Tawiskaron

Sometimes an idea has to chase you around for awhile before it sinks in.

I spent some time recently in northwestern Ontario on a project that required considerable engagement with the local Indigenous community. One band member in particular took a shine to us and, over the course of the week, crossed that happy threshold between business acquaintance and friend. Towards the end of the project, he took us for a ride in his boat to show us his community and his favorite hunting and fishing spots. Midway through our adventure, a loon with two chicks swam a parallel course to the boat. Our friend and guide looked at them and remarked, "there goes my brother and his children." Then he went back to showing us the scenery. No smiles. No sarcasm. No sign he was being ironic. Just a simple statement of fact.

I have seen this before - but I wasn't paying attention.

Just before the pandemic, I was at a conference which was held in the traditional and treaty territories of the Six Nations of the Grand River - the Haudenosaunee. The event was opened by a community member who delivered the Ohenten Kariwatekwen, a traditional prayer which means “the words that are spoken before all others” and is delivered at the beginning of every important gathering to remind attendees to be thankful for the entirety of creation. At the end of the prayer, which can last 15 minutes or more, this community member explained to us that he hoped we might come to understand the way in which his traditions mattered to how he walked in the world. "I hear Settlers talk about being afraid of the dark when they go out in the night," he said. "This is not a thing I experience. When I am out late, and I look up and see the moon, I know I am with my grandmother and I am never scared."

Thirty years before that, as part of my undergraduate training, I had to learn the Wendat creation story (which has many parallel elements to that of the Haudenosaunee and even some of their Anishinaabe neighbors). Creation began when Sky-Woman fell to earth and the animals built Turtle Island for her so she could have a home on land. Sky-Woman had a daughter who became pregnant with twins - a good twin and a bad one. The bad one was a problem from the start. His name was Tawiskaron. Before he was even born, he clawed his way out of his mother and killed her. As the good brother Jouskeha went on to create beautiful and useful things, Tawiskaron followed along behind to sabotage his works. One created fish, the other put bones in the fish; one made crops, the other blighted them, and so on. Eventually Jouskeha killed Tawiskaron. As he died, his blood fell on to the ground and became flint. Intriguingly, the word Tawiskaron means "flint." Thus, when a Wendat traditionalist holds a piece of flint in their hand, it isn't just a rock - it's a physical connection to a story about how the universe came to be.

For me, it's a rock. And that is the problem that lies at the heart of archaeology and heritage management. The people who only see rocks are the same people who write the rules for how Indigenous heritage is to be explored. In archaeological consulting, much of that exploration means measuring our results against provincially-determined benchmarks to determine which sites have cultural heritage value or interest (CHVI) ...and which sites do not. Once a site falls into the latter category, it can safely be removed from the landscape. It can be destroyed. It's all very clinical and objective. And it's a system that doesn't know how to accommodate an outlook in which a person can be related to a water bird or the moon.

That an object, place or activity could have simultaneous, non-competing meanings in the spiritual/symbolic realm (mythos) and the practical one (logos) is a textbook example of so-called pre-modern thought?- a term that seems smug at its best ...and racist at its worse. (I'm eager to see it replaced but we seem stuck with it for now). In pre-modern thought, words, and especially names, have a power to them that can link people, places, and activities to the symbolic realm in ways which can seem utterly baffling to the so-called modern or Western mind.

To MY mind…

The only experience in my world that comes even close happens on those rare Sunday mornings when I am given a piece of bread and some wine that I am told is the body and blood of a god who also happens to be his own father. I say it comes close because, to me, that part of the ritual just doesn't track. To me, it's just a piece of bread. I wish I could see it otherwise, but I seem to lack the mental apparatus to do so. It's like being colour blind, but instead I am culture blind. There is a richness, nuance, and connection to tradition that I will simply never be able to experience as adherents do. As a lapsed Christian, I'll be fine. I don't know what I am missing anyway. But that is my choice: it wasn't forced on me.

We Canadians take our religious freedoms seriously. The idea that a non-practicing outsider could make pronouncements on the validity of Jewish dietary laws, Christian holidays, Hindu practice or Islamic doctrine is so outrageous as to be absurd.

And yet...

Indigenous heritage cannot be neatly picked apart from their ritual and symbolic lives. Nevertheless, the First Nations are forced to accept that the rules for how their heritage is to be explored, measured, and in many cases destroyed, are set by outsiders - Settlers, who are almost entirely blind to the most important meanings that are attached to the beings, events, places, and objects that make up that heritage. A fragment of stone that was once (and still is) the blood of a god is not just a rock - it is more like a holy relic. And if the system that has been set up to manage those relics cannot even see that, then is never going to justly represent the interests and aspirations of Indigenous peoples.