You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. By Gabby Mottesi. Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Naming your mother tells others the lineage of mothers before. I was preparing the coffee and tea and an Elder asked me who I was.
I told her my name, that I was from there and my mother. She said she was happy to meet me and that I had a good family name. Before she told me I had a good family name, I had no idea that I carried so much on my shoulders.
Since then I had carried myself in a good way so that someday my son will be told that he has a good family name. Acknowledgement and responsibility is being called for today. By ignoring this history, American society is claiming full success in colonizing, creating and surviving early America. It has created the Euro-centric history with many hidden histories shoved under the rug.
It also helps U. I do think that Americans have learned from their history. How important is our past, our ancestry to our present and future lives? Not knowing your mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, etc, is not understanding them and where they fall into history and failure to know this is failure to know yourself.
This is your position and its attendant traditions and history. Respect for mother earth and respect for others. If mothers fail to teach or we fail to learn then we can feel abandoned, self- estranged and alienated from our own lives. Native American culture includes hope; hope for the survival of the people and women are the life givers and so then are honored and respected.
Without our women we would be nothing. Native American culture values charity. No person goes without. If a visitor comes to your house, you offer them something to eat.
Even if it is the last piece of food in your kitchen, you still share that last piece of food with visitors. At family dinners the children and elders are served first and if there is enough food the women are served next then the men eat.
Respect is HUGE in our culture. From an early age, you learn to respect your elders. Elders are the ones who are full of knowledge and the cultural traditions. They are the ones who can teach us who we are and where we came from and how we got here.
Respect for mother earth for she is the one who cares for us all: she gives us the sustenance for life. Respect for the passed aways, the ancestors of all peoples. Our ancestors ancestry provided our literal lives today and our actions and the way we live our lives will affect future generations and their lives for the good or bad. If American society could follow and actually live these logical and simple values of Native American culture there would be much less room for oppression of peoples and of the earth.
With respect it is hard to look someone in the eyes and step on them on the way up the ladder of success. Open navigation menu. Close suggestions Search Search. Emphasis mine. Beliefs, attitudes, and laws such as these became part of the vision of American feminists and of other human liberation movements around the world. Yet feminists too often believe that no one has ever experienced the kind of society that empowered women and made that empowerment the basis of its rules of civilization.
The price the feminist community must pay because it is not aware of the recent presence of gynarchical societies on this continent is unnecessary confusion, division, and much lost time. An odd thing occurs in the minds of Americans when Indian civilization is mentioned: little or nothing. As I write this, I am aware of how far removed my version of the roots of American feminism must seem to those steeped in either mainstream or radical versions of feminism's history.
I am keenly aware of the lack of image Americans have about our continent's recent past. I am intensely conscious of popular notions of Indian women as beasts of burden, squaws, traitors, or, at best, vanish. How odd, then, must my contention seem that the gynocratic tribes of the American continent provided the basis for all the dreams of liberation that characterize the modern world.
We as feminists must be aware of our history on this continent. We need to recognize that the same forces that devastated the gynarchies of Britain and the Continent also devastated the ancient African civilizations, and we must know that those same materialistic, antispiritual forces are presently engaged in wiping out the same gynarchical values, along with the peoples who adhere to them, in Latin America. I am convinced that those wars were and continue to be about the imposition of patriarchal civilization over the holistic, pacifist, and spirit-based gynarchies they supplant.
To that end the wars of imperial conquest have not been solely or even mostly waged over the land and its resources, but they have been fought within the bodies, minds, and hearts of the people of the earth for dominion over them.
I think this is the reason traditionals say we must remember our origins, our cultures, our histories, our mothers and grandmothers, for without that memory, which implies continuance rather than nostalgia, we are doomed to engulfment by a paradigm that is fundamentally inimical to the vitality, autonomy, and self-empowerment essential for satisfying, high-quality life.
The vision that impels feminists to action was the vision of the Grandmothers' society, the society that was captured in the words of the sixteenth-century explorer Peter Martyr nearly five hundred years ago. That vision as Martyr told it is of a country where there are "no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits All are equal and free' " or so Friedrich Engels recounts Martyr's words.
Columbus wrote: Nor have I been able to learn whether they [the inhabitants of the islands he visited on his first journey to the New World] held personal property, for it seemed to me that whatever one had, they all took shares of They are so ingenuous and free with all they have, that no one would believe it who has not seen it; of anything that they possess, if it be asked of them, they never say no; on the contrary, they invite you to share it and show as much love as if their hearts went with it.
At least that's how the Native Caribbean people acted when the whites first came among them; American Indians are the despair of social workers, bosses, and missionaries even now because of their deeply ingrained tendency to spend all they have, mostly on others. In any case, as the historian William Brandon notes,. Something in the peculiar character of the Indian world gave an impression of classlessness, of propertylessness, and that in tum led to an impression, as H.
Bancroft put it, of "humanity unrestrained Early in the women's suffrage movement, Eva Emery Dye, an Oregon suffragette, went looking for a heroine to embody her vision of feminism. She wanted a historical figure whose life would symbolize the strengthened power of women.
She found Sacagawea or Sacajawea buried in the journals of Lewis and Clark. The Shoshoni teenager had traveled with the Lewis and Clark expedition, carrying her infant son, and on a small number of occasions acted as translator. Dye declared that Sacagawea, whose name is thought to mean Bird Woman, had been the guide to the historic expedition, and through Dye's work Sacagawea became enshrined in American memory as a moving force and friend of the whites, leading them in the settlement of western North America.
But Native American roots of white feminism reach back beyond Sacagawea. The earliest white women on this continent were well acquainted with tribal women. They were neighbors to a number of tribes and often shared food, information, child care, and health care. Of course little is made of these encounters in official histories of colonial America, the period from the Revolution to the Civil War, or on the ever moving frontier.
Nor, to my knowledge, has either the significance or incidence of intermarriage between Indian and white or between Indian and Black been explored. By and large, the study of Indian-white relations has been focused on government and treaty relations, warfare, missionization, and education.
It has been almost entirely documented in terms of formal white Christian patriarchal impacts and assaults on Native Americans, though they are not often characterized as assaults but as "civilizing the savages.
But, regardless of official versions of relations between Indians and whites or other segments of the American population, the fact remains that great numbers of apparently "white" or "Black" Americans carry notable degrees of Indian blood. With that blood has come the culture of the Indians, informing the lifestyles, attitudes, and values of their descendants.
In view of this, it should be evident that one of the major enterprises of Indian women in America has been the transfer of Indian values and culture to as large and influential a segment of American immigrant populations as possible. Their success in this endeavor is amply demonstrated in the Indian values and social styles that increasingly characterize American life. Among these must be included "permissive" childrearing practices, for imprisoning, torturing, caning, strapping, starving, or verbally abusing children was considered outrageous behavior.
Native Americans did not believe that physical or psychological abuse of children would result in their edification. They did not believe that children are born in sin, are congenitally pre. Yet the very qualities that marked Indian life in the sixteenth century have, over the centuries since contact between the two worlds occurred, come to mark much of contemporary American life.
And those qualities, which I believe have passed into white culture from Indian culture, are the very ones that fundamentalists, immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia often find the most reprehensible.
Third- and fourth-generation Americans indulge in growing nudity, informality in social relations, egalitarianism, and the rearing of women who value autonomy, strength, freedom, and personal dignity—;and who are often derided by European, Asian, and Middle Eastern men for those qualities. Contemporary Americans value leisure almost as much as tribal people do. They find themselves increasingly unable to accept child abuse as a reasonable way to nurture.
They bathe more than any other industrial people on earth—much to the scorn of their white cousins across the Atlantic, and they sometimes enjoy a good laugh even at their own expense though they still have a less developed sense of the ridiculous than one might wish.
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