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Interview with Kay McGowan, Anthropologist and Native AmericanThe Spiritual Traveler
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I
arrived an hour late for my interview with Kay McGowan, after having
had a flat on I-75 and nearly causing an accident as I slowed down to
turn off to the side of the road. So I was nervous and
apologetic as she ushered me into her spacious home on Grosse Ile, a
lozenge-shaped island of suburban residences in the Detroit River,
originally home to the Wyandotte tribe.
“That’s OK,” she said, when I
expressed regret for my tardiness. “We (Native Americans)
don’t worry about time.”
She led me into a sitting
room with a large dining table laden with grapes, melon, and homemade
blueberry bread. The walls of the room were covered with a
bewildering variety of masks. I sat down, shrugged off my
apologetic feelings, and stared at the masks, trying to decide which
appealed to me most.
 “What’s
that one?” I asked, pointing to a striking mask of a cat-like animal,
its mouth wide open, and a mirror in the middle.
“It’s a jaguar mask from Guatemala,” she replied.
I pointed to a number of
other masks that were equally striking, and she indicated their
provenance—masks from Central and South America, Africa, Southeast
Asia, and practically everywhere else.
“Almost every culture in the world produces masks,” Kay said.
“So you’ve been everywhere in the world.”
“I’ve been to lots and lots
of places. Usually every year I go and do some kind of work,
sometimes twice a year, depending on who wants to pay me to go
where. I teach Native Studies at Eastern Michigan University
and Marygrove College. And also I work for the Wyandotte
Indians.”
“Are you a member of the Wyandotte tribe, yourself?”
“No. But in 1729,
there were 29 of our families, Chickasaw and Choctaw, living out here
on the islands with the Wyandotte. I’m Cherokee and Choctaw,
myself. The Chickasaw and Choctaws are from
Mississippi. That’s where I was born. Anyway, the
Wyandotte are applying for Federal recognition, and in order to do that
they have to file a petition and prove that they’ve been here since
time immemorial. And they have to have an anthropologist or
a historian do the petition.”
“And what kind of evidence do
you have to produce for that—oral evidence or documentary evidence?”
 “Both
kinds. I’ll take oral history from the Elders, and then I
will look for any written material, such as on their relations with the
Jesuits—the earliest written material on the
Wyandotte. It’ll take a long time, simply because there’s
such a backlog of other tribes that are applying for Federal
recognition. So I’ve put their treaties
together. There are 19 treaties that they signed with the
United States government. It’s easier for tribes that had
warfare with the United States to prove their existence than for tribes
that didn’t.”
“So the Chickasaw and the Choctaw met with the Wyandotte in this area…”
“For centuries.”
“Even though they were based
down in the South? There were always some members of those
tribes in this region?”
“Yes. They moved
back and forth. Usually the Wyandotte would go to Kentucky
to hunt, and our people would go to Kentucky to hunt. So
they met each other there.”
“Sometimes they’d come back up here with the Wyandotte?”
“Yes. And
sometimes the Wyandotte would go down to Mississippi with our
people. So there was a tremendous amount of interaction
between the tribes.”
“And in this particular case there were good relations between them?”
“Yes, they had good
relations. For instance, I have a letter written when a
group of Cherokees came to do council with the Wyandotte in
1783. I have it sitting in my desk. It’s a
written account of the council meeting between the Cherokees and the
Wyandotte. This was a long-standing relationship that took
place over many centuries. So when they asked me to help
them get Federal recognition, I said, ‘Sure, absolutely.’”
 “Are
those ancient connections between tribes still factors
today? Are there some tribes that in centuries past were
traditional enemies and still don’t get along as well today as, let’s
say, your tribe does with the Wyandotte?”
“Yes. Because
people knew who were their traditional enemies. Now they
make jokes about it. The Chickasaw and the Choctaw, for
instance, were originally one tribe, probably 1,200 years
ago. They split, and became two tribes.”
“How did that come about?”
“There was controversy over divergent burial practices.”
“What other tribes are the Wyandotte related to?”
“The Wyandotte from this area
are related to the six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy—the Seneca,
Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora.”
“Not to the Chippewa (Ojibwa).”
“No. They’re a
different people altogether. The Chippewa, Ottawa, and
Potawatomi were Algonquin speakers, and their kinship pattern was
patriarchal. Descent was traced through the father, and the
men were the leaders of the tribe. But the Iroquois people
were matriarchal. One was born into the clan of one’s
mother. And the clan mothers were very powerful in the
society, and still are.”
“Do the Algonquin and Iroquois comprise two large linguistic families, as well?”
“Yes. There are
actually four linguistic families in the eastern half of the United
States—the Algonquin, Iroquois, Muskogee, and Sioux. Our
people—the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—are all Muskogee
speakers.”
 “So
I take it there were variations between these dialects, but within
these large families the dialects were mutually understandable, more or
less?”
“Yes. They’re
slightly different, but usually people within these linguistic families
can understand one another. Altogether, there are 250 native
languages still in the United States.”
“I was just reading an
article about language extinction that I saw in an airline
magazine. I believe the article said that in the next fifty
years the 60,000 indigenous languages still in the world today would be
reduced to about 6,000. That’s about three language
extinctions a day. I could be wrong about the figures,
though.”
“Well, there are many people
losing their languages all over the world. But we don’t
believe that a language is ever lost. Languages get
incorporated into other languages, as place names, for instance.”
“Sure, there are place names
all over the United States are of Indian origin that most Americans
just take for granted. I imagine it’s interesting if you get
into the languages at all. You’ll find that all these place
names have meanings. But still, these remaining place names
are no substitute for a living language.”
“No they’re not. But there is a resurgence now in these languages.”
“My impression from reading
this article was that both trends are occurring
simultaneously. The article said that the extinction rate is
continuing at a faster pace than ever, but while that is occurring,
certain indigenous languages that have enough of a foothold in terms of
number of speakers, and are not threatened, are now consolidating and
getting stronger. For instance, the Amazon Basin is one of
the richest and most diverse linguistically.
 The
article said that one could go just a quarter mile in the jungle from
one linguistic group, and come to another group that is complete
distinct linguistically. There is absolutely no relation
between the languages at all. Some of them are complete
isolates!”
“And yet some of them are related to Indian languages right here in North America.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, anyway, the languages
in the Amazon Basin are dying like flies, but then you have the Quichua
language in the Andes region, which is very much holding its own.”
“Well, there are millions of
Quichua speakers, as well as Amara. Those are the two main
languages in Peru. I was there in 1999. Last year
I was in the Amazon jungle. They asked me the same questions
about our Indian tribes up here as I would ask them. So it
was a wonderful exchange.”
“Do you find that there’s a
general similarity in terms of belief systems between all Native
Americans, all the way from South America to here?”
“Absolutely. They do the same ceremonies that we do here.”
“Really?”
“Yes. The smudging
ceremony—they do that in the Andes, the Quichua and the
Amara. It involves the taking in of the smoke from sacred
plants.” She got up and came back with a display case of
sacred plants. “These are four different kinds of sage that
come from four different places,” Kay said. She pointed at a
row of plant stalks that did, indeed, look like relatives of the sage I
was used to buying fresh in the supermarket. “Traditionally,
if we go to a location such as the Southwest or the Andes to visit with
other tribes, we bring some of our own sacred plants to share with
them.
And when we come back, we bring some of their sacred plants to share among ourselves.”
“And they understand that
gesture? That’s universally understood among indigenous
people in the Americas?”
“Absolutely. This,
for instance, is universal among us—the tobacco tie.” She
pointed to some small bundles wrapped in red cloth. “You
come to learn from them, so the first thing you do is give them a gift
of tobacco. This,” she pointed to a cord of braided fibers,
“is sweet grass. We braid it first and then we dry
it. And we use that in our ceremonies, too.”
“Is tobacco almost universally recognized as a ceremonial plant in the Americas?”
“Yes. The Creator
gave us tobacco so that we can speak to the Creator. Our
prayers and our thoughts go up to the Creator on the smoke of the
tobacco.”
“What relationship does the
sacred use of tobacco have to the custom of smoking it
today? Is there much of a relationship, or not much of one
at all?
“The white man took the
tobacco and abused it,” she said vehemently. “We did not
take it into our lungs.”
“It was never taken into the lungs?”
“As a rule,
no. Occasionally, this was done with the
pipe. But the same could have been done with any of the
sacred plants—the tobacco, the sage, the sweet grass. Any of
these plants could be used in the pipe. But the white man
took the tobacco and abused it. And look at all the sickness
it’s caused.”
 “That’s
interesting to me, as a non-smoker,” I
commented. “Non-smokers tend to think of tobacco as a
repellent product because of this abuse, but when I saw it being used
ceremonially, it seemed to me to be a very beneficial plant.”
“Absolutely. The
smoke takes the message to the Creator. Pocahontas’s
husband, John Smith, was the first person to export it to England, and
he became rich, addicting people there to the tobacco that we used in a
sacred way. They used it as a commodity.”
“Well, it had no meaning to them.”
“That’s right. But
they didn’t care about what meaning it had. They didn’t ask
or understand our attitude toward the plants. We believe
that the Creator made the plants before the Creator made
us. We need the plants to survive, for food and
healing. But the plants don’t need us.”
“In the West, as well as in
Asia, there are a number of major religious traditions—Christianity,
Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and so
forth. They each have names by which they are identified, as
well as their respective creeds. But the Native American
belief system is treated more as an aspect of culture, rather than a
religion. Among outsiders, it doesn’t really have a
name. So I would like to know whether, among indigenous
Americans, religion is thought of as religion, or whether it is just
considered part of traditional culture. Does the Native
American religion have a name, or is there a way it is referred to,
apart from the other aspects of the culture?
“Sure. It’s called
the Medicine Wheel,” Kay replied. She pointed to a circular
wall hanging mounted close to the ceiling just opposite
us. “This wheel symbolizes our belief system, she said.
“There’s an outer circle, with 44 places. And those 44
places represent gifts of wisdom and knowledge.
 We
believe that you are born at a particular place on the Medicine Wheel,
which represents your starting-point, your gift from the
Creator. Your job, as a person following this tradition, is
to learn all 44 places on the Medicine Wheel. The difference
between our belief system and organized religion is that our
spirituality is based on the idea that everything is connected and
everything is interdependent.”
“And is the Medicine Wheel a
belief system that you have in common with indigenous people in other
parts of the Americas?”
“Yes. It’s very
similar. There are no dos and don’ts. There’s no
concept of sin or salvation. There’s no notion of eternal
damnation. The important thing is how you live your life and
how you treat others while you’re here. There are 44 places
on the outer circle, but there’s an inner circle, too, also with 44
places, each representing a different animal. Each animal
has a different lesson to teach us, no matter how insignificant that
animal might seem to other people, to mainstream society, or mainstream
religions. We believe that every single creature has
something to teach us, a gift to give us, and knowledge that they are
willing to share with us, if we watch them, respect them, and
understand them. An example might be the
porcupine. To mainstream society, the porcupine doesn’t mean
very much. But in our belief system, the porcupine teaches
us how to trick or intimidate someone without hurting that person,
while at the same time allowing us accomplish what we want to
accomplish. The porcupine raises its quills and scares away
its enemies.”
“That’s very understandable
to me,” I responded. “Animals have particular
characteristics that they embody. Humans have certain
characteristics, too, of course. If we could get outside
ourselves, we’d see that, as well.
 And
within the parameters of our human characteristics, there are
individual traits. Animals are individuals, as
well. They have their own personalities, if you get to know
them. But nevertheless, they’re working within a certain
framework, which is their nature as members of that particular species.
“I had an experience years
ago with a creature similar to the porcupine,” I added. “It
was a possum. I came across it in a deep wooded
area. The way a possum ‘plays possum’ is also a defense
mechanism, but this was something I had never encountered
before. It was the strangest thing. The possum
got a frozen expression on its face that was like a grin, and it gave
off a feeling, or put on a kind of act, that was like
dementia. There wasn’t anything aggressive about it, but it
just gave you the feeling that you didn’t want to mess with
it. It was a very odd feeling.”
“It has a spirit that has to be respected,” Kay offered.
“Yes. It has a certain kind
of spirit or power that it evidently summons, which is part of its
nature.”
“There’s a big one that I
feed at my back door that I feed at night, around 10:30. And
the raccoons come to the front door, and I feed them there.”
“Like two different visiting tribes, huh?”
“The animals come to Indians
because we respect them, and they know that. They’re
indigenous to this land just as we are, and we’ve lived together for
centuries, right here. So they understand that, and we
understand them. Last week, two big deer just walked across
my back yard.”
 “I
had another interesting experience a few month back,” I
volunteered. I was visiting a shaman from Ecuador for the
very first time. He was staying in Manchester, just outside
of Ann Arbor. I was just about to turn onto the dirt road
leading to the house, and I came within inches of hitting a
deer. The deer was standing right in the middle of the road,
and as I came to a screeching halt, it just stood there. I
found myself absolutely face to face with it.”
“It was a message.”
“Yes. I felt it
was some kind of a message. I didn’t think it was a
coincidence. The shaman, in a certain way, represented for
me a way of getting closer to the natural world. It was
almost as if the deer was showing me the power that I might eventually
encounter on this path.”
“Yes. The deer was
there for a reason. It was there to tell you
something. And you have to be open to that. But
in the world today, animals are discounted. Man has set
himself up in this society as being the center of all existence, when
in fact we’re just part of the Medicine Wheel. We’re just
one link in the circle of life.”
“I’m an animal person,” I
admitted. “I feel closer to animals than people,
really. And it really bothers me to see any depiction or
reference to animals being hunted or killed. It actually
bothers me more than depictions of people being killed on TV, for
instance. Now, that doesn’t mean I’m insensitive to people,
does it? I don’t think it does. Of course, our
whole society is desensitized to violence through TV, in
general. But I think that animals are basically at the mercy
of humans. I’m not saying we don’t have a responsibility to
our fellow humans, as well, but I think we have even more
responsibility towards animals because they’re less able to put up
resistance. Humans at least have a chance to defend
themselves in the same manner in which they’re attacked.”
 “It’s
true not only of the animals, but of the plants, the earth, the water,
the air, and all things. People haven’t honored other living
things, and that brings us to the state we’re in now of spoiling our
own environment. The environment is finite. Once
it’s destroyed, we can’t get it back. Six inches of topsoil,
sunlight, water, and clean air sustain every single thing that
lives. And when one of those is destroyed, everything will
die.”
“It’s been suggested to me
that in the future, these environmental commodities such as water will
become our means of exchange, if they become scarce enough.”
“And the people who control
the water will control the world. I’ve never seen water as
dirty as that which I saw in China. Lake Erie on its
dirtiest day was clean compared to what I saw in China.”
“I remember years ago when I
was in Belgium,” I chimed in. “I crossed some kind of a
river or canal that was so polluted that it was
fermenting. It was more like a cesspool than a river, and it
was just bubbling with escaping gases.”
“I was in China for the
Fourth World Conference on Women,” Kay continued, “and I waited for the
women with whom I was traveling to notice that there were no birds in
the trees. I waited and I waited. And nobody
noticed but me. There were 55,000 women from around the
world who had come to talk about women’s issues. Finally,
after about eight days, I pointed it out to them. And they
said, ‘What?’ As soon as I got to China I started writing
cards back home, saying, “There are no birds here. There are
no birds here. There are no birds here.’ And
that, of course, to American Indians, is horrifying. There
were no birds in the trees. There were no squirrels, no
rabbits, nothing. There were no four-legged creatures at
all, just two-legged ones, and way too many of them. It’s
the most populated country on earth, and the whole situation is just
very sad.”
 There
was a brief silence while we contemplated on this, and then we began
talking in a similar vein about the academic profession, of which we
were both critical. “I love my students, and I love teaching
my students,” Kay said, “but I don’t care about the rest of
it. I don’t care about bringing money into the
university. It’s not about money. It’s about
learning and teaching and sharing, and they’ve taken that, and bent it,
and made it into a commodity in which there’s no value except for ‘Am I
going to make $50,000 a year by the time I get out of this
institution?’”
I commented about my own
precarious situation after having recently left the academic
profession. “I’m in dire straits, financially,” I admitted,
“but it’s probably better this way for me. If I were to
accept that for myself, to teach and work in academia just for the sake
of security, I wouldn’t have a life, and I wouldn’t want the life I was
having. So I’m better off in this situation, and it’s opened
me up quite a lot. It’s opened me up to the whole prospect
of living in the NOW and really depending on Spirit, not necessarily to
fulfill all my wants or desires, but to meet my needs. And
it’s actually an adventure, because I hardly know from one day to the
next what I’m going to be doing. It’s a spiritual challenge.”
“We’re spiritual beings,” Kay
replied, “and most of the people around us have no
spirituality. They have religion, but they don’t understand
the spirit. And I find that there are a lot of people who
are very interested in American Indians, because they sense that we
have something that’s very real, and they recognize that they don’t
have it. And some people go on a quest to acquire
it. That’s what you’re doing. And so I believe
that the Creator put you here for that reason.”
 “Well,
in my work for this site, I’ve encountered a lot of spiritual paths and
religious groups. But I feel that the shamanic tradition
here in the Americas represents a particular opportunity for people to
connect with the here and now, with the physical world, with their
relationship to their environment. We’re living in the
physical world, and we can’t just discount that. Sure, I
believe in a hereafter, and I believe that there are things we can do
to prepare ourselves for it, but we also have the task of living in
this world as long as we’re here.”
“Living at peace with
yourself. Living in harmony,” Kay added. I try
very hard to avoid anything that causes me disharmony, because I
believe that if I am not in harmony with myself, I will disrupt the
harmony of my children, my husband, my people, and ultimately the
disharmony just spreads.
“So by taking responsibility
for yourself, you’re ultimately contributing to the world as a whole,
is that right?”
“Yes, “she
replied. “The Native American belief system is a very
tolerant belief system, and that’s what I like about
it. It’s tolerant of everybody’s ideas and everybody’s
beliefs. It’s not this ‘Thou shalt not…Thou shalt not…Thou
shalt not.’ Instead, what it tries to do is present to you a
way to live by example. Each one of these points on the
Medicine Wheel represents a lesson about life. We believe
that sometimes you can learn the lesson through a single experience,
but some people have to experience the lesson many times before they
learn. So to get around the Medicine Wheel takes a long,
long time. And some lessons are easier to learn than others
are. But the Medicine Wheel presents a way to live your life
in a very harmonious way, in a very non-materialistic way.
 “The
place where I was teaching, before,” she continued, “I couldn’t stand
it there. I couldn’t stand the disharmony, the
mean-spiritedness, or the competition. And I said to myself,
‘I just can’t stay here, because I don’t have good feelings about this
place at all.’ I just don’t stay where I don’t feel right,
and I don’t stay around people that I don’t feel right
around. We put great store in intuitiveness. For
instance, I was asked on Martin Luther King Day, several years ago, to
do a smudging ceremony at Marygrove College. So I got there,
and they called me up to do the ceremony and something inside me said;
‘Don’t do it here.’ Something felt very wrong in that
place. There’s some very ‘bad medicine’ in the
room. So I explained to the audience what the smudging
ceremony was all about, but I didn’t actually perform the
ceremony. And about a half an hour later Bishop Gumbleton
was a speaker. He’s the most liberal of all the Catholic
bishops in the United States. He started to talk, and all of
a sudden four men in the audience started heckling him. They
shouted at him, and then they stormed the podium. The
security guards at Marygrove grabbed those men and took them
out. But I had sensed that something was very, very wrong in
that room. That’s why I didn’t do the smudging
ceremony. And people came up to me later and asked, ‘Why
didn’t you do the ceremony?’ And I told them, ‘Because
something was wrong in that room, and I listened to my intuitive
self.’”
At that point, Kay got up,
left the room, and came back with a couple of issues of a magazine
called Shaman Drum. “Shamanism was the very first form of
religious expression,” she said, “and the first evidence for that is
about 80,000 years ago in the Shamandar caves in Iraq, where they found
a bear cult. They had bear skulls set up on an altar in the
caves, and in front of those bear skulls were offerings. It
was the first concrete evidence of people long ago believing in a
spirit world, respecting the spirits of their ancestors, or having a
belief in a higher power.
 So
our belief system is very, very old—nobody knows how
old. But the fact that it survived when 95% of our people
died is, in itself, extraordinary. They managed to destroy
so much, and yet our belief system, our spirituality, is still intact.”
“Well, I really have to
confess to feeling almost a personal shame,” I
responded. “When I started thinking about doing some
articles on shamanism, it suddenly occurred to me that we have an
indigenous shamanic tradition here in the United
States. It’s embarrassing to think that it came to me almost
as an afterthought. But of course Native Americans are so
marginalized that people are just unaware of them. Most
people just don’t know that we have an indigenous culture, as well as
an indigenous religious tradition.”
“We keep our heads down,
because there’s no advantage in talking about it,” Kay
replied. “The mainstream religions discount our
beliefs. They don’t want to understand, nor do they
acknowledge that our belief system exists and is
intact. “They’re very threatened by it.”
“If you think about it—as I’m
just starting to—the Native American belief system is the ‘American’
belief system, in that it’s the indigenous belief system for this part
of the world.”
“For all of North, Central, and South America.”
“Exactly. But even
if you go down to the Andes region, where the indigenous population is
a much higher percentage…
“And much more obvious,” Kay added.
“Yes, but even there, the
traditions themselves, and the religious tradition in particular, are
completely marginalized. Catholicism is absolutely
dominant. And the people, in general, don’t know any more
about their indigenous traditions than we Americans know about
ours—maybe even less!”
 “You’re
exactly right. In the United States, we’re the smallest
minority in our own country—2.4 million, according to the 2001
census. Yet two thirds of our people have gone back to
indigenous religious belief traditions, and have abandoned Christianity
altogether.”
“Well that’s very important,
because if that were not occurring, that would be it. I
doubt that the traditions would survive.”
“You see, they wouldn’t tell
you that, because they don’t want you to know that. They
don’t want people to know that American Indians have given up on
Christianity. Christianity, quite honestly, never did
anything for us. It led us like lambs to the
slaughter—‘Either you become a Christian or you
die.’ Nominally, many American Indians became Christians,
but not any more. Most Native Americans have very bad
feelings about Christianity, and what was done to us in the name of
Christianity, in an effort to make us Christian. Our belief
system is older than Christianity, and it has survived despite all of
the oppression, the marginalization, and the genocide of our
people. And it’s survived because there is validity to
it. And we believe that eventually the whole world will have
to focus on what we believe to be true—that it is necessary to respect
the Earth like you respect your own mother.
“When you destroy and pollute
that Earth,” she continued, “everything will suffer and
die. It’s that simple. So if you can’t respect
the Earth, and your idea of spirituality is to go to church for an hour
on Sunday morning, that’s not what we believe. We believe
that everything is linked together spiritually, and we have to
understand that link if we’re to survive.”
 “One
of the things that it distresses me to hear expressed on the part of
spiritual leaders,” I commented, “is the idea that this is a world of
abundance,” I commented. “We are told that we shouldn’t envy
people their wealth, and that if such people want to make money and
build huge mansions to live in, that’s their
prerogative. Now, I’m not quarreling with
that. It’s true. I don’t believe in envying what
other people have…”
“It is just stuff, after all,” Kay offered.
“Exactly. But
there are always two sides to everything. This is certainly
a world in which we should pursue our dreams, and we should believe
that whatever we wish to attain, it is possible to
attain. But at the same time, this is not a world of total
abundance. There are certain limits to the resources we have
in this world. Not everyone is going to become rich, and
there’s a great deal of poverty in the world at the same
time. So there’s a certain limitation built into the world,
and when we’re talking about natural resources, that’s part of the
limitation. Just because we feel that this is a world of
opportunity doesn’t mean that we can just go blindly pursuing personal
ambitions for ourselves without recognizing limits to
resources. If you take the idea that this is a world of
abundance to an extreme, you will become a despoiler.”
“I was raised in a very poor
family,” Kay replied. My father was a poor Indian from
Mississippi. And most of my life I had basically nothing,
materially. I can remember asking for the smallest things,
and the answer was always no. And I realized when I grew up
that the answer was no because my family really didn’t have
it. But I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve been with
my husband, Blair, for 27 years, and he’s been very
successful. So I have this stuff here. I have
this beautiful house and all these masks and art that you see
here. But I don’t measure my wealth by these
possessions.
 I
measure it by my children, and how they turn out. These
things could burn up tomorrow, and it wouldn’t mean much to
me. I’ve been all over the world, and I’ve seen that in most
of the world there is not abundance. In most of the world,
or on an Indian reservation, they couldn’t even begin to comprehend
what I have and the way I live. And I clean my own house and
do my own cooking and my own gardening, and work very hard, myself.”
“But still they wouldn’t be able to comprehend it.”
“Right. Most of the world wouldn’t comprehend this.”
“And yet if you go to the
Third World, you find that it doesn’t matter if people are
poor. They often seem happier than people
here. Even if they’re dirt poor, they seem happier.”
“I always say that Indians
are the poorest people in America, and that’s true, but culturally and
spiritually we’re the richest people in America.”
“But that can’t be true for
all Native Americans, can it? There are obviously some that
are more in tune with their native traditions and values than others
are, isn’t that fair to say?”
“It’s just as in any
society. You’re going to find degrees of acculturation and
adherence to traditional beliefs.”
“I will say
this. Among the few Native Americans that I’ve met in the
course of my recent research, I’ve been surprised by the depth of
spiritual feeling that I’ve encountered. I think that
somehow I took it for granted that that would not necessarily be the
case. Does that make sense to you?”
“Yes. Most
Americans simply don’t know us. And we don’t go out and talk
about our spirituality, because it’s been the source of a lot of
pain. If someone comes to us, and wants to talk about it, we
can do that. But our beliefs are viewed with
disdain. People make comments like ‘How come you’re not
Christians? How come you don’t believe in the same God that
we believe in?’ So we usually don’t wear it on our
sleeve. We’re usually very careful about who we share our
beliefs with, because we’ve been the subject of a lot of ridicule, a
lot of oppression, and a lot of discrimination based on our belief
system.”
“So you’re saying that even
today, you’re likely to get a reaction from any Christian such as ‘How
come you don’t believe in Jesus?’ or something like that…”
“Yes. ‘How come
you don’t believe what we believe?’ We’re still doing
everything wrong, you see. The Indian Religious Freedom Act
was only passed in 1978. That’s pretty
recent. American Indians have been very quiet about their
belief system because, in a lot of cases, if you voiced the fact that
you were not Christian, your children would be taken from you in an
effort to Christianize them. Children were put in Christian
boarding schools, separated them from their families, and were not
allowed to practice traditional beliefs.”
“Something you said earlier
really stunned me, but I didn’t follow up on it,” I noted, in
response. “I thought it was pretty remarkable that you said,
at the beginning of our talk, that the Wyandotte are just now applying
for Federal recognition. This is the year
2001. Am I failing to comprehend something
here? I know there are a lot of American Indian tribes out
there, but why would there still be a waiting list for tribes to
register for Federal recognition?”
“Because
they really don’t want more Indians. They really don’t want
to recognize more tribes. And they do so reluctantly.”
“How long has this process of granting Federal recognition been going on?”
“Some tribes have been trying
for 50 or 60 years. The Eastern Pequot have been trying to
get Federal recognition for 35 years. The whole process is
arbitrary, you see. We’re the only people in America who
have to prove who we are. Why should we have to prove who we
are in our own country?”
“Well, when did this whole Federal recognition process start?
“It started when they began to put Indians on reservations, after 1830.”
“So there were some tribes
that received Federal recognition as long as 170 years ago?”
“Yes. The tribes
that got Federal recognition were tribes that were removed, taken from
their traditional homeland, and moved to Oklahoma. Oklahoma,
of course, was a new territory that was supposed to be Indian Territory
forever. Forever lasted about 20 years, because the Federal
government’s of forever was very different from ours. So
twenty years later, it was opened up to settlers. The
Wyandotte here, who are applying for Federal recognition, are a group
that didn’t leave when they removed the rest of the tribe to
Oklahoma. They didn’t feel that should have to leave their
traditional lands, so they went to the islands out here in the Detroit
River, and they hid. They hid until General Hugh Brady and
his regiments of soldiers were gone, and then they came
back. Right on this island, here, there are 150 Wyandotte
Indians still living.”
“Do your whole history, your
culture, and the nature of your spirituality affect your
politics? Is that a strange question to ask?”
 “No,
it’s not a strange question. Of course it affects our
politics. We have a very strong sense of social justice,
because of what’s been done to us.”
“It does tend to put you and
other Native Americans, to put it in the bluntest way, on the liberal
side of the fence.”
“Absolutely. We’re
not Republicans, as a rule. I don’t know a single Indian
who’s a Republican.”
“Well, I’ve noticed that
there seems to be a polarization among religious and spiritual groups
that mirrors the political polarization we have in this
country. Some spiritual groups are very laid back, while
others are very rigid and organized.”
“The whole world is too rigid and too organized…”
“Exactly. The
whole world is too rigid and too organized, so why do religious
organizations have to be the same way?”
“They’re ranked and
stratified, too, just like society,” Kay agreed with
me. “Why does it have to be that way? Why do we
have to have a ranked and stratified church? If the Creator
made all of us, and everything that lives is the same, so why does
everything have to be ranked and stratified?”
“For this reason,” I added,
“I think that some of these religious and spiritual groups could
benefit from listening to the Native American point of
view. Just the process of listening is important, in
itself. It’s so easy for religious or spiritual groups to
get wrapped up in themselves. They believe that their God is
the true God, or that their path is the highest path. And
they have gotten out of the habit of listening to people other than
those within their own group.”
 “They
stay within their own comfort zone,” Kay replied, “because to go out of
it is to challenge their own beliefs, their own dogma, and their own
selves. And most people don’t want to do that.”
“Exactly. And I
can understand that, because it’s a cultural
thing. Americans, in general, don’t get out of their comfort
zone a whole lot, because they’ve got such a big comfort
zone. The whole country is a big comfort zone. To
go outside of your own religious group, to go outside of your own state
or city…”
“To go outside of your own
head. Just try to view the world through someone else’s
eyes. I went this past weekend to the Unity Church National
Conference. And I spoke to a thousand Unity ministers from
all over the United States. They had never heard an American
Indian talk before. I came away thinking that what I had
said to them might make some kind of difference, or at least create
some kind of bridge of understanding.”
“Did you feel that they were receptive? Did you feel that they listened?”
“I felt some of them didn’t
have a clue as to what I was really saying. Or some of them
would take were taking the things I was saying, and thought they
understood, when they had only had only picked up the surface
meaning. For instance, here are these feathers,” she pointed
to a display case she had brought out, along with the one that
contained the sacred plants. “What do these feathers
mean? Everyone associates Indians with feathers, don’t
they? By age three, every kid in America knows that Indians
wear feathers. But no one asks, ‘Why do you honor these
feathers? What do these feathers mean?’ These
feathers are sacred things. What do they
mean? You know, I go out and talk to groups of people all
the time. I talk to thousands of people in the course of a
year, but I have never had one person ask me that question!”
 “You’re
bringing up something that’s very profound,” I replied. “To
me, the feathers themselves are a deep mystery—not a mystery in the
sense that I don’t know anything about their ceremonial use, but a
mystery in the sense that they represent that very elusive connection
between the physical and the spiritual worlds. The feathers
are used in a ritual way, but what most people don’t realize is that
every act can be a ritual act. If you make every act sacred,
then you’re living spirituality to the highest degree. And
the feathers are a part of that.”
“Exactly. We don’t
separate ourselves from anything. We respect
everything. So spirituality is lived each and every
day. It’s a way of life.”
“I came across a book
recently that was about living the spiritual life, and the author was
saying that his goal was to do only what he wanted to
do. Only what he wanted to do. He never intended
to do what he didn’t want to do…”
“That’s a very lofty goal.”
“Well, some people might say
that it’s a really self-indulgent kind of philosophy. But I
think most of us could benefit from that point of view, because the
majority of people are so hung up on what they should be doing, rather
than what they want to do. Because of this guilt factor—‘I
have to do this because I have to be a responsible person, or because I
have to conform’—very few people are actually pleasing themselves.”
“My cousin, Spud, is an
Indian farmer in Mississippi,” Kay responded. “He’s a read
laid-back, harmonious Indian. He said to me, ‘Tell me about
the people who live in the city.’ I can’t even get him to
come here and visit me, because this is such a foreign environment to
him. He’s down there with his horses, his catfish pond, and
his six children. So I said, “Well, the city is full of
people who are rushing around, going places, and doing things that they
don’t want to do or go to?’
 He
said, ‘What do they do?’ And I said, ‘Just what I told
you. They’re all doing what they have to do, and none of
them like it very much. They’re all caught on a treadmill,
going as fast as they can, and doing things they don’t really want to
do.’ And he thought that was the craziest thing he’d ever
heard. But I told him that’s the reality.”
“And I suppose that reality
has built up the material wealth of this country,” I
replied. “But still…”
“I feel very grateful,” Kay
concluded, “because I have a husband who has taken very good care of
me. So I have the freedom to do what I want to
do. I can say yes I want to do it or no I
don’t. And I really try not to do things that I don’t want
to do. Because I want to be an authentic human being, I want
to be real, I want to be able to look in the mirror at the end of my
life and say what I did was real and authentic, and it wasn’t because
someone was forcing me to do it. And I’m very grateful for
that. I’m very, very grateful to be able to do the things
that I want to do…”
The interview wound
down. I had consumed most of the grapes and a good deal of
the melon on the table. Kay showed me around the house, and
I took pictures of the masks and the artwork. Before heading
back home, I took a little tour of Grosse Ile, stopping at a bridge
overlooking a peaceful canal, its borders hung with willows, a towering
recreational boat moored in its estuary. For a moment, I
felt that I was hiding on the island, like the Wyandotte did from
General Hugh Brady, and then the moment was past and it was time for me
to get back on I-75 and head home. |
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Date Submitted:
1/2/04 |
Copyright Information:
Copyright © The Spiritual Traveler, 2001 |
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