O Brave New Indigenous World.pdf

1 O, Brave New Indigenous World! A Brief Speech about Being a GRIC Student in 21st Century America Delivered at the annual Chief Azul Scholar – Citizenship Awards Banquet Friday, May 4, 2018 In 1623, William Shakespeare published his last play, The Tempest, in which he had Prospero’s daughter Miranda exclaim with delight: “O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world That has such people in it!” While the site of Shakespeare’s play may have been an uncharted island somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea, the inspiration for this drama were the stories that returned from the English colonial settlements, such as Roanoke and Jamestown, that populated the northeastern coast of what became North America. Over there—which is to say, over here—the “beauteous mankind” that the settlers encountered were the people of the Croatan and Powhatan confederacies. Not long afterwards, of course, the English met with the Wampanoag at Plymouth Colony. Three hundred and eight-eight years later, Jack Forbes, the Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape scholar, published The American Discovery of Europe, which was about the pre-Columbian expeditions of Indigenous people that traveled across the Atlantic to European shores. In his introduction, Forbes asked his reader to imagine “Ancient American mariners, perhaps from the Caribbean or the east coast of North America…following the Gulf Stream,” the same one followed for millennia by Sea Turtles, “in dugout boats, large and small, reaching places as diverse as Ireland, Holland, and Iberia.” 2 The lesson of such narratives is that Indigenous peoples have long been explorers, adventurers, and travelers. They may not have set out to conquer “new worlds,” as did their European counterparts, but they did take great risks for the sake of building alliances with other nations, for the sake of acquiring knowledge, and for the sake of establishing trade relations. Indeed, the Akimel O’odham oral tradition is replete with stories of great voyages undertaken to distant points across the O’odham homelands, as well as beyond our boundaries into the lands of the Colorado River Tribes and up to the Hopi villages. Then, of course, ever since the Americans began settling here during the 1850s, the O’odham and our Pee Posh cousins have journeyed far and wide for work, for school, and sometimes for war. In the case of those who availed themselves for the most dangerous of endeavors, Ira Hayes, who served in the US Marines during WWII, stands as a symbol of the O’odham tradition of honoring our alliance with the Americans. Hayes, moreover, was the most prominent example of the O’odham custom of treating your friends like relatives, and of valuing that kinship tie above all else. For better and for worse, the tradition that Hayes represents began with the Pima Scouts, who served as the First Arizona Volunteers and who took it upon themselves to protect the whites, whom they now regarded as friends. At this juncture, it is time to speak of education and the epic journey that we each embark on as we set higher and higher goals for ourselves, as O’odham and Pee-Posh, as relatives—we are all someone’s child and grandchild—and as learning human beings, driven by a desire for knowledge, new experiences, and to do some good in the world. For everyone assembled here tonight, where we are today with respect to our lives and careers is in large part the result of the choices that we each made about our education, be it going to college, pursuing a graduate or professional degree, or even choosing not to go to college at all. When George Webb recalled his school days in A Pima Remembers, he told of a time when he and his peers were the first generation of O’odham to attend the day school in Santa Cruz Village. To get there, George and the other kids had to walk three miles, crossing the Gila River along the way, which back then always had a stream 3 running through it, “about two feet deep and twenty feet wide.” Interestingly, what George remembered much more than going to school was playing, sometimes all day, along the banks of the river with his friends. So, “going to school” was great fun, that is until they got caught and the teacher complained to George’s father. While George Webb did not go on to college, he did grow into a respected elder and community leader, which included serving on the tribal council that was created with the 1936 constitution. I should note that the author of A Pima Remembers was not alone in having dubious feelings about school. Anna Moore Shaw recalled in her book, A Pima Past, the story of “Little Chehia,” who was no more enamored with school than was George Webb. “To Chehia,” Anna wrote, “it didn’t seem fair that Pima children now spent their days in the one-room adobe school houses on the reservation. Her older brothers and sisters had been able to play outdoors all day long! But now everything was different. Ever since the Pimas had started going to church, the mothers and fathers wanted their youngsters to be educated in the white man’s way.” Indeed, the “white man’s way” is how many still see the schools provided for us, even more than a century later. What is different nowadays is that the idea of going to school is no longer an Indian Bureau experiment, but rather has become a generations-old tradition of our own making. At this point in our history, in the year 2018, there is virtually no one in our community who has not participated in the so-called white man’s education, be it elementary school on the reservation or the high schools, colleges and universities at which community members attend far and wide. Having said all of this, I do not mean to suggest that by virtue of choosing to pursue your higher education that you therefore are choosing to forsake your O’odham or Pee Posh identity and assimilate into the Anglo-American mainstream. You are not “turning white.” On the contrary, while you may on occasion encounter someone who envies your good fortune and insinuates that you are “selling out,” what matters more than placating your detractors is appeasing your own selfworth. By choosing to go to college, you are choosing to honor the life that your family has 4 provided you, the values that your community has bestowed upon you, and the opportunities that your nation has created for you. The only way to sell out is to reject or disparage what the people around you did to help you get where you are today. This is what most people mean when they advise you to “remember where you’re from.” Whether you are going nearby to ASU or the U of A, or much farther afield to college campuses around the country, when you are asked to remember where you are from you are being asked to not only remember to call your mom—which you should do regardless—but also to acknowledge the fact that, even if you are the first one in your family to pursue a college degree, no one achieves their dream without the support of others. It may be just a few words of encouragement, but somebody believed in you, and that belief was just the medicine you needed to overcome any doubt or uncertainty you may have felt as you grew into the young man or woman you are now, sitting at the threshold of one of the most important personal journeys in which you will ever enter. Speaking of personal journeys, if I may share an anecdote, when I went away to the University of Rhode Island, I went with the desire to see and experience a world that I had only seen on TV and in movies. For up until the time that I went away to complete my undergraduate degree, I had not seen much of the world at all—only the Rez and the Greater Los Angeles area, and a few points in-between. Other than that, there was one time that I rode a Greyhound bus from Pomona, CA to Baltimore, MD to see my uncle Avery, during which I traveled with my mom and grandfather. Consequently, when it came to going to college, I was motivated by a youthful sense of adventure. Also, I wanted to go to school as far away from my parents’ house as I could get. Where I wound up was in a completely alien environment, which did not look anything like the areas in Southern California or Arizona with which I was familiar, not to mention being surrounded by more white people than I had ever encountered before in my life. Needless to say, I had a lot to adjust to in my new life as an undergraduate. 5 It probably goes without saying that I felt homesick, sometimes I felt like I’d made a big mistake and that maybe I should just go back home. What I did not realize, at least not immediately, is that what I was going through is what many students go through when they are away from home for an extended period of time—I was discovering my true identity, both as an aspiring academic (I was a philosophy major with an interest in going on to graduate school for a PhD) and as an Indigenous person (I was the child of a Pima mother and a Mexican-American father). What I thought was the distress of realizing that I had made a mistake was in fact the growing pains of having to make my own decisions about what kind of person I was becoming and what kind of life I was really going to lead: Was I going to give up and head back home with little to show for myself? Or was I going to persevere and try my hardest to do well in school? As I grappled with these questions I received an unexpected missive from back home. In the one and only time he would ever write to me, my grandfather, Simon Lewis, sent me some words of encouragement, which were handwritten and dispatched from his tiny house, which sat across the road from what is today the retirement community of Sun Lakes. My grandfather’s letter was on a single sheet of notebook paper, on which he wrote from front to back. In his comments, he expressed admiration for my effort at getting a college education, especially so far away from home. He reminded me that my mom felt homesickness when she went away to Haskell, where she went for high school. So, my grandfather figured that I was homesick, too. Most importantly, my grandfather explained that what I was doing to educate myself was important, not just for myself, but also for my family and community. “So few of us do this,” my grandfather said as he pointed out the members of my immediate family who attempted to do what I was doing, but did not complete their degrees. With that in mind, my grandfather told me that he was “proud” of me, which made my heart soar. While I knew that my family would forgive me if I tried and failed at going to college, I nevertheless knew from that moment that I did not want to fail at all. 6 In the end, my grandfather’s letter to me that first semester that I was away from home was the inspiration for my growing awareness and appreciation for the people in my life who played a role in my aspirations. Fortunately, as I made friends and got to know my professors—as I embraced the new world around me and committed myself to my education—my self-esteem grew, my confidence grew, my knowledge and understanding grew, but most importantly my sense of community grew. Suddenly I realized that I did not need to wait for the non-Indian world to make a place for me as an O’odham person; instead, with my education and the support of my community, I could define that place for myself. In fact, to this very day, I have been approaching my life’s work with that same self-affirming attitude, be it my teaching, my scholarship, or my community service, which crosses a range of Indian and non-Indian worlds. So, as you prepare yourself for your own journey, remember to believe in yourself, believe in your family and community, and, most of all, believe that you have a bright future ahead of you as an O’odham or Pee Posh person—because we here tonight believe that you do. Thank you very much.