...or so says modest mouse. My returning culture shock does not agree. I am home! If very briefly--I leave tomorrow at 10:05 a.m., for a serious continental shift. First stop: Lima, Peru.
Being home after ten weeks in South Dakota, I'm noticing different things--like how well manicured everything is, how all the grass on the side of the road is mowed, the roads are kept up, and neighborhoods are fenced in with these stylish and expensive iron contraptions that Re-Member volunteers would have serious problems with. My hands automatically move to the side of the steering wheel when I want to put the car in park, and I couldn't figure out how to turn off the windshield wipers because it wasn't a 15-passenger van. The humidity feels deadly. I miss open space and no traffic and slow evenings.
The last few weeks were packed--what with getting our vans stuck on dirt/mud roads (twice) and me taking off for a weekend in the hills to attend a wedding. When I say "in the hills," I mean literally: they didn't rent a space or anything, they just choose a spot overlooking the lake and said their vows while the guests sat on rocks and a bluegrass band played to the side. It was gorgeous.
One thing I will not miss, though will no doubt encounter again and again, is the blatant prejudice that came out from our volunteers. I heard from one volunteer that "these natives" just needed to clean out their houses and burn "all that shit" in there. This is one of the tamer examples.
The danger in bringing primarily white volunteers from off the rez into Pine Ridge to do work projects is that it reinforces these binaries. Not only are the Lakota people "these people" who don't look the same, but they live in a demarcated zone with specific grievances, histories, and issues. While it's important to understand the unique problems of a reservation, I think it's too easy to extrapolate that uniqueness to one-sided essentialization. What I wish people would understand is that this is a window not into the soul of Pine Ridge, as Tom says in Wisdom of the Elders, but a window into the darker soul of white culture. This is product of your inheritance. This is the consequence of centuries of genocidal arrogance AND of awfully misguided benevolence. And that's not just limited to white culture--these are the characteristics of an extended interaction, which by definition involves other peoples. There are ways the perpetrator and victim have blended, shifted, and taken from each other. What I wish we would investigate, together, is how we now stand, not as separate and static peoples, but as a tragic community of the powerful and the powerless.
I suppose I will keep musing about Pine Ridge over the next few months, though I have an entirely new continent of colonization to explore. Wish me luck.
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interesting, the first thing I noticed when coming home was the grass as well.
ReplyDeletewe had this "us vs them" problem on my program as well. it was so severe, in fact, that the participants divided themselves into two social groups. It was especially obvious in academic settings where we would have class discussions concerning development. There was the one group who would complain about how "they-- the senegalese-- did this or that 'incorrectly'" and there was the second group who cringed in response.
From my experience, i feel that this "other-mentality" stems from whether you go into a situation with a tourist mentality or with experiential motivations. The tourist mentality is in it to take all the postcard-esque pictures (with or without consent of subjects), to purchase 'cultural-garments', and essentially just to say that they experienced whatever it was that they experienced. Those in it for the actual experience usually are the ones who temporarily relinquish their personal perspectives so to take on a new identity and learn somethign new; while the tourist-mentality walks away with photos of say, random African babies, the experiential-type departs possessing only an intangible, intellectual good.