Your Story Changed Mine: Writing Interpersonal Relations Between Nations

(Tina)Theresa Hannah-Munns
Third Mini-reflection paper
ING 258 - Lorena Sekwan Fontaine
October 18th, 2005

Your Story Changed Mine: Writing Interpersonal Relations Between Nations

I re-member (come back to and reclaim into who I am today) my experience of kindergarten and of spending most of my time in the hallway for one reason or another. First, it was because I did not answer to my name; next I was being punished because of my left-handedness. I re-member other occasions of sitting in the hallway because teachers would have some problem with how I was or who I was. The patterned blocks of black and white tiles of that hallway floor is imbedded into my head from the amount of time I spent in the hallway. Sometimes my mother would come down that hallway and furiously defend who I was or how I was. She would explain to the teacher that I was called ‘Tina’ since birth and not ‘Theresa,’ so this is why I did not answer the teacher. My mother would fume at the staff of the school for their policy of slapping left-handedness out of the students, especially her daughter (me), and threaten them if they touched me again she would ‘pull the Irish Mulligan’ of our lineage (this means utilizing the anger associated with Irish peoples. It just so happens that we are of the Mulligan lineage). Or she would make them explain why I would come home crying because the other students would poke fun at me, both physically and verbally but always emotionally, about my red hair.
These memories kept rising because of the assigned readings of native women writing for native women; I am not a native woman but an Irish one, a left-handed redhead that lived in an extended family and moved between Bobcaygeon in the Ontarian countryside and the townhouse in Scarborough, then a part of the larger city of Toronto. There was one teacher in that school, William Tredway Elementary, which nicknamed me the “Old Penny” because I would always show up at the start of the school year and then ‘get lost’ -leave to other schools around the country and/or province. It is reflecting on these indigenous women’s writings that allowed me to more fully understand why most of my life, for over twenty years, has been in identifying me more with Indigenous populations rather than my own eurocultural racial belonging. I may be white, but I am a process thinker from a collective ethnic group eaten up by the mainstream culture.

Why did I become bi-cultural and why was my identity so entwined with the Indigenous populations? My story is not about racism but is about sexism and oppression while entwined with supposed privilege and power. I stand on a threshold of identities, with one foot in the white, eurocultural privilege set while my body and soul is exposed and hovers over the weight supported by the foot that steps into the culture that belongs to my children and not to me. My privilege is that I get to choose how I express my life everyday, and I choose, and have chosen, to walk with the Indigenous culture more than the eurocultural mainstream that assimilated the stories of my ancestors into their worldview.

This reading package contained in one book has given me more of myself, intuitively reminding me of two points; first I re-member that I myself come from an oral tradition of Celtic ancestries that call to be heard. Second, I re-member that I belong to humanity and the interconnectedness, interrelatedness, and interdependence that my ancestors taught as they have met, and continue to meet, the First Nations peoples, ancestors to my descendents.

My daughter contains ‘sacred vitality’ (13) in everything that she does; in the article by Young and Nadeau I am affirmed as a mother of how my decision to step out of the isolation of my ancestry and seek the cultural identity of my daughter gives her a “primary source of strength and spirituality” (13), making her resilient as she walks through life. It is this purpose, of giving my daughter strength in the knowledge of her Irish and Indigenous ancestry, and of her being a woman, that has given me an identity I can be proud of. Along the way, I also find out how I can decolonize my body while helping her to do so; the multiple folds of oppression have impacted my daughter in more ways than simple racist or sexist definitions can explain, with my daughter providing for me a role model to learn from as she chooses to express her sexuality as a two-spirited woman. Between my firsthand location of my own experiences of womanhood and the secondhand experiences of promoting my daughter’s location in becoming a woman, this article allows me to unlearn the “ways of thinking” etched onto my own body and reconnect through escaping “coercive tutelage” (15) that was created by the assimilation of my own people; this escape also allows me to be aware of the active roles in the attempts on assimilating Indigenous communities here in Canada that my own ancestors played, and that I need to continue to un-learn.

This confusing pre-history of my own ancestry, how the Celtic peoples where both colonized and colonizer really was brought forward in my interpretative reading of Kulusic’s article on cultural identity; the paradoxical nature of my own life story came forward in this adoptee’s experience in a way that would surprise the author. “The sixties scoop” (25) reminded me of my own people’s forced exile from Ireland, and the stories of families torn apart because of economic forces that created survivance strategies that disintegrated our own communities through forwarding institutional poverty onto my peoples. In the process of exile that covertly forced my ancestors onto First Nations soil, the stage was set for the atrocities committed by my own peoples as they reacted to being powerless in their own lands, taking advantage of migration under the assumption of gaining supposed freedoms in Canadian lands. In our being white, self-determination was not an issue for the Irish peoples arriving in Canada; the issues of self-determination as addressed by Napoleon were taken away, in a smaller and unracialized scale, in Ireland, through colonial imperialism (33) and their enterprises. The racial aspects of colonialism was not felt by my peoples, but the imperialism still assimilated our process orientation and storytelling existence into their mainstream cultural diasporas, just as the internalized frameworks of band membership and exclusive thinking is dividing and conquering First Nations (35) and disintegrating indigenous communal paradigms.

While it is hard to discuss the impact of politics and sovereignty within the structure of this paper that parallels my peoples experience of colonization, the articles impacted me to recognize the truth behind Powers’ assertion that “we have to start thinking about this in a different way” (48). Rather than “either/or” (49) thinking of Aristotelian logic, I adopted at a young age the attraction to ‘both/and’ thinking of Einsteinian logic. I resolve tensions in my life and worldview by the same recommendation that Powers forwards in her conclusion (52); I embrace change as giving me true freedom, with my responsibility in making change within myself so that I can then affect the collective and turn the tension into dialogue by recognizing my own footing in the camps of both participants. I am a living testimony of loss and gain, colonized and colonizer, suppressor and suppressed, victim and oppressor.

In the history of my Celtic peoples, there are stories of good people, bad people, good actions, and bad actions in their relationships with indigenous peoples. Many of my peoples have moved from process orientation of thought and living life as interdependent relationships, as taught in our ancient teachings (and brought forward in Horn-Miller’s article, 57); instead many have adopted the product orientation of individualized identity. Our circles became broken and we repaired them with the linear and hierarchal perspectives and models of being perpetuated by our colonizers and we became assimilated into the mainstream only to become colonizers ourselves. Concerning Irish women, we internalized the stereotypes others produced for us, especially women like me who have red hair, an external symbol of my ethnic identity. I became the uncontrolled whore, the temptress, the violent ‘pagan witch,’ especially when I associated myself within the ‘nature worship’ of another indigenous framework. It is my attempt in creating a circle back to my own ancestors through a cousin path of being in community, that I hope to “extend the boundaries of the discourse and offer new and exciting ways for gathering and interpreting information” (69) as Forsyth implores. But unlike Forsyth, I believe the “distinct patterns in the literature” (69) should include the pre-contact examination of patterns that existed in the colonization of other indigenous and/or oral cultures such as my own. My people were divided in identity through religious status while colonial ‘divide and conquer’ techniques expanded and evolved as they crossed the ocean into more insidious forms within the status game of bloodlines and band memberships. How are these located within the ideological methods and linear, evolutionary frameworks of the colonizers? How can their own tools of assimilation, of dissection and observation be used to dissect, observe, and learn the patterns in order to reverse the colonial impact into a more proper decolonialized, soteriological-empowered position for First Nations and, more specifically, for my daughter?

It is easy to get lost in the very important specific issues that impact indigenous women, such as divorce, real property, and self-governance. These specific issues must be addressed and changed, but as Flies Away, Garrow, and Jorgenson note, the tension between self-determination through self-governance and individual rights can not be addressed until the larger patterns of internal colonial ideologies is brought forward into the awareness of how each action of indigenous legislature may be falling into the trap of the colonizer’s web of assimilation; this cannot be fully made aware until First Nation communities utilize their own legislation and see the oppressive results of their own positing and become aware of the internal colonizer’s mechanisms of control. One example of the institutional use of poverty and its function in the Celtic exile into Canada can be compared to how band policies on membership buy into the issue of scarce resources and other colonial propaganda. This is one of many parallels that can lead to the more creative and imaginistic solutions that are called for by the various authors of the articles in this book. The use of indigenous narrative, such as in the articles of Breinig (97) and McGregor (103), is of such formulation that can create leads into how to use Traditional Knowledge Systems (TKS) in order to produce both identity empowerment and practical solutions that transcend the limited scope that the impact of colonialism shrouds, and can be incorporated into theories and frameworks of indigenous designs to analyze the historical patterning of colonial practices throughout the colonizer’s history and relationship with the world. Researching the techniques of the colonial relationships held by other indigenous and oral traditional cultures throughout the colonial history can help show what does not work, as can be seen in the annihilation (except for the disjointed narratives and music) of my own ecological cultural framework of the various Celtic peoples. In knowing what does not work in past attempts can help formulate what will work, especially when the traps and pitfalls are brought to light and compared to the attempts already installed in post-modern theories. In utilizing the theories of “Loving Indianness” (111) the value of storytelling needs to be forwarded with the recognition that it is one aspect that can not work in isolation; for example, my Celtic peoples have many stories that are products passed throughout the mainstream cultures institutions, but are isolated out of the soteriological understandings of the worldviews that created them. Without the ritualized and ceremonial understanding of their value, they are simply products rather than the representations of a complete traditional knowledge system of my people. I can be represented in their images and in these narratives, re-constructing my self-representation as Spears highlights in her article, but the soul of my people is not transmitted through the tidbits of information without the communal forwarding of the teachings in their ecological contexts. My identity is not whole, but dismembered; for example, the Drui (commonly referred incorrectly as the Druids) have disappeared and I am now on land foreign to my ancestral domain, out of community with the larger interrelational community of my ancestors. The image of our endless knot exists in representational form, and lives as the mnemonic device to the Ancient Ones and their teachings, but is now ‘the moon’ (a product) rather than the ‘finger pointing to the moon’ (the process). My concern is that the representations produced by indigenous authors will eventually be decontextualized and deconstructed into assimilated products for the global economy, much like the remnants of my own ancestors. To this day, our Celtic peoples continue to write of themselves, but remain disjointed and at war with each other within the colonial context of our existence. Thousands of years have gone by and assimilation has taken its toll.

Rather than the piecemeal ‘product’ collections of stories and the internalized intellectual productions of abstracted conceptualizations of processes, such as my Celtic peoples have done, First Nations’ traditional knowledge systems are living processes anchored in real life contexts and real life locations, whether that anchor be to specific lands, peoples, or teachings. Universalism needs to be balanced by specificity in diversity, globalization by expanded tribalism, product with dynamic process. As more white, eurocultural individuals like myself start to extricate ourselves from the majority and find our own ‘third space’ location of diversity, the three Ps of power, prestige, and prosperity can be transformed and allocated with equal distribution, especially as more indigenous individuals are rising to infiltrate the limited colonial understandings of how power, prestige, and prosperity should be defined. My favorite reading within this assignment was Spears’ article on representation; it forced me to look at the ways that I have freed myself from adding to the ‘colonial gaze’ (127) and yet see how trapped I am in provoking and forwarding that same colonial gaze in the limits of my own interests in spirituality and mysticism. I “interpellate” (129) the mystical stereotypes of indigenous knowledge systems just as I do in my own culture, as well as other representations in other cultures, including eastern Christianity. The one difference that I do have is that I am ‘in community’ with the living spiritualists and mystics of the nēhiyāwak (Cree) worldview; I am a religious studies scholar, with a ‘colonial gaze’ (130) that seeks and expresses the spiritual in all its pluralistic forms. In the extra awareness obtained through the challenges propounded in looking at myself and my location that this article provided me, I am re-minded to re-member that I must balance the position I hold as both an insider and outsider to the various cultural constructions of spirituality, and to always forward my responsibility of respecting diversity while deconstructing the ‘othering process’ created by my own discipline and position within eurocultural community. My being is an “active agent in culture” (133) and I have a responsibility to the interconnection, interrelationship, and interdependence that all the cultures have to the spirituality and location of meaning of humankind as a whole.