Survival Leadership from Indigenous Experts

[jesse_the_k]

Jingle-Dress Dancing as Pandemic Medicine

Thanks to nursingclio_feed, a reflective, captioned video tracing the history of Ojibwe jingle-dress dancing as a religious response to the 1919 flu pandemic. Dr Brenda Child, an Ojibwe historian, explains how the jingle-dress and dancing has traveled through her family, and how it can support hope that we will turn the corner.

Content notes: genocide, suicide, school shooting, residential schools.

direct link

Jingle Dress Medicine via Virtual Powwow

Whitney Spears’ words from the video:

It’s hard to describe the feeling when you’re out there dancing.

It has helped me tremendously because there was a time in my life where I was so stuck. I survived the Red Lake high school shooting.

I got pregnant when I was seventeen with my son, and I feel like I put myself through a lot at a young age. Twenty-two when I got my G.E.D. And now I just finished my second semester at BSU.

I started dancing, I would have been about two or three when I got my first Jingle Dress. My mom, she had it made for me. We were living in South Minneapolis at the time.

And there was a gap from when I was ten up until I was twenty-seven.

It was actually through my kids where I got back into dancing. They’re all a year apart. I had my kids back-to-back-to-back. I knew that when I had my girls I wanted to push them to be the best they could be--doing really good in school, but also how fast they have picked up our cultural practices with dancing.

Also for their original-style Jingle Dresses, the Dance…

You go forward. You don’t go backwards. You don’t spin.

And you go in a zigzag.

I feel like for me that’s what I’m doing right now. I’m just pushing myself and going forward. No matter what goes on in life I’m just always going forward.

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High Country News is a non-profit journalism service covering the Western US, building a regional perspective while addressing environmental and indigenous issues, resource "management" and destruction.

I live in the ancestral home of the Ho-Chunk People, where the University of Wisconsin-Madison now sits on the former sites of sacred burial mounds.

High Country News explains how "land grant" institutions like UW-Madison — often held up as examples of democratic learnings — were funded by stealing indigenous people’s lives and land.

Land-grab universities

In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which distributed public domain lands to raise funds for fledgling colleges across the nation. Now thriving, the institutions seldom ask who paid for their good fortune. Their students sit in halls named after the act’s sponsor, Vermont Rep. Justin Morrill, and stroll past panoramic murals that embody creation stories that start with gifts of free land.

Behind that myth lies a massive wealth transfer masquerading as a donation. The Morrill Act worked by turning land expropriated from tribal nations into seed money for higher education. In all, the act redistributed nearly 11 million acres — an area larger than Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. But with a footprint broken up into almost 80,000 parcels of land, scattered mostly across 24 Western states, its place in the violent history of North America’s colonization has remained comfortably inaccessible.

[…snip…]

Like so many other U.S. land laws, the text of the Morrill Act left out something important: the fact that these grants depended on dispossession. That went without saying: Dubiously acquired Indigenous land was the engine driving the growing nation’s land economy.

[…snip…]

“There would be no higher education as we know it in the United States without the original and ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands, just like there would be no United States,” said Sharon Stein, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. “There is no moment or time or place or institution that is not deeply entangled with the violence of colonialism.”

[…snip…]

The University of California located all of its grant among these stolen lands. To capitalize on its 150,000 acres, the university ran a real estate operation that sold plots on installment plans, generating a lucrative combination of principal and interest payments. In the late 19th century, income from the fund — traceable to the lands of the Miwok, Yokuts, Gabrieleño, Maidu, Pomo and many more — covered as much as a third of the University of California’s annual operating expenses.

[…snip…]

"There’s a basic, underlying need for settlers in settler colonial states to have these kinds of mythological narratives about the benevolence of their own governments and about the progress that they supposedly brought to this place,” said Sharon Stein. “Having a conversation about the colonial foundations of those nation states really complicates those narratives, and it starts to bring into question our very right to be here and our right to make claims on this place and on the institutions that we are generally so attached to.”

https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities