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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

Native history

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The slow death of assimilation

Dr. Crystal Lee stopped by New York City today to share Navajo history, culture, and family stories.

Lee, a public health postdoc at UCLA, is also the founder of a nonprofit organization that offers mentoring to young Native students, and she regularly advocates for Native youth and young women at the United Nations.

She prefers to be addressed simply as Crystal.

As part of her presentation, Crystal shared a video from the Montana Historical Society on the legacy of last century’s Indian boarding schools. White Americans literally rounded up Native children around the United States and treated them to a thorough and thoroughly abusive program of “civilization,” or cultural assimilation.

“To change a people, you change their children,” a participant tells the interviewer.

The Native boarding schools were explicitly designed to strip Native children of their languages and cultural customs, to reshape them in the image of White Christian Americans.

From the pronouncement of the Doctrine of Discovery in mid-15th Century Spain clear through the mid-20th Century, the European relationship with Native people in this hemisphere included infection, warfare, and what Lee calls “cultural genocide.”

The Doctrine of Discovery has been institutionalized in law and policy, on national and international levels, and lies at the root of the violations of indigenous peoples’ human rights, both individual and collective.” —Tonya Frichner, Special Rapporteur to the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council

This history can be challenging to digest, and it’s worth watching and sharing with others.

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Suppressing the natural

A beige and red-toned fabric cape and headpiece by Chickasaw designer Margaret Roach Wheeler. The headpiece has a beak and a long nape.
“The Messenger”: Cape and headpiece by Margaret Roach Wheeler

At the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, visitors learn about Native dance, art, history, and modern culture. It’s a two-floor archive and represents thousands of years of Native contributions to the Americas.

A recurring theme across the exhibits is colonial religions suppressing Native ceremony. Everywhere their boats took them, European colonizers repressed Natives’ ways of expressing their natural social and spiritual rhythms, and in some places suppression and repression continued for centuries.

For well over fifty years in the United States and Canada—and for centuries in Latin America—church and “civilizing” regulations discouraged and even outlawed many indigenous dances. Deeming the dances an obstacle to assimilation, federal governments prohibited Native societies from performing them.

It wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century that laws against ceremonial dances were fully reversed. Today many Native communities continue to preserve their dance traditions, some of which were underground for decades. A powerful impulse, dance is a universal form of expression that remains deeply meaningful in Native America—and integral to Native ceremonial life.”

I noticed this theme woven into anthropological accounts of dances across the Western Hemisphere: dances from Peru, Alaska, British Columbia, and the Great Plains dot the walls of a great, circular hall.

The Brazilian and Colombian Cubeo Oyné dance, for example, is part of a funereal ceremony that was “suppressed by missionaries in the 1940s.” As Janet Chernela explains it, the dance helps the community move “from grief and loss toward play and laughter.” And even that ceremony, a  ceremony that promoted collective healing, was suppressed.

You can count on authoritarianism to suppress the natural and war with any creative expression that doesn’t easily yield to external control. Every piece of art, every moment of embodied joy, each free movement is a reason to dampen energy or translate it into more acceptable forms.

As I’m reflecting on the exhibits in the New York museum, I’m also reflecting on authoritarian religion’s ongoing drive to suppress and control human nature. We gain from playing with structure; and cities like New York depend on our willingness to build our lives on artificial rhythms and patterns.

But I left the museum today wondering about how much we lose in that process of disciplining the human. Which are the other cultures that don’t survive “civilizing” projects?