Photo courtesy of Megan Mack
This piece originally ran in Sprit of the Waters Journey.
At the beating heart of any Totem Pole Journey, one will find Jewell James, Master Carver of the House of Tears Carvers from the Lummi Nation. Much of his professional life you could find him in judicial courts or the halls of Congress, advocating for treaty rights to be upheld and Tribal sovereignty respected; Now, you will find him still fighting the good fight, but often with a large totem pole in tow. We were able to sit down with Jewell for a conversation in Umatilla, the half-way point of this year’s Spirit of the Waters Totem Pole Journey.
To begin, can you share a little bit about your vision for this year’s Totem Pole Journey?
JJ: We're on a campaign to save the river and save the salmon and support the Tribal governments that have made the decision to call for the removal of the dams on the Snake River. We're not making a choice for them [but] to be an ally to them.
We know they consider the water of the river alive — a sacred place from the headwaters on down to the mouth of the Columbia River — and the salmon populations are extremely important to their well-being, their traditional culture, and lifestyle. So we would like to reinforce their call, because Native country can't do it on their own. We absolutely need churches, environmental groups, citizens groups and other tribes to support their cause.
Throughout this journey there has been Native youth at these events and many calls to fight for future generations. Based on your decades of activism, what is your advice for these young folks on how to make change?
JJ: Well, first they have to understand that they are a sovereign person. They have a mind, a body and a soul. [In our] native culture, the elders and the ancestors have specific ways of preparing them to make sure that their body is healthy, their mind strong, and their spirit is strong. And so as long as all three of those are healthy, then they should become a healthy, well adjusted adult.
For teenagers, I talk about the issue of [Tribal] sovereignty and our constitutional relationship, to reinforce in them that they should know this and understand it and take it into mind and heart and keep it there; because they're beginning to move towards leadership, and they should be engaged in the questions on how to protect the traditional lands of their people.
What are some of the challenges Native youth face as they engage in these questions and approach leadership roles?
JJ: There's a lot of things that interfere with that. You know, there's a lot of trauma, that kind of historical trauma and generational trauma because of the families that have suffered as a consequence of federal law and policy.
Our experience with the United States has been always trying to defend what we have and keep it for the next generations. So they're going to need to understand: what is a treaty and how does that relate to the United States Constitution? And how are politicians or judges obligated to honor those treaties? If they can understand the basics, they'll be good leaders, but they need to be aware of that. They have to understand our people first —- What are [they] doing to defend our rights to exist, to live longer than they have? You know, if you don't have the heart for the people, then you're never going to be a good leader.
The topic of historical trauma, particularly from Indian boarding schools, has come up throughout this Journey, and the Dept. of Interior just released their initial investigative report on boarding schools this week. Could you talk more about that history?
JJ: Well, the boarding school experience began about as early as 1801, although it may not have had federal funding [at that time]. The [policy] of taking children from their tribal families, and tribal communities and teaching them to be white has existed for a long time. There was a period of boarding school development from 1868 on where there was a heavy concentration of federal appropriations and church involvement as the number of institutions expanded over 400. [The goal was] to basically ‘kill the Indian to save the man’ [...] and to get rid of the those parts of a native identity that made them tribal people, to disconnect us from the land itself. It's easier to take land from a people that are disorganized, disconnected, or suffering in pain. And so a lot of trauma was forced into our communities and a lot of children were taken right from the arms of the crying mother; and those children never came home.
The boarding school experience has created a lot of inability of the parents and the children and the grandparents to communicate with each other. When you break that up, you open up a wound in the heart that will never go away and the child is always going to be searching for that love they lost and in the wrong places.
I went to boarding school, but for me I went there to learn not to fight. I was a young man that practiced reverse racism. When I walked through the city there was a lot of racism, and I just always believed I had a right to defend myself, that I always got to accept it, you know? And then if you hit me, I hit you back harder; but that started to create problems for me.
So I had myself put in boarding school and went to Oklahoma. It was still the termination era, so they would send us 2,000 miles away so that you couldn't just go home. For me, I'm lucky because in 1969, there was a crackdown on making sure there was no abuse from the boarding school. So I didn't really see what those that were in the boarding schools before then had experienced. We all just mainly focused on self-awareness and self-survival when I was in boarding school. I got to take care of the horses and I really enjoyed that — I kept myself busy that way.
I know that the whale totem was created to represent Tokitae and to bring awareness of the campaign to bring her home. Do you feel like there is a connection between the stealing of Tokitae and the stealing of Native children from their families?
JJ: For Tokitae, it's the same thing. Whales have families, you know, they have their own tribe and their own ceremonial ways of communicating. Now, she's the last of those that were taken back in 1970, the sole survivor. But she still sings the family song. She still misses her mother.
[Her mother] could live for another 20 years, and so [Tokitae] could still come home and be with her mother again. We just hope that corporations have finally exhausted, basically the raping of her identity. But that's kind of a reflection of our attitude towards the Earth and Mother Earth spirituality — [ Native Americans] are a target for destruction and anybody who practices that way. Native Americans had song and ceremonies that reflected that Mother Earth spirituality and so that's why [the United States] had to destroy our spiritual practice, that traditional cultural identification, because it connected us with the world around us too much; and you're going to be defending that environment a lot more aggressively when you're aware of that disruption or taking that was unjustified from almost every Indian tribe across the nation.
Given the depths of the intergenerational trauma caused by the colonialism of the U.S., including the boarding schools, what does reconciliation and repair look like to you?
JJ: The [U.S.] government is full of graft and has 200 years of history of stealing Indian funds. We all know the boarding schools were partly funded by the federal government, partly funded by the churches. But a lot of the funding also came from children working, and anything they earned was put into a fund and the school took control of it.
Take the example of Chemawa: The kids bought a lot of land that's now west of the Interstate five. That was their land. Then when the children disappeared, died or were sent back home over the years, the government sold it to white capitalists. A lot of those children died for that land, you know? And that's why I have the argument that all lands purchased during the time of the schools, especially by child labor, should be owned indefinitely by the tribes that had children there. I think any tribe that had a child die at school should be entitled to be on a board of directors preserving that land.
But whether it's protecting the environment and securing environmental justice or trying to get reconciliation over the damage done by the boarding schools, the key question is whether or not this country is capable of living up to constitutional law.
Can you share more about that?
JJ: Well, [historically] you had two views of the relationship of Native America. One is in compliance with the US Constitution, what I consider the litmus test written into the constitution by the Founding Fathers. The other wanted us to believe that all Indians are incompetent and the United States has complete control of us under what they call the trust responsibility. That trust responsibility is based on a misinterpretation of a couple of laws, [namely the] Doctrine of Discovery. The Doctrine of Discovery was an international gentlemen's agreement between sovereigns that if you discover a land before anybody else and it was empty, you have rights entitled to it. Well, in 1823, in Johnson v. McIntosh, Chief Justice Marshall [...] basically interpreted the Discovery Doctrine as if [North America] was terra nullius [nobody’s land] , but the area was occupied. Therefore, the United States inherited the rights of discovery from England when they drove [native people] out — and that's a legal fiction. So from there forward, the legal fictions began to build.
I really like the 1986 Harvard Law Journal article by the late Milner Ball. He was never involved in the Indian question, but he decided to look at it as a constitutional law expert and teacher. When he looked at all the court cases dealing with Indian Country that were governing the relationship between the United States and and the Indian tribes, he said legal fiction, legal fiction, legal fiction. None of these could stand up to constitutional scrutiny.
Is there anything that is giving you hope right now in battling back against these legal fictions and upholding constitutional obligations?
JJ: The Yakama Nation just won a case and they had to address the question of whether or not the Yakama Nation can conduct on and off reservation commerce without interference from either the state of Washington or state of Oregon. The court ruled that the States’ are not going to come into this court and demand renegotiations of the treaties made. They were not party to it and those treaties came into being before they even existed. It's that type of constitutional interpretation that Indian Country really needs.
That's why I always favor quoting Felix Cohen, “Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith.”
Do you feel like that has motivated you in your decades of work and activism? That the Constitution is actually on your side —- we just need to ensure the people and courts realize and abide by it?
JJ: You know, even though it's a small document, it's too complicated for many, and that's because they don't know the history of the evolution of sovereignty of the people, popular sovereignty. Even if they read it, they really don't understand it.
The Articles of Confederation was based on state sovereignty, and if the Articles of Confederation continued, it would have institutionalized a legal picture that the states preexisted the people; but states didn't preexist the people. When the 1787 Constitution came out, it went back to ‘ We the people’ and constitutionally all states were required to begin with the same foundation to their sovereignty : ‘We the people of the State of Idaho’, ‘We the people of the state of Oregon’, or Washington, etc.
People don't understand their own sovereignty, so they allow it to be invaded all the time. It's our sovereignty that the country is based on, we the people. You don't get it from any other source.