fall on me in one crucial committee meeting, pounding into me the moral imprint of Pima relational expectations.

I had been scheduled to begin the crucial process of proposals to Tribal Council committees for permission to conduct research on the reservation. My name appeared on the agenda right after the presentation of an esteemed, midcareer research physician whom I knew by reputation, representing a globally influential research group. As I describe in Diabetes among the Pima, that physician’s well-funded clinical investigation was rejected by this panel of five Tribal Council members. They did not explain their reasons in much detail, but what they did say focused largely on the failure of the research group’s leader to come in person that day, or perhaps frequently enough in recent history.

Then came my turn. While my proposal was under consideration, only one question was asked: “Didn’t I see you at the mul-chu-tha?” The mul-chu-tha is the annual fair and footrace held in Sacaton, the government seat for the reservation and where I usually stayed on work weekends with Pima friends. It is a celebratory event with traditional round-dance music (keihina) as well as the more recent dance music waila (chicken scratch). The few Mil-gans who do attend the mul-chu-tha are either close friends or family to Pima Indians or are among the more culturally interested staff who work on the reservation.

So the mul-chu-tha was completely irrelevant to my research proposal on diabetes in pregnant women. And this was certainly not an appropriate time for idle chitchat, although that’s what I initially thought this was—a way to fill time since no one else had any questions about the research. But what seemed like a meaningless comment to me proved to be an important cue to his fellow committee members about his favorable outlook on my application (without saying so directly, as this would have been too forceful should others have damning information about me that he did not know) and the reasons for his support. Those reasons, he and other council members would later explain to me, had to do with my presence in the community, my demonstration of relationships and commitment to people within it, and my having shown altruistic intentions in my purpose and manner while on the reservation.

Following several more (agonizing) moments of silence, the chairwoman thumbed through her pages and asked if there was a motion. My questioner moved approval, followed by a second from an elder to his left. And my project was unanimously approved at this committee level (and later at the Tribal Council).

It took several years of committee meeting attendance and a familiarity with the many people referenced in casual ways during Tribal Council decision making to understand this lesson. Only one thing cemented my good standing before the Tribal Council committee that day: that I had been seen by community leaders in social settings on the reservation, working a slower pace and with more personal investment than my role as a student, my title as a hospital volunteer, or any office-oriented exchanges would have produced. The extra step was professional, certainly—anthropologists insist on participant observation. But it was also personal. I had ingratiated myself to the Tribal Council members (who were strangers) by having genuine and personal connections with a number of community members (not just council members or hospital employees). Even my small network spoke volumes about my intentions and my methodological approach, though I lacked the higher status and title of the physician whose proposal was rejected. As these and a third case show, in the Gila River Indian Community little emphasis is given to official titles and positions, much more paid to how speakers demonstrate community relationships and commitment.

Notably, this standard of being present, of relational obligations, applies to community members as well. From research narratives on a variety of topics, I regularly end up with reflections like the one b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Belonging
• 2. Generation
• 3. Representation
• 4. Hybridity
• 5. Asserting Communalism
• 6. Global Indigenous Communalism and Rights
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author