(transcription, Mary speaking to a largely non-white crowd that is about to go to Olympia for some sort of learning experience concerning NA culture)
"I think it's difficult to understand why groups like this gather, until you know the sequence of events that in common brought us here, both in the heritage as a single entity, the United states, and in the dual obligation of understanding and perception that we will never be the same. I think it's on the grounds of our history that we have strayed so far, from our obligations, designed in the creation of human diversity and established in the cultural heritage of different values, and until we understand this as a nation we will never be a democracy, and if we do not understand this, we will surely die, probably first as humans, and then as a life form requiring the kind of understanding that requires an acceptance of diversity, which demands a different kind of educational system than we have today. And then subsequently, a different kind of economy, a different kind of shared labor and shared resources, which is not, I do not bring these both as a part of economy. One is involved in our recognition and respect for each other as different groups. I don't know how many times in my life I have been told by my white friends "you are not different," but have come against the belligerence of this idea when in secret they talk about me in inhospitable ways. And this is the kind of relationship that has overlaid our country.
I don't know how much you folks know about art, or how much you're schooled in literature, but if you're acquainted with any of these two exacting skills you will know that the original idea of an artist does not always appear on his masterpiece. For some reason in the growth of the skill, changes both inherent to the personality of the person, and then manifest in what he started out to create change... but everything stays there, and in time, everything comes back. I think this is most characteristic in art. If you look carefully at art, in the changes of time that those materials that art is put on, you can see the vestige of the original idea. There’s a word for it, but I can't think of it right now... pentimento. Does anybody here know that word? That is when, from the facade of a masterpiece, the original content comes through, and all of a sudden, for many times the first glimpse, we see that the masters have also had changes in their thinking and their commitment as they proceed.
In the United States we are experiencing this. We had first drawn a very panoramic view of a quality of human existence that has not been experienced in the world in the expanse that it has been here. But behind that, there are four figures. The first is, that when the white man appeared on out shores, he meant to kill us. And in a unique entity, we did not mean for him to live, certainly did not assume that he would live on us. But as it happened, the compatibility of humanity locked together, and in the struggle of survival, we existed and we survived on each other. The second figure that we must see is that neither of us wanted to accept the figure of the other as he was, we wanted to accept you folks more friendly, and you wanted to accept us more absent. Not more absent in figure, but absent in quality of life. You wanted to make slaves out of us. It was not inherent to our sovereignty to do this. And therefore the struggle of another figure is coming through, in self-determination and self-direction for Indian people today. The land that we are here on, looking awkwardly in to a future that has inflation and pollution and corruption as its benefactors. The third figure that we must look at is the stealing, eroding quality of education, and education that was sung and that was stamped into the Indian people with the philosophy "kill the Indian, but save the man". And of course the last, and what you folks are going down to Olympia to experience today, the last figure is a political one.
Drenched in the insincere and faithless platitudes of those times in which the exacting form of the nation was not yet realized. The Indian people submerge the sovereignty of their understanding of themselves emerging as a second-class citizen to be called "American Indians". In a way these are harsh words, but I have said them. Second, you can read them in such books as A Century of Dishonor, The Trail of Tears, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Of Utmost Faith, the tranquility of our victory as a Nation in a Cheyenne Winter, the established caricature of a people in Stay Away Joe, the renouncement of the sovereignty of a nation in the National Treaty, the establish of a concubine in the history of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the perpetuation of genocide in Indian Education. It is all there. It is all true. And it is all ours. This is the history that you folks come together with us today; in hope that together, as intelligent human beings we might sort out of our past that which is valid for our future.
There seems to be about five or six steps that as a nation we must take. The first one is to face the fruitless nature of subordinating ourselves to the technological gargantua of our current society. And once again, with the humility that we are just human beings, establish a more functional relationship between ourselves and our land. This land is our land. This land is the present of our future. It is the establishment of our past. It is part of us in such a way that without it, we have nothing with which to hold onto a meaning and a purpose in life. So there has to be a concerted effort. It's ludicrous that today in Washington DC that we have a President's Commission on Ecology and there is not one non-white on it. It is asinine that we have, as a people of intelligence, prescribed the democratic system in terms of majority rule. It is absurd that we have the audacity to speak for one another when truth only emerges when we talk to each other. So our first pass as a nation, and your first pass as an individual, is to see what the properties of the education must be to understand a functional relationship that you might have with this land.
The second era... I have struggled for thirty years as a non-person in the educational system because I happen to be Native American. When I'd write my signature, I'd write Mary Hillaire Lummi, and my white friends would snicker. They'd say, "Well what's that?" So I'd look back at their name, PHD and MSW and all that crap, and I’d say, "what's that?" Maybe if each of us understood the other, they would be one in faith. If that's what you believe in, then that's what I believe in. There must be a way, again, with intelligent creatures, to establish a means of developing a criteria in which we can be equivalent to one another. I have no hopes to be better than them, but I have no desire to be less. There has to be a means in this intellectually oriented country to establish a work force that takes you because you're competent to deal with the task and not because you're either white, when dominance is control, or black, when dominance is in penance.
The third step, is of course people have been, since the obsolescence of an agrarian culture, we have been attempting to reconstruct our economy, which was based on that kind of a culture, to establish the kind of food shelter and clothing that will allow us the freedom of interesting enterprise within the kind of work environment we have today. We have to work like farmers because we have to eat like pigs! And yet there is no work, that which the farmer made meaning of his life in. There must be a new way of reconstructing the world of work so that contributions can encompass the total facility of human endeavor. Next, we must re-educate the educators. One book that you might consider is De-Schooling the Schools. Revitalizing those things that are important, that will allow us to develop the kind of schools that will help us become decent human beings, sensitive to beauty, and aware of the needs of others, not so consumed with the demands for ourselves. So there has to be a reconstruction of our educational system.
Finally, there must be an understanding of exchange. The type of aesthetic value of life that restrains us from taking the posture of a god, but enable us to be a creative human being. We must have knowledge of one another that provides for the kind of sharing that does not depend on what we have left, but is prescribed on what we can contribute. It seems as though this is where we are now. And I think as one of your leaders indicated, we will find, in the battle with ourselves, whether or not a country so conceived can endure. Our question: if not us, who? And if not now, when? The challenge, of course, in the dehumanized system of our education is, what is it that I can do? Our challenge is, when will we do it? How prepared is prepared?
I'll end with a little story that may open some philosophical considerations. I worked many years with people who are trying to develop a human rights commission. And of course, the human rights commission, as our laws of purity has a given, our human rights commission has to catch a person invading not just the privacy but the existence of another. They have to be killing somebody before we can take any control over them! I say to you, that when you form spit in your mouth to spit on the sidewalk, you are in defiance of human rights. If we do not start at that point, the sensitivity required for human continuation of life as we know it is dead already. Establishing in us a new hope for life must be predicated on those things we have never experienced before, and established on our will to be the true measure of human beings. To further endure, we can't count on the past, for it has its place. We have now. What is it that we're willing and able to do today that will insure the possibility of tomorrow? The answer is you. Thank you very much." (end).
new lecture, unidentified place. unsure about identity of woman speaking.
[too garbled to effectively transcribe, concerns the current political situation of the Native American population.]
Mary speaking to group (of teachers?):
"...An old person having the ability to teach really really young kids how to take care of their mothers, how to treat their neighbors, how to behave with other little kids, how to get the right kind of pitch so that your canoe won't sink, how to build a shelter that will be air-tight, that'll keep off the rain, how to find the best berries, and after finding those berries, how to dry them so that they will last. And also how to have them, how to make baskets, how to cure meat, how to tan hide, how to cure your neighbors. The whole process of teaching with love is the very basis of survival. With separation of [------] and responsibility... people's interest and ability, with every person in the community having a place, being needed, being part of the overall [-------] family.
You don't need unemployment insurance, and you don't need welfare programs. The ability to survive without nursing homes, you don't have to hide the old people; you don't have to [------]. They still know things, they can share this [-----]. And when people are learning their values when they're not members of a trenchant, anonymous society, you don't need the penal system. A few old women can do the job; just some basic instruction in how to treat their neighbors. And so these Indian people hear [all sorts of laws and it strikes them as silly because these things are just common sense borne out of respect]. Just real basic rules, this area down here, this industrial area, it used to be a rain forest. It used to have medicine, this used to be a real rich area, and some of the medicines that grew here aren't anywhere, not anymore. [...] And these things are being choked up, and the Indian people are different in a lot of respects, but maybe the main respect is that the Anglo people used up Europe and the proceeded on into the US, and you meet a lot of people now that are talking about moving on to Australia, others about moving on to Africa, and you don't find Indians talking about moving here and moving here and then eventually going on to heaven. You know, the Indians know that this place is paradise, and that you can't just keep using up these continents. The [tribal name] medicine men say that it's a violation to cross those [...] waters, violating natural law. The great spirits put you in one place, that was your instructions, to take care of them. So the Indian person comes from a different [...], all of these other people are trying to find the answer. The Indian people have always had the answer and have just been branded and labeled, and the answers have been ignored. But we see the immigrants coming to this nation seeking [...] freedom, and then having 14, 18 children, 14, 18 children to tend that farm, and that was real acceptable. A long time ago, in Indian communities, a woman that did that would be considered [like a god(?)]. People practiced birth control, and used a little common sense. [...] We've just been overrun by a population that was necessary to make the West a fit place for [...] folks to live. And there was already decent fold here.[...]"
Audience member: [woman acknowledges Mary's grievances but objects to blanket statements about how the whites are, what they do/feel/etc, as well as the perception that Mary's suggesting that whites and non-whites teach their children to hate the other]
Mary: "There is a trite, but I think maybe relevant, little quote here: "who gives to me, teaches me to give". We have had 200 years of education from whites, and we have found that they do not learn, except in hostility. I felt like you do, I don't want you to get the idea that Indians or I do not like whites. Some of my best friends [audience laughing]... I found, see I worked for the welfare department for about 15 years. Every year I had to go through the obstacle course of teaching somebody that I was human so that they could treat me humanely. OK, I worked for ten years, then I, not because of administration, but because a group of caseworkers, seeing how I worked, wanted to work with me. So they asked the administration, "Could she be our supervisor?" And because the administration was not without being racist, couldn't say no, put me there, but the man who gave me my promotion said, "now you're one of us, Mary Hillaire, but we're going to treat you like any other god damn Indian [relative (?)]".
I would like to refer you in thinking of the character of life, and I'd like to use the example of the heart transplant. Now everybody knows a body that's heart is worn out needs a new heart. But the very first reaction of the body to a heart, even though that heart is going to sustain its life, rejects it. OK? And what has to be, here, for a long time the Indian people did not reject. If you would take time to study some of the writings on the original treaties, you will find that if there was humanity in there, it generally came from the Indians. Hospitality is part of the nature of Indian people, but when you get kicked in the teeth time after time after time, when you witness the brutality, a really bad story, "The Cheyenne Winter", under the philosophy, I think it is of your man Jefferson, who said, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian". And beyond that, in order to justify the consciousness of those people that were killing, they fed to them as they went on, as they now give contraceptives to the soldiers that they send off to other countries. They said to them each, "remember: gnats become lice." And this is a kind [...] history that we're trying to circumvent when we do not allow ourselves, in the humility of understanding to realize, that there is a difference between us. If you knew this, if you knew what we could tell you, you wouldn't be here and we wouldn't be bothered.
Woman in audience: "do you really feel that the average person feels that way about [...]"
Mary: "No, the thing of it is, there are three major problems in our society that deny people, either a functional, or a responsible, negative or positive response. It's always something in between that really ends up in nothing. And that is, the first one is law. No, the first is religion. And the second is law. And the third is the flushing toilet [audience member: "the what?"]. Analyze these three processes and you will find a significant thing. Each of them remove the consequence of your behavior beyond responsible reflection. We've been through this together. It has not worked that we have taken a backseat in a silent partnership that the minority voice has in a majority dominated plural society. Now we have to say, you know, like they say in education, books, which are the main instrument of education, are written in three different levels. They tell you what they're going to tell you, and then they tell you, and then they tell you what they told you. And we're now having to tell you what we told you. And it's kind of hard, you know the first time, in the first sensitivity of first love, one can whisper, but in a divorce court, you hear very little civil conversation.
Audience member: "The question is, are people trying [...].
Mary: People may be trying to feel compassion, to understand, but one of the greatest problems is that, you know, when you take history in school, there's always someone in the class that wants to know why it's necessary to take history, and the instructor almost always tells them that we learn from our history to improve our future. And what I'm trying to tell you is that you teach a false history, an erroneous history, and part of the problems that are happening today are happening as a result of the effort to [...] the national consciousness, to make the nation's history look good. There would never have been the Melai massacres if American students had really learned an accurate history. The [San Treece?] massacre would have made your children so sick, would have made you so sick, that you would have put restraint on governmental military action, if you would have seen in your head Indian women putting your shawls around their little babies faces so that they wouldn't see the long knives, wouldn't see those galloping [men(?)]. If you had, as children, identified with that pain and terror, and that injustice, you would have a government now controlled by educated people that would not tolerate those kinds of actions.
What we're seeing, at this point, the Indian has been delegated to such a role of inferiority that there are very few people that are prepared to listen to things that Indian people might have to teach, might need to teach, because just as sure as we're all here in this room, when the whole thing goes down my children are going to be just as affected as your children, and I don't want that, I don't want that kind of a judgment. The whole attitude of supremacy continues to this day. I have a little 2 1/2 year old and his name is [Lithebatsu(?)], which was his great grandfathers name, it's a [Pullalapush(?)] name. That's the name of our tribe, not Puyallup, not Peyallup; Pullalapush. It means 'the generous people'. Not 'ridiculous people', just generous people. That was the nature of the people. The name of the tribe was changed because the Anglos couldn't pronounce those 'foreign' names. Lithebatsu's name was changed to George Jackson because you couldn't pronounce those 'foreign' names. My little boys name is Lithebatsu, and when he goes to kindergarten, his teacher is going to have to learn to pronounce those foreign names. Names like Elizabeth and Randolph Atwood are as long of names, if people can take the time to learn those names, they can take the time to learn our names. The whole idea that we have to suppress ourselves, mask our identity, apologize for some basic differences, is frustrating at best.
The Indian person [...] faces, from infancy, some pretty terrible statistics. The median education level achieved by an adult Indian in the country is the 5th grade. 25% of the Indian kids in the Tacoma school are totally out of school by the 7th grade. The median family income is one half of what is considered the national poverty level. The housing conditions are gross. Sanitation is almost non-existent. The resources of the tribe are being exploited by governmental controls and governmental [...]. And whenever this particular part of the discussion comes up, there's invariably someone that jumps up and says "we should abolish the whole reservation system if conditions are that awful". But those are our communities; those [...] are critical to the survival of our family unit. It's not an accident that these kind of statistics are a reality, it's a governmental control, a government of, by, and for the dominant society. And you say, "Do you think that all people feel that way?” Perhaps they don't, but it certainly isn't reflected in your governmental system. When we started out this morning, I was talking about unconstitutional state laws that are racist in nature and designed to economically oppress Indian people. And you tolerate it, and the legislators are confident in passing those laws that they're going to be accepted. So what am I supposed to think when I see a legislator that represents you all down there talking about tax immunity and then forgetting the topic and screaming in my face about fishing, which is not even related to tax immunity, and I know that he's passing that bill because he just hates Indians, and he's representing you, you know, I've got nothing else to think. I've got to assume that there's some hostility there because it's reflected in the judicial system. Because we see it, we know that it has to be there.
[Audience question].
Mary: I'll just give you an example: A girl [...] from the Tacoma public school system was asked to do a report on Andrew Jackson. She was asked to research Andrew Jackson and she was asked to submit a report. She turned in a paper that said, "Andrew Jackson did genocide on my people". That's all. She footnoted it, she [...] books that she had read, [...] to think of to say about Andrew Jackson, who in fact ordered the wholesale slaughter of Cherokee people, a death march that made WWII look like fun and games, you know, something that rivaled Eichmann and Hitler easily. But you hold him up as a national hero, and that instructor refused to accept that report, and told her she was going to have to do something else. And she walked out of that class, and she didn't come back. Damn, she knew who Andrew Jackson was! But as long as you look at your history in such a false way, and impose it on children's minds in such a false way, there are bound to be some children that are sensitive to that, and reject that, and if what you learn in history and English is bullshit, then probably what you're learning in math isn't very relevant either.
The whole process of education is one of forcing the Indian person to compromise themselves. My own son, in the 7th grade, sitting at the table, going through a book, you read the chapter then you write the answers, all these kids do that, and I looked over to see what the question is that he's working on, and it says 'what happened to the Indians as the pioneers moved west?’ I looked at the answer, and the answer is 'they moved further west"! What!? My son says, "Well that's what it says in the book". That isn't true; you can't turn that in, rah rah rah... You know I'll go talk to the teacher, I'll get that book pulled out of the school, and he looked at me: "Everyday it's something, every single day, and if you make an issue out of every single thing, I'll never get through the 7th grade, I'll never get through high school, and I certainly'll never be a lawyer. Let me just do my work." But it's offensive! [audience members share anecdotes concerning education].
Mary: Can I say that there are about three major trends, I think since about 1957 Indian people have taken to heart the concept of self-determination. Of course we get a lot of conversation about your feeling [to audience member], which is not wrong, it just isn't handy right now. So this effort of self-determination is to try and transcend backwards, which is very hard for whites. Whites have a hard time stepping down. Just think how many of you would start being a learner instead of chronically being the teacher. For some reason, whites seem to think that the American way is the white way. But if we are to achieve democracy, we can, and part of we is you, you can no longer maintain the stubborn idiocy of having all white presidents. You're going to have to do something about it, because the only thing you've allowed most non-whites to do is survive. You helped the blacks a great deal more than you helped others because you've made house pets of them. And the thing that has to be is that we have to stop coddling one another, and come down to the kind of abrasive relationship that will submerge the truth that's within us. I really know that we're not as stupid as we're acting right now. I know it! The manifestation of the Indian's belief in that is that since 1957, they have tried self-determination.
Of course it's terribly hard to think of a good encore for [Nikia?] or a man named Horse, or Billy Jack. White acting Indians. It's hard to follow that; it's hard to follow [Erma?] Gunther, it's awfully hard to try and contend with the disciples and the epistles of [Bow-ax?]. It's almost irresponsible to try and hold the treaty as dear as you people hold your constitution rights. And for some reason, try to dislodge your beliefs that we want your constitution rights. We don't want your constitution rights. We want the right to live as we are, we're Indian people. And in this, there are about four things that you can ask your congressman, especially if he isn't the one that I asked for support from who said, "I cannot support you because I feel that the Indians have survived as well as any other captive people in the world." That's a direct quote from one of your representatives. We are trying to develop a functional opportunity for our people at the higher education level. We need your support and understanding. We need for you to get off dead center, and thinking of only how it will hurt you to go beyond where you are now. And I grant you that it will hurt, it will hurt to know that America really is a plural society. And that our representation is foul. When we don't see any Mexican Americans or Native Americans, it is hardly successful because we see a black who has been here since [...]. That is not representation. You have to think beyond seeing a non-white skin to establish true representation. We are preparing each other to take a meaningful position within the partnership democracy.
There are educational systems which are absolutely dying because they don't have your understanding. And I don't care, the one thing, we had a day school on the Lummi reservation; the government gave an allocation of x-many thousands of dollars to the school. The white superintendents saw that money and thought that the Indians would just waste it, so they consolidated Lummi day school into the day school system, into the public school system. 11 people voted for it, and one person voted against it. The crime of that was, the one person was the Indian representative. And democracy worked on him, just like religious freedom works because I have been given a chance to be either a Protestant or a Catholic. Neither of which do I wish to be. I am of Indian descent, and as such have my own beliefs, which I can challenge anybody in this room to deal more competently with mine, and yet mine are not considered when they set up a program on the TV that's supposed to represent all the leading religions in the country. There are four, I think, or three. There's the Jewish religion, the Catholic and the Protestant. There might be one more, I don't know. But that's the kind of thing that you've got to think about, and until you change you thinking, we can't change what we're doing.
In 1973-74, we had 100 Native American people in the program at TESC, it's almost phenomenal. Of those 100, 14 gained with almost the charge necessary of the battle of Wounded Knee. We had to fight every possible way to get those students through public education. Why? Because they haven't read the books that you folks should have read, and yet I have gone out throughout this country and I have asked teachers, "name the last ten books that you have read". I have found an incomprehensible, illiterate group among the teachers of your children, but do you question that? Do you question the fact that, how many of you, how many of your children, how many of your grandchildren, are going to have an Indian for a teacher? And yet I promise you, to the point he will not, he is denied the kind of freedom that allows him to grow in the understanding he needs to get along in the world. These are the kinds of things that we have to do together. This is [why] we take the kinds of irresponsible questions, 'why don't you forget every hurt that you've had', it's because it is with those hurts that we are knitted together as a country. It is in those unresolved promised of our treaties that we are here today, and that you are in dominion over our affairs even if you don't know us. These are why we have to go through these bad times together, because until you change your thinking, we cannot change what we have to do. And we are human, and we do have the inalienable right of human beings within the structure of government, [...] supportive rights to think and be and become those things that are Indian, by properties beyond what we are able to grant one another. But there are things that you folks can do, finding out about, questioning, 43 thousand people are teachers, how many of them are Indian? And yet every one of your children is denied part of his education because he's not heard the voice of the Indian people. [audience questions].