Roots

Last fall, a guest speaker came to my school. Anton Treuer spoke about the importance of seeing and understanding the Native American experience. As a white male educator, I have spent a lot of time uncovering implicit biases of my own and taking steps to make sure they do not negatively impact my students experiences.

It seems that many times, these conversations focus on elimination. Eliminating bias, preventing prejudice, getting rid of old practices. Without diminishing the importance of leaving those things in the past, I find the work more invigorating to look at it from a different angle. This angle, which is often forgotten in the discomfort of leaving the ugly parts of myself in the past, is that I get to create a new self which is better than I have ever been before.

Professor Treuer mentioned the following quote during his presentation: “There are only two lasting things we can hope to give our children: one is roots; and the other is wings.” This opened the door for me to learn about myself, and I only have Ojibwe wisdom to thank for that. I doubt that Dr. Treuer was the first person to say these words (if you were, let me grovel at your feet in apology and admiration!), but the lens through which he explained it impacted me in a way that caused me to still be thinking about it 11 months later.

For reasons which could be explained better by someone with a degree in humanities, Euro-Americans tend to focus more on the wings. In my case, that has been almost exclusively the case. In the quest for the bigger and better, for reaching to the stars, I never stopped to look back to where I jumped from.

The only ancestors that I know about are my grandparents. I met one great-grandma in my operative memory, and one great-grandpa according to the photograph in my parents living room, but I don’t know anything about them. Over the past weeks, I have started to grow roots, small and fragile as they are.

It doesn’t seem very impressive when I write it down, but I have been talking with and spending time more with my Dad. We went on an incredible sail which seemed to kick things off. Since then, we have spent evenings sitting in lawn chairs in the driveway looking at the clouds as we talk. We have watched thunderstorms roll by, moved boats around the backyard, and watched movies together.

With my Mom, I was baptized into the process of harvesting peas. We woke up at the buttcrack of dawn to drive down to the farm in southern MN. We spent the rest of the morning in the field planted by my Aunt, picking peas before the combines came to collect them.

After returning to my grandparents house, we spent the afternoon pulling the peas out of their pods. Magic happens when families sit around a table. I find more value when menial tasks are involved. The monotony leads to long discussion, a rare commodity. In the passing down of that knowledge, I felt closer to my family than I have in ages.

Creating a new me, one with both wings and roots, is not easy. It doesn’t happen when I am complacent about it. But Dr. Treuer has made an impact, even if it wasn’t in exactly the way he expected. I suspect that this will help me to understand my students better when they miss school occasionally for hunting season, or harvesting, or for another gathering which I might not know of yet. I have also learned about myself by learning to understand the people that invented me.