Speaking Truth

It was a moment of truth-telling.

It was a moment of moral and historical reckoning.

NHI was presenting on the Abya Yala mural project at the film festival of the Southwestern Anthropology Association’s (SWAA) annual conference. Abya Yala is a beautiful piece that was envisioned by Leah Lewis and Votan Henriquez. With input from youth and a community effort to paint the wall under Leah and Votan’s direction, it became a part of our city’s landscape this time last year.

Votan, proudly an Angeleno (from Los Angeles) starting talking to anthropology students from California in our SWAA presentation and began to teach. Here is how I heard it:

“We were told to assimilate. We were told to talk White, act White, pray White. This was the only way to survive in a White society that didn’t recognize us as human and wanted us wiped off the face of this land.

Then they brought some of you all into the Los Angeles, anthropologists working with the U.S. Government. You found us talking White, acting White, praying White and determined that we did not meet your criteria for being Indigenous people. That meant we had no right to the land.

Anthropologists essentially said that my people didn’t exist.”

I listened and saw the conversation that ensued, the students absorbing what they were hearing, asking questions. Votan had become their professor and his lecture was called “Speaking Truth.” He wasn’t looking for an apology, but wanted these budding academics to see the power that their work has not only for knowledge-building but for harm.

I was the student as well – no longer University professor, I was being schooled. Ivory tower institutions and our academic disciplines have so much to learn from the activists, artists, and knowledge keepers that exist beyond our campuses. Votan was an agitator who spoke a needed truth, unconcerned with academic speak, unconcerned with who might feel uncomfortable in the room.

It was a moment of truth-telling.

It was a moment of moral and historical reckoning.

It was a moment that offered healing.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More on the U.S. Termination Policy 

In the 1940s-1960s the U.S. had a termination policy whose goal was assimilation of Indigenous people and termination of Tribes. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Northern Cheyenne), a former U.S. Senator summed up the approach in a speech in 2007:

“If you can't change them, absorb them until they simply disappear into the mainstream culture.... In Washington's infinite wisdom, it was decided that Tribes should no longer be Tribes, never mind that they had been Tribes for thousands of years…It is analogous to the federal government mandating that black Americans can no longer be black. Many Tribes are still trying to be re-instated as a federally recognized entity. The reason is that the federal government has a contractual obligation through treaties to perform “trust responsibility” to Tribes – not individuals – rather an ingenious manner of avoiding responsibility. If we get rid of “Tribes” we can avoid responsibility to individual Indians.”