cell913blog.com #6

 Just as Mandela had to walk into and through a myriad of both differences and discrepancies, primarily those that divided the whites in South Africa from the majority blacks as well as the Indians and the Afrikaners (Boers from Holland), underlying the depth and the malignancy of the divide was fear, and the concomitant ‘fear’ that including fight and more flight. Flight, given that all South Africans were ‘native’ to their national land boundaries, was not really an option. Following the arrival of the Afrikaners, the English arrived drawn by the prospect of ‘getting rich’ through the discovery of both gold and diamonds.

Between 1899 and 1902, the South African War was fought between Great Britain and the two Boer (Afrikaner) republics—the South African Republic (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. British military far outweighed South African, from 500,000 men to a meager 80,000; nearly 100,000 lives were lost, more than 20,000 British and 14,000 Boer troops. While Black Africans were recruited and fought on both sides of the conflict, the peace treaty, the Treaty of Vereeniging, specifically excluded Black Africans from having political rights in a reorganized Sough Africa as the British and Boers cooperated toward a common goal of white minority rule. (from britannica.com)

For us in the west, and in North America, the status, mind-set, attitudes, fears and resentments of the Black Africans, along with their deep respect, honour and adherence to traditional tribal values, rituals, dress, menu, and pride, remain mostly a series of black letters in the history books. We can read those letters, and we can imagine and we can empathize, to a degree. And yet, it is a very large leap, of both consciousness and unconsciousness, to put on the sandals and the isikhakha or imibhaco (elegant textile shirt) of Mandela’s Xhosa tribe. We are foreigners in a foreign land, and more importantly, humbled by anything resembling what might be presumed intellect and imagination and empathy, that we might fully appreciate how deeply ‘colonized’ and dominated, subverted and spied upon, deprived of minimal rights, and condemned to contempt, openly, legally, criminally and culturally. As a first step, we have to both divulge our historic white-man’s sense of superiority, inherited in large measure from our European ancestors, from rationality, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the hierarchical model of social and political structures, beliefs, legal frameworks and all of this culturally and imaginatively aligned with and supported by the church.

Our foreign-ness, innocence, ignorance, and actual cognitive, emotional, psychological, and even spiritual divide, as European-bred and educated men and women to the Black Africans, is perhaps analogous to our foreign-ness, innocence, ignorance, and actual cognitive, emotional, psychological and spiritual divide from the Indigenous peoples who have lived in North America. In her book, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, archaeologist Paulette Steeves argues that the settlement of the Americas may have occurred closer to 130,000 years ago. (University of Nebraska Press, from CBC Radio, Ideas, January 13, 2022)

For the longer term perspective of attempting to ‘make the case’ for a very different, ideally liberating, and yet highly challenging metanoia, to the perspective in which we ‘North American whites’ have been enculturated, it might be both useful and illuminating to begin to peek into and even to try to integrate some of the thinking that has emerged from The Great Law of Peace, as our entry into a path of discovery, not only into the mind of the Handenosaunee peoples in the northeast of North America, or turtle Island. Entitled, KAYANERENKO:WA, The Great Law of Peace, is a book we open in our tepid, yet honest, somewhat curious, yet in awe, respectful, and yet, shameful, determined to do the work, yet doubtful of ‘walking in the moccasins fully of our indigenous ancestors. We North American ‘whites’ have to acknowledge centuries of ‘missed opportunities’ to embrace, integrate with, and to respect and honour our indigenous ancestors. The cancelling of statues, for example of John A. Macdonald, as a way of paying homage to our sins of both commission and omission, will never fully atone for our racism, our bigotry, our fear, and our outright white supremacy.

A March 20, 2021 piece in the Hamilton Spectator, by Darren Green, President of the Hamilton Steelworkers Area Council, we read:

The apartheid laws introduced by South African governments were all adapted from laws that had been introduced here in Canada 10 years earlier…March 21, 1960. Dateline: Sharpeville, South Africa. Sixty-nine Black men, women and children were shot in the back while fleeing from police: another 180 were injured…Colonization, the reserve system, the Indian Act, the introduction of Indian agents—all were put in place by the Canadian government. Colonization had begun in earnest. There was a real fear that if Indigenous people congregated, they would forma resistance similar to the Northwest Rebellion of 1885-an insurgency led by mainly Metis and their First Nations allies against the Canadian government….The pass laws of that time prevented large spiritual gatherings, helped enforce the Indian Act and pressed for assimilation. It was a precursor of things to come including residential schools….The Pass Laws Act (in South Africa) of 1952 required Black South Africans over the age of 16 to carry a pass book, known as a dompas, which means “dumb pass,” everywhere and at all times. While previous versions of the pass were not for Black women, this new law covered everyone. Men and women had to find a way to support their families so they often broke the law to find work in fear of being caught…The Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), a splinter group of the African National Congress (ANC) created in 1959, organized a countrywide demonstration for March 21, 1960, for the abolition of South Africa’s pass laws, Protesters were encouraged to bring their passes, surrender them and ask to be arrested. In Sharpeville, a township 50 kilometers outside of Johannesburg, over 20,000 Black women and children gathered to protest the pass laws. Police officers opened fire. Submachine guns were used and 69 people were killed; 180 were injured. Both PAC and ANC were outlawed. This was a major event in the apartheid era. When Nelson Mandela was released and became president of South Africa, he chose Sharpeville as the location to sign South Africa’s new constitution.

Recounting this story from Dennis Miller, serves as a reminder of our deep affiliation, connection and shame to the Black Africans, as well as to the Indigenous people in Canada. One of the political differences, however, is that world opinion, seeded, engendered, fostered and delivered through the persistent and indefatigable courage of men and women like Mandela, offered a surge of political, legal, diplomatic and historic energy to the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. In Canada, for many reasons, not the least of which has to be the camouflage of church-government-operated residential schools, that, while defaming and abusing indigenous children, as uncivilized, barbarian and un-Christian savages, provided a cover for the public officials who were making the primary decisions. I am reminded of a visit of an Australian high school student, under Rotary sponsorship, who, in a grade twelve English class, was asked, “What is the difference between American racism and bigotry and the racism and bigotry in Canada?” She replied, without skipping a breath, “Oh that’s easy: in America the racism is all on top of the table, for everyone to see, while in Canada it is all under the table!”

While we are wont to record historic events in dates, places, numbers and documents, rendering them specific, literal, empirical, actual and thereby capable of sharing without refutation. There are other ways to ‘record time’ and it is the longer-term, less concrete, less literal, and less rigid adherence to a concept of time that seems appropriate to ‘appropriate’ from the Haudenosaunee people, not as a false “imitation” but rather as a model from which to learn. If we are ever going to free ourselves from the rigid militaristic, and conventional ‘religion’ of ‘time management’ and ‘appointment precision and perfection’ and scheduling and prescriptions of regularity, and organizational schedules and vision statement, ‘envisioning’ the next three years’ goals’….and collectively begin to appreciate, not merely cognitively but imaginatively as well, that we are grains of sand on a global beach, part of the timeless of the universe, a much more than modest shift, a transformation in a large portion of our perspective will have to be given to acknowledging, and to embracing, and to integrating a universal, alpha and omega, in time, if not necessarily in theology (although for many cultures they are related). And our clocks, calendars, decades, quarter centuries, half-centuries, centuries and even eons will not suffice.

If we are all going to try to move from an intense perspective the wrong way down the telescope (magnifying the immediate, the literal, the sensate and the seemingly urgent) to trying to turn the ‘scope’ around, we will be then ‘seeing’ a wider, longer, and obviously less ‘defined’ image. One of the models for such a perspective, comes from the Haudenosaunee people. In a section of The Great Law of Peace, entitled, “Considering the Coming Seven Generations,” we find:

In weighing any decision, the rotiyanershon (Male Chiefs) are instructed to consider the effects of their choices on the seven generations downstream from them. This long view is one of the arguments in favour of the stability of Haudenosaunee governments: men with a life term in office will be able to more confidently consider future generations, whereas leaders with a short election horizon will tend to be more eager to satisfy the short-term appetites and concerns of the voters:

How shall we do that our chil(dren) shall have many days. Therefore you consider carefully in regard to this matter….they must have a regard…also for those children whom we have not yet seen…We must look to see how it’s going to affect those future generations. How are we protecting?” How are we safeguarding? You have to protect those future people. They don’t have anyone else to protect them. When they stand there maybe sixty or a hundred years from now in a society which may be very hostile, when they stand there looking for a house or looking for a place to live, they are going to look back in time and say ‘Who was that who gave away my land?’ Everyone will be gone but the names will be there.

Why seven generations? Even the oldest and most productive among us can know and see only our great-grandchildren—four generations. WE may know the people who can before us, as well. Looking forward, looking back, our perspective may span seven generations. But to consider unto the seventh generation is really to say that our thought must go beyond our physical capacity to see; they must go downstream and around the bend of the river. It is not an unreasonable period of time—but it is beyond what we can see around us.(Kayenerenko:Wa, Kayanesenh Paul Williams, pp. 357-358)

There is so much to learn from the indigenous peoples, in Canada, as well as those in other regions of the world. They all bring a tribal mythology, tribal rituals, customs, and a perspective of their place in the universe far less driven by the immediate, scheduled, appointment-goal-resume-personal reputation-driven of the inherited European culture in North America. And for the
Haudenosaunee, there is a clear rejection of the Christian belief, that we are made in the image of God and thereby are “the ultimate beings in the world, the end of evolution. Things change.”

Sotisowah John Mohawk observed:

Things flow from sources which have roots deeper than individual talents of society’s gifts. They flow from nature, and the sacred beings who designed nature. In one embraces the initial premise, that human beings were extremely lucky that of all the places in the universe, they have a home just the right distance from a sun of just the right intensity, that there is enough water, grass, and enough of everything. From there, it’s a small step to accept that whatever created all that is a force of unexcelled sacred dimensions and the will of that force is something people should try to cooperate with to perpetuate life. The way the group expresses its cooperation is through ceremonies which recreate the conditions present when people first came to consciousness of these things.

Humankind’s relationship to nature projected in this precolonial, pre-patriarchal, pre-modern story carries a fundamental and unchanging truth, but one which subsequent generations would need to relearn over and over. Humans exist in a context of nature, and not vice versa. Everything we have ever had, everything we have, everything we will ever have—out health, our good looks, our intelligence, everything-is a product not of our own merit but of all that which created our world. That which created our world is not society, but the power of the universe. Nature, which is the context of our existence, is sacred. A significant manifestation of nature, the regenerative power of life, is also sacred, and we who walk about on the earth are not without obligations to perpetuate this system, the ‘work’ of the Giver of Life, in the greater scheme of things. (The Great Law of Peace, p. 37)

If we in contemporary North America are ever going to be able and willing to imaginatively, authentically, fully and unreservedly ‘try to walk a mile’ in the sandals of either Mandela or our indigenous peoples, we are going to have to see ourselves very differently in both time and in nature, to the perspective and the parameters of the European/Christian tradition, as well as the oppression (not in the abstract, but in the real time and real flesh) of the colonial mind-set, the colonial governance, the colonial superiority (assumed and presumed as inherited from the religious and cultural traditions) and the colonial insensitivity to the minority native peoples and their authentic identity.

And this process is not merely an intellectual, or a sociological, or a political exercise. Nor can it be reduced to a merely psychological exercise, as if we were entering some experiment in empathy, compassion. We are also going to have to release much of our fear that what we perceive as the reality of the universe, and our place in it, is not either the only one or certainly even the optimum perspective.