By the time you read this, CSU Monterey Bay’s Native American Heritage Month will be almost over. A final event happens in conjunction with this eighth annual symposium, a music gathering called Songs About Indians Tour 6-8pm Thursday, Nov. 13, at the university’s Student Center (which houses the Otter Cross Cultural Center). It’s worth checking out for a few reasons, primarily the fact that it breaks through stereotypes to provide a live immersion into Native American culture.
“Every time I turned on the TV as a kid, American Indians were portrayed as brutal, as savage,” says Ruben Mendoza, an archaeologist and Ph.D. professor at CSUMB. “It was embarrassing. You didn’t want to admit you were Indian. Now everybody wants to be Native American.”
He says that the recent spate of non-Native people co-opting Native American culture suggests reinforcement of the stereotype he describes as “Indian in the wilderness, untouched by civilization, in touch with nature and the cosmos.”
That doesn’t fit the consensus that Native Americans once numbered in the tens of millions across the Americas.
“They built massive civic and ceremonial centers,” he says. “Ancient Teotihuacan, near Mexico City, had a population of 250,000 when many European cities were small villages.”
Native American Heritage Month events try to inject reality and history via the voices of Native Americans.
Mendoza is committed to that aim. At age 12 he learned he was descended from the Yaqui Native American tribe and devoted his life to exploring native cultures, going on archaeological excursions and vision quests into Central America, Mexico and the American Southwest.
At the first event, Nov. 3, Mendoza unveiled his 52-photo exhibition In the Eyes of the Ancestors – which will stay at the Student Center through January – while muralist Guillermo Aranda spoke about his CSUMB mural of Esalen people, and Dennis Johnson screened his film The Legacy of the Grandfather Flute. It was an inclusive invitation into the culture; as part of the proceedings, students gave the speakers sage.
On Nov. 4, two speakers held court at the University Center.
Poet Ronald Colombe, a Lakota and member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe of South Dakota, best known for his works Silent Shouting, Quiet War and Thoughts Like a Bullet, was one of them.
He read his poem “Faces”: “Look at us, smiling, dancing, laughing,/ floating in this circle of life and culture,/ Look at our faces, behind the smiles,/ see our past, our history.”
He was joined by Geri Wisner, a former Marine, and a current tribal court judge and member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, who talked about the clashes between tribal court and the U.S. justice system, which makes crimes against reservation Native Americans by outsiders difficult to prosecute.
That topic segued into a bigger discussion about social justice by Kathryn England-Aytes, a CSUMB psychology professor and a Native American Children’s Alliance board member, who facilitated a Nov. 12 panel “A Cultural Perspective on Historical and Contemporary Trauma in Native American Communities.”
“Poor health, addiction, depression, suicide, domestic violence, suicide… those are all artifacts of historical trauma,” she says. “Historically, native people didn’t have these issues [before being] displaced and disempowered.”
Then there is the 800-pound turkey in the room. Thanksgiving. It’s a topic that was carved up on Nov. 10 by author Beth Piatote, of UC Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies Department, in a talk called “I [Heart] Nixon,” about “Thanksgiving as both ideologically problematic and also the most culturally indigenous of observations.” And she talked American presidents.
“Lincoln, a fairly undisputed good guy,” Piatote writes, “presided over the largest mass execution in American history: 38 Dakota warriors.”
On Nov. 12, England-Aytes moderated a panel of speakers from the Costanoan Ohlone, Chumash, Ponca, Salinan T’rowt’raahl, Osage and Kansa tribes.
“Many of us in Indian country call Native American Heritage Month ‘Be Nice to an Indian Month.’ It’s right before Thanksgiving, which we find funny,” England-Aytes says.
(See the Weekly’s Arts & Culture blog for more on CSUMB’s Native American Heritage Month.)
The tributes began strong, but there wasn’t enough money to program the whole month, so it ends Nov. 13 with CSUMB faculty member George Baldwin’s music jam.
Baldwin is the son of an Indian Affairs official who was Native American. His mixed ancestry exposed him to abuse and ridicule as he moved from tribe to tribe. “The music is his way of communicating the ironies and challenges,” Mendoza says. Native American Heritage Month is “not about blaming,” says England-Aytes. “It’s about awareness and appreciation of American history.”
The key phrase being “American.”
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