Key to survival consciousness, not attitude

Page 5

Tansi, ahnee and hello. Memory is a funny thing. It can become selective either by choice or circumstance. These days I choose to remember the things from my history that bring vitality to the dreams I carry into each day. However, there are times when circumstances elects to bring back the other side.

We had a rally recently to protect federal cutbacks to the Aboriginal Friendship Centre Program. Centres across the country will have their program funding slashed by 10 per cent, taking them to an operating level lower than the mid-80s. About 150 urban Native people gathered to march through Calgary's downtown and express outrage.

Everything went well and I was feeling very proud of the dignified way our people came together in a common cause. The rally speakers were concise and passionate. The protesters were polite, attentive and obedient to the directions we were giving them concerning the rules of the march. Then, it changed.

Our return route to the Friendship Centre had to be changed because of a glitch in the city clerical department's handling of our march permit. When it was announced over the blowhorn a number of voices rose sharply, aggressively, in dissent.

Circumstance chose the memories at that moment. While those voices swelled around me I went back to the days when push-and-shove politics were the way the battle for our peoples' rights was waged. Those days when we believed that our attitude would deliver us and that the political ends justified the means.

In the swell of voices I heard the echoes of my old attitude. It bothered me. Bothered me because the people those voices belonged to were members of the generation immediately behind mine. Young people. Those in their late teens and early twenties who are trying to live in the realities we created by our political choices twenty years ago. The people living the legacy of the attitude.

When the voices swelled it showed me that there's a long way to go in pursuit of our people's future. A tremendous journey that has its beginnings within our individual selves.

Because there is a gigantic difference between an attitude and a conscience and

for our peoples' survival it's an aboriginal consciousness we need to foster rather than an aboriginal attitude. If our generation of pushers and shovers failed it was in our inability to foster a conscience.

Attitudes are easy. They're built on defensiveness, denial, half-truths, incomplete knowledge and lies. You can adopt an attitude immediately. Living with an aboriginal attitude is simply going through life as a Velcro Indian. You just slap on whatever it is you need to get by and toss it off when you're finished.

The difficulty lies in the reality that attitudes can be defeated easily as well. They can be crushed, changed or manipulated. Political whim and fancy, the unpredictability of life and the attitudes of others can all do irreparable damage to an attitude. As a original people we can see the shells of broken attitudes stumbling by us on any street or reserve. Velcro, you see, eventually wears out.

A consciousness on the other hand is built on belief, faith, pride, honesty, humility and trust. It's developed rather than assumed, given rather than adopted. Living with an aboriginal consciousness is simply going through life as a water-proofed Indian. What is essential remains within, nurtured and protected, the rest just slides off the outside.

When you have an aboriginal consciousness you have an infinite knowledge of who you are. You know where you came from, the ceremonies that sustain you, the ritual that defines you, the philosophy that propels you, the tradition that guides you and the future that inspires you. You stand in a position of balance with the universe, strong and unafraid.

That's what we need to give our people.

That's not to preclude the necessity of things like marches and protests when they're warranted. However, when we smudged ourselves with sweetgrass prior to marcing, we elevated ourselves to a position of balance. We spoke of the need to do this thing in a good way, without malice. We spoke of the need to think of those we were marching for, the defenseless, the immobile, the children, the homeless. As Maggie Black Kettle prayed, each of us prayed in our own way for the strength to do this thing with respect and dignity. We got out of ourselves and into the needs of our people.

And that's the essential difference between an attitude and a consciousness. An attitude is a very self-centered thing, it seeks only to nurture itself. Consciousness, on the other hand, possesses the ability to think of the whole as opposed to the individual. The needs of the many over the needs of the one.

Out of that one word spill many others. Words like unity, harmony, solidarity, brotherhood, self-government, freedom and hope. Out of that one word spills the future.

Because a people with a consciousness about themselves are not going to disappear. They don't shuffle by you on the street, glassy-eyed and lost. They don't disappear in the mainstream and reject their histories. They don't succumb to negative influence and they don't kill or harm themselves, each other or anybody else. They become a people, unified and strong.

Through our political structures, our schools, our cultural centres, our programs, our newspapers and our relationships with each other, we need to give the sense of who we ARE as opposed to what we SHOULD be. Reality is the root of consciousness and who we become is relative to that initial knowledge.

Because in the final analysis, our success or failure in this reality, as a people and as individuals, will be measured, not on what we have gained or lost, but in what we have given to each other. And the future beckons.

Until next time, Meegwetch.