November 22, 2017 at 12:50 p.m.
Seven grandfather teachings: The foundation for rebuilding culture
LdF educators helping to raise new generation proud of heritage
Seven grandfather teachings: The foundation for rebuilding culture
By By Raymond T. Rivard-
Those longtime tribal teachings are based around the concepts and guiding principles of honesty, love, courage, truth, wisdom, humility, and respect.
Building a base of understanding of their heritage, language, and culture is the basis of the educational process for the children of the community ... and when combined with programs like Cultural Connections, LdF language and culture teacher Wayne Valliere said this past week that they are bringing their children one step closer to being whole individuals.
So when Valliere says that language is "the nucleus of our culture," he is not just giving a nod to the concept, but is providing a full salute.
Whether it's teaching about the importance of hunting and gathering traditions, the importance of providing spirit names to their newest children, or understanding the importance of elders within the community, it's the underlying precepts that will guide future generations to a complete vision of the world surrounding them.
Valliere didn't hesitate to explain: "We follow the seven grandfather teachings, which is a guide for our children to follow about respect. We teach the children that we don't look at the deer and the forest and the lakes and the fish - we don't look at them as a resource. We look at these things as relatives."
Seeing their "relatives" in a new light helps lay the groundwork for an education that has for centuries helped guide an entire people.
"Because they are our relatives, we have a great amount of respect for them," Valliere said. "We teach the children to harvest only what you can use. To show respect to the deer, there are certain ceremonies we have right at the time of kill. There are certain protocols we do to teach respect of the animal. The importance of always leaving something for seed, meaning that we never over-harvest an area."
And in using the traditions surrounding hunting as an example, Valliere sets the stage for a wholistic educational process that has been successful in providing a new pride and strength in children, something tribal educators and leaders have been striving to achieve for years.
'They are no longer lost'
The entire educational process based upon the seven teachings has been threatened for many decades and has taken generations for tribes around North America, including the Lac du Flambeau, years from which to recover.
"I think as far as Native students in Lac du Flambeau ... a long time ago at the time of my grandparents, they were forced to go to boarding schools where the language and culture was taken from them forcibly," Valliere said. "They were taught that being Native was a bad thing. The governor of Carlisle University was quoted at the time in 1898, 'We want to kill the Indian to save the man.' That was detrimental to our people. So, social problems have stepped in the way of our people and brought great low self-esteem. Since 1970, our people have been working hard to retrace steps for our ancestors and we're seeing the fruits by our children being proud to be Native once again, because they are no longer lost. They understand who they are and our elders always tell us that by knowing where we've been they will have a better understanding where we're going."
It's been a process that had taken generations, but one that continues today to help the individual become whole.
Valliere told about the importance of teaching their children about the ways of the People, so they can use those teachings in their daily lives and to follow in the footsteps of their fathers whose pride and connections to the world around them are sacred.
Take, for instance, why it's important to respect not only the animals they harvest for sustenance, but the plants they use for their thousands of traditional recipes.
"We teach them about in the old deer camps that Native People had; a family would have three, maybe even four different winter territories they would hunt every year," Valliere said. "So they would hunt one territory, one area, for say, two hunting seasons. Then what they would do would be to move out of that area into their next territory and hunt that for two seasons. When they got to the fourth territory they would go back to the first one and the animals would be replenished. It was conservation, is what it was. It worked well for centuries for the Ojibwe People.
"We definitely put it into practice - only harvesting what you need and we go into one area and harvest a few deer and then move into another area. Let's say we harvest 10 deer. OK, those 10 deer will go to 30 families in the community. So those 10 deer would probably be harvested ... but how we practice that today is going into six, sometimes seven different Wisconsin hunting units to harvest those deer on state and federal land, using our Ojibwe treaty rights."
To teach these principles, school staff not only talk about them in theory, but they will take children on hunts to teach them in the field.
"I take the kids out on hunts and Greg Johnson at the youth center takes them out on hunts," Valliere said. "I do more work right in the school, but I do sugar camps, I do the wild ricing, hunting ... we're going to be showing them how to trap underneath the ice pretty soon. We honor our relatives. It doesn't matter the animal we are hunting."
Ojibwe language
To understand the foundations of hunting, gathering, and respecting those in the world around them, the students must also be taught the Ojibwe language, the glue that holds the people and their culture together.
"Traditionally when we make an offering to the animals and the plants and the fish, they are revered as spirits," Valliere said. "When we speak to them and we ask for their favor, they don't understand English, they understand Native language. For our ceremonies and our ways of life, our stories are in our language and our history is in our language. If you imagine English as a flat piece of paper, Ojibwe can be compared to a cube. It's a verb-based language."
Consider, if you will, that if English has three tenses: past, present and future; Ojibwe has four tenses: past, present, and two future tenses.
"It has an extra tense called the definite tense," Valliere said. "We have three different forms of our language: The A form, B form, and the C form, which is the change-conjunct form - a very high level of speaking.
"For the change-conjunct form, people 50 and older were the only ones who understood it," he continued. "It was very complex so that when the younger generation were listening and they didn't want them to know, or to listen in on, they would go into the change-conjunct form."
Valliere, who said Anishinabe is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most complex language, has been teaching language since 1998, and has been at the school since 2000 when he was certified as a state of Wisconsin educator.
But his journey as a student and learner has been a lifelong venture.
"I've been on a quest for Native knowledge for about 45 years," he said. "I'm a birch bark canoe builder to you name it, I make it. As for our language, that instruction I received from my elders. Ojibwe language is not in jeopardy, globally, but where it is in jeopardy is in the respective dialects. Each reservation, each community, has their own dialect of the language that identifies them uniquely."
For LdF students to continue to understand who they are and where their people have been, Valliere said it's as much a personal journey as it is one that's taught within the confines of the four walls of a brick and mortar school.
For his personal journey, he utilizes the lessons he's learned as the guide for imparting those teachings onto his students.
"My main teacher was ... Joe Chosa. He was my teacher. I spent 15 years in a rice bed with that old man, so I learned to be fluent," he said.
He not only learned the language, but developed an understanding of how it ties to the ways of his people - how it ties to music, to art, to the names given and taken, to the food they eat and how they harvest and prepare it.
Music, traditional music, is another mode in which the Ojibwe have connected to their world.
"I am a singer and what I'm doing in the schools is working with the music teacher to put Christmas carols in Ojibwe," Valliere said. "Our kids are singing in Ojibwe. They've been doing that for the past four years. It's amazing and an awesome way to teach Ojibwe."
Add to those lessons the education students learn about art.
"In the area of art, we're working to teach our kids in traditional mediums," Valliere said. "We're working with different textiles like birch bark, rawhide, different fibers, different natural dyes ... teaching them to work with leather and learning sewing techniques. They are making birch bark baskets, they're sewing, they're learning different techniques, using different fibers and different materials.
"So what that is doing is that's educating them in the wide range of areas," he continued. "It's a great awareness of what's happening to our forest and how these places are changing. It's about clean water and clean forests and talking ... for example, a discussion the other day we had was about the bullfrogs ... I was realizing that I saw only one lake and this was the only lake that I saw a bullfrog in it. To have bullfrogs it has to be clean water. I explained to the kids that when I was young it was common to see them. That's no longer the case."
In addition, the unifying forces that come about through the naming of newborn children is also one of those traditions that connect generations.
"My name is Meminogiizhig ... it means good sky," Valliere said. "We get our names from the spirit world through our elders, the people who have the right to give names. Tobacco is taken as a gift to an elder by the parents. They ask that person to look into the spirit world and retrieve your name. There is a ceremony that's held, the people gather and we have a feast and the elder gives the name to the person and it's spoken around the room.
"The story and the dream that came with the name is told," he continued. "It's part of your life's journey. I was born with a white streak in my hair when I was a baby. My full blood Ojibwe grandmother told my mom that someday I would know much about the Ojibwe culture and ways because I'm a reincarnated elder.
"Not everybody has a spirit name. Everybody used to have one ... but that's changing also. We have a lot of young people following traditions that I've seen change in Lac du Flambeau. They are going to the traditional ceremony and getting their children names, so we have a lot of students in the school who have Native names and they use them.
"The person then keeps that name their entire life. It's very special," Valliere said. "So, the importance of our spirit name ... once we are able to use that name, it's believed that the spirits are able to recognize our faces and say we have some turmoil or light, maybe we become ill or have some strife. Our name can be used by our ceremonial people to help us and cure us in sickness. That's the importance of our name."
Elders
So what is an elder and how do individuals earn that designation?
Valliere said it's not just about getting older.
"An elder is a person that ... is more than just an older person," Valliere said. "An elder is a person that goes on a quest for knowledge and is knowledgeable, one who is loving and is kind and has gone through the hills of life and has wisdom. When a person gains knowledge and wisdom of certain things and is kind, loving, and respectful ... they become what we call very light, meaning they become very powerful because of that way. They have the ability to pass that knowledge down to the next generation in a loving way. That's what an elder is. There are things you have to do and ways you have to live by in order to be considered an elder by people.
"We have a few elders. Like every other community ... in years past it wasn't uncommon to have several elders," Valliere continued. "But because of living standards in the 1940s and 1950s a lot of our old people died. So what happened was that the people from my generation have paid attention to the old traditional knowledge ... and we got put into a situation where we were elders before our time, in order to save tradition and to save knowledge. To save the language, we have to step to the forefront and take that on way before our time."
Imparting the guiding principles has become the mission of those working with children today ... within the school and within the community. Their efforts and adherence to tradition have provided a basis upon which to build and sustain their ways.
"And because of our culture and our identity and who we are today ... we understand where we're going," Valliere said. "The other thing in our culture ... when we do our talking circles ... we teach our children the importance of color ... the medicine wheel has four colors on it ... they represent the four directions: white, black, red, and yellow. But they not only represent the four directions, but four is duplicated many times and is sacred. The colors also represent the four races on our planet. All of those together are called one word ... 'The Human Tribe.' It's a teaching for all of us. That we're all together. No one is better than the next."
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