Both of my grandmothers: Diné and Dakota, a rug weaver and a star quilt maker (via @jfkeeler Instagram )

Ihanktonwan (Yankton) Family

My 16-year old daughter was pretty unhappy today about Trump's inauguration. She was supposed to go to a rally with her friends but became overwhelmed and despondant. I realized I couldn't make her happy by simply a heart-to-heart about what Trump's election means to our Native American family. In fact, to anyone American who is not white. So, instead I decided to read her a chapter from my great-great Aunt Ella Deloria's book "Speaking of Indians." The title of the chapter is "A Scheme of Life that Worked: Kinship's Role in Dakota Life." The book was published in 1944 but I feel it still held truths that would be relevant today in 2017.

My great-great Aunt Ella Deloria

My aunt opens the chapter saying, "All peoples who live communally must first find some way to get along harmoniously and with a measure of decency and order. This is a universal problem...The Dakota people found a way: it was through kinship."

The beauty of this way of life she recounts, this vision of how humans can—and did—live together had a healing effect on my daughter. She was laughing and smiling by the end of the chapter. (My aunt ends the chapter with a funny joke.) And I was thankful to my aunt once again. Her words remembering what we once were, 'Odakota' as she calls it, drove away the despair this society had filled my daughter with, driven as it is by division and polarizing self-interest.

Ihanktonwan Camp in 1882

I remember asking my Uncle Vine Deloria if Aunt Ella told him everything she knew (I had heard there were things she did not share with the younger generations) and he told me that she had not. He said some of these things were just too precious to be passed on in some malformed way and losing our way of life, which our elders loved so much, was so painful that passing it on in some twisted form, well, they could not bear that. I thought about this for a long time and several years later, I came to the conclusion that our ancestors had confidence we could find our way back again. That we could rediscover this "way of life that works" for us today. Coming together, as we have at Standing Rock, bringing the bits together each of our families still have of the previous society that once filled our ancestors with such joy, is the start. And it will grow. Even under Trump. It will not be denied.

On Facebook I shared this photo of my dad with the following caption:



Politics, the way it's constructed, it attracts a certain type and that's across the board--all creeds, all cultures. To counteract this we should be more actively recruiting the sort of person who would not push themselves to the forefront. This was the kind that in our traditional Dakota/Lakota societies that would be chosen.

My father was once chosen this way. I remember at an election for the White Buffalo Council in Denver, my dad stood in the back of the room. His was his usual silent, introspective self, leaning against the wall, surveying the crowd deep in his own thoughts. And I suppose for our Indian people still waters run deep because the next thing we knew my dad had been elected as Vice Chair by the entire crown before us without even running.

As a child, this stayed with me. My father was in character so different than the candidate who offers himself up and glad-hands his way to power.

Indeed, politics attracts the entitled. Research shows less qualified male candidates are more likely to put themselves forward to run than more qualified female candidates. The whole process of becoming a candidate is so tied to the ego of the individual that the system elevates those that feel particularly entitled to power.

As happens on Facebook, a relative, my grandmother's cousin Sam Deloria gave me some feedback on my perhaps too romantic rendering of our Dakota culture. I thought the exchange is worth sharing:

Sam Deloria: In small social units it is easier to preserve this approach, but pretty hard in larger societies, where we don't really know the people. and where the media seem to be taking sides. 

Jacqueline Keeler: I think that's what I'm trying to figure out--a scalable approximation. 

Sam Deloria: A lot of the things I read seem to be to miss the importance of what can be done in smaller societies that can't be done in larger ones. Our constant bragging about ourselves overlook that we probably couldn't sustain those systems if we had larger, massive social units.

Jacqueline Keeler: I wonder sometimes if Cahokia was a cautionary tale. 

Sam Deloria: I suppose there is real scholarship on this issue that I am ignorant about. 

Jacqueline Keeler: That was partly said in jest. But I do think our traditional social order can provide insights that we cannot perceive otherwise. These are starting points for action not simply an end road to romanticism.

I remember when I was a kid, we'd go to powwows and my mom would run a Navajo fried bread stand. She would buy me dolls made by members of other tribes. She wanted to teach me that not all tribes are the same, that they each had their own ways & culture. I remember when I got a Seminole doll from a woman wearing the same beautiful, cascading ruffled dress as the doll. I stared at it for a long time. The dark brown cloth face with the face made of appliquéd beads. I knew it was an alien, foreign culture to my own Dakota or Diné one. I never thought the Seminole would support the misappropriation of my father's Dakota culture for money and gain or to simply appease their fellow Floridians. When I looked at that doll, I saw only the great multiplicity of what we Indian Nations are and could be.