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In 2019, Native Hawaiians protested the building of a telescope on a volcano they consider sacred.

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Teaching Source on Indian Boarding Schools

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Teaching Source on Indian Boarding Schools

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Hollywood dramatic version of a young Native boy getting his hair cut at a Carlisle School - great source to show students and also to critique the White teachers reaction and depiction. In what ways do the characters show resistance and compliance?

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Zitkala-Sa founded the National Council of American Indians, to "protect and preserve" the American Indian people."

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Just as in other cultures, the hair of Native Americans had significant meeting within their tribal culture. Boarding schools desire to cut off braids was humiliating to them

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There are many teachings and practices in our tribal cultures that are significant to who we are as Native people. One of many things important to our cultural identity is, our hair. Our hair is considered sacred and significant to who we are as an individual, family, and community.

In many tribes, it is believed that a person's long hair represents a strong cultural identity. This strong cultural identity promotes self-esteem, self-respect, a sense of belonging, and a healthy sense of pride. As part of the practice in self-respect, we are taught to take good care of our hair through proper grooming. In preparation for ceremonies, we take great care in the grooming, styling, and ornamentation of our hair. Our hairstyle and ornamentation are guided by the values of our family and tribe. It is a form of creative self-expression that reinforces our connection to our family, tribe, and Creation. Some tribes will use two braids, while others will use three. Some families will paint their hair depending on the ceremony or their family's distinction. Women and men will adorn their hair with fur wraps, woolen wraps, feathers, fluffs, and bead work for war dancing and ceremonies.

How we relate to our hair is a constant reminder of our connection to our culture and a distinct worldview grounded in the sacredness of relationships. Braiding a child's hair is the beginning of establishing an intimate and nurturing relationship. My mother used to braid my little brother's hair every day before school. When my grandfather died, my mother cut my brother's hair. She expressed the sadness she felt because she could no longer sit with him and braid his hair. It was a special time of bonding for the two of them.

At pow-wows, it is common to see family members and friends brushing and braiding hair for each other. It's a beautiful way to bond and a powerful way to reinforce the sacredness of relationships. There is a teaching about the symbolism of the braid, itself, that reaffirms this practice. It is said that single strands of hair are weak when tugged on, however, when you pull all of the hair together in a braid the hair is strong. This reinforces the value of the family and tribe along with our connection to all of creation.

When I was about 5 years old, my grandfather first told me about being forced to cut his hair when he was carted off to boarding school, and I am sure I heard this more than a dozen times as I grew up. But as I got older, he would tell me more about his experience and what it meant to him. Eventually, he told me his hair was cut in an effort to strip him of his culture and identity. Cutting his hair was their way of showing dominance over him through forced assimilation. He said that every time his hair was cut, he would cry, and every time he would cry, he would be physically punished. Unfortunately, being forced to cut our hair was a common practice in many institutions and schools across the country, and is still occurring as recent as 2018.

His story is important because we are taught as children that we don't cut our hair unless we have experienced a significant loss, like the death of a close family member, traumatic event or significant life change. Tribes have different teachings about the value of hair and how to care for it. In our family, we are taught that our hair is a physical extension of all our thoughts, prayers, dreams, aspirations, experiences and history. When we cut our hair, it represents the end of something that once was and a new beginning. When we do have to cut our hair, it is never to be thrown away, but rather, burned with sage or sweetgrass in a ceremonial way. When our hair is burned, all of our thoughts, prayers, dreams, aspirations, experiences, and history rise to the Creator to be properly taken care of. We are then guided in the direction for our prayers to be answered. Throwing our hair away is a form of personal disrespect. So, when my Grandfather had his hair cut off and thrown away, his tears were of deep grief, confusion, helplessness, and shame. It was against everything he had ever been taught, along with grieving the loss of everything his hair represented to him. When this cultural practice was common in most Native communities, it was easy to recognize when someone in the community was grieving or experiencing a significant change in their life, because their long hair was no longer.

With our hair embodying so much of who we are, boundaries are important. Touching someone's hair without permission is disrespectful in the Native community. Some even find that asking permission is a form of disrespect, especially with children and elders. This is not something to take personal, it's our way of protecting ourselves from the energy of someone we know nothing about.

Does your family or tribe have special teachings about hair? We would love to hear and learn from you.

Photo Credit: Esperanza Califas Tomeo
Child in photo: Willis Tomeo

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The Significance Of Hair In Native American Culture

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There are many teachings and practices in our tribal cultures that are significant to who we are as Native people. One of many things important to our cultural identity is, our hair. Our hair is considered sacred and significant to who we are as an individual, family, and community.

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Modern Day- Native Resistance comes through political and environmental activism to preserve land sovereignty

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"Indian Boarding Schools" were established to assimilate Native American children into Anglo society. This included physical changes, like cutting their traditionally long hair, but also culture, where they were forbidden to speak their native language or practice their religious traditions.

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Zitkala-Sa wrote The Sun Dance, an opera based on her essays that promoted Dakota culture and values.

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Tommy Orange wrote the book "There, There" about the struggle to be a modern, urban Native person, with so much of the identity and culture rooted in the past. His book follows many characters to show there is no ONE Native perspective and the complex intersections of cultural preservation, cultural and residual trauma, and everyday mundanity of life. Many characters in the book have mixed feelings about cultural preservation, but ultimately hold on to it, as a form of resistance.

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Your story in this week's issue, "The State," is drawn from your forthcoming novel, "There There," in which a large cast of characters, most of them at least part Native American, converge on a powwow at the Oakland Coliseum. How did the book come about? Did it have this panoramic structure from the beginning?
I knew I wanted to write a multigenerational, multivoiced novel about Native people living in Oakland. My wanting to write it largely had to do with there not already being a novel about Native people who live in cities, and very few novels set in Oakland. Native people suffer from poor representation as it is, but having little representation in literature, as well as no (literary) version of our (urban Native) experience, was what made me want to write into that space, that void, and try to honor and express fully all that it entails to be Native and be from Oakland.
You mentioned that the main character in "The State"-who is named Thomas Frank in the book-is the most autobiographical of them all. Did you intend from the beginning to include a fictionalized self-portrait in the book? (And did you know, going in, that he would be a relatively minor character in the over-all plot of the novel?)
I did not at all intend to include a fictionalized self-portrait. I mean, all the characters resemble me in different ways, some more than others, but more resemble me than they resemble anyone else, any real person. This chapter came out pretty late in the writing of the book. And it came out fast. I wrote a ten-page first draft in one afternoon, and felt this urgency for it to be a part of the book. I hadn't planned on it, so it kind of blindsided me. The nature of his being a relatively minor character has more to do with when he entered the novel.
The character is half white, half Cheyenne. He has a sense of being "both and neither." He talks about having "too much and not enough" whiteness for him to know what to do with. What does he mean by that?
That aspect of the character is largely based on my own experience, and I can only speak for myself, but being half of one thing and half of another, when it comes to people and their histories, their stories, culture, heritage, language, especially for someone whose two histories seem set against each other-as with Native people and white people, for example-makes for an internal conflict, which I felt from a very early age. It's been a struggle to get to a place where I can firmly identify as Native. The too much and not enough whiteness has to do with being half white, but not having grown up with any particular culture of whiteness. For example, I know that on my white side I am Swiss-Italian and Scotch-Irish and I have roots in Southern France. Plus a whole bunch of other fractions involving other European nations. But I didn't grow up learning about or identifying with any of that. And being only half Native, and not necessarily looking the part, is difficult. In white spaces I'm not considered white, but in Native spaces I am-or have been in the past, anyway.
Some of the other chapters in the novel are narrated in the first person, some in the third person, but this is the only one told in the second person. What made you choose that voice for this character?
I played around a lot with P.O.V. in writing this novel. Tried different P.O.V.s out on almost all the characters. Tedious work, but I wanted to be sure that the story felt-to me, anyway-like it was coming from the right place. Was told in the right way. This chapter first came out in third person, then first, then finally, when I tried it in the second person, something clicked. Revision became easier, and that's usually when I know I have the right P.O.V.: there's less resistance.
What led you to fiction writing? Was it always your ambition?
I didn't grow up a writer or a reader. After I graduated from college with a Bachelor of Science degree in the sound arts-a b.s.-sounding degree, I know-I needed a job, and I got one at a used bookstore. I'd started to read by then-not fiction but religious texts and philosophy, more in search of meaning than anything else. Then I found writers like Borges, Kafka, Robert Walser, Clarice Lispector, and, eventually, John Kennedy Toole and Sylvia Plath; " A Confederacy of Dunces" and " The Bell Jar " were pretty important to me as novels. I fell in love with reading while working at that bookstore, and felt like I was playing catchup for the next ten years. At some point in there I started writing, too, and felt even further behind. I became pretty obsessed with reading and writing. I loved what literature could do, how beautiful and transformative and devastating it could be, in such big and small ways.
Are you a drummer, too?
I am not a drummer. I play piano. But I do tap and drum my fingers incessantly.
Do you have any literary models you like to go back to again and again?
There were certain books that made me want to write. "A Confederacy of Dunces" and "The Bell Jar" are in that group. I would add these writers and books I still go back to now, in no particular order: Lispector (most of her books), Roberto Bolaño (most of his books), Louise Erdrich (most of her books), Álvaro Mutis (the only one available in English is " The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll"), Felisberto Hernández (he has two story collections available, " Piano Stories" and " Lands of Memory"), and Andrey Platonov (" Soul and Other Stories ").

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Your story in this week's issue, "The State," is drawn from your forthcoming novel, "There There," in which a large cast of characters, most of them at least part Native American, converge on a powwow at the Oakland Coliseum. How did the book come about? Did it have this panoramic structure from the beginning?

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The language had always been oral and passed down from grandmothers to granddaughters. Mary helped to put the Hawaiian language in writing for others to learn

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Raised on a reservation before being sent to a boarding school, Zitkala-Sa was able to use the artistry and tools of Anglo American society to tell stories about Indigenous People. She was traumatized by her own experience in a boarding school, but it's part of what pushed her to resist assimilation through cultural preservation.

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Mary Wiggin was raised by her Grandmother in Hawaii as part of a cultural effort to have the older generation teach the young the Native Hawaiian Language and Culture. When her grandma died she continued with her education at a Missionary School. Being able to culturally and socially function in both Hawaiian and Anglo culture she was able to advocate to preserve the culture in museums.

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Mary Kawena Pukui taught classes in traditional Hawaiian language, danced the hula, and demonstrated traditional practices

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Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum - Honolulu, Hawaii

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Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum - Natural and Cultural History

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Visit us at the Bishop Museum. Immerse yourself in Hawaiʻi's rich culture and heritage at the premier natural and cultural history museum in the state.