Dirk Campbell, November 2006
In the autumn of 2006 I was in the USA for three weeks working as a musician with the Royal Shakespeare Company. We had been invited to Ann Arbor by the University of Michigan and were performing three Shakespeare plays in the prestigious new theatre there. Since I was involved in only one of the plays, I had quite a lot of time on my hands. One thing I wanted to do while I was in the USA was visit an American Native reservation if there was one near by. I expected there wouldn't be; from what I'd read, reservations were in places like Arizona, not in the industrialized mid-west. I had contacted Olaf Bowman, a friend who lives in Michigan, before I left the UK, and when I asked him about this, he told me that there was indeed a reservation at Mount Pleasant, not far north of Ann Arbor, though he didn't seem unduly enthusiastic about it. My own delight at the information was soon tempered by the knowledge that the reservation was the home of a few hundred native Americans and all anyone knew about them was that they had put up a casino.
Nevertheless I resolved to make the trip. Even if the Saginaw Chippewa, as they are called, turned out to be nothing but modernised materialists I would still get to see some genuine American natives, and that must be worth a day out. Olaf generously offered to pick me up from the hotel on my first free day and take me to the reservation. As we drove along the seemingly endless freeways, I looked out at a flat, featureless landscape of fields and occasional sprawling collections of houses. Even though I was speeding along in a car, I could not help feeling the destruction of the natural environment by a culture of exploitation and control. The native inhabitants must have lived here not so long ago, on the very land I was travelling over, when it was abundant with forests and wildlife. Now it looked tired and sick.
We arrived at Mount Pleasant. Was it a town? I couldn't see anything that looked like one and the countryside was as flat as ever, despite the name. Standing right next to an exit off the freeway was the casino which I had been told about. It was a large, lurid building of the type one would expect to see in Las Vegas. As we drove past I saw a big arch decorated with native style imagery, rather like a curved-over totem pole. The name on it was 'Soaring Eagle Casino'. Seeing this lifted my heart, for it was an expression of traditional native American priorities. I could immediately see that though this solution to the problems of poverty and despair might seem like a grossly materialistic stratagem, a betrayal of their own philosophy, it had at least not erased native identity. And, along with wealth, comfort and self-respect, it had brought them the means of communicating some rather important information.
Apart from the casino we could see no other buildings except what could have been low-rise office blocks on a side road. Everything was modern, clean, ordinary. There was no visible activity apart from road traffic. Olaf and I drove back and forth a couple of times. There was a sign in front of one of the low-rise office buildings. It had a car park in front of it. The sign said 'Ziibiwing Centre'. I paid it scant attention, assuming that 'Ziibiwing' meant nothing in any Native American language, but Olaf said 'That must be it. The Visitor Centre.' 'Are you sure?' 'Yep. That's it.' So we drove into the car park. There was only one other car there.
The building was spacious, modern and, for the most part, empty. There seemed to be little to see and no-one to talk to. Aside from a well-stocked gift shop there were a couple of rooms with displays of artifacts, and a large, unoccupied central hall. At the end of this hall was a door marked 'Permanent Exhibit'. We walked in. It was like entering another world. In a series of interconnected galleries there was recreated, in extraordinary and sumptuous detail, the history, culture and lifestyle of the Anishinabe, a large North American language group containing a number of tribes including the Ojibway or Chippewa (the two names are cognate). Voice recordings in the Ojibway language with a voice-over translation in English accompanied us as we walked through the winding galleries. We were led through tableaux with life-size clay figures in traditional dress fishing in a river of running water, building birch-bark lodges, using domestic equipment, conducting ceremonies and many other things. We sat in a small dome-shaped movie theatre and watched a beautifully animated film of the Anishinabe creation story. Everything was carefully and elegantly designed and beautifully lit.
We learned of the history of the Anishinabe beginning with their long migration to the Great Lakes area, including 200 years of peaceful coexistence with white traders, and ending in their struggle to survive the onslaught of the loggers and settlers of the USA. We saw documents and reports by the US government justifying the occupation of all their land. Finally we came to the section dealing with the Seven Prophecies, or Seven Fires, integral to the history of the Anishinabe. The prophecies have been dated back to 900 AD. Most of the Anishinabe now live on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes; had they not followed the prophecies and travelled away from the Atlantic coast and out of what is now US territory, there would be hardly any of them left. (Those that did stay, such as the Algonquin, were virtually exterminated.)
The prophets of the Seven Fires counselled the Anishinabe to go on a journey that would take many centuries, warning them that if they did not, they would be destroyed. The first three prophecies predicted points along the journey where certain things would happen and certain discoveries would be made. They would find, for example, 'the place where food grows upon the water' (this was the discovery of wild rice). The Fourth Prophecy concerned the arrival of the Light-Skinned People and warned of such things as polluted waters and poisoned fish unfit to eat (which is the condition of the Great Lakes today). The Fourth Prophecy is an amazing prediction when you think that at the time of the prophecies, the existence of the Americas was unsuspected in Europe, and Europe was undreamed of in the Americas.
The Fifth Prophecy predicted a 'great struggle' and a 'false promise'. The struggle turned out to be that between the natives and the whites, and the false promise turned out to be that of the whites. Accepting the promise of the white way of life and abandoning traditonal ways nearly destroyed the native peoples. The Sixth Prophecy concerned the hiding of traditional knowledge so that it could never be found until the native peoples were free to practise their religion openly once more.
The present time is that of the Seventh Prophecy. For this time there is no prediction; the future is unknown at this point. The Seventh Prophecy, among other things, addresses the Light-Skinned People with two alternative paths: the Path of Desecration or the Path of Compassion. To choose the Path of Desecration will cause much suffering and death to all the Earth's people. This of course we now know, perhaps too late; but 'desecration' is an interesting choice of word. It means having no respect for anything, no sense of the spiritual. Those of us whose mindset is that of the monotheistic religions may think of ourselves as spiritual but in the Anishinabe sense this is not true. 'Compassion' is also an interesting choice of word. The prophecy does not say 'spirituality', 'wisdom', 'sustainable technology', or anything like that. It is compassion – kindness – that is at the heart of the change we must make.
Olaf and I emerged silently and thoughtfully from the exhibition. We wandered into the gift shop, which contained a large number of books and native artifacts. The only other living person in the visitor centre was behind the till in the gift shop and was presumably the owner of the other car in the car park. She was a middle-aged woman, white (apparently), dressed in a clown costume with a red plastic nose. As I paid for the books I had chosen, I asked her what the clown costume signified. 'Hallowe'en,' she replied. 'It's a big thing in America.' The world I had just emerged from seemed suddenly to recede further.
I reflected, as we drove away in the gathering dusk, that I had not actually seen a single native American. It was as if they were keeping themselves out of sight like silent watchers in the woods who had left signs for the traveller to discover. I had been given a great deal of information and understanding; far more, in fact, than I had expected to get. I had not needed to meet or talk with any of them in person. What they had provided, for me and for anyone else willing to make the small effort to find them, was nothing less than a wholehearted and generous gift of themselves. It was a story told without rancour or judgment, despite the horror of their treatment by those who had initially been received as their guests but had eventually become their hunters, oppressors, and jailors. It was a story told by people who are walking their talk.
As I think about this now it seems there is an important secret buried here. How is it possible for a whole ethnic group which has been so cruelly treated, disdained and finally ignored, to practise compassion? We who have grown up with the Christian religion and are materially privileged know that we are enjoined to practise compassion and forgiveness, yet for over two thousand years many of us have found this teaching difficult to follow, whether we have been oppressed or not. Native Americans in general attracted a reputation for warlike behaviour, but the records show that this is unjust. The Anishinabe in particular refused requests for help by Eastern tribes to repulse the white people. As one Ojibway author says, if they had agreed to fight the whites, the history of America would have turned out rather different.*
What I learned about the Anishinabe is that their way was the way of peace, because peace was taught them from the beginning. Understanding of all life was their wisdom. Co-existence with all life was their culture. Respect of all life was their spirituality. These are principles that I find more meaningful than most others I have come across. The way of the Anishinabe is gone now; what's left is their story. That is all they have to give to their children to define themselves by, and to offer to any non-native who may be interested. It's a beautiful story and its message, though simple, could hardly be more vital. I'm committed to it. I invite others to commit to it. We'll be needing it, I think, in the decades ahead.
* Edward Benton Banai, The Mishomis Book
