What is a Matriarchy? With Aisling and Exulansic

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Transcript:
What is a Matriarchy? With Aisling and Exulansic

Alright, well, it’s so nice to see you again. Would you like to introduce yourself? 

My name is Aisling. I am a Choctaw woman. I live in Kentucky but my mom’s family are all Choctaw.  I here because my dad’s family is from Appalachia, so I have both of those influences. And it’s interesting to have patriarchal and matriarchal influences on both sides of my family.

Yea, that is very interesting, and I am in a similar situation because my mom’s side is mainly french mohawk, and my dad’s side is more influenced by traditional patriarchal cultures. You know, both sides are mixed, but my understanding is my father’s side is not mixed with Native. It’s just all European. Whereas my mother’s side is Native-European mixed, from largely the French assimilation project that was happening in the New France colonies. I don’t know much about Choctaw culture, so I am interested to hear more about what it means that the Choctaw were patriarchal.

Well, the Choctaw were part of the Muskogee confederacy in the southeast, so influenced a lot by the Cahokia mounds culture.   The mound-building was very central to our society. The majority of Choctaw today are in Oklahoma because of the trail of tears, but there is a small portion that remained in Mississippi that are now a separate band with their own government. My heritage comes from the Oklahoma line. My grandfather lives out there. I sometimes visit him for Pow Wow.  But there - the ceremonial practices and cultural beliefs are pretty much the same between Choctaw, Chochiuma, Chickasaw, and also Muskogee and also Cherokee.  Unfortunately, a lot of the ceremonial practices of the Choctaw have died out of practice because of the Baptist church. The Spanish were very influential in trying to kill off the Choctaw, but then the French came and saw them, so a lot of Choctaw are also French, but the Baptist missionaries were very prevalent. And today, most Choctaw are baptist or church of christ, so my family was Church of Christ. I’m part of a movement of people who want to revive our traditional culture - like, decolonizing from the Baptists. I will attend Muskogee ceremony in order to revive that, because interestingly, the Muskogee got a lot of stuff from us that we had first. But Choctaw believe that owmen are the life givers. The word Ohoyo is for woman. I tmeans giver of life. That’s often represented by the turtle, because the mother turtle is like mother earth or Yakni, which means land or Earth. 

So you have a Turtle Island traditional as well? To refer to the continent as Turtle Island?

We don’t really refer to it as that. We actually call it, land of the eagle, because it’s like - Yakni already is a feminine term. Eagles are masculine. So in order to balance the masculine and feminine, we will say land of the Eagle. The men dwell on the land, and the land is the mother. So the turtle shells represent womanhood, so when you’re in the square, for the ceremony, the women will have traditionally turtle shell shakers strapped to our legs that are filled with rocks. We’ll step in time with the chanting to bring in that feminine medicine to it.  Now a lot of times now, the turtle shells aren’t used because they’re not legal to use everywhere, so now the tradition of using milk cans that you got on the reservation, developed. A muskogee ground that I visited recently in Florida, they use dried deer toes that are clacking together as a way to bring a kind of natural element into it. Even though deer are traditionally symbol of the masculine in Muskogee culture, but in Choctaw culture, we have a deer woman goddess .We also have corn woman, Ohoyo Shishiba, which means the woman from unknown far away, who brought us the corn. That’s our most important festival, is green corn, hwich is in the midsummer when the corn turns green. And the story goes that, a long time ago, there was a famine, and two choctaw boys went out in the woods to look for food.  And they found this cornplant, and they’d never seen it before, and they were like Oh I’m so hungry. Should we eat this or should we take it back and share it with our family, even though we won’t have as much? Then they see this woman they’ve never seen before, and she’s like, will you please feed me? I’m very hungry. And out of the generosity of the Choctaw spirit, they give her some corn, and then she transforms into the corn woman and they realize she created the corn. And she said you’ve passed the test of this generosity and because you’ve shown that you’re willing to share, now you’er going to have a harvest of this corn every year. And you’ll never be hungry again. So that story is always told that the spirit of generosity that is so important to the Choctaw, comes from Corn Woman or Ohoyo Shishiba, because she came from unknown far away and she was still received.  So women are usually responsible for everything that has to do with providing life.  So obviously literal life as in children, but also farming and gardening were only entrusted to women because if men are to touch gardening tools, they’re going to bring death onto them, because they kill in war.  So the men are not allowed to touch that. And that’s why Choctaw women don’t touch feathers of birds of prey like eagles, because they represent death, because those are predatory birds and they kill .So it could like interfere with our life energy, which is also why men don’t touch us when we’re on our cycle, because we’re like clearing out all of the death and it’s too powerful for them to handle.

So there’s some propaganda that’s just built into the culture that’s just, this is how men are. This si how women are. And this is why men and women have different domains. So having that distinction isn’t necessarily about oppressing one or the other, but about making sure there’s respect for the fact that women have this unique capacity that takes so much from us.

So usually the men would be like the ones who would make war decisions, but on the home front, men make all the decisions and the men have to ask.  The women are the ones who own the houses traditionally.

Same as in …

But men like, if they wanna marry a woman, they can ask ehr, and she’ll allow him to live in her house for as long as she wants him to. She can kick him out if seh wants to. My mom always made a point of that with my dad. I like that. He used to try with me and my sisters if he didn’t like something we were doing, like “Who’s house is that?” And we were like, ‘mom’s.” So that always shut him up. Surrounding Muskogee culture, traditionally only men participated in the war dances, but the Choctaw nation is the only one in which women were involved in the war dances.

There’s something like that in Mohawk. There was a smoke dance. It used to be only for war ceremonies that only the men would do, but recently there’s been a women’s version adapted, that’s pretty cool. I’ll probably splice it in here. It’s definitely a very energetic dance.

That’s really cool. The term ‘hatchet woman’ actually came from Choctaw culture, because in a lot of surrounding nations, it was just hte men whow ould  go to war. But in Choctaw culture, the men and the women would go, and the women would walk behind the men so the men would protect them and the women would watch their backs. If anyone were coming up behind them, the woman would take them out. There’s actually a story of the first encounter of the Choctaw nation with colonizers, when the Spanish explorer, De Soto, came up through Florida like slaughtering everyone in his path. He got to the city of Mabila, which was a Choctaw metropolis at the time. And the chief Tuscaloosa met him, and he was talking with him, and he said you need to provide each of my men with two women to satisfy them, or I’m gonna burn down your village. And Tuscaloosa was like, how about you meet me back at the city tomorrow, and we’ll see what the women have to say about it. So, he’s like okay, and they meet back at the city the next day, and there’s nobody there.  Where is everyone?  And the city is surrounded by the women and they all are aiming flaming arrows at the invaders. Like, this is our answer to you.  And I just love that because it perfectly illustrates like, they ask the chief, who’s a man, you know, give us your women. And he’s like, go ask the women what they think about that.  And the women are like…

It’s very different than the story of Lot, in the Bible, where a group of men are like, “Give us these travelers that came with you.” And he’s like, “No, take my daughters instead. Just take them.” The cultural attitudes are just different, and it’s really hard for people who have had patriarchy only, to even start to conceptualize what it would mean for everyone in the culture to have an understanding that women are in control, and that this is actually natural and good. There’s this idea that it’s somehow natural for a male because males are stronger, to come up with this idea that maybe things would be better if I got a bunch of males together and started oppressing my mom. That’s not natural. That’s ass-backwards. And it’s no surprise that that cultural error is destroying everything. It’s ruining the planet, it’s colonized everyone, it’s just like… you didn’t win just because you stole a bunch of stuff. That’s not proof it was right to break in.

The game isn’t who has the most toys. That’s not the game. You wanna look at the men and be like, who gave you life? Whose legs did you come out between when you first encountered the world? Who gave you that gift? It was a woman. Even the ground beneath your feet…

Where did your words come from? 

Hmm?

Where did your words come from? For the vast majority of people, it was from your mother primarily, and from largely female caregivers.

I saw this post earlier today - it’s an old one - but it was a picture of a news clipping that said, a monk on Mount Atos dies having never seen a woman. And I laughed because like, so he never saw his mother?

She transitioned. Now she’s his father.  Don’t misgender her!

For at least a month or two, he must have seen her - unless he was blind, but I think they would have specified that.  I mean, they - I just. 

He must have seen her from the inside. Surely he felt her.

For a while there, she was his entire world. Like, he doesn’t know a place outside mother. Mother is the surroundings.

And so they’re fixated on changing that. They’re so angry that women have this power. They are fixated on taking that away from us, so they don’t need us anymore, and so that we have nothing that makes us special, and otherwise setting us up to be so economically marginalized that we have to sell ourselves. That’s what we want, for women to realize we have nothing else to sell except our bodies.

They think it’s empowering that we can rent our wombs out to men, so men can complain we didn’t serve them well enough as handmaidens, wit h our wombs, so we can pose in the background of their maternity picture.

That was a disgusting photo, the handmaid one that’s going around, and it really shows just how dark, depraved the culture has to be to think it is not harmful to an infant to take them from their mother. Like, they want to devalue women’s role, because they know that if women’s role is properly valued, women are given resources, and women are given support, and the culture will be structured in a way that no man can come between a owman and her home. And now we have the opposite situation. So in Iroquois society, their word is Haudenosaunee, so it means “People of the Long House” in that language family. So people would live multi-family in one long house that would belong to the mother’s family. So men would leave their family of origin and go live with the wife’s family, so there was never a situation where the husband could kick the wife out because she didn’t make herself available in some way to him. Literally her whole family is right there to knock some sense into him, and ot remind him, hey. This is upstate new york. We can kick you out of the lodge actually, and you’ll just die. So there was a better understanding of the circumstances, whereas now we have the nuclear family model where women are isolated and colonized by their own personal de Soto. 

I like that. Their own personal de Soto. I mean, ti’s almost like the concept was like men were paying rent, because they go out. They hunt. They bring home their game In order to continue living here. This is our house. Your job is to bring home the bacon, almost literally.  

And now we have a situation where women have a job. Women have to make up for the expenses we bring somehow. Even though we’re the ones giving life to everyone.

The unpaid labor of working around the house at home is not considered work.

Yea, being a mother is considered a luxury choice that the state doesn’t have to fund. It’s so backwards, the situation we have now that women are asked to take on this expense of pregnancy and birth and then to go right back to work the next week. 

Like, you better find somebody to watch your kid.

Why did you have a kid if you couldn’t afford it? The entire system is set up to impoverish women systematically and to make us feel dependent and like we’re extensions of men and male families.

Yea, they also ask women what about your work-life balance?  They don’t ask men that.

No. I don’t know if you’ve ever read it. There’s a book called Wifework by Susan Maushart that’s - I read it in college so I am sure there’s been more recent research, but it just looked at different statistical angles of the work that wives provide to their husband that is not compensated, but benefits the husband economically for reasons such as they live longer, and therefore they can make more money. They don’t have as many sick days. When they do have sick days, there’s someone else keeping up with stuff.  There’s all of these angles of it where, when you really look at it, women are taught not to value ourselves so that we are cheaper. Women need to start valuing ourselves and recognizing that it is actually not a burden that we get pregnant. It’s not a burden to men. It’s seen as a burden right now, and it’s not.

Yea, it’s also seen as a medical emergency. I’m not saying that you should never have a hospital birth, but the normalization of it, that everyone should automatically go to the hospital because they’re giving birth, it’s like - do you remember what Suzanne [Forbes-Vierling] was talking about at the conference about how they’re selling the bodily fluids of women during their birth, selling the placenta. Making bank off of them, and while charging them thousands of dollars for being able to touch their baby after giving birth and you know various things.  I mean, birth

And that also to reinforce to women - by burdening women in this fashion, we are sending them the message that they are burdens and they deserve to be burdened because otherwise they’d be burdening everyone else. I agree with you that there’s a huge emphasis - like our c-section rate is like 3x the next developed country’s c-section rate, and nobody wants to ask the question of, is this rate so high because we stress out mothers while they’re giving birth so they can’t relax and give birth.

Or if they’re in a hospital, allow them to move as they feel comfortable to do so. 

Or if they’re a prisoner.  It’s a position fit for a king. And that’s the origin of that positioning.  That’s literally the origin

They think that women’s bodies are property because if you’re in the hospital, not only are they going to make bank off your placenta, they’re going to charge you for giving birth, and charge you for touching your baby. It’s like, well is that my baby or is that your baby? Why are you charging me for my baby?

It’s like medicine, every time a woman is pregnant, they’re like what? What are you thinking, doing this. This is outrageous! Well, we’ll try to help you out of this ridiculous predicament you got yourself into.  We got off relatively light compared to hyenas, where they have the female pseudophallus, and they have to give birth through it, and it rips open.

Somehow, this isn’t even the worst birth on this list. That title belongs to the hyena, because straight up death is actually better than what they go through. Female hyenas evolved a pseudopenis that’s so similar to the real thing that it’s actually difficult to tell males and females apart.   This is actually a female. Only problem is, it’s not just for show. They actually have to give birth through that thing, and yes it’s every bit as painful as you think.  And just to somehow make it even worse, relative to its size, hyenas have to give birth to the largest cubs of any carnivore and they have to do it through a penis.  Good amount of first-time mothers don’t even survive this, because the process involves rupturing and splitting open the pseudo to make it easier for a cub.  But the cubs don’t get it easy either. About 60% of hyena cubs will suffocate on the way out and become past tense before technically even joining the present.  And you’d think that because this directly affects both mother and cub that evolution would have patched this. But apparently nature and lions have something in common when it comes to doing hyenas dirty.  Yea, you don’t wanna be a hyena. They’re also a matriarchal animal, and I was watching something saying that they bully the males to make sure that they stay submissive. So it’s hard for me to imagine us going from patriarchy to egalitarianism and not having it just revert back to patriarchy. I think we need to get comfortable with the idea that a matriarchy is better than a patriarchy, objectively, and is the only system that will work for women long-term.  

It is the only system that will work for women long term.  Yea I mean, I get, a lot of times, when I tell people that When I tell people, oh what are your political views.  And I’m like, I’m an indigenous matriarchists.  But then they go on to basically describe patriarchy, but with women, and it’s like, that’s not what I said.  And it’s like, that’s not what I said. They devalue women so much that they cannot wrap their minds around the idea that we were put in charge for a reason. That it actually, biologically, is better. We’re not men with breasts. It’s not gonna be patriarchy, but with women. We don’t have a motivation to exploit male reproductive capacity. We actually don’t have that motivation.  They have a motivation to exploit us, to farm us. We don’t need to do that to men. There’s no motivation. They freely give it. They say they like doing it.

The whole idea that if you put women in charge, they’re just going to do everything to men that men have done to women, it’s admitting - it’s men admitting that what they’re doing is wrong.  Because if they don’t want us to do it to them, why are they so afraid?

Right.  They understand that the system only perpetuates through unreasonable force, violence, and gaslighting, and they are terrified of the tables turning, because a lot of these men don’t trust their mothers, and they don’t trust their mothers because their mothers were raised in patriarchies and were broken by the time they had children, by design. And they never got proper tending to that they needed to, so then they had issues raising the kids, and the children grew up not respecting their mothers. So they just can’t imagine women doing better - that the system is just better when the people who have the reproductive role of female are the ones who are making choices about where the resources go, to children, which includes male children.

Yes, absolutely.  My mom, she told me that I made her a feminist, because, you know, she was raised with a Choctaw father, but in a family that was very fundamentalist Church of Christ with patriarchal expectations. So, I mean, she knew like the stories, like, the old Choctaw stories, but in practice, her assumption was: the expectation is that I grow up, I find a husband, and I have children and then that’s it.  It wasn’t like what do I wanna do. It was just that. So that’s what she did.  And then she comes to realize after a little while, that he’s not actually even doing his job in terms of patriarchy. Like, he’s not leading or even providing very good. So she’s realizing that it’s kind of not as competent as she was led to believe, and she had to step up and become the breadwinner, which she didn’t expect that she would have to do. And she realized, oh my gosh, this I the same pattern that happened with my parents.  And then she was like, you know what? This is ridiculous. Why are we expecting women to do all of this and for men to be in charge if men aren’t good at being in charge? The simple way to ensure that males provide for females is to tax males on the basis of maleness and to send that money to mothers. We need to stop chaining women to the man who got them pregnant. It’s not right.

So now she is - she is financially in charge of everything. She pays for everything. It all comes from her. And whenever somebody doesn’t like it - usually a man - doesn’t like something that she wants to do, she’s basically like, who’s paying for this? Who’s paying for it?  Me? Ok. Shut up. We’re doing what I want. I can have 5 cats if I want to. Nobody can stop me. It’s my money.

It’s so interesting. Yea I feel like my mom really wanted to role model - she was very feminist her whole life. Kind of, just wanted to - she found a partner who really wanted to role-model what she believed, which is that it’s important for women to see women leading and women in charge, and to have an actual understanding of the system we are in. So my dad is also very feminist. So they just did what they could to teach me what the system really looked like, and I appreciate that.

That’s awesome.

They - my mom I think, had it more directly from. Like I don’t think she ever really bought into the patriarchal assumptions due to a situation in her family life, and because she had had such an influence from her French mohawk grandmother.  Less so - some from my grandfather, but I actually never got to meet him, due to a family situation that’s unfortunate. But it just shows that you can’t have an assumption about strict parent-to-child transmission, because families are extended networks.  There’s an assumption that the nuclear family is like it, and that everybody else understands that they’re not part of the nuclear family and they need to just stand back and just kind of be welcoming on the holidays.  And there’s a devaluation of the kind of relationships that exist outside of the parent-child relationship, and the cultural transmission that happens there, and lack of consideration for events that might happen that might render the patriarchal structure unworkable for some families, even if it worked for any families.

That whole concept is very foreign to indigenous cultures as well - the concept of the nuclear family as opposed to the extended family.  In Choctaw culture, for example, the maternal uncle played a greater role in the children’s lives than the father, because he’s related to the mother and the mother’s like the most important. So it was like, the mother’s whole family would raise, but maternal uncles were viewed kind of the same way fathers are viewed in modern American culture.  Like oh there’s the mother and the uncle. And the father’s kind of there.

That’s where they’re gonna get their masculine influence, and not from - The Mohawk origin story involves a male spirit coming and causing the first pregnancy, because Sky Woman came into the world already pregnant, so the spirit of the west wind impregnated her daughter that she had had, and then just took off. 0% importance. And then the daughter gave birth to sons, and in the process, she died. So built into the origin story is, sometimes women die in pregnancy, and actually it’s either the fetus’s fault or no one’s fault. Because in the story, it’s because something the fetus chose to do on purpose. So we’re gonna guilt trip  male children in the origin story systematically.  So the sons were like, we have to continue our grandmother and our mother’s work. So that was their motivation to create was that they were continuing the work of women, who started the work.

That’s similar to the Muskogee version of the corn woman story. When I was at the Muskogee [inaudible] recently, I was talking to them about Corn Woman. We have different origin story and I told them the Choctaw one and they told me the Muskogee one.  In the Muskogee one, it wasn’t just like two random children who were looking for food.  They were these children who were being raised by Corn Woman, but they didn’t know she was Corn Woman. They were just like oh, this is our mother. But she always fed them by giving them corn.  And they one day asked her, where does the corn come from? And she pulled up her skirt and showed that she was scraping it off her body. And that that’s how they were being nourished. And they were like really grossed out. They were like, that’s so nasty. Why would you scrape that off of your body? And she’ like, well if you don’t appreciate my gifts, then the only way you’re ever gonna be nourished is to kill me and drag my body through the fields, so that you’ll be able to have the corn but you won’t have to see it from obviously my totally disgusting legs, if they’re just too much for you. So they do, with great regret, she dies, and then they remember forever that they don’t get to see corn woman anymore because of their ingratitude.  

I’m seeing we’re about to time out so I can send you another link if you want to finish the story.  Okay, so you’re telling me about Corn Woman and their ingratitude.

The same way you were saying that like the men had to carry on the work that the women had started, because she gave them life even though she died, it reminded me of how in the Muskogee story, all of the life and nourishment that men experienced from then on, from the corn, came from the fact that Corn Woman gave her life, because interestingly, they didn’t want her body.  Which is interesting. That’s still what we’re dealing with today, is that men don’t want women’s bodies, they just want what they can get out of it without actually having her as a person. Right. So built into the story is stigmatizing male disgust at femaleness, as something that precedes destroying femaleness and the loss of that woman. So it’s just like all these warnings are built In, in order to allow the matriarchy  to self-perpetuate, and to discourage the formation of a patriarchy, because the culture remembers what happens when a patriarchies form. It’s very very bad for women and children.

I love that. I love that.  And I love the way that, when we were talking about extended families and their importance. Extended families safeguard against male violence and those problems, especially when they’re the women’s family.   Because, like you were saying, like in a longhouse, where all the women are in the women’s family, and the men live in her house. Like, if some man goes rogue and is like, I’m going to colonize the women’s bodies.  Like, they’re going to be my slaves, or whatever. Then, I mean… What are the other men that are in that woman’s family going to say about that? They’re not going to be happy.  Like, they’re gonna gang up on him and kick him out.  Yea.

So it was seen as something where we need to systematically empower women and to keep families together in order to protect women and their children, versus a system where all the women are systematically impoverished, systematically separated from their families of origin, so they’re all powerless to help you. And everybody with power in the family is male, and the family structure that’s kept together is male.  It’s just hte opposite.

That happens when you take a woman out of her family and give her to teh man’sfamily. If that’s the system, then where is her protection? Where is her safety?

It’s nowhere. If she doesn’t want to do what the man wants, she doesn’t have that protection.  

Yea

And women don’t realize they’ve been set up like that until it’s too late. Whereas in a matriarchy, where, you know, a woman could freely divorce the man, and not lose everything.  Who could kick him out if he didn’t do the right thing and where he was separated from his family. It’s just going to be harder for a system of male power to form and people will all have this, from the stories, from the cultural set-up, this deep suspicion of the other way of doing things. Right now we don’t have a deep suspicion that’s in the culture. We’re all raised. Like children are taught that you know, God made man first, and took a piece of him and made woman, and now women are in charge of giving life as a punishment, and so it’s their fault it’s so hard for them and so easy for a man.

And it’s a hatred of life-giving. Why is that a punishment? Why is giving life a bad thing? Like ooh, so terrible. Just a second ago, the man was giving life.  That wasn’t considered terrible.  Like even with the safety thing, my mother has said that if she ever spoke up against my dad in certain areas, that his family would not want to talk to her. Like that would defame her as, oh she’s so bad. This Appalachian clan mindset, this Scottish-Irish type.  She’s the outsider. She married in. She’s the bad guy. Duh-da-duh.  Even if it’s obvious that what he did is the wrong thing.  And that upsets me because I love my dad’s family, but I don’t like the way that their culture approaches things. I don’t like the way where it’s never about what’s right, so much as it’s about sticking with our own. Well that’s our son.  I just, I find that exasperating, and it creates fear for the woman, and for her children who feel torn about their family.  

Right.  It is an interesting clash of cultures, when there’s intermarriage between a patriarchal and a matriarchal family.  You know, the patriarchal structure seems fundamentally confused and lost.  Like, they don’t seem to understand why they’re unhappy, and it seems like there’s a degree of unhappiness that just comes from seeing your mother be marginalized. Like, it’s normal to really love your mother.  That’s a normal thing.  And yet, everybody in our culture has to see that mothers don’t have power, and that really affects you. You don’t feel like you have power if you don’t see your mother having power. And that’s terrifying when you are a child.

Yea, I mean, my mother has grown more empowered as I’ve gotten older, as she’s had to become more of the breadwinner and has saved up her own money and has basically control over all her assets. She doesn’t care anymore what other people think. She just says that. And I just find it really inspiring. I’m like, yeah! Say it! And she’s like, really? And I’m like yea. And she’ll get kind of sel-conscious like, oh no, am I doing something wrong?And I’m like no, you’re not doing anything wrong. You’re amazing. That’s why I find it really important that I pass on that legacy and not the legacy of patriarchy to my children, because I do want to have children. But I don’t like the way that America is structured to where it’s expected that I entrust the raising of my children to a patriarchal government. That - I don’t like public schools. I don’t like them. Because they teach children: separation from family is normal. Entrusting strangers to raise your children is normal. And teaching them patriarchal, colonizing history is a normal day care to brainwash your children.  And I don’t like that.

It’s quite an experience, the first time in a public school I was updated as to my race and was invalidated regarding what I said was my actual background. And of course that’s never stopped. That’s still happening to this day.  But like when you’re a kid, it’s like… your mom tells you one thing. You go to school, and people at school tell you another thing. And you go home. And it just causes problems. It’s about systematically, like, trying to still carve off children from their mother’s line and separate them ideologically on the theory that if you can just get them away from the culture, they will Frenchify, and they will turn into model citizens. You’ve killed the Indian and saved the man.  It hasn’t stopped! It never stopped. I’m tired of pretending that this is somehow different than what they started in the 1600s.

And they’re also doing it with autistic youth.  They want to make the autistic youth conform to act like neurotypical kids, or they’ll sideline and segregate them and say you’re too stupid to understand. It’s like, if you don’t conform to us enough, then you’er stupid. So it’s not good for indigenous kids. It’s not good for autistic kids. And it’s not good for kids in general with the whole gender ideology, when they’re coming in and saying, well what do you feel inside is your gender.  And that’s, I mean, that’s never something that we learned from our parents or our families at home, traditionally at all.

Oh yea. I’m quite proud that there’s minimal evidence that there’s any sort of berdache tradition in Iroquois society. Berdache is the origin of two-spirit.  There’s just not any sign of it, and it wouldn’t make sense in our cultural model of the world, that sometimes males can be female. Like, we have very specific spiritual beliefs about ancestors, and about adoption, and about what it means - what is a spirit. What does it mean to communicate with spirits? Things like that. So it’s a very modern form of colonization to come in - and one of the sources that I was reading on that was saying that, trying to make the argument that even though there’s no evidence outside of one account from a European that this tradition existed, the burden of proof is magically on us to show that we don’t have this tradition.  It’s like, no!

Yea, in Choctaw you’ll see some people try to say that we do have early photographs of women wearing men’s clothing and men wearing women’s clothing.   And I’m like, you’re the one whose saying that that’s women’s clothing or men’s clothing. Why wasn’t your observation, Choctaw don’t have a big distinction which clothing is for which sex? Maybe that’s your observation instead of, “ooh, they have cross-dressing.”

Right, and they also came in and immediately wanted - were like - they thought we were backwards, so they just wanted to fix it.  And they did that all over during colonization, including like Africa too, not just in the Americas, where when they found a cultural structure that looked matriarchal or matrilineal in some way, they just tried to flip it. And so they would only interact with men and they would only trade with men, and so it just completely changed the structure to only have males as recognized by the state that they were interacting with.  And to require women that married into the assimilation project to abandon the cultural - but you can’t fully abandon your culture.  You just can’t.  You got it. You got it as a kid. It was impressed upon you. It’s yours now. There’s no alternative programming that I can just replace it with, besides the one that I was exposed to.

And I think that we will remember, even with the kids who were brainwashed in residential schools or whatever.  The ones who survive, if they have children, it might take a few generations, but they’re gonna remember. They’re gonna remember that what they’re being told is not who they are. They’re gonna remember. And that’s why I think that in the past, for the past several decades, there’s been so many indigenous youth trying to reclaim and decolonize stuff, because we’ve hit the 7 generation mark and we’re done.  We’re done tolerating it.   I’m seventh generation and I’m not having it

And the underestimate about what can be transmitted, even if you aren’t talking about it and labeling it as the culture. It is about parent-child interactions.  It is about how women carry themselves and see themselves and what choices we make, adn that conditioning. And you can’t just tell someone, okay, stop acting that way and imagine you’ve been oppressed your whole life. So it’s been passed down that way.

Yea, that’s the one frustrating thing that I find about the fact that I’m Choctaw, means that I have to go get most of my ceremony from the Muskogee because they’re the ones who’ve preserved it more. And I just find that so unfortunate, that some of the Choctaw ceremony is older but it’s not being practiced anymore. Like if you go to, like, a Choctaw pow-wow, or something - and pow-wows aren’t even like our tradition, but whatever - if you go to one, we’ll do all our traditional dances, but it’s almost like a performance.  It’s like, hey, look, this is the snake dance. Watch you guys. But there’s not like a fire that they’ve set up traditionally, or anything. And I’ll go there to be with my people and wear our traditional dress which varies slightly from the Muskogee, but it’s frustrating that if you talk to a lot of Choctaw, even elders, they’ll talk about eveyrthing in the past tense. We used to, da da da.

Yea that’s hard.  You’ve gotta revitalize it.

And I’m like, why don’t we? I can’t go do a ceremony by myself, because you have to ahve a bunch of people who all have this wisdom passed down. You have to have the men over here and the women over here.

The assimilators will tell me point blank, you know like, if you didn’t grow up with it, it’s just gone now. It’s not your culture anymore. It doesn’t count. You don’t get to identify with them at all. It’s just - so it’s like, and of course they won’t make any attempt to find out what your actual background was.  They’ll just make a racial assumption.  And then tell you all about what your childhood was like, and what cultural influences you had, and it’s like, i’m sorry. Were you there? I don’t remember seeing you there.

It’s genocide. It’s trying to convince us that our culture should just be forgotten, that it’s not important. Like oh, you just lost.

Yea. White culture has everything you need.  You haven’t figured out anything that we couldn’t figure out. There’s the assumption that it’s the same culture, except for mistakes and different names for things. And that’s just not how it works.

Right, or if you’re mixed, they’ll say, “Why don’t you care about your Irish heritage” or whatever it is. “Why don’t you care about it? Why isn’t that important to you?” And I’m like ,first of all, I never said it wasn’t because that’s not what we were talking about. And second of all, maybe I prefer not being dehumanized as a woman. And…

There’s that.

And maybe, like, just because I value my indigenous culture, that doesn’t mean that… I mean, they see valuing that as a threat.

Ireland is doing fine. They were colonized, but they’re doing okay.  And then further, maybe it’s because the family members that gave me the cultural influences didn’t grow up in Ireland. They grew up in Mohawk country. Maybe that’s why Mohawk was more significant in terms of what I was taught.  

Yea, or they’re like in Appalachia so it’s a little separated, and none of them speak Irish or Scottish anymore.  They speak the Appalachian dialect of English.  

Yea.

Which, I mean, I do care about my Scottish and Irish heritage. I know what clan I am. I want to learn the dances and stuff.  But like, they think that if you value your indigenous culture, that that’s somehow a threat to any other culture you have.  Now you’re nothing else.  How could I?  You’re a traitor.

Yea, they wanna stamp it out.  So I had somebody where - I actually wrote an essay response on my substack to it, to a comment that said that  “If I didn’t grow up with the original stuff, then it doesn’t count.  Even if it’s legit [ancestry],” they called it.  Then turned around and was like, “Why aren’t you proud of the fact that you’re descended from Danish Mormons?”  And it’s like, well, I’ve never practiced Mormon affiliation. I didn’t grow up in Mormon culture.  So I don’t understand why this heritage counts. I’ve never been to Denmark. Why am I allowed to be proud of my Danish heritage? Why am I allowed to be proud of my Mormon heritage?  Why? Is it because they’re from Europe?

I like that you use the phrase, “allowed to,” because that is how they view it.

Yea, they view us as less-than. We have to seek permission.  Alright I do need to wrap this up for today, actually. Something just came up. But I will.. hope that we can talk again about this. I feel like there’s still a lot more to cover.  

Yea, it feels like we’ve only been talking from 20 minutes or something.  It’s just been flying by.  

Yea! No, I think this is great and I’m glad we decided to do this. I think a lot of people will benefit from hearing two people talk about it from the perspective of people who understand what a matriarchy is and that there have been stable matriarchies that have been very successful. We know that.

Thank you so much for having me on.  We say yakoke fena. Thank you so much.  Oh, well thank you for teaching me. Yakoke fena? Yakoke is thank you and fena is very much.  Okay. Yakoke fena. Great. Well, take care! Bye. Bye.