"as a shem": balance in the protection of native homelands

“Our homeland is the place with the bones of our ancestors. It’s what we’re made of. The spirits have always been here – we know because of both archaeological evidence and our oral histories.”

How do we protect our homeland? Mr. Lozar taught us our first Salish word: as a shem, meaning balance. This was a crucial concept of the tribes. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes (CSKT), combining Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreille peoples, let balance guide their life, and naturally then, their approach to protecting their home ranges.

The balance is between traditional and modern methods. Traditionally, they protect their homeland through prayers, ceremonies, and family. In the CSKT, successive generations live together in large extended families and knitting together so closely helps sustain community values and the metaphysical spaces of their homeland. When members in the tribes do something wrong, their extended families are involved in their pronouncements and rehabilitation processes, and the whole tribe works like a macro extended family to reintegrate offenders into the community. The way I interpreted this way, these measures work to protect the integrity, materiality, and bodies of their homeland.

On the topic of criminal justice, Mr. Lozar raised the statistic that while Natives were 12% the population of America, they constituted 47% of the incarcerated. This decidedly disproportionate ratio indicated that something was helter-skelter with the way the American justice system trialled and prejudged Natives. In Native tradition, instead, sweat lodges were used. This was, physically, a small tent lined with buffalo skin, heated rocks in the heart of the lodge, doused with water; spiritually, it was a time of reflection and connection to ancestors and the land. Sometimes, it got so hot that to make it more bearable, you lay on the ground, your skin pressed against the earth that birthed it; sometimes you would even dig a little into the ground and cup the soil in your hands, feeling the cool respite before placing it on your face to breathe a little easier.

In that moment, you learn to cherish a breath of cool air.

Mr. Lozar said, the rate of recidivism in the Native legislation is very low. I imagine, when you come to put your heart to the earth…you get ‘hearth’, a place where you tend, stoke, and revive smothering embers. In the poem “Hearth-life” by Annabelle Fuller, she calls it a “kiln womb”, and the same imagery of rebirth is evoked. You recall your ancestors and ties to the land, and in so doing, you give life to them again. Using her poem’s final words, you “rest to bind with wizened earth” – a powerful and faithful description of someone lying with their chest to the soil.

This image repeats itself when Mr. Lozar told us a heartbreaking yet heart-healing story of his daughter’s death. When she died, he felt the most incredible pain in his heart. He walked to a sacred land in the mountains, took off his clothes, and laid down. Chest to the soil. At rest. “This catalysed healing and as a shem – balance.” The balance came from the incredible joy the tribes experience as when people die and are returned to Mother Earth. That’s why wakes are celebrations. The CSKT have circles everywhere, in their architecture, design, dances (one of their celebrations, the jump dance, sees even 90-year-old elders jumping and dancing away in a circle), because they think of everything in a circle. Death, then, is no finality nor conclusion; it is only part of a circle, the circle of life.

Chieftains are another traditional method used to protect their homeland. Chiefs have different areas of expertise which form their spheres of leadership, e.g. a chief for hunting, one for oratorical skills. But the tribes knew, they recognised that warfare had changed. “We don’t fight with bows and arrows anymore. Instead, we fight with documents.” And so the tribes, adaptable and resilient as they are, fostered a generation of college-educated hydrologists, soil scientists, air quality experts. The council tries to give out scholarships to tribal members to encourage them to pursue higher education and technical learning so they have the know-how to help the tribes protect their environment. They protect the land in legal disputes, they protect the physical landscape and lives on it through scientific research, they find ways to protect their homeland in line with as a shem.

But why do they need protection? The last thing Mr. Lozar said to anyone from our group was to me. I asked him why there were signs stuck in the soil outside the People’s Center, and he said these were the missing Native peoples. They tried to get the non-Natives to do something about it, but no one would help. “Why have they gone missing?” As the Fellows on my van shouted at me to load up in the backseat, he said, “I’m not sure, but most likely human trafficking. Drugs, alcohol are very prevalent and it’s very easy to just take them–”

The clue to Native peoples’ present situation is in their past. The traumatic history of Native decimation isn’t something I can presume to explain well. I anger over it, I feel injustice and sorrow and pain, and I am but a Singaporean living thousands of miles away. But I know that the Natives were attacked physically, emotionally, spiritually. Their land, their life source, was taken from them forcefully. They were forced to speak only English and use of Native languages was punished – given the strong oral tradition of Native peoples and lack of a written script prior to American invasion, this completely alienated them from familiar ways of life, social bonds, and their identity – essential to developing a healthy psyche. Is there any wonder why the alcohol use of Native populations is so high, given the wholly damaging and horrifying trauma inflicted on them for decades?

Bison roaming Montana and nearby states were decimated, in a shockingly abusive program to deprive the Native peoples of their food source. When I saw the unpardonably horrifying photo called “Where the Buffalo No Longer Roamed”, I understood it as Americans going crazy for the thrill of the kill and decimating bison populations just for the sake of it. When I learnt from Dr. Len and his student Louise in our car ride up Going-to-the-Sun Road that they did it to deprive Natives of their food source, my stomach twisted with abject disgust at what some of our fellow humans can do. Mr. Lozar said that tens of millions of bison become seven.

The human species is more terrifying than any apex predator in the wild.

Make no mistake, the colonisers are contemptible f***ers. But the Salish nursed bison populations back to health. They took the seven, protected them, buttressed their food sources, and got their populations back to healthy levels, reviving six out of 8 bison home bases. Dr. Len and Louise told me that connecting these home bases is one of their key projects now, and will significantly expand bison range in the northwest. They have also developed written scripts that are prominently displayed on signs within the reservation and languages are experiencing a revival in schools on the reservation. Mr. Lozar said, when shit hit the fan, many of them took their practices and beliefs underground, and kept them alive that way. So they couldn’t have celebrations or express their respect and profound love for the land openly, but whatever small actions they could do to retain connection to the land they did. And the good thing about nature is that you can find it anywhere : ) So they went, underfoot, a cloud of rootlets taking hold.

At the end of our session, Mr. Lozar said a prayer for us, and we bowed our heads, not understanding the phonetics emanating from his lips, but understanding that these were some very powerful and genuine words uttered on our behalf. Over the course of the next few weeks, I would learn more about the Natives, no longer in a dedicated way of sessions on the Flathead Reservation, but through informal conversations (e.g. with Louise) or museums we explored in our own time (i.e. the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, where an extremely chance and serendipitous encounter with a security guard led to a brimming conversation I will share in a separate post, as well as the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, where I learnt that Native Americans were also taken as slaves (!) and formed idiosyncratic relations with the African-Americans on the plantations). It felt like a big puzzle that I was slowly collecting small pieces to – but a puzzle I know I will never finish, because every piece I collect comes with about a hundred more pieces to find.

I do wish to find out more about how Native youth feel, however. When we went to Arlee High School, Lily and I tried our best to sustain a conversation with two students to little avail, but I asked them how they felt about Native history. They were honest and said they felt ambivalent, that maybe they were being lied to, and the facts distorted. Another caveat: Mr. Lozar reminded us that there are 556 tribes recognised by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and many more not even listed. Their languages, traditions, and beliefs all vary, and it would be inaccurate to group them all under “Native” as I did in this post for the purposes of providing a summary of broad trends. Ultimately, my experience learning about the Native Americans has been to always remember I will never understand the full picture, but I can seek out as much information as possible on a group that has been silenced for a long time, express solidarity, and remain respectful and humble in attempts to learn more.

(3 September 2019)

Mr. Steve Lozar, former Tribal Education Director and former three-term Tribal Councilman. He owns Montana's oldest continuously operating silk screen printing business and has been married 45 years to his wife Keryl.

An exchange with Arlee High School students! We shared about Southeast Asia with a view to environmental problems, while they shared about projects they were implementing or developing in school.