A Letter to Nontribal Folks
By Sayra Pinto
Over the past four months I have had the privilege of hosting a series of dialogues between people from indigenous communities in the US, Guatemala and Mexico and non-tribal people of color. We have come together via Zoom across three countries and two languages to discover what happens when we connect across the very precise fracturing the settler colonial project has inflicted on tribal and nontribal communities.
The experience has been intense, eye opening, clarifying, challenging, transformative and also the source of a deep silence within me. This silence is broken in the presence of colonial settler impulses showing up from within the non tribal group, people of color who may identify as indigenous and who do not embody tribal ways of being, understanding of the world, and building community.
Beyond the dialogues and as my relationship with tribal folks deepens, a horrific landscape of cultural appropriation reveals itself where the perpetrators are people of color. These folks, be it from innocence, desperation and also a grasping for certainty, demonstrate a sense of entitlement to indigenous practices and knowledge, ceremonies, ways of being, and even of identity. It feels important to begin to language and map out that appropriative entitlement, to bring attention to it and to complicate the idea of BIPOC, another flattening of collective nonwhite identities that defaults into the visibilization of some groups and an intensified invisibilization of that which is indigenous.
There are a variety of types of appropriators of color: 1) LatinX people claiming indigeneity without sustained connection with federally or state recognized tribal communities; 2) indigenous individuals from here that were not raised by their communities and have not built intimate relationships over time with people from their particular tribes or other tribes; 3) people of color pretending to be Native American taking up space that rightfully politically, culturally, intellectually and spiritually belongs to actual Native Americans; and 4) Black folks claiming indigeneity without relationship to tribal communities where they live or anywhere else.
I also do not believe that there is any single definition of indigenous and so this is not intended to be prescriptive or controlling of a particular identity.
However, I am also not saying it is a free for all when it comes to this kind of claiming, especially when there are economic, political, cultural and spiritual implications to the claiming that is going on. And to be clear, I do consider myself an indigenous person without a clearly defined tribal connection or affiliation in Honduras, the place where I was born.
There are some key impulses that fuel the cultural appropriation of indigenous ways of being, seeing the world and building community. These impulses come from the settler colonial project. They are:
1. Accessing something of value without permission from the people to whom that something belongs because doing so makes someone feel better;
2. Claiming belonging to a tribe because it is difficult to own one’s belonging in the settler colonial project;
3. Practicing indigenous ways because it makes someone feel special and more important than others;
4. Running towards indigeneity out of a sense of not belonging anywhere; and
5. Feeling a right to something that belongs to indigenous peoples because somehow one or two individuals have said someone could have that thing.
There are examples that come to mind for each of these five impulses.
“...But it feels so good and so right.”
Many people currently doing circles work in the restorative, transformative and healing justice spaces feel entitled to the circles themselves because they see immense value to the people they are about when they are implemented. I have watched many federally and state recognized tribal members object to the use of the process only to be met with rationalizations that serve to make it OK for non indigenous people to wield control and hold those processes for communities of color. In my estimation, this is not OK.
Indigenous peoples connected to the land they come from should have a moral and ethical role, and a protagonist role, in creating opportunities for those processes to be held. Their voices and ways of thinking should feature in a central manner in the creation of those spaces. In the end, circles are about communities. They cannot flourish in the hands of individuals. They should emerge first from indigenous communities from the lands where they exist or where there is a desire for them to exist and the rest of us should assist at the request of First Nations members.
The right role for non tribal indigenous peoples is to be for and about the well being of tribal communities in connection with our own work on our own communities. It means we have to be OK with being exactly who we are, where we are, and who we are with. The past is not coming back, the future is the result of our present, and in the present time we can model solidarity with tribal nations and we can bring our non tribal communities closer to health and well being by working with them communities to get them there.
“My biology tells me I’m Native American, so I’m Native American…”
I have run into several instances of people claiming belonging to a tribe because they cannot tolerate being part of the settler colonial project. Sometimes, folks who operate from that place build an entire alternative reality that they must defend at all costs even at the expense of actual indigenous people.
For example, currently, we are managing being harassed by someone who is recognized as a legitimate Native American trainer by non-indigenous people in the domestic violence and restorative justice spaces and is not recognized by ancestral and historically rooted and bound Native American communities themselves. Over the years, this individual has claimed multiple tribal identities, none of which reflect her current claim. She has caused a lot of harm in the various processes she has been enfolded into by Native American communities that have given her access as a result of federal agency endorsements. And personally, she harassed and verbally attacked me for the duration of a year while I was working in the domestic violence space in Massachusetts.
The harassment stems from our efforts to intervene in the domestic violence and restorative justice spaces to address what we understand to be rampant cultural appropriation. A number of us including two Native-led organizations (one in Wind River Reservation and one in Aquinnah), my LLC, and one educational institution are preparing to present two case studies highlighting instances of harm done in indigenous communities by restorative justice practitioners. After having done significant harm to tribal members on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, this person reached out to me via the Moon Jaguar Strategies website as an attempt to intervene in our presentation.
Given the history between myself and this person, I could not believe she would reach out to me in this way. This message felt to me as a desperate attempt to influence the stories my two co-presenters will tell based on this person’s fear of being exposed as an illegitimate spokesperson for the regional tribes and for indigenous peoples. Here is a screenshot of the email sent to me a few days ago:
I forwarded the email to my three co-presenters and some other members of my immediate community. Their response was the same across the board: “What card?”
I responded in the following way:
And so two days later, one of my co-presenters received a peculiar call from the fine folks organizing the conference where we will be presenting both case studies. They told her that they had received several calls from this same individual asking them to cancel our presentation or else she would not be attending the conference. As we discussed this attempt to interrupt our presentation, we noticed a familiar pattern of perpetrators who work to gaslight, intimidate and control their victims’ conversations and relationships. We predicted that this person would further escalate the situation.
Three days later, I woke up to a flurry of emails from folks at Wind River and the state coalition there. This human being had approached my other co-presenter’s place of work to continue to state her claim to Native American legitimacy and expressed that she hoped our presentation would not be about her. As dynamics would have it, when she attacked me, she did so in the context of my place of employment in a serious attempt to discredit me to my colleagues and to take control of the initiative I had arduously begun in my own community.
In the wake of her horrible attacks of my personhood, I simply walked away and chose to let it go. I can no longer let this go. She is now harming people on their own ancestral lands who already carry the massive responsibility of response to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s crisis on top of their already existing tribal responsibilities and collective healing journeys. And she is doing so in an underhanded way that is a typical White supremacist maneuver to have people perceived to have power (conference organizers and employer) over others (in this case, my co-presenters) simply use their power to limit access and silence their voices.
This type of behavior is not intended to benefit or support indigenous communities. This behavior is intended to silence indigenous women and to create a general sense of fear as they make the effort to speak for themselves about deep experiences of harm they have endured. This person is displaying typical abusive gaslighting behavior and is seeking to gain control of a perceived narrative that has not even been articulated yet. I wish I could say that this person’s behavior is uniquely hers. I cannot. The pattern is such that tribal communities are fending off multiple ongoing efforts to appropriate ceremonial practices, circles, and pretty much anything that is cultural.
Just in the last two months, my friends in various tribal communities have had to manage this same person, individual non tribal people involved in domestic violence and sexual assault situations, non tribal people showing up on reservation land and trying to leverage power and access by talking about how much access they have to funding in large population centers, non tribal folks setting up ceremonies appropriated from them to amass power and non tribal followings without invitation or permission, circles being implemented in their schools without tribal consent, restorative justice practitioners showing up to do circles trainings in environments that directly impact tribal communities, etc. These enactments of power are not neutral and they are exhausting to manage.
“I am the only one…”
I have also been watching a direct link between the practice of indigenous ways of being, seeing and doing and some people’s sense of personal specialness. Somehow having access lifts individuals into a type of separate and special category to themselves and sometimes others. The person also falls under this category. So do a bunch of people of color I have known throughout the years. Doing circles, lodges, Sundance and ceremonies and then drawing from those practices to ground their identities while not understanding that in traditional environments people have to earn the right to play certain roles.
They mistake the enactment of ceremonial behaviors as holding the same impact and significance as enactments of ceremonies in the historical, linguistic, cultural and relational context of the actual communities from which they emerged. I believe that there are profound differences there and that the untrained nontribal non indigenous view cannot pinpoint or perceive those differences. The need to be unique, to stand out, to be special, is a deep seated deficit response to a familiar cultural milieu that devalues individual human beings. The presence of that energy is a dead giveaway of not only not being culturally indigenous but also of having been imprinted by the settler colonial culture that is the mainstream culture in this society.
The irony here is that indeed we intend to discuss this person’s abuse of trust and power at Wind River without ever revealing her identity. There is a video recording of the presentation we will do in San Francisco in April where she is not mentioned by name or affiliation. She outed herself as the object of study because of her need to snuff out my sisters’ voices to desperately preserve her fundamentally fictitious story.
“I just want to belong”
Then there are those of us for whom this culture we live in has demanded that we be stripped of our ancestral lineages, languages, world views, historical narratives, and cultural and community ways. We have been beaten into invisibility and sometimes literally we inhabit the spaces in between everyone else’s identities. Take LatinX for example, as an identity. It is a bucket that has many complexities in it. So many, in fact, that very few, if any of us, are actually LatinX, whatever that is to begin with.
It is a bucket that holds all the unresolved grief, rage, loss, and criminal genocidal histories of this land. It is easy to feel as if we are from nowhere even though we stand on the land we are from. That is an awful feeling. Many of us want to feel like we are at home. We want to be home. In attempting desperately to tend to such disheartening and difficult feelings, we rush to make claims about what we think are more legitimate or historically true identities. Many of us now say that we are indigenous, and biologically we may be.
On the other hand, biology by way of DNA classification is not an indigenous thing. And so we are latching on to a non indigenous creation to ascertain our indigeneity. Now, how does that work? It doesn’t. Native American communities have struggled and survived together. There are lineages, familiarities, ways of being that are unique to their experience and that are different from those of us from LatinX communities. We have our experiences too and we also have our own crucibles. Specifically related to our need to be in solidarity to indigenous communities in Latin America and here as well, especially immigrants running from Central America and Mexico who are indigenous there and here.
All this to say that we carry a double obligation of solidarity to indigenous communities in Latin America and also in the United States. Let those relationships of solidarity serve to help us have a sense of home without the need to adopt language in the absence of a deep loving practice of showing up to fight, stand for, support, fund, and accompany their paths of struggle and liberation. No one needs to be indigenous to show up in a way that is meaningful and supportive. I wish I ran into solidarity practitioners with the same frequency I run into people of color claiming indigeneity without a practice of solidarity.
“...I was trained by two Tlingit elders…”
Lastly, are the people who are people of color and who may have met one or two Native Americans who taught them how to do ceremony and now feel entitled to enter Native American spaces and offended when they are not allowed in because of their relationship with one or two individuals. Individuals do not make a nation, or a community. The illusion of an entitlement to access because of such an individualized experience can only happen in the presence of the prevalence of the idea of the special individual as superior.
Communities have the right to choose who they allow into their collective intimate spaces. Individuals who have been taught ceremonies by individual Native Americans have not been enfolded by entire communities and tribes no matter how important their individual teachers may be. Also what may work in the Plains, may not work in the Northeast.
Native Americans are super diverse and their communities have a right to determine who belongs to them and who doesn’t, who worships with them and who doesn’t, who lives with them and who doesn’t. Anyone feeling entitled to their spaces or somehow offended because communities use their hard won power to self determine needs to understand that their resentment and resistance of that autonomy is the most salient expression of settler colonial values that are premised on the need for indigenous communities to acquiesce and allow themselves to be dominated. All I can say is that we are living in a different time when thankfully indigenous communities are powerfully tending to themselves and grappling with the immense pain and violation of physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual and political boundaries that is normalized in mainstream culture. May people like me be kept out in favor of communities’ self determination, autonomy, and self care.
Folks may be taught ceremonies by individuals who are Native American and they may even be given permission to practice these ceremonies as individuals. That connection between themselves and their teachers does not translate into an automatic enfolding into the teachers’ communities or into other indigenous communities. Invitation and permission are critically important. The invitations and permissions granted are immense honors that should not be commodified or leveraged.
These are intimate and loving enactments of community life that are so sacred they should hardly be mentioned at all outside of their appropriate context. It is beyond me why anyone should be hurt or offended when they are told “No” when attempting to bring ceremonies to indigenous spaces without invitation or permission, but I’ve heard about people who are offended and hurt. They feel as though they are made invisible. It is ironic. In fact, they are invisibilizing the very people they are claiming as the source of rejection.
Fundamentally these dynamics are not about racial identities but rather the encounter of tribal and nontribal ways of being.Individuals are the source of their own importance. For the tribal, what is important is the well being of the whole of a community and the world in which that community operates.It is unthinkable to assume the role of ceremonialist without a community invitation or request, and without the support that comes from a community that has asked one of their loved ones to take on that challenging role.
For the nontribal it is unthinkable to be so tied to a community that you do not act on your own behalf. And yet, the core of indigenous identity rests on the capacity to surrender personal needs on behalf of community interests and to trust that the community will tend to you always, no matter what. This has nothing to do with biology. It has everything to do with who one loves and who loves us back. How we think of others when we think of ourselves and how we know the limits of our awareness in relationship to the unknown, what is nonhuman and what is sacred.
How to engage properly
For those of us on the nontribal side of things, indigenous and nonindigenous, here are a few guidelines for engagement that I hope you find supportive:
1. Be clear about your motivations to engage tribal communities. Let it be out of love; not curiosity, a need to belong, or learning about indigenous people. Let it be out of a true spirit of solidarity, to show up and support what they are trying to build, to be a resource, a supporter, a source of love.
2. Respond to invitation, not your own personal ambitions. No one likes an uninvited guest to move into the living room and feel like they can be at dinner every day uninvited. If the invitation does not come, don’t force it. It’s supposed to be an invitation. If you get your feelings hurt because you are not invited, that is yours to deal with.
3. Love yourself even if you don’t know where you come from. Love yourself when you feel jealous of tribal people’s certainty about where they come from. Love yourself when you find yourself trying to pretend that somehow you are close and intimate when you know it’s too soon to be that close and intimate. Love yourself when you find yourself the focus of attention of other non tribal people because they are taken with your relationships with tribal folks. That is a seductive and insidious occurrence that takes you away from your grounded loving of these communities. The exoticization of indigenous people is another form of dehumanization. People are people, and tribal people are people who remain connected to their roots. The tribal is endangered in this world, anywhere in this world. Exoticizing tribal folks is a form of genocide. Do not partake.
4. Be useful. I don’t mean let yourself be exploited. I mean be useful to the paths and structures tribal people are trying to build. Especially when it comes to the practice of circles, we should be lifting up those tribal folks who want to do this work and who want to engage mainstream communities. That is not an easy task. At no point should non tribal people be calling attention to their offerings over those of tribal folks. The seat of cultural appropriation is in the connection between circles and peoples’ livelihoods. That’s the rub of capitalist theft for the purposes of personal gain. Even if you have a calling from a spiritual place to do this work, surrender it unless you are invited. If you are invited, show up within the parameters of the invitation.
Please do not misunderstand what I am saying, I am not saying to give up your power. On the contrary, I am saying use your power wisely and on behalf of tribal folks. Your curiosities, personal needs for belonging, and your exoticizing gaze are not central or important to tribal communities. Why should they simply give to anyone? Consider yourself lucky to be in the presence of the tribal and act accordingly.
The path of connecting to tribal communities is a sacred path. It is a blessing to be on that path. My life today is only possible because of the many gifts I have received while on that path. Gifts of love, recognition, intimacy, heart break, loss, reconstitution of my brain, reconstitution of my understanding of what to do in this life, how to think, how to love properly. I have been made a human through this path. It is a path of deep joy, silence, service, and forgiveness. It is a transformative path. Without this journey, all the mistakes, the gleanings and awarenesses, my life would be a half lived life. This is a worthwhile path that needs to be traveled with rigor and humility.
Returning to right relationship with the sacred demands a return to tribal values, and yet that intent alone does not make us tribal. The wake of one’s life determines what we have stood for, and that determination far exceeds the reach of the individual walking said path. In the end, the people we touch, the communities we love, will speak to the true story of the value of one’s life. An individual cannot control that, no matter how hard one may try.
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