The Wisdom of Our Elders

Dawn Hill Adams told me the story below in an email and I got permission from her to share it in this blog. When Dawn talks in the opening sentence about 'these contexts' she's alluding to the difficult times being experienced by many Indigenous peoples around the world - Fiona

One of the things I always think about in these contexts is an experience we had at a meeting in Palo Duro Canyon about 20+ years ago. At that time, Albert White Hat was on our board. He was a very highly respected Lakota Elder on the Rosebud Reservation. You can find various videos of him online at Youtube because he taught at Sinte Gleska (language and culture). Well, Lori Lambert was one of the people on this team and she brought a video her husband Frank had just made about the Salmon Nations. One afternoon we stayed in the hotel's small conference room and projected that to watch it together. There were about 8 or 9 people on the team.

Albert White Hat

In the video they showed this very famous set of huge rocks that used to stick out into the river like cliffs, and the men used to stand on them and spear the leaping salmon that were working up the rapids. These salmon were almost as big as a man. The people went to this place every year during the salmon spawn time and they got all the fish for their whole year, and dried them there. It was a big festival and ceremony time, their major one.

At the end of the movie, they showed old photos from when a dam was built across the river to flood that area. The people were real unhappy about this, obviously, and they gathered near the stones as the water got higher and was going to cover them and flood them under the lake. There was an older woman Frank interviewed, who had been there that day as a child. She said that the dam people did not trust the Indians to leave the dam alone if there was a chance to reclaim that place. So she said that before the water swallowed the stones, the men from the dam place laid dynamite and blew them up so they were destroyed and could never be saved even if the dam was gone. As she told abou this, she started crying. This was at the very end of the film, so it ended within moments. By that time, every Indian woman in the room was crying in a bad way. And the Indian men had gotten very red in the face and had stood up, shoving their chairs from the table with their bodies rigid with anger. They began to yell things, and the women began to almost wail. It felt HORRIBLE, what had been done, and all the past feelings of badness were like the flood of that river.

And suddenly, in that crazy grief, there was a loud shout and a slam on the table. It was Albert, yelling, "STOP THIS!" Albert was a gentle man. That is the only time I heard his voice raised. He was not angry with us and yelling that way. He was yelling to be heard and also to be firm. He said, "This is how they destroy us! Sit down and stop this!" Then he said that they can do many things to us that are bad, but those things do not destroy us. Even blowing up those stones does not destroy us, however much it hurts. But our own actions, our own responses, DO destroy us. They cause us to drink alcohol and to be violent to one another. They cause us to have diabetes and heart disease and cancer. Then, Albert said, we do the work the white people want done. We finish what they only started. We do their work for them.

Albert said that of course these bad things hurt. But our focus must be the future, and our future people, and the future of All Our Relations. Not how sad or angry we feel about what those bad people do. Because if that is our focus, we give them control over us. And so we allow them to destroy us, which is why they do that stuff to begin with. They know this. It is their intention.

Dawn Hill Adams, PhD

Dawn is based at the Tapestry Institute, which she founded in 1998.  As the Tapestry Institute's website says, "We are about the Land, and about the Knowledge that comes from the Land." Reports from the Tapestry Institute are linked below.