Blackbear

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FROM: INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY NEWSPAPER

http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096410845

Mohawk: Industrial Society And The Culture Wars

Posted: April 28, 2005
by: John Mohawk / Indian Country Today


It has been 40 years since Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former U.S. senator from
New York, issued a report on the African-American family in the United States.
In an alarming tone, he stated that about a quarter of the children born in
the African-American community were born into households that had no father.
Born out of wedlock, he thought, they faced a wide range of social dysfunctions
ranging from being at risk for poor school performance, prison and
perpetuating the cycle of matriarchal families. It was, he thought, a prescription for
disaster.

Fast-forward to 2005. Today, approximately the same percentage of white
American females give birth to children under the same circumstances. A major
difference is that no bells have gone off, no dire prophecies are set forward, no
racism about the inherent weaknesses of the white race is discovered.

Indeed, by statistical measures children raised in homes with a female head
of household do quite well. Far better than expected 40 years ago, far better
than theorized by those who don't actually pay attention to the fact patterns.
Poverty is more of an indicator of how a child is likely to fare in life than
is living, or not living, in a traditional family.

There is, however, a loud drone of warning about the end of civilization
coming from the religious right. Adherents to this viewpoint see threats to the
traditional family everywhere, and have nominated themselves to save
civilization by reasserting ''family values.'' They represent just one phenomenon in
American life, but a powerful and potentially destructive one. The changes brought
by an accelerating industrial and ''post-industrial'' society have touched
almost all people in the developed world, and the contradictions it has produced
are still being played out.

American Indian societies are also impacted by the changes. Over the past
dozen or so years, the last Native elders in traditional societies have passed
away. There may be a few remaining, but for the most part the people who grew up
speaking the Native languages, participating in Native communities, and who
were not forced into schools or who went to schools for only a short time are
gone. They were socialized to a way of being in the world which most of us can
only imagine, and their passing should serve to remind us of how things once
were.

Since time immemorial, traditional societies have existed which were
dependent on elders. Indeed, true traditional societies develop leaders who serve the
communities over long periods of time. Sometimes designated as chiefs, male or
female, they sat in small groups of councils and presided over the
community's business.

A traditional society has a special place for its elders, but elders aren't
simply old people. They are the old people who are steeped in the traditions,
who have been paying attention to the community, who know how that community
solves its problems. In semi-technical jargon, they are the keepers of the
customs and customary law, the living encyclopedias of the group.

In most Native societies, they were not elected but rather appointed through
some process of acclamation, and they often served a lifetime. The ancient
chiefs who were famous - Sitting Bull, Seattle, Crowfoot and Chief Joseph - were
such people.

Traditional societies are associations of families, although they define
family in diverse and distinctive ways. In some societies, families were
identified by the female line, some by the male line (i.e., matrilineal or
patrilineal), but the families generally served similar purposes. Children were welcomed
because they were insurance that when people grew old there would be someone to
take care of them, and elders were treasured because they were the
repositories of the knowledge of the history of the group and the customs of the larger
group, the tribe or nation.

Multigenerational groups cooperated with one another to assist in the group's
survival for as long as human beings have existed on the earth, and almost
certainly since even before that.

Modernity is threatening to bring that to an end. It's not that there are any
people who get up in the morning with evil intentions who want to dismantle
traditional societies. The dismantling is entirely incidental, but it is
nevertheless real.

With the advent of industrial society, the family was no longer the primary
social organization of production and social stability. Wherever people enjoy
the benefits of old-age pensions and adequate health care for seniors, the
birth rate goes down. People no longer feel the need to have a large number of
children as a hedge against poverty and abandonment in old age. The
multigenerational household begins to disappear.

Old people prefer to be independent and not burden their children, and young
people want to live beyond the watchful eye of their elders. They move away
from home: often far away. Their lives are often determined by the marketplace
where they can get the best wages, and they need an education for that. The old
rules about who one can marry, and the necessity of producing children for
the family, no longer apply.

The institutions and ideologues of traditional societies often adjust poorly
to these changes. Young men and women adopt behaviors appropriate to their
newfound ''freedoms,'' and the values of the old ways remain popular but the
behaviors of the new ways are often inconsistent with those values. Arranged
marriages, the bedrock of familial authority in traditional societies, fall by the
wayside.

Although both genders enthusiastically embrace the changes, young women are
especially seen as adopting behaviors inconsistent with the old ways - they
behave as though they have priorities other than marriage, child bearing and
raising, and staying at home to nurture young and old. This is viewed as a moral
failing, one that could destroy society at its roots. Contemporary Muslim
societies are sometimes intensely conflicted on these issues, as are every other
kind of traditionalist society.

Recently, the West turned out en masse to bury a popular pope, but his
positions on a wide range of issues including birth control, contraceptives and
women's roles in society were out of sync with post-Industrial societies. His
church in Europe has declined, as has the birthrate among the flock. The
''morality'' of medieval times does not meet the needs of people in today's affluent
societies, although it is strong in poorer, more family- and tradition-based
societies. Third World societies continue to embrace these ways, and the church
is thriving there.

The religious right opposes vaccines that could protect women from cervical
cancer. They see such cancers as a consequence of a non-traditional lifestyle,
and cancer as God's punishment for naughty behaviors. They oppose a range of
stem cell research and abortion and even pain medication for terminal cancer
patients for the same reason. They celebrate the benefits of the Industrial Age,
but they cannot or will not adapt to the changes it has brought.

John C. Mohawk Ph.D., columnist for Indian Country Today, is associate
professor of American Studies and director of Indigenous Studies at the State
University of New York at Buffalo.

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Don't worry that it's not good enough for anyone else to hear... just sing, sing a song.