An old college chum, a retired United Methodist minister in Tennessee, sent this article along earlier in the week. It is by Kayla DeVault, a Native American living on the Navajo Nation in Arizona.
A number of years ago as an Episcopal Church official, I spent several days on the Arizona Navajo reservation, learning about the Dine, as they call themselves. It was a window into a world very different from my mainline American culture. Once after giving an explanation of a program I was encouraging the Navajo church leaders to consider, a Navajo woman proclaimed she had seen an unusual bird fly by the window while I was speaking, and she interpreted this that I had offered something worthy of consideration. Whether my words were wise is beside the point, but it struck me at the time and has stayed with be since, that Native Americans have something to share with the larger world of western wisdom. Perhaps we would do well to listen more carefully to those of other cultures and nations for we in the west often do not chose wisely. - Glenn N. Holliman
Four Ways to Look at Standing Rock: An
Indigenous Perspective
In the shadow of the Trump election, I found
myself explaining to world climate leaders how to see Standing Rock through an
indigenous lens.
A couple of weeks ago, as I stood before
climate scientists, advocates, and world policy leaders at the COP22 in
Morocco, I felt the increased importance of my message as climate denier Donald
Trump was voted into office. My perspective as a young Native woman living on
the Navajo reservation and studying both renewable energy engineering and Diné
studies had earned me an appointment to the NEJAC/EPA Youth Perspectives on
Climate Working Group as well as to the SustainUs Youth Delegation attending
the November climate talks in Marrakech.
I was there to bring Standing Rock to the
world climate talks.
Rarely
do so many nations come together in one space for a shared purpose.
Watching the events at Standing Rock unfurl
over the past year, I felt compelled to ask our Navajo leadership to divest
from oil, coal, and uranium and instead invest in the Standing Rock Sioux
tribe’s fight against the Dakota Access pipeline. Eventually they did. Navajo
Nation President Russell Begaye announced a formal stance of solidarity and
traveled to Cannon Ball, North Dakota, to plant the Navajo Nation flag there. A
week later, I stood on the front lines of #NoDAPL while energy company
employees hit us with pepper spray and threatened us with attack dogs. I found
everything dear to me, suddenly, at the heart of this battle—fought by people
from the four corners of the world.
Which brings me to the significance of
counting by four. To understand Standing Rock, you must remove the Western lens
and adopt a holistic, indigenous perspective of the world.
BUMP bump bump bump. BUMP bump bump bump. The
rhythm of the powwow drum, the heartbeat of life, beats in a sequence of fours.
It celebrates the ebb and flow of the natural world. The rhythm falters only
during the Honor Beats, when a Jingle Dress dancer raises her fan to catch the
spirit of the drums. Rarely do so many nations come together in one space for a
shared purpose. It is a gathering where commonalities are celebrated, such as
the sacredness of the eagle feather and the direness of maintaining balance in
the world. Certain concepts—holistic methodologies, the value of ceremony and
language, the religious significance of certain landmarks, the beliefs of
interconnectedness and interdependence—put indigenous groups in stark contrast with
Western thinking.
This similarly has been the exception of
Standing Rock.
And, just as the powwow rhythm carries four
beats, an overwhelming number of indigenous communities count various elements
of their lives in fours. The medicine wheel of Native culture represents the
four directions. There are the four elements, which build all life and the four
seasons that govern time.
Where I live in the Navajo Nation, the culture
is steeped in fours. Dinébikéyah, the land given to the Diné (Navajo) by the
Holy People, falls between four sacred mountains. The day is broken into four
phases, which correlate to the four stages of life and the four steps that
govern life in Navajo philosophy: Nitsakees (Thinking), Nahat’a (Planning),
Iina (Living), and Sihasin (Reflection, which provides hope and assurance).
Each Navajo has four clans that constitute his or her identity.
The
beauty of using fours, to define so many aspects of life, is that we are forced
to see the holistic picture.
The beauty of using fours, to define so many
aspects of life, is that we are forced to see the holistic picture. Without
this bigger picture, we lose sight of the interconnectedness of humans to
nature and to each other. The intricacy of this worldview is captured in the
traditional Navajo home, the hooghan or hogan. It represents
the entirety of life as a Navajo: its four pillars symbolizing the four sacred
mountains. Its doorway faces the east, a fire at the heart. Within the hogan,
you are cradled between Mother Earth and Father Sky (visible through the smoke
hole in the ceiling). This same smoke hole allows the sun to pass through. It
traces a clockwise path on the walls called sha bikego, or
“sunwise.” This direction is used in every ceremony and every meeting. When the
sun reaches the northern wall, this symbolizes winter; when it strikes the
fire, it’s time to plant. The northern star, above the hogan, is the symbolic
fire in the sky around which the First Man and First Woman constellations
rotate.
Everything in Navajo philosophy is related to
the concept of balance, and even groups of fours balance one another. These are
pairs rather than opposites, and maintains what Navajos call hózhǫ́,
a sort of harmony the universe relies on. The other key concept is k’é,
or your relations. These could be your siblings, your clan relatives, your
tribe, or even your belonging among all creations on this shared planet.
To me, conversations of hózhǫ́ and k’é are
crucial to global talks of sustainability. We cannot address how climate change
will affect our futures if we do not acknowledge the need for both balance and
our fellow beings. The concepts may be of Navajo origin, but they embody the
holistic viewpoint of many indigenous communities.
What does this view have to do with the
climate? To achieve sustainability in any society, we must ensure the
protection of four areas of community well-being:
Environmental: We are all made of water. We
all breathe air. We cannot change our dependency on the four elements or the
fact that they create us; therefore, we must protect our environment.
Economic: No community can operate without an
adequate and fair economy. Furthermore, the diversity and adaptability of an
economy are key to its survival.
Social: Our relationships to one another
ensure the well-being of us as individuals and as societies. Our communities
thrive when we have mutual respect, safety, and room for personal growth.
Cultural: Identity is a critical part of
community sustainability, and it is often left out of the greater picture. This
is a crucial issue when indigenous communities attempt to assert their
sovereign authority and are faced with infringement of their cultural freedoms
and rights which, without, would destroy the ability to maintain harmony.
So this is what I had to say to the climate
justice world two weeks ago. Standing Rock requires us not to forget that
fourth piece: cultural identity.
Standing
Rock requires us not to forget that fourth piece: cultural identity.
When we have global conversations about loss
and damage, we cannot simply tick off the population counts for displaced
people or the dollar figures for economic impact or infrastructure damage. This
is watching disorder through a Western lens. Instead, we must analyze the loss
and damage done to a way of life, to the sustainability of an entire identity
of people. The United Nations may have a definition for poverty, but to be
impoverished does not always equate to having no financial leverage. Hardships
come in many forms.
Jon Eagle Sr., the tribal historic
preservation officer for the standing Rock Sioux, recounts the struggle of his
ancestors through his tribe’s winter records. Their lives were extraordinarily
difficult, but the definition of what they consider true hardships provides
important context. Not surprisingly, the traditional Lakota people define four
hardships in life:
To hear an orphan cry, as it was a terrible
sound.
To lose a child, an indescribable pain.
To lose your mother.
To not know where your warriors fell.
With this reference point, consider Energy Transfer’s
decision to desecrate sacred sites and destroy graves of warriors and other
ancestors. It is forcing cultural damage on the Lakota people.
I want to make sure the world’s youth hear an
indigenous perspective on sustainability and comprehend how the need to protect
our cultural identity and exercise our tribal sovereignty in the DAPL fight
impacts our survival as nations.
I
want to make sure the world’s youth hear an indigenous perspective on
sustainability.
Because we are still learning how to erase the
colonization of our own minds to really see the cultural implications of our
so-called “infrastructure projects,” perhaps it is easier to identify
straightforward acts of environmental racism, such as placing a refining
factory within an impoverished community. Perhaps we can more easily oppose
using cheap labor as a country’s leading export or stand up for the rights of a
particular sex, gender, or religion.
And perhaps that is why, on Sept. 3, the
water protectors who watched Dakota Access workers destroy the graves of their
ancestors, continued to pray for and forgive the ignorance of those committing
the crimes against them.
“These people in our history, they were our
heroes,” explains Jon Eagle Sr. in National Trust for Historic Preservation’s
Standing Rock Preservation Leadership Forum, as he described the ancestral
burial sites that Energy Transfer destroyed. “I don’t think the mainstream
society understands that.” Our cultural lenses prevent many of us from
realizing that.
As I told the COP22 audiences, the battle at
Standing Rock symbolizes the greater battle we all face: The assurance of
cultural well-being and sustainability as a global community while combating
the short-term visions and greed of corporations. We must remember the importance
of hózhǫ́—balance—and that we, as beings of the Five Fingered Clan, are
connected as k’é—relatives. We are made of the same four elements, and we share
the same finite resources. As my my mother says: “We may be coming from all
four directions, but we all come from the same neighborhood—the earth.”
Kayla DeVault wrote this article
for YES! Magazine. Kayla
is an Anishinaabe and enrolled Shawnee, living on the Navajo reservation. She
currently works for the Navajo Nation Division of Transportation as a project
civil engineer while studying Diné studies at Diné College. She is a youth
ambassador for Generation Indigenous and was a participant in the White House
Tribal Youth Gathering.
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