Intergenerational Trauma and Native Identity
When we see ourselves through the lens of our oppressors, we are guaranteed to see a distorted view of ourselves. When we claim this view as our identity, we serve the interest of our ongoing colonization. When we force this view on each other, we are doing the oppressors work for them. This will never serve the interests of the colonized, only the colonizer.
Beyond the Colonial Narrative
The community held knowledge passed down from our ancestors is the core of who we are as a people. It is through this legacy that we know ourselves. “Western” academic thought brings us important sources that add to our understanding of our identity. We regard these alongside our indigenous traditional knowledge, but we do not hold them as superior. Our ancestors were sophisticated thinkers and the true primary source of our accumulated knowledge base. As is the case with all human bodies of knowledge -- differing worldviews, value systems, methodologies, and interpretations will sometimes lead to conflicting conclusions. These conflicts can impact not only how we see ourselves today, but also who we will become in future generations.
Modern Native communities navigate these multiple perspectives internally, honoring indigenous self-determination and the sovereignty of tribal entities (independent of the colonial state). Unfortunately, some people actively disregard our right of self-determination, seeking to place this power into the hands of a select few (academics, colonial governments, self-appointed arbiters). As sovereign peoples, indigenous communities and tribes do not need permission, certification, or validation in order to practice self-determination. See the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Articles 33 and 34). See also the American Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Article 1).
Breaking the Silence
Unfortunately, in indigenous communities, we are sometimes our own worst enemies. We may fear that someone else’s success comes at our expense. We might think that the only way we can protect ourselves is by tearing down others. We take sides and create divisions in our own communities. Sometimes we don’t even know the original source of animosity, and yet we just go along with the crowd. These are not the values and behaviors we wish to pass on to future generations. Our choices create the future inherited by our children. Rather than rushing to judgement and action, we can be still for a time and reflect on our way forward.
Recent and ongoing events have expedited our call to action, but we have always felt strongly that standing in solidarity is a responsibility we have to our people. We need to create supportive and safe space for our people to work through their interpersonal conflicts without adding fuel to the fire. We can balance having compassion, dignity, and respect for others without having to diminish our own light. We can keep our community healthy and whole, and navigate conflict without ostracizing people. When we see community members and families coming under attack, we can stand together to hold space for resolution rather than allowing fear to keep us in the role of bystanders. We need to end the silence and embrace the healing.
Generational Clarity: Our Legacy for the Future
As indigenous peoples, we are continuously living in connection with our ancestors, our contemporary communities, and our descendants to come. Our people have survived multiple waves of accumulated trauma that still impact us to this day. Healing from intergenerational trauma happens when we consciously move toward generational clarity.
It is our responsibility to choose our actions with a clear understanding of our collective past, a mindful approach to today’s challenges, and intentional consideration of our potential futures. Living under settler colonial occupation, we have limited resources to address the myriad difficulties faced by our communities on a continuous basis. We must be thoughtful regarding where we invest our energy and how we choose our priorities. Any action we take has the potential to ripple out and affect so many others, through time, without us ever even being aware of it.
Rising Together
We strive to pass on a legacy of unity and inclusion. We focus on building capacity, resilience, connection to culture, and protections for our homelands. It is our belief that meeting these goals serves the common good for all beings. There is more than enough work to go around, and if we stand side-by-side and work collaboratively, we can all rise together.
Solidarity Statements
Recommended Resources
From New York Times Magazine: “Efforts to define Native American identity date from the earliest days of the colonies. Before the arrival of white settlers, tribal boundaries were generally fluid; intermarriages and alliances were common. But as the new government’s desire to expand into Indian Territory grew, so, too, did the interest in defining who was and who wasn’t a “real Indian.” Those definitions shifted as the colonial government’s goals did. “Mixed blood” Indians, for example, were added to rolls in hopes that assimilated Indians would be more likely to cede their land; later, after land claims were established, more restrictive definitions were adopted. In the 19th century, the government began relying heavily on blood quantum, or “degree of Indian blood,” wagering that, over generations of intermarriage, tribes would be diluted to the point that earlier treaties would not have to be honored.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/magazine/who-decides-who-counts-as-native-american.html
The Forgotten Tribes: Truth About Federally Unrecognized Tribes in The United States
From Website: “California has the most federally non-recognized tribes in the U.S. with over 50 throughout the state. If you’re not familiar with how American Indian tribes function, they’re classified as sovereign nations by the federal government, meaning they have certain rights as a group/nation. But when a tribe is not considered a sovereign nation by the federal government, then they are labeled as federally non-recognized.
Lack of federal recognition for a tribe can have a ton of repercussions for its citizens. One of the most noteworthy is that they are not legally considered American Indians by the federal government, regardless of ancestry, so members of these tribes can’t apply for American Indian scholarships because they’re only intended for federally recognized tribes.”
From the website: “Conflict between Indigenous peoples and federal, state and local governments over tribal cultural and environmental resources have played a major role in the history of the Western Hemisphere since Europeans first stepped onto the lands of the Americas. While tribes recognized by the U.S. government have more than three centuries of federal law to back them up, non-federally recognized tribes by and large lack the legal authority to step in when a local ecology or cultural area is threatened by development or resource exploitation.
On the state level, California has had the dubious distinction of being one of the worst offenders in historically opposing the rights of both recognized and non-recognized tribes.”
https://therevelator.org/native-american-tribes-protect-land/
From the cover: “Who is a Native American? And who gets to decide? From genealogists searching online for their ancestors to fortune hunters hoping for a slice of casino profits from wealthy tribes, the answers to these seemingly straightforward questions have profound ramifications. The rise of DNA testing has further complicated the issues and raised the stakes.
In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful—and problematic—scientific process that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic information in a web of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules, and government regulations. At a larger level, TallBear asserts, the “markers” that are identified and applied to specific groups such as Native American tribes bear the imprints of the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, and even tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them.
TallBear notes that ideas about racial science, which informed white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century laboratories. Because today’s science seems so compelling, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: “in our blood” is giving way to “in our DNA.” This rhetorical drift, she argues, has significant consequences, and ultimately she shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously—and permanently—undermined.”
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/native-american-dna
From the epilogue: “Membership exclusion obtains today among several California Native communities as well, with wholesale expulsions of tribal members to increase per capita gaming checks tied to interrogations of cultural legitimacy, often by invoking (approvingly) nineteenth-century biological racism in the form of blood quantum. Communities form, alas, as often by cold force of exclusion as they do by the warm embrace of inclusion. More than four centuries of community formation, and perhaps deformation, are expressed at the level of flesh-and-blood individual lives.
How much time must pass for scholars to recognize a formed, or forming, community? […] Is “reconfiguration” the same as “community formation”? At what moment do we know we’re witnessing a healing bridge between the wreckage scattered in the colonial “whirlwind” and the construction of a “community”? […] Raymond Williams (1976) cautioned us forty years ago that “community” too easily assumes a positive essence that diverts us from the reality of “malfunctioning” communities, legal or otherwise. Can we simultaneously discern and describe the positive reformation of shattered communities and the evidence of trauma and pathology that reverberated in the process of missionization and colonization?”
https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/forging-communities-in-colonial-alta-california
From the cover: “When L. Frank and Marina Drummer went on the road in 2002, they set out to visit as many people from different California tribes as possible. Crisscrossing the state, they taped hundreds of hours of interviews and collected copies of nearly fifteen hundred family photos. The documentary project, funded by the California State Library and LEF Foundation, paints an unprecedented portrait of California’s indigenous people using their own words and photographs from their own family albums. In turns moody, beautiful, warm, and humorous, First Families is a one-of-a-kind book that combines extremely personal images with text that gives readers a broader, deeper view of Indian history and many complex living cultures.”
“This collection focuses on those members of the Central Coast community who are of California Indian heritage. The original native people of the Central Coast region include the Tataviam from interior Ventura County, the Nicoleño from San Nicolas Island, the Salinan from northern San Luis Obispo County and the following branches of the Chumash Linguistic Family: Ventureño from Ventura County, Barbareño and Ineseño from Santa Barbara County, Obispeño from San Luis Obispo County and Cruzeño Chumas from the Northern Channel Islands.The collection is based on a photographic exhibit that was produced by the Black Gold Cooperative System Advisory Board in collaboration with Dr. John R. Johnson, Curator of Anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. These photos have been obtained from museums, archives and family collections.”
From the cover: “The first full account of the government-sanctioned genocide of California Indians under United States rule Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide. Madley describes pre-contact California and precursors to the genocide before explaining how the Gold Rush stirred vigilante violence against California Indians. He narrates the rise of a state-sanctioned killing machine and the broad societal, judicial, and political support for genocide. Many participated: vigilantes, volunteer state militiamen, U.S. Army soldiers, U.S. congressmen, California governors, and others. The state and federal governments spent at least $1,700,000 on campaigns against California Indians. Besides evaluating government officials' culpability, Madley considers why the slaughter constituted genocide and how other possible genocides within and beyond the Americas might be investigated using the methods presented in this groundbreaking book.”
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300181364/american-genocide
From the cover: “In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Euro-American citizenry of California carried out mass genocide against the Native population of their state, using the processes and mechanisms of democracy to secure land and resources for themselves and their private interests. The murder, rape, and enslavement of thousands of Native people were legitimized by notions of democracy—in this case mob rule—through a discreetly organized and brutally effective series of petitions, referenda, town hall meetings, and votes at every level of California government. Murder State is a comprehensive examination of these events and their early legacy.”
https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9780803224803/
Women and the Conquest of California, 1542-1840: Codes of Silence
From the cover: “This book tells the hidden story of women during the missionization of California. It shows what it was like for women to live and work on that frontier—and how race, religion, age, and ethnicity shaped female experiences. It explores the suppression of women's experiences and cultural resistance to domination, and reveals the many codes of silence regarding the use of force at the missions, the treatment of women, indigenous ceremonies, sexuality, and dreams.
Virginia Bouvier has combed a vast array of sources— including mission records, journals of explorers and missionaries, novels of chivalry, and oral histories— and has discovered that female participation in the colonization of California was greater and earlier than most historians have recognized. Viewing the conquest through the prism of gender, Bouvier gives new meaning to the settling of new lands and attempts to convert indigenous peoples. By analyzing the participation of women— both Hispanic and Indian— in the maintenance of or resistance to the mission system, Bouvier restores them to the narrative of the conquest, colonization, and evangelization of California.”
https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/women-and-the-conquest-of-california-1542-1840