How Not to Ignore Indigenous Teachers
Raised by missionaries, I often found myself in the company of white travelers returning to our church youth group with tokens extracted from the cultures they’d visited. I recall a white missionary who specialized in the South Pacific who taught my peers and me the haka, the Māori ritual perhaps familiar to non-Indigenous Americans through its performance by the Kiwi rugby team. I’ll never forget how he pounded his thighs, extended his tongue, flared his eyes, and slapped his forearms. His chants bellowed. The only phrase that stuck with me also shows up in the title of the 19th-century version performed by the All Blacks: Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora, ka ora!, which seems to translate to “it is death, it is death, it is life, it is life.” We latched on, eager to slap our own thighs while heeding our instructor’s guidance to direct this war dance at our true enemy, Satan.
Imagine my disappointment when, in missionary training school in Switzerland a few years later, a white New Zealander scolded us for our admiration of the haka due to its connotations with warfare and, yes, savagery. Her admonition left her students crestfallen and confused. Both memories flooded my mind this past week when the Internet was set ablaze by footage from the New Zealand parliament.
Missionary 1 in the first story embodied colonialism and whiteness by reenacting a ritual that had been offered to him as an undeserved gift by Indigenous hosts, which he misappropriated in service of expanding white Christendom. Inversely but just as dangerously, missionary 2 also executed a colonial project through outright anti-Indigenous racism. And so, I know it is wrong that once or twice this weekend, alone in my house, I puffed my cheeks and roared in emulation of Hana-Rāwhiti Kareariki Maipi-Clarke, the Māori Member of Parliament (MP) who inspired the haka in protest of settler colonial oppression.
The whiteness of right-wing fascism extends its tentacles far beyond the conditions that led to Trump’s election this month. In Aotearoa, a faction of capitalists seeks to reinterpret the agreement between European colonizers and Māori people with the effect of impeding Indigenous rights. New legislation’s proponents cite the same sort of logic fueling the backlash to DEI in the US, crystalized in the Fearless Fund case, by weaponizing the vocabulary of racial equity to unwind protections of oppressed people. But the resistance is strong and it is old. As of this writing, more than 40,000 have protested outside of parliament, a culmination of an island-long march (known as hīkoi) refusing to let colonization masquerade as equality. In my estimation, they’re accompanied by some impressive, if necessarily performative, allies. But nothing has captured my attention like MP Maipi-Clarke.
I cannot stop watching this clip. It moves me to tears after a dozen viewings both because I grieve with those resisting colonial repression in Aotearoa specifically and because her emotions depict how I feel as we face the next chapter of Trump’s dictatorship. I recognize the expression worn by the NZ Speaker of the House as whiteness personified. I am not in denial. I am not shocked. I’m steeled. And yes, I am terrified, outraged, and hopeless more often than not. But I’m grounded. I study at the feet of revolutionaries for whom enduring authoritarianism is the norm. I stand in my values with my comrades. I’m rooted in the resistance to the acute threat of increased state violence while taking the long view, both backward in honor of ancestral wisdom and forward in tender compassion for all of our descendants. I am motivated by love and inspired by Indigenous example.
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We ought not extract the viral video from its context. The memeification of everything is not racial-justice organizing, and Māori history is distinct. Māori convictions do not necessarily equate to Lakota values, for example. At the same time (there’s bothness here), their movements belong to a global context of mobilizing against settler colonialism and surviving genocide and erasure, a struggle our Native comrades share here on Turtle Island and, indeed, in Palestine.
If you’re like me now, your spine stiffens at the sniff of any ingredients that might concoct cultural appropriation. But Native activists would not speak of Indigenous wisdom as a notion if there were no connective tissue between Indigenous traditions worldwide. In their diversity, Indigenous lifeways present principles that will carry us through the next four years and generations beyond. For those of us who are white and non-Indigenous, our fear of appropriation, and more specifically of saying/doing the wrong thing and getting in trouble for it, can deceive us into greeting instructions as artifacts rather than gifts. When Native people share their culture with us, it’s not just an FYI: they’re pointing us toward a better way to be human. They usher us back to humanity itself. We ignore them at our peril.
I can’t stop thinking about what Janeen Comenote (Quinault Nation) told an audience I hosted this summer: “Indigenous values are human values the rest of the world forgot.” It reminds me how the only people whom I’ve ever heard express that everyone’s ancestors were indigenous to somewhere were not white people claiming indigeneity as a con. They were Native people invested in collective liberation. When I first heard the phrase European indigeneity, it activated those nervous allyship sweat glands. But I’m now convinced (though always open to being wrong) that my ability to connect with my own people before the invention of whiteness is essential to liberation. And as whiteness elected Donald Trump, it is crucial for activism today. En route to destroying white supremacy, we must destabilize whiteness, which was manufactured to hoard wealth and power for European Christians. In my own lineage, we sacrificed our connectivity to Celtic wisdom and land stewardship at the altar of whiteness. And in our purchase of the top tier of the American caste system and its economic dominance, the byproduct was spiritual decay.
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The articles that inspired this website in the first place described a spirituality I have gardened for myself from the ashes of Christian fundamentalism. I argued that a “spirituality that liberates” would probably look Indigenous both in its values and in its integration with our politics, our bodies, our communities, and all of creation. I do not mean that I am embracing Native American religions as my own. I am not claiming Indigenous identity. I’m saying that Indigenous people teach me what it means to be human, what it means to be a created being, and I’m listening to them. And in these apocalyptic days, I find comfort in little else.
When I first met Brittany Schulman (Waccamaw Siouan), she spoke to me of 5 Rs of Indigenous wisdom in the context of philanthropy: Respect, Relationships, Reciprocity, Redistribution, and Responsibility. In interpretation of her guidance and others’ example for the Trump era, then, I commit to anticapitalism. I commit to decolonization - literally, in addition to but more importantly than metaphorically. I commit to nurturing the earth and my body as part of the same organism. I commit to my connections, including with myself. I commit to generational organizing alongside harm reduction. I commit to respecting literally everyone. I commit to the present moment. I commit to accountability. I commit to reverence and awe. I commit to gratitude.
Thanksgiving’s history is white supremacy. But it is good to spend time away from work. It is good to gather and dine with our families, biological or chosen. It is good to give thanks. Rather than celebrate the colonial holiday itself, let us offer gratitude for the gifts from our Native peers whose utterly divine generosity we have heretofore reciprocated with violence.
And while we’re at it, let’s donate our turkey budget to NDN Collective.
Recommended reading:
Becoming Kin | Patty Krawec
Sacred Instructions | Sherri Mitchell
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States | Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Our History is the Future | Nick Estes
