Right?

Continuing along with my exploration of Aboriginal culture, I’m currently reading “‘Real’ Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood” by Bonita Lawrence. All in all, this has been a real engaging read and I find myself getting through it like a hot knife through butter.

I’m approximately 60% through the book and I find that, though she describes very well the issues that have affected and are still affecting Aboriginal identity, both at large as well as in the individual, there hadn’t yet been too much attention specifying what Aboriginal traditions actually consist of. I’m glad that on page 160, the author had begun to elaborate on this topic. The following is a portion of an interview that I just found said so much.

I can say that I’m traditional, coming from being raised by my grandparents, having them raise me in their traditional ways – a Métis way. But it’s not like traditional with the sweetgrass, or other things. We were traditional in that we were isolated. There were not a lot of white people we were exposed to. We didn’t have electricity, or running water … I grew up with trapping. So for me, I’ve seen skinning, I’ve seen meat smoked, fish smoked. I grew up with fish and traditional meats, and they passed all that on. And the uses of certain teas, and bear fat, that are good for certain things. 

But it’s also the way I was raised, right? The language was passed on, the way of raising children – I grew up in an extended family, where children were never hit; you are taught by example. You don’t realize, until you’re an adult, the values you’ve been raised with. My grandmother would teach me things. Like, if I did something bad, she would say, “You shouldn’t do that – think about how that person is feeling!” Right? So we were taught to put ourselves in the other person’s position, so that we would not do something to hurt somebody. And we were taught by example. They gave us verbal examples. That’s the way our morality was taught. So they taught me a lot of things, even though I didn’t realize it until I was an adult.

My recent forays into topics of culture seem to consist of one part lame identity crisis as well as another part of desire to understand the diversity found in the human experience. And, yeah, the passage itself isn’t an exhaustive exposition on native tradition or whatever, but for a second there, I find myself relating to something in those words on a very fundamental level. And, because of this, I feel that, somehow, this topic was a good idea. Right?