How to Survive Horrible Things Part 3: Ceremonial Freedoms
Native Californians today are a powerful force. They are paddling a river they have recently liberated from multiple dams, recovering vast parcels of stolen Tribal lands and multiple languages, and transforming their relationships with the state itself. They are making schools finally teach children the truth about their history, and proudly wearing regalia formerly banned in graduations. And they are doing it in California, where the invasion of white settlers eradicated 95% of their ancestors not long ago. Given these and other extraordinary Native achievements, what might California DSA members learn from our Native neighbors about how to harness the power to survive -- and overcome -- horrible things?
The Slaughters Ongoing
Americans are facing a lot of death right now. The president signed into law a bill projected to kill more than 51,000 people annually through its impacts to federal health care programs alone, and our weapons have been used to slaughter more than 57,000 Gazans. These are the very definition of horrible things.
Our soil in California is hardly new to bloodstain. The scale of the genocides against Native Californians since the arrival of Spanish missionaries is difficult to contemplate. From mass rapes and child abductions to the state-funded scalpings, murders, enslavement, and comprehensive land theft, nearly every settler, through action or inaction, was in some way complicit. Efforts to eradicate Native people and their lifeways continued for many decades, including through multiple treaty violations and betrayals, and the forced enrollment of children in the deadly Indian boarding school system.
The effects of these dire public policies continue to linger. Recent research indicates being "American Indian or Alaska Native" still costs a person, on average, 6.5 years of life.
Tribal people fought from the beginning against their total erasure, and they are still fighting today. Native studies scholar Gerald Vizenor defines "survivance" as "an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion" and "stories that renounce dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry."
Ceremony as Praxis
We sat down to discuss this question of surviving horrible things -- survivance -- with Gregg Castro, who enjoys and engages deeply with his own t'rowt'raahl Salinan, and rumsen & ramaytush Ohlone ancestry. Castro holds leadership roles in multiple Tribal, cultural and historical entities advancing Native Californian survivance, including the California Indian History Curriculum Coalition, California Indian Conference, and Society for California Archaeology’s Native American Programs Committee. He is an energetic man with a long ponytail who at one point in our conversation whipped out a deer hoof rattle to shake at our Zoom screen with a twinkle in his bright eyes. He brought an infectious optimism to our conversation, and in spite of our subject, we left feeling uplifted and hopeful.
How does one survive a genocide? Not only physically, but culturally and spiritually? We're both disabled and concerned about what fascists may try to do to us, but as white people, genocide isn't the reason why.
As we talked with Castro, the word that he kept using when answering our many, uncomfortably existential questions was: “ceremony.” “Those that have managed to trudge on have done it because they remembered who they were and remembered the rituals, the ceremonies, that connected them to who they were and where they came from," he said. “The purpose of ceremony," he told us, "is really a prayer. And prayer is to constantly renew and replenish and strengthen our relationship to ourselves, to each other, and the place we came from.” This kind of ceremony connects to the past, to a shared culture, and to a hopeful future.
It would be mighty white of us to appropriate either Castro’s or any other Native ceremony, so we asked uncomfortably about that, too. He readily stressed a critical point: “We can give you a ceremony; we can’t give you your ceremony.”
Ceremony here is a form of embodied praxis. In her book We Are Dancing For You: Native Feminisms & the Revitalization of Women's Coming-of-Age Ceremonies (University of Washington Press 2018) Hupa scholar and Tribal member Cutcha Risling Baldy sets out to describe the successful effort to "(re)write," "(re)right," and "(re)rite" Native feminisms through the revival of a dormant, multi-day Hupa ceremony, known in English as the "Flower Dance". It celebrates girls' first menses and their honored and powerful new status as women. The physically rigorous ceremony is rich in dancing and other forms of physical embodiment (running, swimming, practiced stillness); abundant singing, humor, joy and storytelling; and deep and intricate community bonds, engaging participants in many activities from lengthy preparation through the several days and nights of the ceremony itself.
Ceremonies like this were deliberately targeted during the genocidal terror, which was particularly gruesome in northwestern California, where the Hupa have lived from time immemorial. Women were special targets. "Attempts to subvert the roles and place of Native women were built into settler colonial policies because Native women, who at one time exercised autonomy in Native societies, represented a threat to the settler colonial state and settler colonial societal organization," Risling Baldy writes. Native genders and sexualities were more diverse than the invaders' heteropatriarchal system could tolerate. The federal government further forbade in 1882 all "heathenish dances" and ceremonies, adding imprisonment to the potential cost of participation.
Thus, "Native women had to constantly negotiate between continued practice of their rituals and threats of violence" from colonizers who raped, abducted, slaughtered and imprisoned them, and especially during ceremonial practices that made them physically vulnerable, like the Flower Dance. As a result of the violence, while Native peoples persisted in their ceremonies, those "that were led by or featured women" were practiced less, Risling Baldy writes.
“For a regime to have joyful people is dangerous. And that’s what dance often brings,” Castro noted. In this he echoed socialist and legendary DSAer Barbara Ehrenreich in her Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Granta Books 2007): "When one class, or ethnic group or gender, rules over a population of subordinates, it comes to fear the empowering rituals of the subordinates as a threat to civil order."
During the Flower Dance, "first menstruation is tied to world renewal and to the girl's newfound ability to commune with the sentient power of the universe." The Hupa believe singing and dancing "in a certain manner" during world renewal ceremonies corrects the world's spiritual imbalance. The neighboring Wiyot Tribe was in the middle of performing their own world renewal ceremony on nearby Tuluwat Island in Humboldt Bay, when white marauders ambushed and tried to eradicate them, slaughtering hundreds in a single week in 1860.
The Wiyot Tribe has also revived that sacred ceremony in recent years, and got the island back, too.
Like the wins of the #LandBack movement, the revival of Tribal ceremonies in recent decades is a "tangible, physical, spiritual, and communal act of healing and decolonization," Risling Baldy writes. While non-Native menstrual taboos had made participants shy about the Flower Dance, "as more and more girls observed and experienced this dance, the dance became more socially acceptable. After ten years, girls started to request that the dance be done for them, instead of being approached by elders hoping they would want one." This was more than "a static re-creation or an attempt to recapture a 'traditional' ceremony from the 'old days'. Instead the ceremony was being reclaimed as a dynamic and inventive building block of Hupa culture."
Toward a Socialist Ceremonial Praxis
This got us thinking: where are democratic socialists' own timelessly defiant, community-connecting ceremonial practices?
Castro told us, “When we reawaken these ceremonies, we’re reawakening really critical, important parts of ourselves and remembering who we are.” Could communing in an explicitly embodied, ceremonially socialist way with the best aspects of America’s creation stories actually renew its ability to realize them?
The Founders "borrowed" foundational concepts of democracy, common among continental Indigenous cultures, from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, then gritted their wooden teeth and plopped out a nation. For all its capitalist, slaveholding capitulations and hypocrisies, it was hypothetically engineered to improve over time, and not upon the edicts of a king. It even aspired to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. When amended by the global struggles for liberation from all oppressions, it's not a bad origin story to tell.
"[S]o how are you going to face the end of the world?" a Hupa medicine woman asked, thinking of a foster child's re-traumatizing dislocation even as she prepared to be honored by the Flower Dance. "With laughter, with joy, with an open mind and an open heart," she answered. Risling Baldy writes, "We are not sad, dying Indians, and this documentation of our revitalizations is not of a dying culture, but instead a culture that has always envisioned an Indigenous future."
Similarly, socialism must remain up for renewal and reinterpretation across eras and cultures. Risling Baldy quotes anthropologist Peter Nabokov: "Keeping many versions of its primordial claims and cultural experiences fluid and available for discussion enables a society to check and adjust its course through uncertain times." What can be experienced in the moment as unweildy sectarianism might turn out to be key to our long term survival.
According to Castro, "There is a peace to [ceremony]. An innate peace that strikes a part of us that was itself asleep." Perhaps the practiced flow of lively and productive democratic process can also be its own kind of Zen. Ehrehreich wrote that even as they persecuted ecstatically celebratory masses, in truth "'loss of control' is what the colonizers feared would happen to themselves."
Power feels precarity and threat when political collectives seize public fora to passionately plead for justice, or raise iconic fists in an upswelling of defiance, or swarm as neighbors in response to thuggish ICE raids, or hold picket lines. But really each of these embodied practices are a restoration of order. Even as a trans-forward Pride march in MAGA-land is a colorful explosion of celebration, it is also a return to the natural, peacable order of human relations, one in which joy and delight vanquish stuffy oppression.
Tule is a wetland plant once used throughout much of Native California. These long reeds make a light, flexible material which, when carefully bundled together, craft a buoyant boat that was widely used for travel throughout California's many waterways and even coastline. However, staying on and piloting a tule boat requires considerable skill and practice, Castro told us. Without that knowledge, people lose their balance, fall off, and splash abruptly into the drink. The invaders' (his polite term is "newcomers'") theft and pollution of tule harvest sites drove that crucial cultural knowledge dormant for a long time. But multiple Tribes are now reviving traditional tule harvest and boat-making practices, holding festive inter-Tribal races.
The gathering and bundling of separate lives into a whole, the buoyancy and challenge of navigating with them, and their muscular, collective resurgence after a long dormancy are themes socialists can also relate to. An old journey, renewed.
Whatever ceremonies we revive, reimagine and reinvent, they hold potential to steer us away from the traumas now threatening our tenderest togetherness. Many Californian native plant communities need periodic fire to truly regenerate. In like fashion, may the crucible of this nation's authoritarian moment, and our transformation within it, make each of us, and most importantly, all of us together, into the best version of who we might yet become.