9 INDIGENOUS PEOPLE
Black Robe Bruce Beresford (1991) Canada
Once Were Warriors Lee Tamahori (1999) New Zealand
Boy Taika Waititi, (2010) New Zealand
Tamahori, Lee. Once Were Warriors. Fine Line Features, 1994.
Indigenous people are people who migrated to an area before written history. All people migrate. Humans have been moving all over the globe since Homo Sapiens evolved in Africa.
New Zealand consists of two main islands in the southwest Pacific Ocean and 600 smaller islands. New Zealand is more than 1000 miles from Australia across the Tasman Sea. It’s one of the most remote places on earth, and one of the last to be settled by humans.
The Maori people migrated to New Zealand in the 1200s in canoes from Polynesia. This is not pre-historical time. In Europe, it was the Dark Ages, a time of the Bubonic Plague, religious Crusades, and illiteracy for everyone but priests. Abel Tasman sighted New Zealand in 1642. Shortly afterward, colonists arrived. The Maori preceded the Europeans by 400 years, a significant historical period for one culture to claim sovereignty.
The Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 between the British and the Maori. There were no Miscegenation Laws to prohibit marriage between Maori women and the English settlers. 600,000 New Zealanders claim Maori descent. Nonetheless, in Once Were Warriors, the Heke family are disenfranchised. Social Services takes their son Mark away because Beth misses his juvenile court appointment. Jake is out of work. Their oldest son joins a gang. Grace is the one family member who succeeds in school and as a creative writer, but her family cannot protect her from the dangers of living in poverty.
New Zealand prides itself on a history of peace and co-existence, but the native people still suffer from poverty, addiction, alcoholism, and violence, like indigenous people all over the world.
The scars of colonization still harm Maori children 400 years after their ancestral homeland was invaded, and their native language and mythologies replaced.
Sherman Alexie, a member of the Coeur D’Alene Nation, a Spokane Indian from the Pacific Northwest writes about growing up in a dangerous party house in his book, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.
My mother and father hosted a New Year’s Eve party in our HUD house on the Spokane Indian Reservation in 1973. Or 1972 or 1974. I was only seven years old, but I knew, with a fundamentalist’s fervor that the party was potentially lethal. Not because of my mother and father’s actions, but because of their inattentions. They were alcoholics who’d get what they laughingly called bottle-blind… So, yes, my bottle-blind parents invited everybody on the reservation to that dangerous New Year’s Eve party, including two Indian men who were widely believed—who were known—to have committed murders.
I wasn’t all that worried about their presence at that New Year’s Eve party. I wasn’t afraid of being killed as much as I was afraid of being sexually abused. I knew there would be five or six party guests who’d sexually molested my friends and cousins. There would be guests who’d raped only adults. And guests who’d raped only children. And opportunists who had and would violate any vulnerable woman, man, or child.
As an adult, I can look back at the violence on my reservation and logically trace it back to the horrific degradations, sexual and otherwise, committed against my tribe by generations of white American priests, nuns, soldiers, teachers, missionaries, and government officials. The abused can become abusers. It’s a tragic progression. But as a child, even a very bright child, I had little knowledge of Native American history. We Spokane Indian children weren’t even taught about our own tribal history. I only knew my personal history. And, in my story, the villains were other Spokane Indians.[1]
His experience growing up as an indigenous child in the United States is more similar to the experiences of the Heke children on the other side of the planet than to non-native children in his own country.
Men With Quills
Jared Diamond identified Guns, Germs and Steel as the three weapons used by European Colonists to destroy indigenous cultures in North and South America.[2]
The fourth and possibly the most powerful tool of colonization is writing. William Penn arrived in the American Colonies with a deed, signed by Charles II, explaining that the territory now known as Pennsylvania belonged to him. He signed treaties with the Leni Lenape that allowed them to remain in the Delaware Valley, an area where Lenape people may have lived for thousands of years. He was considered benevolent.
In The Dawn of Everything, David Wengrow and Anarchist, Anthropologist David Graeber posit that the US Revolution and especially the French Revolution were inspired by Indigenous thinkers.
In order to understand how the indigenous critique – that consistent moral and intellectual assault on European society, widely voiced by Native American observers from the seventeenth century onwards- evolved, and it’s full impact on European thinking, we first need to understand something about the role of two men: an impoverished French aristocrat named Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de la Hontan, and an unusually brilliant Wendat statesman named Kandiaronk.[3]
They quote Kandiaronk, leader of the Wendat Confederacy, who traveled to Europe and debated the Frenchman, the Baron de Lahontan about the superiority of Wendat Culture.
I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I can genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine.’ I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, –of all the world’s worst behavior. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as look at silver?[4]
Europeans lived in Monarchial states, most people were peasants with no rights and no hopes of ever gaining anything. The Wendat lived in egalitarian societies. They shared what they had with those less fortunate. Children were treated with kindness and never disciplined. But they were fierce in warfare and cruel to captives.
Some of the documents of Revolution and the writings of Enlightenment thinkers quoted the language of Wendat and Algonquin leaders. Graeber and Wengrow argue that indigenous civilizations may have been defeated, but their ideas of Democracy influenced the governments that were eventually established in North America.
Black Robe presents the story of a French Jesuit who travels into Wendat territory to establish a mission and convert the indigenous people of what would later be Ontario, the land between the Great Lakes. He travels with a small Algonquin group, a family, and learns about their beliefs while he attempts to convert them.
Sigmund Freud is credited with developing an understanding of the mind that begins with the interpretation of dreams. This was a central guiding principle of many native peoples of North America. Ondinnonk is the Iroquoian work for the secret desires expressed in dreams. In the film, Black Robe, Chomina sees the She Manitou and can foresee and accept his death. His dreams give him knowledge to make decisions.
History may be written by the winners, but the ideas of Native People that were enslaved, killed, converted, and schooled, live on in the central principles and in the founding documents of U.S. and Canadian culture.
- Alexie, Sherman. You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. Little Brown and Company, New York, 2017, pp 10-13. ↵
- Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London. 2017. ↵
- Graeber, David and Wengrow, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York. 2021, pp. 48-49. ↵
- Graeber, David and Wengrow, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York. 2021, pp 54-55. ↵