Rise

“Honour the Dead, Fight for the living, Honour the Living, Fight for the Dead” by Angela Sterritt. 3.5ft x 4.5ft. Acrylic on canvas.

Last weekend I attended a one-day workshop about the Treaty of Waitangi, where I cried in front of ten of my colleagues. It’s not like I didn’t know. Of course I knew. What I think it was? I think it was having the history of my new home laid over the history of my old home in a way that illuminated (again) the parallels not just between the two stories but among all the stories of the treatment of indigenous people at the hands of colonisers throughout time.

It’s not even like the people on the ground in New Zealand, the Pākeha, as the New Zealanders of European descent are called, came with the intention to subjugate the native population. I don’t think that was what was on the mind of the passengers aboard the Mayflower either. And yet… again and again it’s what happens. It’s a reflection of a core (and largely subconscious) belief that goes back further than anyone can even imagine, I think, but which was defined with terrifying lucidity in a papal decree known as the Doctrine of Discovery (1493). It stated unequivocally that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be "discovered" (and claimed and exploited) by Christian rulers. It stated the goal that "the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself."

The very next year, the Pope issued the Treaty of Tordesillas which, together with the Doctrine of Discovery, arguably sealed the fate of the indigenous inhabitants of the “New World” by dividing the right to conquer the Western Hemisphere between Spain and Portugal. Of course such a decree wholly dismissed the very idea that indigenous people might have any claim whatsoever to the land they inhabited (and often had for generations) and helped to shape the way people of European descent (and specifically of the Christian faith) saw themselves in relation to the “barbarous” peoples they would encounter in that New World, including, though significantly later, those in the Pacific.

So when I look at the multiple histories laid out side by side, it appears that New Zealand is in the infancy of its waking to the travesty of colonisation. Not all the people. Of course those who have been directly subjugated know. And there have been activists and educators working to reverse its insidious impact for decades. But the population at large is in danger of losing its cognisance of just what is at stake…the same way Americans, for the most part, have forgotten. Again, I have to proceed with the following caveat: those who experienced colonisation in an overt way (were marched from one part of the continent to another, for example, by military personnel ordered to collect them on a reservation; who were, as another example, ripped from their families and beaten for speaking their native language; and what litany of colonised Americans would be complete without the mention of those who, if they were lucky enough to survive the harrowing and shackled journey across 3,000 miles of sea, ended up in a foreign land and owned, like livestock, by people who looked like no one they had ever seen before)—they remember. I’m talking about your everyday American—and not just the white ones. We are all in the process of forgetting. At least we were.

The height of the Civil Rights Movement was, in the grand scheme of things, a moment of waking. Of course it was. But many white Americans went back to sleep after that and quite honestly, they have never been ‘woke’ to the subjugation of First Nations people (that population was reduced to numbers that are a shadow of what they once were, or else bred out of visibility—though everyone’s got a grandma who was an Indian princess). And where do we go for our impressions if we don’t see a specific cultural group walking among us? Hollywood. And over time, First Nations people have been transformed into ghosts by a film industry that at first liked to portray them as noble savages, or just savage savages. Since this obsession with the Hollywood Indian waned (thought it is still out there), Hollywood hasn’t really portrayed enough native people to undermine those stereotypes and make real, live people out of them again. And don’t get me wrong. I don’t blame Hollywood. No one made them the authority on the correct portrayal of indigenous cultures and peoples, and they certainly didn’t claim to be. They were just entertaining people and functioning, without even knowing it, under the Doctrine of Discovery. Who concerns themselves with the well-being and self-concept of members of “barbarous nations”, especially when there is a crap-ton of money to be made?

The great Spokane/Coeur D’Alene poet Sherman Alexie so aptly expressed that obsession (which Hollywood didn’t create but certainly cashed in on) in his satirical poem, “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel.” The poem ends with this: “In the Great American Indian Novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians, and all of the Indians will be ghosts.” He alludes to America’s preoccupation with its favourite stereotypes of the “American Indian”: the noble savage and the Indian princess. Look at the “hippie” fashion (which is revisiting us with gusto at the moment); if nothing else it’s a complete ripoff of what people think is Native American “fashion”; the irony is that no tribal men ever wore headbands like that. That was a Hollywood hack for keeping wigs on white actors playing Natives. For real. But we don’t want real Indians. We want to be Indians (how many movies have storylines that play out the American fantasy of being made an honorary Indian by their adoring First Nations hosts?). But of course there is no room for the real Indian, who is just trying to get by (today he’s fighting Covid and taking note of the utter lack of difference between his Trump-administration life and his Biden-administration one). That would be unpalatable.

So yes, there have been moments of waking in our sleepy history, but they mostly punctuate a long hibernation that wasn’t interrupted on a large scale until the Trump administration took office. Honestly, that’s one positive thing I can say about that man. He shook many Americans awake. Those of us who had been happy under the smiling gaze of Obama, our Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning Democratic president while thousands of innocent people were being dusted by “surgical” drone strikes quietly authorised by him—the most articulate president we’d had since JFK—we got a jolt to the system. How could our beautiful country be taken over by this raucous, misogynistic, hate-mongering reality-TV-show personality? How are there 70 million people who would choose him to lead us? But did we even hear ourselves asking the question? It’s an absurd scenario. How indeed?

Now I was as dismayed by having Trump as the “leader of the Free World” as anybody. But I still have to ask myself this question: how were so many Americans willing to vote for him, not once but twice, the second time after he so blatantly fulfilled all of our fears about his disregard for the planet, for minorities, for women, and for truth? What makes decent people (because let’s face it, there aren’t 70 million white supremacists in the U.S., there just aren’t) so desperate that they will make such a (seemingly) rash choice? The craziest part (at least to me back in 2016)? I think that his original win (against Hillary) had a lot to do with the fact that an alarming number of those people who were hoping Bernie Sanders would become the Democratic candidate for president, swung not back to Hillary but, gaining momentum and hollering as they went, right on over to Donald Trump. I remember a friend predicting this, and I remember being horrified at the prospect. But he was right. Many of those people were looking for a demagogue…someone pushing extreme change. Someone advocating for the total revision of the establishment. For them, Bernie and Trump were two sides of the same coin.

I can’t pretend to have a full understanding of what ravelled out after that first Trump win. Quite frankly that’s when I began planning my escape. But there are a few things that have come into sharp focus since it happened. One is that America is awake right now, and it’s uncomfortable. In California as a teen, I really did think that racism was a thing of the past. I wore a ragged path between my mid-town Santa Cruz home, Harbor High School and Pleasure Point, making forays to other beaches and occasionally the “Pacific Garden Mall” (that’s “downtown” for all you youngsters). I didn’t see the racial strife that most certainly existed at that time. I am a woman of colour, but no one can ever tell what my ethnic background is, and with no obvious cultural identity to attack, the average American will reserve their bad behaviour with me.

As a high school kid in Santa Cruz, I went to Watsonville precisely twice, both times for the State Fair. I had friends (and dated) all colours and kinds of people, but even I was unable to see the cultural gulf that separated us in many ways. It never occurred to me that their lives were significantly different from mine. That they were often treated differently than I was. You could call me naive; I prefer the word “innocent.” I use it in the sense that James Baldwin used it. What I mean is that I didn’t know. But when I learned, and I did learn, I tried (and continue to try) not to forget. Baldwin addressed his young nephew in a letter that was published as “My Dungeon Shook” in a collection of essays called The Fire Next Time. In it he tells his nephew, “They [the racists] are in effect still trapped in a history they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it…But these are your brothers, your lost younger brothers, and if the word ‘integration’ means anything, this is what it means: that we with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it, for this is your home, my friend.”

For all its beauty and longing and strength, even the Black Lives Matter Movement couldn’t wake the American people the way having Trump for a president did. But of course the power to wake is born in the contrast between the two forces. The greatest contrast perhaps came in the form of the police and military response to the armed and aggressive insurgents who stormed the U.S. Capitol on the 6th of January 2021 compared with that which met the unarmed Black Lives Matter protesters on the 1st of June 2020, a mere seven months earlier. I’m thinking some people are beginning to “understand their history.” If nothing else, there is awareness. There are a lot of people who would still deny the systemic racism that frets American policy and the American ‘experience.’ But there are a lot who suddenly get it. They’re not any better equipped to deal with it than they were before (arguably less, hit with a global pandemic and recession, and possibly profound personal loss, as we have been in the past 12 months), but at least they know. They are no longer “innocent,” and this state of being “woke”? It needs to stick.

So here I am in New Zealand, where the stories of the American struggle reach me on the evening news and online in the voices of my friends in waves. It is distant but real. It is about Covid-19—stories of illness and death but also of public unrest and protest around individual rights; the tangle of truth and lies that seems impossible to manage; protest and strife in the wake of an election that was, by those we should be able to trust, decried as stolen or highjacked somehow; it is about a change that can’t happen fast enough. And glimmers of hope: a man who speaks of unity and equity has moved into the White House with his lovely educator wife and two dogs. A relief plan was passed by both the House and the Senate—finally. Covid numbers are dropping off in some places, my beloved Santa Cruz among them. Vaccinations are rolling out in increments. There is sweet silence where before there was a constant assault of hateful, truth-less rhetoric on certain influential social media accounts. Glimmers. May they not lull us back to sleep but rather nourish us in our fight to stay awake. To shake ourselves into the kind of wakefulness that does make America great, if only for the first time.

Here in New Zealand, I learn more and more about an education system that has not served the Māori people, except to convince so many of them that they are less. Less intelligent. Less capable. Less civilised. And those not convinced? They choose to fight, not always in ways that serve them. When I lay the histories of colonisation alongside one another, I see that my Cherokee ancestors had barely landed in Oklahoma, the lands to which they were “relocated” under the Indian Removal Act of the brutal American president Andrew Jackson when a group of Māori chiefs signed their first (and, it turned out, the defining) treaty with the British crown. By this point in time, the Cherokee had already learned that there was nothing sacred in the word of the coloniser. That no matter what was agreed to or offered, the mindset of the people who came under the protection and sanction of the Doctrine of Discovery would forever direct their behaviours and mean one thing: that there is no such thing as an equal footing. And certainly no such thing as shared power.

And possibly the worst part is that many of the colonised, though they might never admit it or even realise it, believe and are guided by that doctrine as much as any coloniser believes and is guided by it. It has circumscribed the amount and quality of what they believe they deserve and it has limited what they believe they could ever become. And very few people, colonised or colonisers, could ever articulate it, but they have functioned under the assumptions of that doctrine for their entire lives, as did their parents, and their parents before them. That’s the power of colonisation. It blooms from the inside: a blood-red stain that expands like ink dropped in a solution of water. We don’t see it land. It’s like it’s been there forever. But it’s there, and it grows, and it controls. There are efforts to address this force. Valiant efforts to decolonise Aotearoa. I myself am a part of this, working as I do in a kaupapa Māori organisation to pull at-risk youth into the light of their own beauty and worth through education that starts simply with love. But man is it a big job.

And I guess my fear is this: what if the waking is still to come here? What if I have left one place where the waking is manifesting as civil unrest and a gross mismanagement of a deadly virus to come to a place that has yet to experience its own Donald Trump? Not that I think Kiwis would ever elect such a nincompoop, but I do wonder what it would take. You know, for all of these non-Māori, or tauiwi, New Zealanders, to feel the struggle of the Māori people and their Islander counterparts, as their own. For it most certainly is their own. The struggle belongs to all of us for as long as we let this whenua (land) embrace and nurture us. And for as long as young people, specifically Māori and Pacific Islanders, are taking their lives in such staggering numbers. So this was the source of my tears last weekend, I think. Just the “matching picture” of the recent Māori history and the less recent history of the indigenous people of my own land. And that of the Hawaiians and of the Tahitians and of the Australian Natives…I could go on and on. It overwhelms. It causes one to languish.

And what is there to do? I realise that the answer is simple, though not very satisfying. I do what I am already doing. And I keep doing it. I am one, but one is mighty when it is part of a larger whole. I am not alone (there are many other ‘ones’, and I am doing what I can with the gifts that are mine. I show up every day to love up these kids who need loving. They need to see themselves in all their perfection (and all their flaws) and know that there is a way forward. I will keep teaching them, giving them education in tiny doses wrapped in communication, kōrero, ease. The way I gave my yellow lab Bella her medicine wrapped in bologna. They won’t even taste it at first, and when they finally do, it will be too late. They will have swallowed whole just enough of the medicine of learning and of being seen to feel its effects. Maybe even to want a little more.

I have one right now who is writing poetry and sending it to me in little missives from her home. I have one who is building a pizza oven for our organisation and knows himself as capable in a work space. I have another who, after one week of breaking down barriers, gently, gently, is willing to read to me…aloud. These are enough. I am enough. We carry within us the history of colonisation. I brought my own story from far across the sea, and though they are staggered by a couple hundred years, our stories echo the same burden, the same longing, and yes, the same healing through the canyon of our living. I may very well cry again. In front of my colleagues even. But I will also contribute to the decolonisation of this land that has received me and which sings back to me my own history and the history of every other colonised place. In the end, the land becomes me, and I have nothing to do but be the thing that I am. My own language rises in my heart again: What can I be but this thing that remains? What can I be but this?