Wife is Cleaning
Our home computer is located in the office my wife keeps for her home business. The Mrs. is what I call an "event cleaner" which is to say, she only cleans when people are coming over. Her office is a disaster area (I am strictly forbidden to touch it as far as cleaning is concerned) and my dad and step-mom are coming into town this week. The room with the computer was kept away from me most of yesterday and probably most of today. My posting will be sparce if nonexistent today. The Mrs. is sleeping now, and that's how I got to write this.
Constable Paul Wright’s discussion on Ojibway discipline is taken from http://www.maquah.net/AhnishinahbaeotjibwayReflections/AppendixI/1986-11-03_Lorraine_Kingsley_on_discipline.html.
Some years ago, I had the privilege of reading the Journals of Lewis and Clark, which is a long record of their trip up the Mississippi River under the order of then-president Thomas Jefferson to find the nonexistent Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. One of the most fascinating aspects of the journals (which are in many sections a dull read, precisely because they are journals), is their encounters with the Native American tribes, many of whom were meeting White Men for the very first time. Lewis and Clark were instructed to meet with the tribes to establish trade relations, particularly for furs, for the United States. As they met each tribe they wrote notes on the culture of each that they passed, and there were significant differences between them. I remember in particular, Lewis and Clark were irritated with the Apache, because they did not discipline their children. You have to understand that Lewis and Clark were military during a time when if a man disobeyed orders, the standard punishment of the U.S. military was to flog the man in front of the other men. So, you could expect the degree of obedience by children was probably pretty high. Nevertheless, the Apache reason for not disciplining children as expressed by Lewis and Clark was that they did not want to injure the spirit of the child. The Apaches were considered the low mark of Native American tribes as far as that was concerned. Virtually every other tribe encountered fared better in description, and many were described as extremely conservative in dress, and behaviour of children. So, when Jesse Mukwa displayed, what I would consider a complete disrespect for Liz Patterson’s authority, I was curious what the thought about the discipline of children was for the Ojibway. Searching for “Ojibway discipling of children”, I found that website above.
The good constable’s post expresses the opinion of the website in a fairly nice way (i.e without the anti-White statements) compared to the Lorraine Kingsley letter quoted in the website above. After reading it, it is clear that the Ojibway method of discipline of children is similar to, but slightly more disciplined than the Apaches from the days of Lewis and Clark. It also reflects a problem that Native Americans have with their own history, i.e. portraying the time before the Whites came as a utopia, where no one ever did anything wrong to anyone else. I have the same problem with people in the States who believe the 1950s were a utopia destroyed the 1960s. My father, who lived through the time, has informed me that the 1950s were anything but a utopia. What I took from the Lewis and Clark writings, was that the Native Americans of their day were not land and nature-loving holy people but were people just like you would expect, trying their best to survive the elements, to get food, and protect themselves from attacks by other Native American tribes.
Constable Paul Wright’s discussion on Ojibway discipline is taken from http://www.maquah.net/AhnishinahbaeotjibwayReflections/AppendixI/1986-11-03_Lorraine_Kingsley_on_discipline.html.
Some years ago, I had the privilege of reading the Journals of Lewis and Clark, which is a long record of their trip up the Mississippi River under the order of then-president Thomas Jefferson to find the nonexistent Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. One of the most fascinating aspects of the journals (which are in many sections a dull read, precisely because they are journals), is their encounters with the Native American tribes, many of whom were meeting White Men for the very first time. Lewis and Clark were instructed to meet with the tribes to establish trade relations, particularly for furs, for the United States. As they met each tribe they wrote notes on the culture of each that they passed, and there were significant differences between them. I remember in particular, Lewis and Clark were irritated with the Apache, because they did not discipline their children. You have to understand that Lewis and Clark were military during a time when if a man disobeyed orders, the standard punishment of the U.S. military was to flog the man in front of the other men. So, you could expect the degree of obedience by children was probably pretty high. Nevertheless, the Apache reason for not disciplining children as expressed by Lewis and Clark was that they did not want to injure the spirit of the child. The Apaches were considered the low mark of Native American tribes as far as that was concerned. Virtually every other tribe encountered fared better in description, and many were described as extremely conservative in dress, and behaviour of children. So, when Jesse Mukwa displayed, what I would consider a complete disrespect for Liz Patterson’s authority, I was curious what the thought about the discipline of children was for the Ojibway. Searching for “Ojibway discipling of children”, I found that website above.
The good constable’s post expresses the opinion of the website in a fairly nice way (i.e without the anti-White statements) compared to the Lorraine Kingsley letter quoted in the website above. After reading it, it is clear that the Ojibway method of discipline of children is similar to, but slightly more disciplined than the Apaches from the days of Lewis and Clark. It also reflects a problem that Native Americans have with their own history, i.e. portraying the time before the Whites came as a utopia, where no one ever did anything wrong to anyone else. I have the same problem with people in the States who believe the 1950s were a utopia destroyed the 1960s. My father, who lived through the time, has informed me that the 1950s were anything but a utopia. What I took from the Lewis and Clark writings, was that the Native Americans of their day were not land and nature-loving holy people but were people just like you would expect, trying their best to survive the elements, to get food, and protect themselves from attacks by other Native American tribes.
posted by howard at 5:55 AM
2 Comments:
Interesting source material on Ojibway discipline. I agree with you on nostalgia--it always invokes an idyllic time that never existed.
Is Ms. Kingsley's description of Ojibwe 'discipline' accurate - or is it 'nostalgia'?
From the vantage of Western Europeans and Euroamericans, perhaps it seems 'nostalgic' - but from an Indigenous vantage, it seems accurate, coherent with the rest of the culture when it was written (in the 1980s).
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