A RESEARCH PROJECT - INTERVIEW
A RESEARCH PROJECT - INTERVIEW
I initially sought out an interview for this project out of a desire to use the interpersonal vantage as a means to familiarize my audience with relational qualities of my investigation regarding influence and inherency. I felt that an interview would demonstrate the more practical accessibility of my project's less-conventional analytical lens to examine the phenomenology of discourse as a definite form of literacy. This lens would bring into contrast the more conventional study of literacy as a demonstration of certain levels of linguistic competence or excellence. For the purpose of my investigation, the idea is that in addition to linguistics, symbolism, or grammar, at the foundation of both language and communication is always also behavior, mannerisms, beliefs, and viewpoints (Gee, An Introduction). This lens aids in locating the deeper origins and capacity of competence as more than a symbology, but as a praxis developed from within the dynamic of author and audience, and the dynamic of context and content originating in human experience, perception, and perspective as a shared reality.
Later on in the project's adolescence, I sought to compare the traditional rhetorical designs of logos, ethos, and pathos to more contemporary concepts of “intellectual property” as the assumed morality of the shared creative mind, respectively as accountability, accessibility, and responsibility. This would function partly, to describe the scholarly value of employing a reciprocal modality of examination, to analyze the exigency of discourse as both an ambition and an interaction. And, that these qualities will naturally present as imperative forms of competency and excellence in discourse.
I also sought out an interview with the ambition to expose from within the dialogical and dialectical nature of a rhetorical relationship, how literacy and language can be set apart from conventional traditions in linguistics (such as in writing, reading, and grammar systems). The interview could demonstrate how literacy and language are also employed and experienced through a shared social framework of relationality and reciprocality of behaviors, styles, and modes of participation through and with certain values and beliefs. The interview could demonstrate how the integral human experience of a shared social framework is compounded by a sense of the universality of symbolisms, such as with the anthropological and social development of “the mythic framework” (Philip Arnold, proceeding interview).
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From this interview, my audience might consider how the participants demonstrated the effort of praxis by engaging a mythic framework which necessitates relationality through a sense of shared diverse values. And how this modality of praxis influences the manner, behavior, and style by which knowledge, education, and pedagogy is discussed and internalized. Finally, my audience might consider how the participants each demonstrate a personal and social modality to engage the concept of “praxis as an inherency” in the discourse, and specifically as “an activity”. Consider, as in verbing, forming “to praxis”. For example, how participants use language to experiment with and observe the exchange of information in congruence with the exchange of perception and perspective.
Finally, I hoped that engaging in a conversation with an expert would expose some inherent qualities present in professional discourse, such as dialogically, narratives involving facts and a focus on detail. And dialectically, narratives harnessing the more deliberate rhetorical opportunities afforded by a praxis-oriented dialogue such as applicability, clarification, and inquiry, but also intervention, disputability, and perplexity. This will especially stand in contrast to the additional focus of this project, on the less pedagogically-minded forms of “information depositing” often implemented in 1950s Brazilian public education systems. These methods had been positioned and performed by the autocratic government at the time to maintain systematized oppression of the laboring classes, and to maintain the general concept of the junction of labor in society as a “class” or “rank” with diminished influence in the social framework of the governing body (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed).
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So, to accomplish this goal, I reached out to my Native American Religions professor, Philip Arnold, who originally inspired me to learn more about the history and culture of the First Peoples in his “Introduction to Native American Religions” course, a year prior. After a hurried email, and a brief meeting with Phil in his office to discuss my intentions for this project, we set a date to sit down for coffee at a local cafe to make a recorded interview. I had also expressed that it was my original intention to speak with a member of a Native community, and so he offered to present the project to his wife, Sandy Bigtree. Sandy is a member of the Onondaga Tribe within the Haudenosaunee Nation, and as an active member in her community she too agreed to meet and discuss her experiences and perspectives. Below is the full transcription of the discussion we had over coffee, beneath a young tree, about symbolism, mythology, language, identity, history, religion, and Indigenous culture.
It should also be noted that my original intentions for this research regarded activism and literacy. The interview below discusses the original intention. Today, I have since shifted my focus to the inherency of praxis in discourse as an imperative of literacy. As well as, to include additional lenses and modes for employing praxis, such as ethics and morality, and in the efforts involving political, social, and ecological justice.
INTERVIEW
(Paraphrasing and notes included at end of document)
Eva: So, given my project's focus on literacysocial-proficiency as activism, I would like to ask you both a few questions that I hope will help me ground the components of this project in real-life work and experiences. Phil, what does your current work focus on? And what work are you most passionate about?
Phil: My work is on the history of Religions. That's how I was trained in graduate school. And really the history of religions is about trying to discern the origins of this strange phenomenon we call 'religion' in the world. And the origins have a lot to do with indigenous peoples and their connection to the natural world. So it was a natural connection then to start looking at the Haudenosaunee. So I don't really consider myself an 'activist' specifically, but I do think that education if done well can be a form of activism, if you like. That is, it can inform people about issues of injustice, and environmental devastation, and reasons why these things happen. And, so, I really regard myself as an educator, first and foremost, and that, I think, has lead me into a world of being 'active', you know, 'active in the world', right?
Eva: [Right!] So, one of the things you mentioned all throughout our class, and when we talked again, and which I hear you say a lot in regards indigenous communities, is that the indigenous voice has to be listened to. I think there's a lot in that statement and I'm hoping you could expand a bit on what that means to you.
Phil: Sure. So, the book I'm currently working on… it's a book on the category of indigenous religions, and I've retitled it to be “The Urgency of Indigenous Religions” because I think Indigenous religions discuss “the peoplehood of the world”, that is, the world is alive with other living beings and that human beings then have to acknowledge, not just acknowledge, but actively engage in a reciprocal relationships with the natural world, and those living beings. And that's a natural feature of more religion really, but particularly for indigenous peoples. And so, it's not a world of things, in English it's all nouns, we talk about 'things' in the world, but in indigenous languages it's all about 'living beings' that we have to communicate with. So then the question of how you communicate with plants, for example, or how you communicate with water, that's a natural question for indigenous peoples. But for people who speak in English, or in the 'modern world' we tend to think of those things as natural 'resources', you know, 'for human consumption' basically. So, that's why I think the urgency is that we have to listen to indigenous peoples, that the world of 'things' is not sustainable, the world of 'beings' is much more viable. If you know what I mean? So that's part of the urgency of the matter. That equates into a kind of activism.
Sandy: Well your discipline returns to, kind of, the origins of religion [as well as Native American], and how [originally] God was the manifestation in the material world, so that the world is genuinely sacred, and that God manifests in the world in these original indigenous cultures and religions. That's why there are sacred areas all over the planet. We have a sacred area in Syracuse, which is Onondaga Lake. These are very old traditions, old relationships to the land. But when land became a commodity, and foreigners came in to the Americas to extract all the minerals and resources, they had to change this general perception that this Earth is sacred, so that God then became outside the world. He had to be extracted from the world. This is what we've talked about through your studying [to Phil]. And it seems to really explain a lot, that if God is not inside this world, we can vilify everything of it.
Eva: Thank you. Wow, absolutely. So, how do you see how that this has transformed today—where we claim to be a “secular nation”, or we've “separated religion and state”?
Phil: Well, I would challenge [this], if you take seriously indigenous religions, then you have to take seriously how human beings relate to the land. And, so then it's not an option of whether we are religious or not, but rather what are the forms in which modern people relate to the land? So, in my book, for example, I talk about “real-estate religion”, or “property as religion” because these are all frameworks, really, ideological frameworks by which we have created this relationship to the land as a resource or as an extension of human ingenuity or something, and not as a living being—as something that has its own integrity. So, indigenous religions are about connecting and acknowledging a relationship to the land, to the water—well, modern people, likewise, have that, [but] it's a very different framework. So, you know, I talk about in class, I probably talked about it in our class, is money—for example. Everything about money is religious—nothing 'secular' about it*. Because it's essentially a faith, a belief in symbols, it's totally symbolic, and one has to have confidence and faith that those symbols mean something, in order for us to transact getting these coffees for example, right? [Points at our coffees.] So, it matters in what you count as religion, then, or what you think about as religion. So, I don't necessarily think that all religion is encapsulated in an institutional form, like a Christian Church, or a Muslim Mosque. But rather, it's how people interact with the symbolic life, mythic framework, you know? So all those things [see above, money as symbology, coffee as symbology, etc.] are ongoing, they're not 'options' in a way.
Sandy: We had had this conversation too [pointing to Phil] around money, and that it could be a religion, but only if God does not exist in the world can you then apply that kind of belief system onto some symbolic worth of money, which is in itself worthless, because it's intangible and it has no material sacredness, like Life, or Spirit. So you have to first convince people that God exists outside of this world for a commodified world to be successful.
Phil: Yeah, in religious studies, that notion of God being outside the world—if you talk to anybody who is religious, generally, and you ask them where God is, they usually point up, in the sky. And the framework for that is odeus oteosis [correct spelling unknown], that is “God removed” or “obscured in the world”. That goes right back to the [symbology in the] story of the Garden of Eden. There are a bunch of mythic stories for where, for why, God doesn't exist in our midst anymore. But, if you look at indigenous stories, there are manifestations of the sacred, as Sandy was saying, manifestations of the sacred that happen everywhere, all the time, in different forms. Right? [Sandy, nods.] And that's in the language of the history of religions, that's the “hierophany”, the “manifestation of the sacred”. And that's a feature of all world religions—the sacred manifests itself in Jerusalem, for Christians and Muslims and Jews. But, not so much in the [modern] America's.
Sandy: But once religion becomes secularized, then you're ignoring the diversity of the landscape. [In this specific way, in this respect to symbology.] Because the land really determines who you are. So, each region remains unique according to the network of organisms and species that inhabit that space. But we live in a secular mentality right now, we have McDonalds all over the planet, so you can travel and you still experience what you see at home. It's all become white-washed and homogenized and secularized. But there are different rhythms that can be on the Earth.
… [an environmentally caused break in the discussion]… [now continued]:
Sandy: There is information to be learned from this natural world. We can't organize it and think we have the answers to everything.
Phil: There's a great chapter in the book, Braiding Sweetgrass, [by Robin Kimmerer] called “The Language of Animacy” and that would be very helpful for you. “The Language of Animacy” [Phil points to my notepad and I write it down]. And it's all about how Native languages are not “noun-based” they're “verb-based”. So when you talk about a bay, and she uses this example, they're not talking about a “thing”, they're talking about “being a bay”. Or, what it means to “be a bay”. “Bay-ness”, you know? I had another student of mine who was doing a graduate Ph.D. in Medicine Bundles. Out West there's a group called Blackfeet, and they had these medicine bundles that were taken by museums, but all the museum language is all about “things”, these are “objects”. But for the Blackfeet, these are [known as] “people”. They are living beings. So there was no way, even in language, to talk about these objects as living beings [in accordance with the museum's literacy agenda]—but it shifts the whole relationship on how you treat these objects in your museum. So, we're a “thing-based” society, right? A “noun-based” society, and so she's [Robin Kimmerer has] learned Potawotemi and she realizes, “ah-ha”, she has this epiphany, “oh it's really all just other people in the world, right?”
Sandy: Haudenosaunee names, they all have action to them. They're doing something. They're engaged in the world. They're verbs.
Eva: With all of this that you've just said about “action” and using language in that different way, and expressing relationships “in action” rather than “in noun” [nervously laughs]. With everything that you've studied, and what you know, how do you choose your language when you're writing or speaking? What are you most mindful of—to have your audience listen to, and why? What lines of communication do you want to open, and which do you, maybe, hope to see close as well?
Phil: Yeah. Good question. Because, one of the things about indigenous studies is you have to acknowledge where you are. So, our location is in between a conqueror's language—a colonizing language, and we have to communicate all these ideas in English [too]—and actually we're just going through this at the Skannoh Center, right, you know our audience really has to be non-indigenous peoples, so that they can develop an appreciation of an indigenous world-view. So I'm not ashamed or guilty about the past, but I do think there is an urgency that we have to shift to a new model. So, to present these ideas in English, using our “thing-based” language, to try to just communicate that there is another way of seeing things, and that maybe it's worth thinking about.
Eva: That's [such a complex] question for me to wrap my head around: how do you communicate to someone that doesn't have that language cultivated within them, and how do you reach a person in that waystate?
Phil: Well, we don't. We don't have those facilities, I mean we were all raised—I was raised—Sandy was raised, as a Mohawk woman outside of traditional culture. Those things have been drummed out of all of us, you know? So, the question is then, now what? It's like, you can't just give up. You know, you were raised a certain way, you know, that's a fact. But, then maybe the activist part, or the educational part, depending on your point of view, is to try to push that into another form of awareness in students. And so, you have to make compelling cases.
Sandy: When the colonists came into Mexico, they leveled every pyramid, which were the sacred centers of every community—they were all over Mexico—where they came to preform ceremonies for the Earth. And they would level all of the pyramids, take the rubble, and construct a church. So they used the center that drew everybody together, and reconstituted it into a chapel with a pointy steeple, so that their God's focus was into the sky. It changed the landscape, the horizon. So they knew what they were doing, and they had done this all over Europe long before they came here—how to control indigenous people. So we have to think about that, and give new meaning to the word of 'religion'. You know, we need to take back these terms and reconstitute them so they're anchored here. Because that works. You have to take what people know.
Phil: We're not going to undo that destructive thing that happened. But we can point to it and say what happened. And then what's gonna keep—I mean, people now know we're in a real crisis, you know? Stuff is happening. New York is gonna be in a real fix, in just a few years. You know, you're under water. Right? So, I mean, you can move, I would recommend at least having an evacuation plan, but then the larger question is, how did we come to be that way? You know there is, as Oren Lyons says often, there's nothing wrong with the world, the world is fine, the world is going to do great without us, but, the problem that we have in the environment is that we have no relationship to the environment that is viable. Another thing that Robin says at the beginning of her book… She asked her students, 'what are the positive models for a relationship between human beings and plants that they can name', and not one of them could name any positive models. And that has to do because they're all trained to think about the devastation, the environmental devastation. So if there are no positive models, then what are we gonna do to change those relationships? And, you know, Native people have been telling this a long time. Talking about this stuff, so.
END
It was such a profound experience, to have the opportunity to speak with Phil and Sandy and to reach this depth of thought and collaboration through our discourse. Both Phil and Sandy have deep roots in Indigenous worldview and collaborative education pedagogies. With this they each carried keen, earnest, and enormously complimentary perspectives about the inherency, role, and framework of association, reciprocal relation, symbology, mythology, language, and connection in the natural world.
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Please, let me take a step back though, before I continue. When I embarked upon this project, I was a generous mix of enthusiasm, nervousness, and considerable dutifulness to approach and discuss the preserve of Indigenous worldview, culture, and value using my own words. From both personal experience and formal education, I had gathered a curious mixture of traditional and contemporary awareness and even sensitivity concerning the reliability and jeopardy of speaking “for” other cultures, societies, histories, and politics. To make a list short: I needed to avoid the gratuitous and tedious risk of cultural appropriation, and of misrepresenting cultures, both for myself and my audience, too.
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By this time in my life, I had travelled the world on several occasions – I had immediate family living in Eastern and Western Europe – I was the daughter of a Yugoslavian immigrant and artist, and an internationally mixed-race domestic adoptee and professor of philosophy – my ancestors on all “three” sides had first-hand experience in the WWII effort to defeat Nazism and Fascism – respectively, those on the former side had been raised in territories and homes occupied by both hostile parties at different stages of the War, and later joined the Yugoslavian King's Army to defeat the domestic threat – and of the latter two sides, one had been captured as a prisoner of war and escaped, only to return to pilot the skies again for a fourth and final year for the United States Air Force, while the other had served as an Army technical engineer on the same grounds and hours as the pilot above, both unsuspecting of the fated link, which bound their futures – the latter of these brave men would return home, often crippled with PTSD, and still to father three beautiful girls, one would be my grandmother, and they would carry on the legacy of their maternal grandfather, Sydney H. Coleman, who developed the integral origins in the U.S. of animal welfare through what is now the ASPCA – meanwhile, the former veteran, Carl Joseph Ally, would return home to attend college and soon turn the very character of 1950s American advertising inside out, and unchaperoned create the international world of legal competitive advertising as we know it today: full of humor, wit, and guile – fast forward to 2014, I was studying my fourth foreign language – I had long since used up my small trust fund on a progressive Manhattan private school education in adolescence – I was attending a private University on a full-tuition merit based scholarship as a member of the Honors Program – I had spent a few months in my freshmen year working as an environmental canvasser and helping to organize communities around NYS environmental bills and progressive positions in office, and it had felt as though I had been given the opportunity to do "my small part" in molding the national atmosphere, as my ancestors had done before me – meanwhile, my European relatives were developing the crucial lifestyle necessary to fortify the non-violent solution to the tenuous resolution of WWII in European territory, in the form of Social Democracy – and, as it would be, I was an “outfit repeater”, which is contemporary patois for being environmentally conscious and sustainability-minded by thrifting reusable clothing – by and for all of these reasons, and then some, I was emotionally invested and poignantly attentive to the reciprocal powers of the diverse social, cultural, and political variations that existed between my unique understanding of our ancestral world, and others'.
But, let me take a step back, once more. To accompany this rich ancestral legacy, for most of my elementary and primary school education, I had attended the progressive Manhattan private school, the Bank Street School for Children. “Bank Street”, as students called it, was world-renowned for “The Bank Street Method”, as it broke ground and stride to meet the profound pedagogical exigency of developing curriculum that centered around an imperative of praxis as the educational means for fostering co-operative learning environments, mostly through inter-student dialogue, and all ultimately in the interest of the moral and ethical experience of truth and justice for both teachers and students alike.
As it would be, in the 3rd grade, I participated in a unique and unconventional unit curriculum designed with the Bank Street Method. During this unit, we spent weeks learning and dialoging about the histories of the Lenape Tribe, originally of the territory of our home island of Manhattan, and also about the colloquially “Iroquois Tribes”, who are the known today by their original name, the "Haudenosaunee Nation", from the territory of of New York State. We learned about their daily lifestyle, their peaceful societies, their advanced and sustainable engineering such as in "the Longhouse" living structure, and their meaningful engagement with the land and its resources as a sacred and integral ecology. We also learned that “Manhattan” was a Lenape word meaning “Island of Many Hills”, and that the island had been originally inhabited by Indigenous tribes for at least as long as the dawn of the mortal age... And, that it was only more recently that the colonists had attempted to acquire the island for themselves. And that in this monumental act of treatise, our ancestral society had lied and cheated and used violence and coercion, and finally fabricated a false and illegitimate discovery of the land and the Indigenous societies, which was rooted in prejudice and powerful religious dogma and treated these original Peoples as strangers in their own world. And worse, it deemed the sacred First People as Spiritually expendable and as living refuse for disease and famine. In a desperate and devastating pretense and fatally impetuous effort by the settlers, the rich culture of the Iroquois had been squandered and nearly lost. The Bank Street School, as you can see, did not hesitate to "rip the band-aid off"... Most of us were devastated, and spent many weeks licking our wounds.
After grappling with the immorality of this ancestral encounter and history, and with the inconstancy of the wide-spread American acceptance of such clearly illegitimate treatise, I spent many difficult days and nights, with pain and heaviness in my heart. But, I knew it probably meant: I was growing up. But, unlike some of my settler-colonial classmates, the half of my heritage that included pre-revolution German, as well as circa 1850s English and Irish American ancestry was sorely out of my reach. This was in part due to my father's adoption as an infant, and also in part for our yet slowly developing relationship with his maternal family and “bio-mom”. Meanwhile, his adoptive family were only recently Americanized as immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, with Czech, Turkish, and Italian origins. On my mom's side, Yugoslavia had been dissolved by NATO only a decade earlier, and Serbia was facing the present-day struggle of a recently appropriated economy, in the form of wide-spread Capitalist poverty. It had been only a few years passing that my Serbian relatives were again experiencing silence and peace in their waking and sleeping hours.
At Bank Street, after those few months of the unit, I felt at best suspicion and at worst mistrust in the reliability and the accountability of my United States government. And, as I questioned the legitimacy of my citizenship on stolen land through all of this, my little moral compass settled on: “ok, so I must really instead be a part of the Iroquois People.” I was glad for it, and I even thought, "one day, I'll go to them and tell them that I know who I really am!" I also soon developed a “felt sense” to keep this bald logic more often to myself… And, for the most part, I did.
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So, twelve years later, as I sat down with Phil and Sandy, I remembered this little girl and her stalwart sense of loyalty and citizenship. And I felt a deep responsibility to conduct this interview in a manner that would acknowledge and respect her felt sense, both in its centrality and limits, and both in its minimums and maximums – and, also my adult felt sense, and then Sandy and Phil's, too. The week before we sat down, I was a bag of bones and nerves about finally marking my own path, albeit in a brief venture, into the spiritual and intellectual territory of Indigenous worldview… at least, since I had attended the 3rd grade… I was also admittedly harboring confusion and even disdain for being “dropped off” after the third grade the way I was, while otherwise swept up into the crowd of busy “Manhattan” life. And… I was mortified by the very possibility that the ethers of my sharpened mind and rebuffed heart might rub off some toxic clandestine dust of Manhattanite “entitlement” or “pretention” on my ability to conduct the interview respectfully and honestly. But mostly, I trusted my confidence and Phil and Sandy's professionalism and earnestness as educators.
So, there's just a little more, isn't there? At this point, I was 20 years old, and I had spent a mostly internal and admittedly short lifetime cultivating a more mature “felt sense” about the depths of my responsibility as a US citizen. I knew that I and my peers had the world-coveted privilege “to vote” and to participate in the democratic process, for example. But what about the rest of my responsibilities to society? I felt earnestly that from what I knew about the origins of this now proud country, that the Founding Fathers, in all their wisdom, had not adequately prepared me or my political authority for the framework of the post-Imperial world. I still had yet to be afforded meaningful public access to learn from and truly listen to authentic Indigenous voices from an honest and dignified position or authority - outside of my private university setting, that is. And, all around me and the comfort and cushion of my privileged position in society, even if only as a “passable" "white girl", was the aggression and violence of classism, prejudice, and poverty, and the devastating poison of domination often in the form of sexism, racism, and religious intolerance. More, everyone around me openly engaged the wide-spread and gross Capitalist imitations of the commodification of resources, and the planet was dying beneath our feet and above our heads.
I especially felt a stark difference between my democratic lifestyle, and that of my relatives in Europe who were bracing the monumental post-WWII institution of a contemporary Social Democracy (the loosely appropriated economic misnomer is often “Socialism”, which actually simply means "property", and was first re-used by right-wing American politicians, such as Richard Nixon, and was later adopted more colloquially). My European relatives breathed the rarified air that was Europe guarding the world with the bones of collectivism and democracy, in order to institutionally limit Nazism, Fascism, and the miasma of inequality which had in their recent past fueled the violent protests and devastating power of restrictive political parties in representational government. Meanwhile, I contended with the dissolving of the "American Dream" by the continued institutionalization of classism, sexism, racism, religious intolerance, and xenophobia.
Also just entering the scene was the borderline "invisible" threat of mass shootings. Often, perpetrated from within the unchecked power of privilege as the Constitutional "right", or U.S. certification, to bear arms. This country's legal position on the concept of a ubiquitous "free will" was being extended to the neglected mentally ill, who were often the assailants, and they had been heedlessly scooped up by the second amendment to be granted “the same” freedoms and liberties as trained professionals. Over these years, I was developing hyper-vigilance and losing my faith in the ability for local American communities to self-organize and demand change from their representatives. After a few seasons canvassing for an environmental organization, I knew how much work it took to organize community members, and I was eager for the NRA to already meet its grassroots contenders and truly face the unifying power of non-violent and democratic law-making. It was a long eight years later that I read an op-ed about the Italy's gun laws, and specifically about the Italian government's response to the end of fascism, which legally limited all personal possession of firearms to those who could pass a mandatory 4-month psychological evaluation, and annual check-ins. More, Italian firearm owners might only receive probation once, and after the second infraction the license would be permanently revoked. Italy has never had a mass shooting.
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In all of this, I was careening around the caverns and corners of my mind and heart from what I had learned in Phil's class the year prior about the influence of the Haudenosaunee on the Foundering Fathers and the development of the very language of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. As well as what I had learned in a course taught by renowned feminist scholar Sally Roesch-Wagner, about her research into the lives of the leaders of the Suffragist movement as they were deeply influenced and informed by the Haudenosaunee Tribes, the Clan Mothers' Councils, and Haudenosaunee heritage and worldview. I was also careening over what I had learned through experience from my more recent four-month semester abroad in Ecuador, in my previous Junior year. The air was sweeter than I ever thought before, and I was still gasping for breath. And indigenous people lived, struggled, and breathed the same air, as I did, and this, to me, was evidence of a "living" discourse which I needed to investigate.
This was ten years ago, as of today. I had never conducted an interview before. And, I was suffering under the influence of a chronic migraine condition that had been wearing me out for months. As I later found out, I had chronic Lyme disease, which is a tick-borne blood infection that had by some small chance travelled into my brain and spinal cord, and would later produce a small collection of debilitating symptoms. It was from this space of urgency, uncertainty, and also illness in my youth that I invited Phil and Sandy to engage this interview, and they met me with a heartfelt integrity, and an inspiring attentiveness. Through it all, we managed to collaborate and dialogue with passion and earnestness over the merit and capacity of origin, obligation, and shared experience. And the encounter gave me strength.
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And it wasn't just all too good to be true, it was just true. I had been afforded the opportunity to sit down to develop an adult “felt sense” about Haudenosaunee heritage, under the aegis and dignity of professionalism. I was eager to catch this meaningful glimpse into the Haudenosaunee traditional concept of "a living language" and of “life's inherent activeness”, concepts which I had first learned about in both Phil's and Sally's classrooms. I also looked forward to gaining some perspective and experience into the personal and interpersonal exigency that would inevitably arise while addressing the pivotal interactions of Western society with Indigenous worldview, especially as they have historically been both constructive and devastating.
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The desire to break through the ancestral frontier and engage the interior of our conscious efforts bordered somewhere in between longing enthusiasm and eager desperation.
Phil and Sandy's abilities, ambitions, and aspirations to “actively” use language were so mindful and sturdy, and so profoundly rooted in purposeful, socio-ecological, and adaptable thought and pedagogy. I felt secure in my ambition to conduct the interview, and I was deeply motivated to integrate it into my project. From our shared discussion and inspirations, it felt as though the conversation were being carried by this ancient existential force, like a call. Almost as if this ancient call to uphold the Earth and Her sacredness, in all Her symbology and mythic literacy, emerged from the depths of our exchange and spoke time-honored words of wisdom, equality, and profound existential and ontological bearing. By the time we were through, I found myself absorbed by inspiration. The discourse we engaged demonstrated an incredible and beautiful mix of powerful pedagogical, humanist, cooperative, mythic, and reciprocal exchange, and expression.
Even after we were through and I had thanked Phil and Sandy for what they had to offer and we parted ways, with every visit to the transcript my passion and drive transformed even more deeply and profoundly. I was able to find that little girl inside of me and tell her that while we may not be Iroquois, we were Neighbors of the Haudenosaunee Nation. And, that she might like to know that the Haudenosaunee were helping everyone again today, to alter our course to the future towards a track of peace, where it had once originated. And, that it would be a struggle for everyone to preserve all our lands and cultures and their inherent and profound diversity. So, it was time to grow out of just surviving, the goal now, was to thrive. And, that we were putting in the effort for the seventh generation to come.
Ever since that afternoon, since our meaningful discussion, you will find me striving to adapt to this monumental Indigenous worldview of a "living language". And, striving to sustain my sense for the social and political presence of moral reciprocation as an inalienable right to diversity and peace. Also through the efforts of this project, I have been moved to advocate in small ways in my own life, for the profound legal opportunity afforded to the world by Bolivia and Ecuador, who were the first to institute the inalienable Constitutional Rights of the Earth, and the rights of Her Life to diversity, health, and the preservation of sustainability. And, of course, I have been striving not only for myself, but because I believe everyone else can do for it, too.
We, and all creatures, and all geophysical forms are more than capable of preserving our connection to the Earth through respect, literacy, and responsible association. And every generation ahead will learn from this and thank us.
After everything I have learned during my research, I might ask my reader to carry this ancient call to Guard the Earth and Her Life.
Skä•noñh
(Greetings and Thanks, Onondaga language),
Eva M. Ally
At some point in this project, I found it necessary to paraphrase this interview to more quickly reference certain themes. I'm going to include this effort for my readers here, because there is admittedly a lot of information in this interview. This effort does not serve as an official interpretation, but moreso just my notes. I think it is also important to advise that all of these themes and this information have a deep history, which takes a lot of time and dedicated efforts to understand. This is only amateur research, and there is a lot more story to tell. For me, these first understandings have been best internalized and understood in an academic setting, with input from peers and a professor who facilitated a general direction for discourse and study. I hope you've enjoyed the original interview, and that these paraphrased notes will also be of some use for your understanding or educational purposes.
INTERVIEW PARAPHRASED BY EVA ALLY
...
(E) How would you expand on this need or exigency “to listen" to "Indigenous voices”?
(P) It is about shifting how we engage with the world. So, we take this acknowledgement of “things” and change that to instead engaging in a reciprocal relationship between “living beings”. This kind of reciprocal relationship with the natural world is very different from the modern and Western concepts of resources and consumption.
(S) We're also talking about the old traditions and relationships of indigenous peoples. When the colonizers came to the First Nations' lands, they had to impose their voice to extract God from the world. Before the colonizers, to the indigenous people the land was genuinely scared because God manifested in the world. Only once the colonizers had removed the sacred and God from the Earth could they commodify the land and extract its resources.
(E) How has this exigency transformed today, with the introduction of the secular lifestyle and secular political action?
(P) Good question. If you take seriously how human beings relate to the land, and also if you take seriously indigenous religions, you will challenge this notion of “optionality” in society as the common “sense” of secular values.
Symbolism, more often than we might realize, is not “optional” but in fact serves as a daily social value set, and even a type of religious framework.
Religion doesn't necessarily have to be encapsulated in an institutional form, but instead it's about how people interact with the symbolic life and with the mythic framework. Because all those things, money, property, transactions, they're not “options” in a way.
(S) Modern practices of commodification have been historically structured by the colonial mythologies which replaced concepts of material sacredness with “God-less” concepts (i.e. Hell, Satan, heathens, savagery).
(P) Today, we are familiar with mythologies for “why God doesn't exist in the world”, whereas in our ancient past and in Indigenous societies mythologies consider “why God exists in the world”.
(S) We can't just organize the natural world to understand it, when the natural world determines its own information.
(P) We witness the mythological power of symbolism for example, as we expand our concept of the “value of life” to convey “being-ness”, or “activity”. In Indigenous worldview, this expansion informs every feature of creation as “life”. We see this in the Blackfeet People's Medicine Bundles that represent more than value as objects, but in fact stand as people in the world. We also see this in Native American languages that use “verbs” where the English language uses “nouns”. Also, like with Robin Kimmerer when she learns Potawotemi, who begins to realize, “it's really all just other people in the world”.
(E) What can we (whether as a newcomer or as a veteran) do to inform our mode of communication to more effectively dialogue about this urgency, and these values, and our relationships, from the inherency of “activity”?
(P) Both the colonizers language and the conqueror's language inform our social model and how we communicate all these ideas in English. So first we recognize that there is another way of seeing things, which is by conceptualizing and communicating “beings” and “peoples”.
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