Messengers of the Wind

Messengers of the Wind

by Jane Katz
Messengers of the Wind

Messengers of the Wind

by Jane Katz

eBook

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Overview

"Messengers of the Wind goes beyond the autobiographies of everyday women. These are women who have long been an invisible part of American culture. Their stories are haunting, frightening, encouraging, and courageous. . . . Katz is a faithful guide."
--The Minnesota Daily
In Messengers of the Wind, Native American women, old and young, from a variety of tribal groups, speak with eloquence and passion about their experience on the land and in urban areas; about their work as artists, activists, and healers; as grandmothers, mothers, and daughters; as modern women with a link to the past. And as each woman, renowned and obscure, tells her remarkable personal story, it is clear that each has tapped into the power that comes from within and has reached back into a history that brings with it courage and hope.
" 'Giving energy to Mother Earth' -- Yes. That is our duty as women, as Natives, and as human beings. Messengers of the Wind is a way of doing just that. It is not a dance, feet patting our mother, but it is an offering, the voices of the women sent to comfort her. Thank-you, Jane Katz, for your offering. It is a special and much-needed gift."
--Paula Gunn Allen
Author of Voice of the Turtle
"COMPELLING. . . INTIMATE."
--The Cleveland Plain Dealer
"A RICH COLLECTION OF PERSONAL STORIES. . .REWARDING. . . These are powerful women with important stories to tell."
--Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307557926
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 06/24/2009
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 336
File size: 5 MB

About the Author

Jane Katz is an oral historian, artist, and editor of several multicultural anthologies including Messengers of the Wind: Native American Women Tell Their Life Stories. She studied drawing and watercolor at Minnetonka Art Center and Edina Art Center. Katz resides in Minnesota.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
 
This book records the voices of women I encountered as I followed the many diverse but interconnecting paths Native American women walk today. Equipped with a tape recorder and a rental car, a number of years ago I began traveling down the city streets and back roads of First Nations communities hoping to gain some insight into the challenges and choices facing indigenous women.
 
I had no conception of the enormity of the subject, or of the pitfalls I would encounter as an outsider venturing into “another country.” Fortunately guides appeared along the way. No, they were not wise women of the woods imparting mystical messages, but real Native women willing to illuminate aspects of their lives and share their personal stories.
 
In a dimly-lit pub in the midst of an urban reservation in Washington State, Ramona Bennett, former chairwoman of the Puyallup Tribe, taught me a history lesson:
 
When white people came here, they pointed up at the Mother Mountain [Mount Rainier] and said, “Who owns that?” And the Indians cracked up—what a funny idea, to own a mountain! For us, the Mother Mountain is for everyone. It brings fresh water, it’s where our river comes from.… It’s sacred. Then the white people wrote up title to the mountain, they cut roads and put ski slopes on it.… It’s like putting a recreation center on the Virgin Mary’s breast.
 
Bennett recounted the theft of land from her forebears. She spoke of Indians locked out of the job market because of institutional racism. She showed me the graves of babies who died because of malnutrition. She spoke of children virtually kidnapped and sent to orphanages or boarding schools that separated them from family and tribe, leaving them culturally bereft. These were not nightmare scenarios, they were the stories of real people trying to survive in a society that wanted them to disappear.
 
On a Dakota reservation in Minnesota, Rose Bluestone talked about her ancestors, who, like the Puyallup, had been deprived of land and livelihood and felt betrayed by whites. For their part in the U.S./Dakota Conflict, they were forcibly removed to a concentration camp environment. Rose Bluestone had come to terms with personal tragedy, sustained by the power of prayer. She derived strength from her heritage.
 
Other women reflected on episodes in tribal history that they perceived as attempted genocide: the Spanish assaults on the life and culture of the Pueblos, the forced removal of the Cherokee known as “The Trail of Tears,” the massacre of hundreds of unarmed Lakota at Wounded Knee. Their accounts are not, however, mere litanies of loss; they attest to a people’s ability to surmount huge obstacles and endure.
 
I talked with mixed-blood women who recalled growing up on the margin with the sense that they were invisible, that they didn’t belong in either Indian or white society. To fill the empty places in their lives, they joined with other Native people in social service, art, and ceremony, forms of ritual that heal. Their stories affirm human potential. These women are re-creating community. They are remaking their world.
 
I visited women in traditional, relatively cohesive communities that have managed to hold on to land and culture. In the Northwest, Lummi weaver Fran James showed me the baskets she weaves just as her ancestors did generations ago and proudly modeled a dress woven from cedar-bark strips. In Taos Pueblo, Southwest arts specialist Soge Track spoke of dealing with “the western mind” in town, then returning to her adobe village to dance, giving energy to Mother Earth. Said Soge Track, “We have children growing up here at the pueblo who follow our life way.”
 
Whether they remain within reservation borders or move beyond them, Native people often find it hard to uphold their time-honored traditions. The contemporary Native woman may find herself navigating in unfamiliar waters without channel markers, forced to make her own way in the world. Some adapt and build bridges between worlds. They come to see traditions as living and breathing entities that can be molded to fit the times. Nevertheless, many Native Americans have been torn apart by value and identity conflicts.
 
Listening to the voices of women reflecting divergent views and lifestyles, I found myself confronting seemingly endless contradictions. Why is it that Indian and Native Alaskan women have been viewed by the larger society as passive when in fact they often play major roles within their communities and on the national scene? Why is it that indigenous people with deep roots in this land often feel like exiles? Why do some tribal members put their lives on the line to oppose gaming and the appropriation of sacred lands by government and industry, while others sanction these practices? I asked questions, but there were no simple answers.
 
Gradually I became aware that Native Americans possess a worldview quite different from that of Euramericans. Said Standing Rock Sioux scholar Flo Wiger, “We not only have a different value system; we inhabit a different universe. We don’t adhere to rigid standards of right and wrong. Let’s face it, on our reservations, we haven’t had jobs, we haven’t had choices. We will do whatever we have to do to survive.”1 I realized that what seems contradictory to the outsider may make some sense when viewed against the backdrop of Indian history and experience.
 
Unraveling that complex web of history and experience was a task I was not prepared for by background or training. I grew up in New York City virtually insulated from people of color. In the 1960s I moved to Minneapolis and taught English. I began exploring ethnic cultures and created a black studies course. I left teaching for motherhood. With my children I attended a Native American powwow. After the dancing, an Ojibway elder named Rose Mary Barstow spoke of her journey from tribal circle to Catholic school. She seemed gifted with total recall as she captured the sights, the sounds, and even the voices of her childhood world in vivid detail, making it live. I was in her power.
 
I included Rose Mary Barstow’s account in my 1977 anthology, I Am the Fire of Time: The Voices of Native American Women, in which American Indian and Inuit women gave their perspectives on tribal and contemporary life in poetry, prose excerpts, and brief interviews. Native women told me the book echoed their experiences. They gave it to their mothers and grandmothers. One said the book gave her the courage to come out of the closet as a writer.
 
Moving on to other projects, I collected the life stories of Native Americans in the arts, Holocaust survivors, and refugee artists from many nations. Whether I was talking to a Navajo weaver, a writer who had survived Hitler’s death camps, or a painter-turned-freedom-fighter from the hills of Afghanistan, I observed a common obsession: those who had lost their homeland turned to art and storytelling as a way of preserving and passing on their heritage.
 
The subject of Native American women still called to me, and in 1988, I began a new book focusing on the life stories of Native women. At a dinner party someone asked, “What is the premise of your book?” I replied, “I’m interested in cultural survival, but I don’t begin with a hypothesis and then look for data; the knowledge and concerns of Native women will determine the direction of the book.” For background I read books on tribal history, I read Indian magazines and newspapers, but I kept the focus on women’s personal testimonies, for these put a human face on history. As each woman shared her tribal legacy and communal values, she was in her way celebrating cultural survival.
 
To gain a sense of the many dimensions of this subject, I looked at the available literature on Native American women. Indigenous communities had been described and dissected by white men—explorers, traders, missionaries, and scholars—whose observations sometimes revealed more about their own cultural biases than about Native people. Misperceptions of Indian women were rampant because they were held up to the patriarchal model. Euramericans expected men to be the providers and defenders of the family while women were supposed to be adjuncts to their husbands, dependent and frail. Among the affluent, those who did manual labor had inferior status. Even an Ojibway Indian turned Christian missionary viewed his own people through that distorted lens. Reverend Peter Jones wrote in the mid-nineteenth century:
 
“The Indian men look upon their women as an inferior race of beings, created for their use and convenience. They therefore tend to treat them as menials, and impose on them all the drudgeries of a savage life … all the hard work falls upon the women, so that it may be truly said of them that they are the slaves of their husbands.”
 
White observers rarely knew Native languages and thus remained outsiders. They did not ask Indian women how they perceived their own status. In fact Native women did work hard, but labor is not necessarily servitude; most were partners with men in the business of survival.
 

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