Questions about kinship have been much on my mind.
I wonder about my former students who call me “Pops” or who tell me - in the most serious tone - that I have been selected to stand in as their father. I often feel as though that makes me a deadbeat dad because I haven’t sent them to sleep-away camp or taken them on vacation: the dad things I did with my daughter and stepkids.
Before my grandsons were born - and when I wasn’t certain that there would even be any - I imagined that some of those former students’ children could be my grandchildren. I kept that to myself, but now I find them introducing me to friends as their grandpa. I do my best to live up to that.
I wonder too how it is possible that so many Americans could descend into the rhetoric of calling their neighbors “alien” and “illegal” and why they can’t see those neighbors as family.
Even worse, I wonder how Israelis can conduct genocidal war against their neighbors in the West Bank and Gaza, murdering tens of thousands and driving them from their homes. Why can’t they see them as kin?
I see the revival of union organizing in this country after forty-five years of decline. I see workers at Starbucks and Amazon and even in the auto plants calling one another brother and sister.
But I also see the employers who bleed those workers using the language of kinship. The antiunion consultants who owe their livelihood to defending the riches of exploiters describe union organizers as outsiders who want to break up the workplace family. I wonder whether the employers are equally abusive to their own blood children.
Over the weekend I read a book on Lakota language, Life’s Journey Zuya: Oral Teachings from Rosebud, by Albert White Hat, Sr. He keeps returning to the phrase mitákuye oyás’iŋ (all my relatives, or all are related) as the essential idea of Lakota thinking.* And he explains that this literally means “we all are related.” White Hat writes: “We are related to everything on earth and in the universe. We were all formed from the blood of Iŋyan: humans, animals, trees, water, air, stones.” Iŋyan is usually translated as “stone” and White Hat explains that this primordial stone had power, meaning it contained the ability for both good and evil.
He explains that everybody in a Lakota family is addressed with a relative term, but that - regardless of how these words may be translated into English - they have different meanings:
Your father and all of his brothers are the same to you. It’s like you have a whole set of fathers. If your father has sisters, then their husbands are in that role as well and become Lekší. Today Lekší is translated as ‘uncle’ but doesn’t mean the same as it does in English.
He adds that it doesn’t carry the implication of distance that uncle does in English. The Lakota language dictionary that I use clarifies that Lekší applies to mother’s brothers and male cross cousins, but that is not applied to one’s father’s brothers, who are called Até, father. And there are parallel sets of words for mothers, aunts, and their female cousins.
In the early twentieth century it was common for anthropologists to see taxonomies of relationship that were different from their own as evidence of cultural backwardness. They even claimed that those words showed that other peoples didn’t know where children came from. They used the phrase “fictive kinship” to distinguish other peoples’ vocabulary of relationships from "true" kinship. It should be clear just how backward these assumptions of superiority themselves are. When White Hat remembers his boyhood instruction, he recalls that everything around was a relative:
When we were kids, every time I would go out to play, Mom would always say, “Don’t forget, before you take a drink, say ‘Tȟuŋkášila, Úŋšimala yo.’” Tȟuŋkášila is a term of respect of a relative. Úŋšimala yo means “help me.” So if I lie down to drink from the creek, I’ll say, “Tȟuŋkášila, Úŋšimala yo,” asking that creek that water, to address my thirst.
Clearly White Hat’s mother understood that a creek wasn’t the same as a human relative, but there is a different philosophy at work here.** You may decide that you don’t want to identify a stream as your kin, but disparaging that view as “backward” says more about you than it does about her.
There is another kind of relationship that comes up in White Hat, that of adoption. He includes an entire chapter about the thióšpaye system. Thióšpaye is usually translated as a band, subtribe, or extended family, but White Hat simply defines it as family. He says there are three ways to become a thióšpaye member: descent, marriage, and adoption. Adoptions require a formal ritual, the huŋká ceremony. He tells a humorous story about contemporary understandings of huŋká:
A friend of mine told me that one time he went to Minnesota with a friend of his to visit his friend’s family. There he was introduced to the family, he met four beautiful sisters, and he was immediately attracted to them. The whole family sat down together for coffee, and my friend said he couldn’t take his eyes off those girls. His friend’s father was very gracious but kept watching him as he kept his eyes on the sisters. After this went on for a while, the father said, “My son is the only boy I have, and I’m glad he has you as a friend. I’m very happy about this, so I’m going to adopt you as a son.” My friend said, “I said ‘Thank you,’ but deep inside I was thinking, ‘Oh, shit.’” His friend’s sisters were to become his sisters as soon as he was adopted.
At least White Hat’s friend understood the web of reciprocal obligation that adoption incurred. I wonder whether Kevin Costner did when Albert White Hat himself made the actor his huŋká after working together on the film Dances with Wolves. Only five years later the actor and his brother were in conflict with the Lakota people over a complicated land swap for a golf course and casino in the Black Hills. The Lakota reserved that land for themselves in treaties with the US government in 1851 and again in 1868, but it was seized by the US government in 1876. Then, in 1980, the US seizure of the Hills was ruled illegal by the US Supreme Court. The consequences of the Court's ruling were still being adjudicated in 1995 when the Costner brothers decided they needed their own casino on federal land. They’re still being adjudicated today, years after the Costners' development went belly up.
But what especially interests me is whether people understand the obligations of huŋká to the two individuals, to the thióšpaye, to the oyáte (nation.) In his glossary, White Hat defines the huŋkápi ceremony as “between two parties [my emphasis] or two people to renew relationship and harmony.” And he conditions today's individual-to-individual meaning by saying: “Since reservation times, the people have used this ceremony for naming and making relations.” I read this to mean that it was used to cultivate nation-to-nation connections in pre-reservation days.
For me this raises the idea that the making of relations can be a mode of conflict resolution between two peoples. Two recent books have explored the history of this, Covered With Night, by Nicole Eustace (2021) and Our Beloved Kin by Lisa Brooks (2018). Covered With Night is the story of a 1722 murder in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Two white fur traders robbed and killed a Seneca hunter at a time when the entire colony of Pennsylvania was still vulnerable to destruction by the (then) Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee. (The powerful Five Nations Confederation included the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk tribes.) The Pennsylvania government was convinced that the only way they could survive was by actually taking the crime seriously and hanging the murderers. They struggled - and failed - to understand that the Seneca saw it as an opportunity for rituals of reconciliation that would bring the Indigenous and settler communities into a right relationship. Our Beloved Kin is a new history of King Philip’s War in New England in the 1670’s. It, too, looks at the resolute refusal of the English colonists of the Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies to honor the kinship relationships in which the Indigenous peoples tried to include them.
I’ll look first at Our Beloved Kin because it opens with an adoption. In 1623 the British sea captain Christopher Levett explored the coast of what is now Maine. At Caskoak (today’s Portland) he was welcomed to a meeting with the sôgeskwa, or queen, of the area. Brooks writes that
a well-established ceremonial and economic system of exchange” allowed effective leaders like the sôgeskwa to resolve conflicts “through diplomatic councils and annual ceremonies at places like Caskoak, where people of all ages participated in symbolic and material exchange.
In his own 1623 book about his explorations, Levett reports that he was offered a place in her family, and “was not a little proud . . . to be adopted cousin to so many great kings at one instant, but did willingly accept of it." Brooks notes the captain's humorous tone, and wonders how much he understood of the responsibilities this adoption entailed, adding, “When the Queen welcomed Levett and his ‘friends’ into this space, she invited them to enter into its network of people, diplomatic practices, and reciprocal relations.”
Much of the conflict that led to King Philip’s War was the result of coerced mortgages, in which an English trader would sell something to an Indigenous person on credit, then insist that the loan was secured by land that the trader wanted. In the most important case, the united colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut demanded compensation from the Narragansetts for pretended crimes. A private company then “covered” the costs, in return for a mortgage of land amounting to most of today’s Rhode Island. The company specified repayment by a staggering amount of wampum (strung clamshell beads) within six months. When the Narragansetts actually came through with the usurious sum, the company then refused to accept their payment, demanding the land instead! A royal commission sent by Charles II declared this deal fraudulent and nullified it, but that didn’t prevent it from being a cause of the eventual war.
Our Beloved Kin’s companion website lets the reader see a handwritten deed, in English, signed by several sachems, or chiefs, in 1651. It identifies the territory of a saunkskwa, or queen, named Weetamoo - the “beloved cosin” of the chiefs who signed it - and confirms her right to allow an Englishman to herd his cattle on Pocasset Neck, a part of her territory. It is important that these neighboring chiefs identify Weetamoo as their cousin. It is important that they recognize her right, as custodian of the land, to allow a white man to enter into this relationship with that land. It insists that Weetamoo’s conveyance is just and without controversy. It acknowledges the possibility of conflict with Plymouth which claimed that the land was theirs: “I nevar did nor intended to put under Plimoth any of my kinswoman’s land… and therefore I disalow of any pretended claim.” All this is important because it recognizes the web of mutual kinship obligations under which they all worked and that those obligations included responsibilities to the land itself.
In 1675, fourteen years after those chiefs wrote, signed and notarized that document, Plymouth Colony was still trying to assert their authority over Weetamoo’s land in Pocasset. At Plymouth's request, Rhode Island Deputy Governor John Easton met with her to get her to concede that her land was theirs. He was unable to get what they wanted. In Our Beloved Kin, Brooks summarizes Easton’s report to the governor of Plymouth:
‘the Queen’s right’ had been ‘confirmed’ by dozens of settlers whom she might call to testify in a higher court, and it encompassed a far greater tract of land beside’ which she now proposed. Weetamoo was still in a position of considerable power, not only among Native people, but among the neighboring English with whom she had formed lasting relationships of exchange [emphasis mine.]
I emphasize those “lasting relationships of exchange” because in so many cultural contexts other than capitalism they are the heart of maintaining right relations with neighbors. Far from being isolated on the far side of a racial (and gender!) divide that would allow the Plymouth courts to erase her position and ignore her testimony and those of her fellow chiefs, she had cultivated strong, protective, reciprocal ties with her individual English neighbors who would testify on her behalf in a white court.
If you are unfamiliar with the history of King Philip’s War, I’ll just offer this summary: The United Colonies of Plymouth, Connecticut, and Massachusetts eventually allowed their land hunger to overcome their caution about the power of their Indigenous neighbors. They tried and executed three Wampanoag men for the murder of a Christian Massachusett Native. (We will have more to say on capital punishment in the next section.) The retaliatory raids led Native fighters to within a few miles of Boston. They were only turned back when the Governor of New York sent a party of Mohawks (from the powerful Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, Confederation mentioned above) to attack the Wampanoags and their Nipmuck and Narragansett allies from the west. The Englishmen also began massacring entire Indigenous towns. What is important for us here, though, is the English refusal to accept or recognize the long-term meaning of reciprocal relations, of kinship.
The events of Nicole Eustace’s Covered With Night took place about fifty years after King Philip’s War and about four hundred miles southwest, in eastern Pennsylvania. Two English brothers, John and Edwin Cartlidge, visited the home of a Seneca hunter named Sawantaeny, hoping to purchase the beaver, deer, and bear pelts he has been accumulating for trade. They lubricated the negotiations with rum, then - after an evening of drinking - informed him that they would be taking his furs and that the liquor they had provided was his compensation! When Sawantaeny angrily objected, they murdered him.
The Indigenous hunters of the area had been objecting for some time to this kind of sharp trading practice. One year earlier, Eustace notes, at a conference near the site of the murder:
Colonists recorded, without truly registering, a request made by a representative of the Seneca Nation that, “we may now be together as one people.” The Senecas preceded this request by presenting a “small parcel of dressed Skins” and followed it by offering “a Bundle of Bear skins.” By presenting ritual gifts immediately before and after they spoke, the Seneca representatives made their diplomatic message manifest. In pairing words and goods, they were trying to make something ineffable—that is, the feelings that came with unity—into something tangible. Through just such a process of coming together, the members of the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee had managed to contain conflict among themselves over the last century or more.
So, while the Senecas clearly understood the idea of a fair bargain, they also understood that reciprocal gifting can be a means of uniting two disparate peoples into one. They had also learned that teaching this lesson to white people would be a challenge. Eustace writes:
Leaders from the many nations living in and around Conestoga try to explain to colonists how broadly their people seek to distribute material riches, the better to create extensive bonds of benevolence between peoples. When asked at one treaty council how they liked the diplomatic gifts passed out by Pennsylvania officials, they replied that, “not only the Indians that were at Conestogoe . . . but likewise those of the whole Country, were pleased with what then passed, and that the Presents then delivered to them were divided into the smallest parts, that [they] might reach all the Indians everywhere & be read as a Letter.” For Indians, gifting is a powerful means of communicating. They do everything they can to spread the word of friendship as widely as possible.
Pennsylvania Governor William Keith did understand at some level that the Indigenous people were trying to draw him into a different set of relationships. Responding explicitly to Native complaints about the greed of white traders, “Keith told the assembled Indians, who objected to the poor returns they received for their furs, ‘you must take Care to make the best Bargain you can.’ After all, Keith asserted, every man must take care of himself.”
I can not think of a clearer response to the suggestion that we all work together for the common good than “Every man for himself.”
Keith even understands the oratory that is expected of him. At a later conference, after the murder, he opens his remarks with the words, “When I speak to you, I think I speak to my own flesh and blood.” Eustace makes it clear what kind of rhetoric device this is:
But as Keith continues, he makes it clear that he has a very particular type of flesh-and-blood relationship in mind:
“I expect,” he tells them, that you will “look upon me even as a child would respect and obey the words of a tender father.” There it is. Keith wants to position the Indian leaders in front of him as his subordinates. He takes for granted that they will accept this role.
We are right back to that abusive dad conjured up for us by our anti-union consultants with their talk of family. This racist “Great White Father” trope persisted well into the 20th century. It’s probably still alive today.
But let’s get back to the murder of Sawantaeny, because it afforded all the tribes on that Pennsylvania frontier with another opportunity to teach these resistant and obtuse white people about the kinds of relationships they wanted to cultivate. I mentioned at the outset that the government of Pennsylvania was genuinely concerned about retaliation by the Seneca and the entire Five Nations. That explains their rush to judge and hang the Cartlidge brothers, despite the fact that they put no particular value on Sawantaeny’s life. In fact, his name barely appears in their judicial or legislative records. But neither Sawantaeny’s Shawnee wife nor his Seneca people are looking for a compensatory killing. They have their own protocols and rituals of reconciliation in mind. Eustace writes:
Native tradition holds that the Great Law of Peace of the Five Nations itself began when the spirit Hayonwhatha, plunged in mourning, picked strands of rushes and strung them with shells, saying, “This I would do if I found anyone burdened with grief as I am. I would console them for they would be covered with night and wrapped in darkness. This would I lift with the words of condolence and these strands of beads would become words with which I would address them.” When the Haudenosaunee followed this teaching, peace began to grow among them. By the first decades of the eighteenth century, Native people across the Northeast, Algonquian as well as Iroquois, have learned the fundamental importance of pairing words and beads, offering ritual condolences for death along with beautifully worked belts of wampum, whenever they seek to smooth away conflicts or build connections. Emotions must be addressed before politics; emotional exchanges are the very basis of national formation and diplomatic negotiation. And binding cords of wampum embody the emotional and spiritual bonds between peoples. When offered along with ritual speeches, wampum does many things. It ties together the work of the colonial government seal that authenticates, of the colonial Christian cross that consecrates, and of the colonial book that commemorates—all in one gleaming belt.
First please note the phrase “covered with night” which Eustace used as the title of her book. It evokes so much of the language of loss that fills the condolence ceremony the Haudenosaunee included right in the Constitution of the Five Nations. In 1916, Arthur Parker, who was NY State Archeologist and himself a Seneca Indian published an English translation for the State Museum. I’ll include a few words here:
We have now met in dark sorrow to lament together over the death of our brother. For such has been your loss. We will sit together in our grief and mingle our tears together. We will wipe the tear from your eyes so that for one day you might have peace of mind.
Now hear us again, for when a person is in great grief caused by death, his ears are closed up an he can not hear. We will therefore remove the grief from you ears, so that for one day you may have perfect hearing again.
The Native peoples of Pennsylvania were requesting formal condolences along with reparations. So was Sawantaeny’s wife, Satcheechoe. So were his Seneca relations. They made it clear in meeting after meeting that the deaths of the Cartlidge brothers could never make up for the loss of Sawantaeny and that those executions could never reconcile the Indigenous peoples with the whites. Justice and reconciliation would require an in-person visit to the chiefs of the Five Nations, a formal ceremony of comfort, and extensive gifts, including wampum.
What is interesting to me about this is the recognition that conflict is inevitable. There is no expectation that a single recognition of kinship will eliminate all our future disputes. There is, instead, the realization that even siblings (maybe especially siblings) fight. But it establishes protocols for resolving those conflicts. And it establishes the need for regularly renewing those bonds. As Albert White Hat said, we have the capacity for good and evil.
I don’t imagine that we can all sit down together and sing “Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu” and Gazans will just forget the murders of tens of thousands of their family members or the demolitions of their schools and hospitals and mosques and churches. I don’t imagine that West Bank Palestinians can join hands with Jewish Israelis and dance together to erase the memory of homes stolen, burned, and demolished; nor of beatings and of detentions without trial. I don’t imagine that pro forma Native land acknowledgements by the descendants of white settlers resolves centuries of genocide or that public admissions of “white privilege” makes up for slavery, Jim Crow, and racist mass incarceration. I don’t think reciting an aspirational sonnet from the base of the Statue of Liberty makes up for mass deportations.
I believe we need serious reparations. I believe we need public statements of truth and formal rituals of reconciliation. And I believe we need to do them regularly, not once.
I also believe that without all this we are doomed.
* I am choosing here and throughout to use a different Lakota orthography than that chosen by White Hat
** A couple of points here. The word tȟuŋkášila is generally translated today as “grandfather.” And White Hat - who is deeply concerned about the way Jesuit and Episcopalian translators have actually mutated the language in search of cognate words - explains in a note “Today the church has translated Úŋšimala yo to mean ‘have pity on me’ or ‘have mercy on me.’” In fact, my Lakota dictionary translates that phrase, Tȟuŋkášila, Úŋšimala yo, as “Have pity on me, Creator.” The disparity in meanings White Hat identifies here is an important example of his lifelong quest to find what the language as spoken by his grandparents revealed about their understanding of the world.
