Exemplars of Indigenist leadership

The following is an excerpt from my dissertation The Ontology of Love: A Framework for Re-Indigenizing Community ©2015

When I think of people who have had a profound impact on my personal and professional development and who embody the principles of indigenist leadership, I remember John Mohawk and Harold Gatensby in very high relief. These are two men from very different places in the world. John Mohawk was an intellectual, and elder, and a statesman of the Seneca people of the Haudenosaunnee Nation. Harold Gatensby is a teacher and elder of the Tlingit people around White Horse in the Yukon Territories in Northwestern Canada. John spent his life focused on three main projects: 1) cultural conservation; 2) the academy; and 3) building a foundation for the types of technologies of liberation he often talked about which mainly included the development of local traditional agricultural projects. Harold spends his time on three main projects as well: 1) cultural conservation; 2) environmental organizing (which is fundamentally about cultural conservation for indigenous peoples anyhow); and 3) engaging with the West about how the West can learn to build community and then to lead in ways that can alleviate the suffering of oppressed peoples.

I had the privilege of being mentored by both of these men at very different times in my life. John asked me if I would volunteer to help him build a multimedia course at the State University of New York at Buffalo when I was a student there in the mid 1990s. He had a vision for a full immersion experience for students taking the introductory courses in the Native Studies concentration in the Department of American Studies. John, another student who was a musician, his wife Yvonne Dion-Buffalo, and myself would discuss the content of each class and think about visual and audio aids that would enhance the experience for students. He would organize his course into three sections: 1) storytelling; 2) history; and 3) reflection. He would get up in front of the room and tell stories from the Haudenosaunee tradition about the time in history he would later on discuss from a historical standpoint. The visual and audio aids would play in the background while he told his stories. Then, he would tell the story of the same period in history according to mainstream historical narratives. Lastly, he would invite discussion and reflection about what was heard, seen, and felt.

John operated in this manner in every way. He always was concerned with the experience of those people whom he was there to teach and he sought always to experience a mutuality of dialogue. He was impeccably unassuming, many times to his own detriment in a culture that worships individualistic ideas of leadership.  He often said he was as comfortable and at home in the academy as he was with his own people.  His teaching was designed to engage local indigenous students in the life long journey of walking the worlds of the West with its needs for credentials and that of Haudenosaunee with its needs for dedication to the task of ongoing cultural conservation. Every last effort he made, was dedicated to that task. He was generous and gregarious and he embraced me, although I was raised without a people and thinking of myself as a non-Indian with the same gentle quiet love that he gave every other person I ever saw him interact with.

I remember one day in particular when he invited me to dinner. I arrived at the place and he introduced me to an elderly and very short woman who at that time was wearing a head wrap. “This is Wilma Mankiller, I really wanted you to meet her.” I was aghast. Ms. Mankiller looked me up and down and looked up at him and said, “This one yours too?” And he replied by saying, “Oh Lord, no!  I can’t take credit for this one!” And then let out one of his full-bellied laughs. A laugh that I hear now and again whenever I realize just what a dumb kid I was and how he had no reason whatsoever to want me to meet Ms. Mankiller, except perhaps to just love me. For many years after I left Buffalo, I wondered why he ever bothered to spend time teaching me, to get me to meet people, or to even take a trip home with me one weekend. He had no reason whatsoever except for to just be there for me. He led with his heart on his sleeve and for that reason, I can even now feel rooted enough in myself to write, speak, and think in ways that seem to also benefit others.

Harold Gatensby is a different man altogether from John. Harold went to boarding schools, and then was imprisoned for a good portion of his young adult life. When he came out of jail, Harold began to piece his life together and to reconnect with his people’s ways of being in relationship to nature, to themselves, and to others who are not Tlingit. I met Harold about fifteen years ago in the year 2000. His work pioneered the development of peacemaking circles practices in the field of restorative justice. I asked Harold why he did what he did. He simply said that the women in his community had asked him to go teach circle practice out in the world so that perhaps people who are not Tlingit can begin to change the way they behave and how their institutions behave towards native people. Harold also had no reason to spend time with me or to gift me with anything in particular, yet Harold did. One day, as he and I prepared to host a process, Harold wore a black t-shirt that said “Born Again Human.”  I loved it. I ooed and aaed about it. Eventually, he went and changed and gave me the t-shirt. 

Some years later when I went to visit him at his home on a lakeshore, Harold showed me a thick and dark log that constitutes the top of his doorway. There, he had sketched his name while he was forced to attend boarding school. Harold had no idea that I survived sexual abuse in the context of a church as well. I had no idea that the t-shirt he wore so aptly captured both of our experiences, although they were different. He redefined his sense of personal renewal through his reclaiming of his cultural practices and identity. I did too, through the gifts John and he have given me. Harold’s leadership is marked by a profound sense of humility and also, as Sanchez and Stuckey explain, the task of calling out that which needs to be examined and/or corrected on behalf of the well being of the whole that is a community. 

Harold is motivated by this ethic even when it is detrimental to him personally and professionally. This has been the case as his involvement with the restorative justice field has waned as a result of the way in which people have irresponsibly and grossly appropriated circle practices and fail to honor the invitation to create institutional practices in the justice system that are accountable to the communities they impact. At the precise time when restorative justice as a movement seems to be reaching its apex, trailblazers like Harold are invisible. This is so because as circles process becomes increasingly commodified, it is the White judge from the Yukon territories that wrote the first book and built the first certification program that gets all the accolades and recognition. Harold, who still fishes with a net in the lake; who then sorts the fish and guts them; who takes the guts and offers them to the eagles who come stand on top of the pines waiting for their offering as he does so on the beach; who then takes the best cuts and rides around the lake dropping them off to the elders and the single mothers first; who then takes the leftovers and freezes them for his own family; this Harold, has no place in that conversation in large part because of how he leads.

I am part of both John and Harold’s legacy in the form of a queer native-identified Central American woman immigrant. Their signatures on my soul show up in the way in which I understand my part in the lives of not just indigenous communities but rather in the world community. One day as I raged about some ridiculously irrelevant political thing in John’s little office, he looked at me and said, “Just because you’re in something, doesn’t mean you’re from it.” I looked at him like I had no idea what he was talking about. I did not understand him. Then he said, “Where are you from?” I said, “I don’t know.” Then he said, “Go find out.” 

I came back to the city then and found out I was not from here. I went to the queer community and found out I was not from there. I went to the Latin@s and saw that I was different. I went to the Central Americans and found out I was not of them either. I went to the feminists, no luck. I realized after many years and after John passed away that I simply have the choice to conserve the ways of indigenous people because at their core is the acceptance of the fact that I am just from here, this planet. That as such, it is my responsibility to make sure it is here for others who are coming after I go.  That as such, I have the privilege of being aligned with such a people. That as such, I have the obligation to keep reminding myself and others that this thing we are in, this culture, is not eternal and that as such it is mutable. That as such, change is not only possible but it is inevitable.

Indigenist leadership operates at the nanopolitical level through the enactment of love politics. It is based on the intellectual contributions of collaborative intellectuals and it is critical to the conservation and development of iterations of community and organizational structures that are alternatives to the way in which the West creates them. Its outcomes can be intangible as in the case of Harold’s influence on me or his work in building community, or practical as in the case of John’s classroom designs and traditional agricultural models. It is a critical ontological intervention from which change happens.