Commencement Speech, or, What Would Auntie Say?

 

Commencement Speech / Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

 / U of Oregon / 

2024

Deborah A. Miranda

THE SACRED KNOWLEDGE OF ANCESTORS

OR,

WHAT WOULD AUNTIE SAY?

Thank you for inviting me to share this day with you.

Before I say anything else, congratulations. Congratulations on completing not just the big things, like all the required coursework and labs and papers, but congratulations on persevering through a pandemic and its never-ending aftermath, financial challenges, and all the quotidian details of simply having a life in the 2020s. This is not a celebration of one event; this is a celebration of innumerable small triumphs, a celebration of maneuvering detours, a celebration of that awe-ful word, PIVOT. 

Congratulations to your professors, your mentors, your advisors, too, and all those whose guidance and effort contributed to this moment. Days like today call for a hefty serving of gratitude for blessings, as well; don’t discount angels, fairy godparents, or sheer luck. I earned my Ph.D at the age of 40; I knew I did not accomplish it ALL on my own.

Now, I have a confession: this is my first ever Commencement Speech. And the fact that it’s for WGSS is the icing on the cake, right? But, as soon as I accepted the invitation, I was stricken with paralysis. What could I possibly say that would be even remotely useful to a group of young WGSS scholars graduating in the dumpster fire that is 2024? How could I address your hopes, your pain, your anger at inheriting such a mess? Should I just say, “goodbye, good luck, have a good time saving the world, write when you solve climate change, racism and world hunger”?

Somehow that didn’t feel like enough. 

I needed guidance myself. So I thought, “Okay. I’m going to channel my inner Auntie.”  W W A S: What Would Auntie Say? Maybe, something like this:

As an Indigenous woman, I can tell you that we Indigenous peoples have already faced the end of the world; the fires of colonization, missionization, and assimilation attempted to burn us alive. Our apocalypse arrived complete with epidemics, a bad economy, an impossible real estate situation, and climate change. And let me tell you, the result was generations of grief and anger.

Some of us survived, however, and have been busy reinventing ourselves ever since. Because here’s the thing: we did not lose our ancestors, who continued and continue to live within us, within our DNA, and our memories. These ancestors give us our connection to identity, to homeland, and to story. Strangely enough, Indigenous peoples all over the world are experiencing a kind of renewal of Indigenous knowledges, art, literatures, music, medicines and leadership even as the world around us seems to be going down in flames. This is not a coincidence. Claiming and owning our roots as living, breathing relatives of this planet, beings who must establish and maintain a relationship with this planet in order to flourish is, in fact, the definition of indigeneity, reciprocity, survivance and thrivance.

In this way of thinking, we are all indigenous to this planet. We all have responsibilities to this planet, and to our relatives, both human and non-human. We are the planet, the land, walking around in a particular and temporary manifestation of flesh and blood. When we remember that, honor that, and act on that knowledge, we are working on a world and a way of being in this world that is based on ancestral relationship rather than accumulation of power.

But when I say that we carry our ancestors within us, ancestors whose experiences and knowledges support us, I do not mean only those ancestors connected to us by genetic materials. 

Joy Harjo, three-time US Poet Laureate and member of the Muskogee Nation of Oklahoma,  talks about her realization that she has “poetry ancestors” who influence her work, carry her in times of difficulty, and who continue to mentor her whether or not their physical bodies are still present. She writes, 

… That thought was a door that made a fresh path of understanding. Each of us carries human ancestors within us. The DNA spiral is ancestral stories and songs. Even the stones, plants, elements, and creatures have ancestors. [Likewise,] each poem has ancestors, and maybe even an origin story.

Harjo is speaking of other poets who came before her, whose work she turns to for inspiration, for education, and for solace. The poems left behind form an archive that she can call upon for her own work, and from which she draws not just strength, but very real information and strategy.

As scholars of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, we have ancestors, too – important people who came before us, created new paths of understanding, put their minds and bodies on the line for equality and justice. Ancestors who left important knowledges behind for us to use, carry on, and develop. I know who some of my ancestors are – Gloria Anzaldúa. Ray Young Bear.  Audre Lorde. Paula Gunn Allen. Raewyn Connell. James Luna. Kimberlé Crenshaw. N. Scott Momaday. bell hooks. Haunani-Kay Trask. Cherríe Moraga. The interdisciplinarity of such ancestors is breathtaking, isn’t it? Poets, theorists, researchers, activists, artists, educators. 

I want to share with you some of the specific teachings from these ancestors that I’ve carried on my journey.

Perhaps the most important teaching concerns the uses of anger. Most of us identify anger as violence. And we fear it – both the anger of others toward us and the anger we feel towards others and ourselves. It wasn’t until I read Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses of Anger” that I was able to reclaim anger not as a weapon that damages, frightens or alienates, but as a tool in the journey toward justice.

Lorde writes: “Focused with precision [anger] can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change… unexpressed anger lies within [us] like an undetonated device. But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision of our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification…”  This was a radically new concept for me! In this vision, anger is a kind of power, and like any other power, it can be used with positive or negative intent. When we choose to use anger to express ourselves, anger serves us as a strategic tool for truth-telling, establishing relationship, creating community. When we attend to what someone else’s anger seeks to communicate, anger again serves us by getting our attention, clarifying the stakes, setting boundaries. Lorde emphasizes that “Anger is loaded with information and energy…” Anger, then, comes to us as a complicated and often unpredictable teacher. In her poem, “Who Said it was Simple,” Lorde notes, “There are so many roots to the tree of anger / that sometimes the branches shatter / before they bear.” She’s right: using anger, understanding its power, is not easy. But if we do not fear the chaos – if we can steel ourselves to embrace the chaos that often erupts from expressed anger – it can become a valuable form of communication.

It is probably not coincidental that Coyote, the trickster of many Western tribes (including my own), is known for unpredictability, for committing chaos in the name of creation, innovation, and survival. Coyote likes to rattle the status quo, break taboos and boundaries, and generally piss people off. But Coyote is also one of the beings who helped create the world, teaches us how to think outside the boxes that limit us, and reminds us that learning to embrace transformation is THE key survival skill. Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winning author and civil rights activist, says, “Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.” 

One of the hardest parts of using anger in service of our goals is learning to pay attention when our anger (or someone else’s) gets too close to that line between usefulness and hatred. I have thought about this a lot lately. Lorde carefully explicates where that line is: anger wants to build something better, while hatred seeks only to destroy. She writes that while the object of hatred “is death and destruction, Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.”  

 “Anger is a grief of distortions between peers” – look at what Lorde does there! “Peers.” Peers are individuals on equal footing. Peers are in relationship with one another. Peers want to communicate with one another, share goals, share values. If we listen to our peers even when the information they share is disturbing and disruptive, we learn from it what is needed to move into consensus, to move ahead with our work, rather than becoming deadlocked. 

In the same vein, poet June Jordan is an ancestor whose teachings deepen my ability to practice compassion – for myself, for my community, even for those who stand between us and our goals. “We are not all that is possible,” Jordan writes, “None of us has ever really experienced justice. None of us has known enough tenderness.” Here again, the precision, the vulnerability, the clarity of language cuts through defensiveness or shame we might feel about experiencing injustice, needing tenderness, and allows us to see the humanity in others. In fact, the way that Jordan positions those words, “justice” and “tenderness” together is stunning. I had never thought about justice as a form of tenderness, or vice versa, but once I read it, I felt it in my gut. Justice is tenderness; tenderness is justice. And that condition of being tender is something that, in the daily struggle, can feel like a liability. To be tender, to express tenderness, seems like the opposite of what justice requires! Somehow, in my mind, justice required a sword and shield, a defensive stance, being on guard against violation. Yet vulnerability, too, is a kind of empowerment.

Another ancestor, activist Angela Davis, teaches us that, “without deep, abiding practices of self-care, there can be no radical social transformation… [self-care] means that we’re able to bring our entire selves into the movement. It means that we incorporate into our work as activists ways of acknowledging and, hopefully, also moving beyond trauma.” Exactly. Compassion and tenderness for our own failures, the hurts we have endured, hurts we have caused, are the medicines that allow us to pick ourselves up and continue. Shame, fear and exhaustion are the opposites of tenderness and vulnerability; they keep us isolated from, and outside of, the very communities, the futures, that we desire to support and build. 

Ursula K. Le Guin, poet and award-winning speculative fiction writer, once gave me this gem of self-care. She said that someone else had given it to her during a time of great struggle, so she wrote it out and taped it to her refrigerator to read several times a day. Here it is: “Today I will do the best I can do, with what it is that I have to do it with today.” BOOM. A teaspoon of self-care. Do what you are capable of doing; then, take care of yourself so that when you are ready, you can give again. To say “I will do my best” is a vow to your better self; to remind yourself that you will not work yourself to death is a promise to your community. Burn-out is real. Your body is a crucial tool, needed to manifest equality and justice and compassion in the world. Eat well. Sleep well. Tend to your mental health and your heart the way you would tend a beloved’s well-being. Think about the long haul. Remember, all that is necessary for you to do the long haul.

I carry these ancestors (and many others) with me on my journey. I remember their sacrifices. I revel in their triumphs. And I know that without them, I would not be standing here today. Standing here at the age of almost-63, strangely enough, on the verge of being an ancestor myself.

And that’s another part of this ancestor thing: we don’t just have ancestors. We become ancestors. Joy Harjo reminds us: “… with ancestry, as much as you look back, you are also looking forward to see who is coming up, because a responsibility of each generation, whether it be blood family or poetry family [or WGSS family!], is to carefully tend those appearing, who break through the imagination to speak the next world into place.” 

You gathered here today have just hatched! – and you are already on your way to becoming the ancestors of those coming up behind you. Every day that you are out there doing your work in the world will lead you to become someone’s ancestor, someone’s touchstone, someone’s reminder that the incredible is possible.

Now, that might feel overwhelming. Let me remind you: you are not doing this alone. Look around. You have many companions with you today -- sisters, brothers, kindred – who move forward into these responsibilities beside you. You will find many more already in place wherever it is that you are headed. Look for them. Treasure them. Collaborate with them. Make your own community of solidarity. Research together. Write papers together. Get angry together. Cheer each other on. Educate and remind each other about the tools available. Make meals together. Feed each other, because nourishment begets nourishment in exponential ways.

I know. It can still feel hard. Like our ancestors, you hope to see justice soon, preferably in your lifetime. And may it be so. May it be so. But if the 2020s have taught us nothing else, we know that great accomplishments can be taken away by the fearmongers and power-hungry whose only goal is to maintain a status quo in which their privilege never fades. It’s good to remind yourself that, as folksinger Iris Dement sings, “I don't have all the answers / To the troubles of the day / But neither did all our ancestors / And they persevered anyway… / I’m working on a world that I may never see.” 

And that’s just it. You are part of a lineage, a genealogy, a powerful collective inheritance, that has already given you knowledge and tools – and the times ahead will ask that you use those tools, and reinvent them for our times. Know that this is a collective struggle. As Gloria Steinem said when someone asked who she would “pass the torch to”: “There is no one torch—there are many torches—and I’m using my torch to light other torches.” 

There are many ancestors on this path whose names we will never know. But they, and the work they did, the light they carried, illuminated the way for us just as much, if not more, than those whose names we do know. It is powerful work to be the one loving or tender or compassionate moment in someone’s day. To be the light that passes light on to another. Don’t ever doubt that.

You are the inheritors of brilliant, courageous, loving work. 

In the days, months and years ahead, remember to revisit your WGSS ancestors often, as you would a favorite auntie who never fails to dish out the truth you didn’t know you wanted to hear. WWAS – What Would Auntie Say?

Nimasianexelpasaleki – my heart feels good. Thank you.

Lane County Farmer's Market

Lane County Farmer’s Market

We’re two weeks into November, 

the air sharp as a blade of ice. 

You buy a jar of blackberry honey 

at a stall that conjures radiance. 

I rest our bags on the ground; 

sleek leeks, onions in crackly skins, 

heavy carrots and potatoes. All around us, 

people with baskets on their arms 

touch, taste, weigh, praise. Exult.

Is it my imagination, or is everyone 

light-hearted, happy, damn near giddy 

with relief? “It’s going to be an amazing meal,” 

a woman promises her companion. Their arms 

cradle smooth-skinned butternut squash 

and bulbous stalks of Brussel sprouts. I stand 

beside a sapling that still bears green leaves, 

scalloped edges gleaming gold. Right there, 

in air almost cold enough to snow, my heart unfurls 

like a fiddlehead fern—completely out of season. 

My heart thinks its spring: the world opening up 

after darkness, sun returning, seedlings emerging 

like little emissaries from a country 

called hope. Silly heart. It falls in love 

with every person who strolls past. Reverently, 

you tuck the amber jar into one of our bags. 

As we walk, you name the soups in our future: 

potato leek, carrot ginger, French onion. 

Our bellies know we teeter on the edge 

of the long darkness. But today, the word 

November is just a series of black marks 

on the calendar. Not our souls.

San Carlos Day Mass, 142 Years Ago Today

 

One hundred and forty-two years ago today, on San Carlos Day, November 4 1879, Rev. Angelo Casanova led a small group of local Catholics from Monterey to the ruins of San Carlos mission to celebrate a mass on the occasion of St. Carlos de Borromeo’s name day. 

Both author Robert Louis Stevenson and his son-in-law, artist Joseph Strong, attended. Later, each man recorded the event in their own genre. Stevenson describes the elderly Indian man leading the service as “An Indian, stone-blind and about eighty years of age, [who] conducts the singing” and adds that he and the other Indians,  “…have the Gregorian music at their finger-ends, and pronounce the Latin so correctly that I could follow the meaning as they sang.” 

Strong made a sketch of the mass (above); at the center is an elderly Indian man.  Barefoot, legs spread, knees slightly bent, a shock of white hair streaming past his shoulders, the man stands just off-center and just behind Fr. Casanova. He claims space in tattered coat and pants.  With one hand, he plants a long cane on the flagstones; with the other, he holds the hand of a young Indian boy—perhaps a guide, an altar boy, or perhaps leading the child to baptism, as suggested in some records.

Steven Hackel, in his book Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis, asserts that “little is known” about the elderly Indian beyond his name: “Old Ventura”; Sydney and Margerite Temple note:

while James Sandos writes,

However, based on oral and written records of that time, I am certain that “Old Ventura” is my great-great-great-great uncle, Ventura Cantua/Soto (he used both surnames, at different times in his life), who was trained as a Cantor at San Carlos (Carmel) Mission.

Ventura's story emerges from the oral narratives of Isabel Meadows, supplemented with historical documents and ethnographic materials. At a time when the life expectancy of a child born into the missions was 7-9 years, Ventura lives from 1816-1883 -- not the "eighty years" Stevenson imagined, but still a startling sixty-seven years. 

Spanning the Spanish Mission, Mexican Rancho and American Eras, Ventura’s long life gives us an intimate look at the brutal treatment of Indigenous masculinity throughout all three invasions and the violent imposition of hegemonic masculinity, particularly the patriarchal teachings of the colonizing Catholic Church. Much of what we think of as Historical Trauma comes to us today through these mostly unknown experiences of Indigenous men at a time when, as Anthony Correale writes, “…both cultural identity and masculine identity are repressed and warped by imperialism.”

I'm thinking about you today, Ventura.

I'm thinking about the ways Indigenous men’s suffering and identity fragmentation became a part of who we are today, a remnant of missionization that, like many other scars, we cannot – and perhaps should not – erase. 

“I want to suggest that we can rethink our relation to scars, including emotional and physical scars," Sara Ahmed writes. She reminds us that we have normalized what a "good" scar is; it is one that is hard to see, preferably invisible; after all, isn't that the goal of a good surgeon? Yet this kind of "good" scar "does not remind us of the wounding." Ahmed says this as if being reminded of the wounding were a good thing. As if it were a kind of writing, a teaching, that we must pay attention to. 

It's true, we’ve been taught that if we can erase our scars, make them invisible to ourselves and everyone else, that would be "healing." That would be the end of shame, fear and despair.

And yet, Ahmed continues, "A good scar is one that sticks out, a lumpy sign on the skin.  It’s not that the wound is exposed or that the skin is bleeding.  But the scar is a sign of the injury: a good scar allows healing, it even covers over, but the covering always exposes the injury, reminding us of how it shapes the body ….”

How multi-faceted scars are! To simultaneously heal, cover, expose, remind; aren’t these the actions of a teacher?

“This kind of good scar reminds us that recovering from injustice cannot be about covering over injuries, which are effects of that injustice, signs of an unjust contact between our bodies and others," Ahmed insists. 

I am drawn to that phrase, “unjust contact” – contact we did not want or ask for; contact that is invasive, appropriative, criminal.  Yes, scars do so much work: they remind us that even as we recover from those wounds of unjust contact, we must not forget what caused them, we must remember in order to protect ourselves and others against future wounding.  We are holey beings, stitched together by our scars, by which I mean our experiences, our knowledges, a kind of testimony that is literally written on our bodies. 

Ventura, at this distance of time and experience, maybe all I can do is excavate, expose, and witness your experience, your efforts to survive. Honor who you tried to be: son, father, grandfather, cantor, choirmaster, a man, who -- blind, aged, poor, traumatized -- was able to sing an entire Mass in Latin at the end of your life despite all the violence visited upon you, and despite all the violence that passed through you, and on into our family and community. 

I'm trying to find the story you were meant to tell. I'm trying to read your scars, because they are the same scars written on our own bodies, today.

Sunrise

photo by Deborah Miranda

                                    

Sunrise

Every day 
        is a little resurrection. 
Every day 
        is a newborn phoenix. 
We awaken in the ashes 
        of the previous day’s dream
or grief. A morning ritual – 
        face and hands washed
with prayer – clarifies boundaries.
        Open your heart.
Release yesterday’s bones.
Offer each day
an armful of wild roses,
the prick of thorns.
 All you need carry forward
is the memory of petals,
the feral tracks of wonder
on your skin.

        - Deborah A. Miranda

PROCLAMATION

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Proclamation on Columbus Day, 2020

Issued on: October 9, 2020

More than 500 years ago, Christopher Columbus’s intrepid voyage to the New World ushered in a new era of exploration and discovery.  His travels led to European contact with the Americas and, a century later, the first settlements on the shores of the modern day United States.  Today, we celebrate Columbus Day to commemorate the great Italian who opened a new chapter in world history and to appreciate his enduring significance to the Western Hemisphere.

When Christopher Columbus and his crew sailed across the Atlantic Ocean on the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María it marked the beginning of a new era in human history.  For Italian Americans, Christopher Columbus represents one of the first of many immeasurable contributions of Italy to American history.  As a native of Genoa, Columbus inspired early immigrants to carry forth their rich Italian heritage to the New World.  Today, the United States benefits from the warmth and generosity of nearly 17 million Italian Americans, whose love of family and country strengthen the fabric of our Nation.  For our beautiful Italian American communities — and Americans of every background –Columbus remains a legendary figure.

Sadly, in recent years, radical activists have sought to undermine Christopher Columbus’s legacy.  These extremists seek to replace discussion of his vast contributions with talk of failings, his discoveries with atrocities, and his achievements with transgressions.  Rather than learn from our history, this radical ideology and its adherents seek to revise it, deprive it of any splendor, and mark it as inherently sinister.  They seek to squash any dissent from their orthodoxy.  We must not give in to these tactics or consent to such a bleak view of our history.  We must teach future generations about our storied heritage, starting with the protection of monuments to our intrepid heroes like Columbus.  This June, I signed an Executive Order to ensure that any person or group destroying or vandalizing a Federal monument, memorial, or statue is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

I have also taken steps to ensure that we preserve our Nation’s history and promote patriotic education.  In July, I signed another Executive Order to build and rebuild monuments to iconic American figures in a National Garden of American Heroes.  In September, I announced the creation of the 1776 Commission, which will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and honor our founding.  In addition, last month I signed an Executive Order to root out the teaching of racially divisive concepts from the Federal workplace, many of which are grounded in the same type of revisionist history that is trying to erase Christopher Columbus from our national heritage.  Together, we must safeguard our history and stop this new wave of iconoclasm by standing against those who spread hate and division.

On this Columbus Day, we embrace the same optimism that led Christopher Columbus to discover the New World.  We inherit that optimism, along with the legacy of American heroes who blazed the trails, settled a continent, tamed the wilderness, and built the single-greatest nation the world has ever seen.

In commemoration of Christopher Columbus’s historic voyage, the Congress, by joint resolution of April 30, 1934, modified in 1968 (36 U.S.C. 107), has requested the President proclaim the second Monday of October of each year as “Columbus Day.”

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim October 12, 2020, as Columbus Day.  I call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.  I also direct that the flag of the United States be displayed on all public buildings on the appointed day in honor of our diverse history and all who have contributed to shaping this Nation.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this ninth day of October, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-fifth.

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Proclamation

the New World

the Americas

on the shores 

of Today, 

we celebrate 

the enduring

Atlantic Ocean—

immeasurable

native 

generosity, love of family

and nation—

our beautiful

legacy,

vast splendor

mark it as inherently

future,

our heritage

our law

we preserve

and rebuild

a Garden of

creation, teach our children

about the miracle of honor,

grounded together,

this wave:

we embrace

the World; we inherit the 

blazed continent, the wilderness,

the voyage

modified

by virtue

call upon the people

with ceremonies

in honor of our diverse

Nation

IN WITNESS WHEREOF 

my hand,

America.

erasure poem, poem, and artwork 

by Deborah A. Miranda

October 12, 2020

In the Thick of It

 

Fogged in here this morning:

Our little world invisible 

in the visible. An invasion 

of moisture hangs in the air; 

water vapor needs 

particles of dust to attach itself 

to in order to be seen – 

this year we've been trapped 

in a fog made of the smoke

 from burning redwoods and oaks, 

 Indigenous bodies, 

Black bodies. 

Sea fog forms around tiny crystals of salt

in our tears. Ashes to salt, salt to dust,

dust to fog, fog to air, and here we are: 

we can’t see, we can’t navigate, we can’t 

bury our dead. We stay inside our houses, 

or walk cautiously down our neighborhood streets 

in search of an open grocery store, 

or drive slowly, cautious, afraid we might 

have to speak with another unmasked 

human being. This year of reckoning, we struggle 

in our national miasma. How thick the air, 

how hard it is to breathe inside 

a foundation made of fog.

Deborah A. Miranda

Toppling Mission Monuments and Mythologies

 

Serra’s Paternalism as a Form of Violence: Why the Statues Must Come Down

by Deborah A. Miranda

Delivered at the Toppling Mission Mythologies Conference, July 15 2020, sponsored by the Critical Mission Studies Project. The Conference Roundtable Response from Jalane Schmidt and Amy Lonetree is posted separately here. 

Saleki Atsa, Haku. Thank you everyone, especially to our organizers and to the participants and our audience. This is a huge occasion and I’m really, really honored to be part of it. I come to you from a place currently called Lexington, Virginia. I also sometimes, in my more bitter moments, call it Confederatlandia, but we’re taking care of that. I want to give acknowledgement to the land I’m on right now, which is Monacan land here in Virginia.

This conference, in a lot of ways, is about voices that haven’t been heard – as the Assemblyman was just telling us. In Bad Indians, I tried to create a space for those voices, and pull those voices out of the archives. This is one voice, and I thought it was appropriate for today’s topic. It’s from a section called “My Very Late 4th Grade Mission Project: Glossary definition: Padre.”

PADRE.

  “The neophyte community was like one great family, at the head of which stood the padre . . . To him the Indians looked for everything concerning their bodies as well as their souls.  He was their guide and their protector …”  (Zephyrin Englehardt). 

The Padre baptized us, gave us names and godparents; he taught us our catechism, officiated at our first communion, posted our marriage banns, he performed our weddings, baptized our babies, administered last rites, listened to our confessions; he punished us when we prayed to the wrong god or tired of our wives or husbands. He taught us to sing (our own songs were ugly), he taught us to speak (our own languages were nonsensical), he made us wear clothes (our bodies were shameful), he gave us wheat and the plow (our seeds and acorns fit only for animals).

                Yes, that Padre, he was everything to us Indians. At the giving end of a whip, he taught us to care for and kill the cattle whose hides were called “mission dollars,” worked us in the fields of wheat and corn and barley, instructed us in the building of adobe to make the Church, the monjerio, storerooms – promised it all to us if we would just grow up, pray hard enough, forget enough. 

But it all went to Spain, to Rome, to Mexico, into the pockets of merchants, smugglers, priests, dishonest administrators and finally the cruel Americans.  Nothing left for the children the Padre had worked so hard to civilize, poor savages pulled from the fires of certain Hell. He was our shepherd, we were his beloved and abused flock; now the fields are eaten down to the earth, we claw the earth yet even the roots are withered, and the shepherd has gone away.  

But we are pagans no more! Now we are Christian vaqueros, Christian housekeepers, Christian blacksmiths and shoemakers and laundry women and wet nurses and handymen – none of us paid with more than a meal or a shirt or a pair of discarded boots – but Christians, poor Christians, drunken Christians, meek targets for 49’ers crazed by goldlust or ranchers hungry for land. We are homeless Christians, starving Christians, diseased and landless Christians; we are Christian slaves bought and sold in newspapers, on the auction blocks, San Francisco, Los Angeles, one hundred dollars for a likely young girl, fifty dollars for an able-bodied young boy, free to whoever bails the old men out of jail: every one of us baptized by the Padre, our primitive souls snatched from this Hell our bodies cannot escape, we are Christian, we are Catholic, we are saved by the Padres and for that, Jesus Christ, we must be grateful.

(Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. Heyday 2013)

I chose that piece to read because we are told that Junipero Serra brought Christianity to California Indigenous peoples – with the implication being, we Indians lived in a deficit of spirituality, of self-governance, and of an understanding of relationship with higher powers. If Serra had brought us the choice of Christianity – with no punishment for choosing to remain faithful to our own religions and ways of knowing the world – perhaps that would have been different. But Serra did not just “bring” us Christianity; he imposed it, he forced it, he violated us with it, giving us no choice in the matter. About this, Serra famously wrote that he was doing no more than a father would do with his children. Paternalism, as he used it, is a term that comes with overtones of wise fatherly responsibility and guidance. But the paternalism that Serra claimed as his right to impose was much more sinister; under any label, the paternalism practiced during the missionization of California was a form of violence – particularly when those being subsumed already live in cultures rich with religion, languages, literatures, governance, family structures, and social traditions that have served them well for thousands of years. We were living in a wealth of spirituality – not a deficit.

Missionization, for California Indians, was more like indoctrination in an abusive cult than spiritual grace. Natives who resisted or refused conversion were beaten, imprisoned, starved, exiled from their homelands – usually by soldiers, at the behest of priests. Religion was the stealth weapon of Spanish colonization; a “moral” reason for conquest, to protect lands Spain wanted for itself. In addition to Catholicism, the Spaniards brought disease, including their own special brand of syphilis that not only sterilized Native women but caused birth defects, blindness and death. We lost 90% of our population in missionized territories, in 70 years. In other historical contexts, this is called genocide, a crime against humanity. Violently enforced religion is not missionization, it is terrorism.

The missionaries’ efforts directly caused generations of trauma to California Indians from which we are still recovering. But we are recovering. As Athabascan scholar Dian Million writes, “We are not our trauma. We can work at healing without being victims. We can be damaged and still be sovereign.”  

Why, then, should Indigenous peoples – and anyone aware of or interested in actual history – welcome the monuments to Serra that are everywhere in California?  

Serra, many argue, was simply "a man of his times." In other words, colonization happens, and we should not blame those caught up in it. But that has a flip side to it:  if Serra was, in fact, “a man of his times” in 1769 when he founded the first California mission in San Diego, he should have known better: Bartolome de las Casas knew better in 1552 when he published "A Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies," and spent his entire life working for the freedom of Indians and return of their lands (a wealthy man, a priest, and former Indian slave-holder); a document Serra and all priests in training would have read and debated. Padre Antonio Horra knew better in 1799 when he protested soldiers' rapes and beatings of Indian converts at his California mission.  The Church officials in California and Mexico sent poor Padre Horra home saying he had gone insane from the stress of missionization and his inability to deal with the hardships of The New World. Horra, however, told a different story:  “The treatment shown to the Indians is the most cruel … For the slightest things they receive heavy floggings, are shackled, and put in the stocks, and treated with so much cruelty that they are kept whole days without a drink of water.” Horra added that charges of insanity were false and brought against him because of his serious charges of cruelty by priests and soldiers, and mismanagement of Church resources (Bancroft 587).  In closing, Horra asked to be sent back to Spain because he feared for his life – not because of savage Indians, but due to his own Franciscan brethren.

Many many other letters, diaries and records of others traveling in California during Serra’s tenure and afterwards left behind testimonies of the brutality brought on by the missions.  In 1786, French explorer Jean-François de la Pérouse observed that during his visit to Mission Carmel a mere three years after Serra’s death, “Everything reminded us of a habitation in Saint Domingo, or any other West Indian slave colony. The men and women are assembled by the sound of the bell, one of the religious conducts them to their work, to church, and to all other exercises. We mention it with pain, the resemblance to a slave colony is so perfect, that we saw men and women loaded with irons, others in the stocks; and at length the noise of the strokes of a whip struck our ears.”  Other visitors in the same era noted that Indians were even beaten with a whip or cane when they did not “attend [to] a worship ceremony.” 

These people saw through “the eyes of their time” and what they saw disturbed them deeply.  

I feel strongly that as one of the few descendants of the Indians who survived the missions, I have a responsibility to my Ancestors and to my own descendants to speak up and try to create a clearer understand about why Junipero Serra’s statues and monuments are another historical flogging of California Indians; these honorings of Serra work to erase, silence, and discredit California Indian lives and histories just as much as the original missions. No, Serra was not the only one involved. Yes, he was part of an intricate machine run by the Spanish Crown’s political desires, the Spanish military’s might, and the Vatican’s multiple ambitions to convert and acquire both souls and wealth. But Serra was also a man who, like many before him, was faced with a choice: go along with the program, achieve his own personal goals, and ignore the larger crimes – or take a stand against inherently inhumane and unChristian acts against a people who were obviously vulnerable to diseases and technologies far different from his own.

Serra made his choice. It was a choice that we California Indian peoples have suffered for. Economic, psychological and intergenerational trauma continue. But that choice does not make him a saint, or worthy of a statue valorizing him as a leader of any kind. Those of us alive now have a choice, as well; in fact, we have the same choice: do we remain silent, frozen with old fears and mythologies, or speak out, take action, finally assert that other, more complete histories that we know, histories that reveals the Indigenous figure is not kneeling, and the missionary has no halo?

I’d like to finish up with a very short poem.

Teheyapami Achiska

Giving Honor

for my sister Louise, and The Breath of Life Language Conference

Eni micha elpa mishmaxanano 

I feel you in my blood,

nishiyano nishiti’anaxno, nishahurno.

in my bones, my gut, my teeth.

Name sikosura niche a’kxi, 

You rise all around, 

kolopisik xulin opa.

return like a lover.

Nishkuuh, niche lahake.

my basket, carry me.

nishimila, niche lasapke.

my ocean, bathe me.

eni namexumunipsha, 

I am your hummingbird

name hi’iyatan neku masianehk.

you are a flower of the heart. 

Name cha’a nishkxatasaxno, 

I feel you in my head, 

nishxushuno, nishkeleno.

my hands, my feet. 

Uxarat kai pire.

We dance on the cliff of the world.

Name cha’a nishchawisaxno,

I feel you in my spine, 

nishxorksno, nishsixihano.

my throat, my womb. 

Namesanaxkak opa, eni inamkak opa.

You are a river, I am the rain. 

Mantuxite, mantuxite,

It is true, it is true,

mantuxite, mantuxite.

it is true, it is true. 

Nishwelel, lexwelel:

My language, our language: 

maksiri maknoco.

breath of life.

 

(Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. Heyday 2013)

Nimasianexelpasaleki. Thank you.

Transplant

In Washington State, where I relocated from Los Angeles with my mother and new step-father in 1965, I was always a transplant - either enchanted or despicable, depending on perspective. “I wish I had a year-round tan like yours,” a teenaged step-cousin told me; I think it was her attempt to be nice. “Mexican turd,” hissed another step-cousin, a boy my age with small blue eyes and skin the color of lawn mushrooms. Looking at photographs of Wickersham Elementary School in Buckley, Washington, where I went to 2nd and half of 3rd grade, I remember one of the places this transplant was given temporary sanctuary. In a third-grade classroom on the ground floor, an elderly woman named Mrs. Freeman taught; she wove her silver hair into a crown every day, and her role as a teacher was second only to her role as a healer.

It was Mrs. Freeman to whom I entrusted my first painstakingly handwritten story, “How the John Rabbit Family Lived in the Tall Grass,” with its tale of bunny love found, family formed, babies born, the awful hunting season that laid waste to it all – and the strange resilience of Mr. Rabbit to start again, with a new family, only to face the same threat. Perhaps it was the happy ending I tacked on; a little girl saves the rabbits by taking them in as pets. Perhaps Mrs. Freeman knew a writer trembled before her, too shy to speak in class but crying out for an audience.

Whatever her reasoning, Mrs. Freeman gathered our small class around her chair, and read my story out loud. A rare ray of sun streamed in the narrow window beside us, dust motes alive on that solar highway. A soft braided rug beneath us held the circle of suspense as she read each page with a storyteller’s skill. I was as entranced as my classmates at this presentation.

Somehow, having this beloved woman read my words out loud gave them authority, enchantment, power. I was seven years old. I had already been raped. I had told no one. We still lived in the same trailer park as the predator stalking me and other girls my age. Did I say this classroom was a sanctuary? It was nothing less than salvation.

Wickersham Elementary was an ancient dark red brick mammoth of a building, leftover from the Buckley's logging heyday; the worn stone plaque by the massive double wooden doors was engraved with the date “1914.” Inside, the interior was haunted by those long-gone pines cut and stained dark, shaped into polished wood floors, a sweeping staircase with curved bannister to the upper floors, heavy doors with wavy glass windows for each classroom, tall wainscoting, solid pine trim and window casings. This building had educated generations of children whose fathers were loggers, pioneers, business entrepreneurs. I was often lost in that building, and when I wasn’t, I was afraid of getting lost. In Mrs. Freeman’s room, though, I was safe. I was seen. I was - along with all of my classmates - loved.

Wickersham Elementary was built 58 years after, and six miles west of, "the decisive battle of the Indian War fought at Connell's Prairie," according to historical records. I was the only Indigenous student there in 1967-68. Torn down in 1973, about 4 years after I left, the building stood for 59 years on stolen land bloodied by murder, constructed of massacred trees hundreds of years old. Old historical society photos show logs bigger than the trucks hauling; photos that break my heart in ways even my Indigenized English can't speak. But look. There is a tiny seedling in that classroom. A little girl who has been transplanted again and again and again, whose roots keep being pulled up and set down in earth far from her homelands. That seedling is loved in that building. She holds onto her story. That story is the root that can never be severed. That story takes root in the woods and fields of Western Washington. I'm still telling that story.

Land Acknowledgment: Why Do It?

Liliana Ancalao, Mapuche poet & activist

On the occasion of planning to do a land acknowledgement for Mapuche poet Liliana Ancalao's reading, I thought back to the ongoing debate over the value of this effort. Why a land acknowledgment? Does it really accomplish anything? Isn’t it just another meaningless, empty gesture that makes non-native folks feel as if they have checked a box that ensures their comfort?

I was reminded of the video short “Land Acknowledgment” by Baroness von Sketch Show, in which a white woman attempts to do a “recite and run” gesture toward Indigenous presence before a live show. Though she thanks the local Indigenous peoples by name, and even pronounces their tribal names without stumbling, she clearly views the statement as required cover-your-ass, trendy but not actionable boilerplate. A woman in the audience stands, however, and asks, “Isn't there something we should do? Should we leave, if we’re on someone else’s land? Or are part of the tickets sales or refreshments going to support Indigenous nations?” In short, the audience member takes the land acknowledgment as serious and important information that requires a thoughtful response, and some kind of action or reparation.

And in the video, that’s hilarious. Who takes a land acknowledgment seriously?!

This video story tells us that a land acknowledgment, in and of itself, is not enough. It is not enough to simply give it, and it is not enough to simply listen to it. To make a land acknowledgement truly powerful requires that we internalize the story to which it alludes: a story about sovereignty, colonization, decolonization, and truth.

Human beings are made of stories. Laguna pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko says,

I will tell you something about stories...

They aren't just for entertainment.

Don't be fooled

They are all we have, you see,

all we have to fight off illness and death.

You don't have anything

if you don't have the stories.

[The destroyers’] evil is mighty

but it can't stand up to our stories.

So they try to destroy the stories

let the stories be confused or forgotten –

They would like that.

They would be happy.

Because we would be defenseless then.

What happens when we forget the stories of Indigenous peoples?

What happens to Indigenous peoples when the dominant culture erases their stories?

What happens when United States citizens do not learn the story that Indigenous peoples had long existed here on these lands prior to contact with Europeans for many, many thousands of years –20,000 according to Western science, since time immemorial in Indigenous traditions?

What happens to the settler-colonial story of “civilizing” the wilderness when we remember that pre-contact Indigenous people possessed all the so-called hallmarks of civilization (language, religion, science, governance, the arts, cities and villages)?

Or when we forget the story that Indigenous peoples gave aid to early European travelers in need on all of our shores – east coast, west coast, Gulf coast, the interior -  preventing those travelers from succumbing to the elements for which they arrived unprepared, because to us, every life was sacred and hospitality was one of the responsibilities of being human?

What happens when we bury the story that the majority of those same travelers murdered Indigenous peoples in waves of increasing violence, forced (rather than offered) a new religion on us; what happens when no one hears the story that we fought back and resisted across every inch of this continent and were cheated, lied to, stolen from, massacred by U.S. military troops?

What happens when we silence the story that education came to Indigenous peoples not as a path to freedom, but because some government official did the math and discovered it was cheaper to educate an Indian child than to kill her?

What happens when we don’t know that Indigenous peoples in this country have gone from 100% of the population to one percent of the total population, yet we have the highest rates of suicide, substance abuse, incarceration, violent assaults and sexual assaults by the dominant culture? the lowest rates of high school graduation? the lowest enrollment in higher ed? the lowest economic status? the lowest life expectancy?

What does trauma look like when no one admits it is trauma?

As you’ve figured out by now, I could go on. I won’t. But I will say this:

When we silence or destroy or turn away from those stories, what happens is the story we are told instead, a story that goes something like this:

“This is the country where children learn names like Wyatt Earp, Davy Crockett, and Annie Oakley. This is the place where the pilgrims landed at Plymouth and where Texas patriots made their last stand at the Alamo. The American nation was carved out of the vast frontier by the toughest, strongest, fiercest, and most determined men and women ever to walk the face of the Earth. Our ancestors braved the unknown, tamed the wilderness, and settled the Wild West.” – President Donald Trump, State of the Union address, February 2020.

But this is not the story of the Americas. It is a story of intentional amnesia, of greed, of the need to erase Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans and African Americans, Chinese, Mexican, and other immigrants, whose exploited labor and suffering either physically performed or enabled the vast majority of clearing, carving, fighting, taming and settling. It is a story that claims all of the bravery and determination of one side, and none of the bravery and determination of another. It is a story that has been weaponized, yet, like a boomerang thrown by one who doesn't understand the power of that instrument, will ultimately circle back and attack the unwary hand that set it into motion.

This is a story that aspires to epic, and yet, only by telling the more complicated, full story, would truly be heroic.  And this all matters because, as Audre Lorde and Joy Harjo remind us, we were never meant to survive – and we did.

For all of these reasons, then, a land acknowledgment serves as a mnemonic device for listeners: a reminder of what colonization (and missionization) have done to damage the very alive Indigenous human beings still struggling with the after-effects of what was an invasion of Indigenous homelands for the purposes of seizing land and the natural resources of that land. Inserting reminders into the land acknowledgment of past and current struggles - for example, citing Wounded Knee as well as Standing Rock or Mauna Kea - and suggesting ways to self-educate and/or work as an ally, enliven the land acknowledgment. When the land acknowledgement has become part of an institution's protocol (which has not happened at my university), those examples should be changed up frequently - to avoid oversaturation, and to keep the campus community updated on Indigenous issues.

Today we acknowledge the Monacan Nation, traditional caretakers whose cultures and customs have nurtured, and continue to nurture, this land, since time immemorial. We honor the presence of Indigenous Ancestors whose work enables us to live here today, and benefit from the harvests, waters, and beauty all around us. We acknowledge the responsibilities we bear to care for our Mother, whose Spirit is creation and sustenance, memory and story, in all her many forms, in all her acts of transformation. We honor our Indigenous relatives currently working to protect our planet's water, sacred spaces such as Mauna Kea, and environmental justice for all.

Nimasianexelpasaleki to Liliana for her visit here this week. I give these words to you with love from your sisters and brothers on Turtle Island.

Liliana Ancalao, Mapuche poet & activist

Deborah A. Miranda