"Surrender" or "Share" - What's the Difference? - Further comments -

Dear Lance:

Thank you for this comment on my blog post “Surrender” or “Share” – What’s the Difference?

As one follows the news reports and court findings re the treaties signed between the First Peoples in Canada and the representative of the Crown, later the Canadian government, one hears reference by the First Peoples to what they termed “peace and friendship” treaties, which refers to the same cultural understnding of what “sharing” of Mother Earth looked like. In fact, the traditional spiritual understanding of the First Peoples’ relationship to Mother Earth simply precluded the idea of “ownership”. One doesn’t “own” one’s mother – rather one shares one’s relationship with Mother Earth with other human beings who also wish to be sustained and nurtured by the bounty of Mother Earth.

That was not the understanding of the settler/immigrant peoples who came to Canada. Those people pursued relationships with the people they met in North America under what they understood to be the “Doctrine of Discovery”, and edict from the Roman Catholic pope which said that whenever Christian people went out into the wider world and found lands not inhabited by Christian people, it was quite okay to claim those lands for the Christian nations under whose flag they were travelling. And that European understandomg of relationship with the land meant that the people who “conquered” the land could put fences around it and say “it’s mine – you keep out”.

One of the things you hear First Peoples saying over and over again is: “We are NOT conquered peoples. We signed treaties as sovereign nations with the Crown, and in fact, treaties are only signed between sovereign peoples, so the fact that those treaties are in existence, and recognized by the Canadian courts of law, means that we are in fact sovereign nations.

So we can see what a really big disconnect was happening between the First Peoples and those who came from somewhere else.

Unfortunately, in the first place, my people have a hard time admitting they may have misunderstood – we are so used to being right and to knowing ourselves as being correct in all matters, so to this day, it is not easy for Canadians to grasp the point that the First Peoples are trying to make. And of course, in the second place, if we admit that we were wrong, we will have to re-assess our understanding of what it means to “share” Mother Earth with the First Peoples, rather than “owning” the land and grudgingly accepting that some other beings (known as “Indians”) have to live somewhere because we have not been able to get rid of them. Those First Peoples are still here in our midst. And it is recorded historically that the Canadian government’s policy towards the First Peoples has been to get rid of the Indian – through assimilation and other oppressive colonial measures.

This is what my “work” has been about for the past 40 years, and I still can’t say I have accomplished much, but I know the struggle will go on long after I have passed from this earth.

Thanks for asking, and thanks for listening, if you are still with me!

Blessings,

Jean.

“Surrender” or “Share” - What’s the Difference?

It appears that Dr. David T. McNab, Metis, and professor of York University’s Indigenous Studies, Canadian Studies and Culture & Expression co-ordinator, was engaged in researching the Canadian Journal of Native Studies (CJNS) Number 16, 2 (1996):293-314, and discovered documents which had been recently made available.

So Dr. McNab wrote a “Research Note” to alert readers of this section of the CJNS that additional information has been uncovered, concerning this particular treaty: “THE PROMISE THAT HE GAVE TO MY GRAND FATHER WAS VERY SWEET”: THE GUN SHOT TREATY OF 1792 AT THE BAY OF QUINTE: http://www2.brandonu.ca/library/cjns/16.2/mcnab.pdf

Dr. McNab continues:
"In a recent (1996) paper, Paul Williams has written about Aboriginal Oral Traditions.(1) In it, he has observed that there are 'some aspects of Ontario Indian oral tradition that remain unsolved mysteries.' As an example, Williams has pointed to the Gun Shot Treaty of '1791' at the Bay of Quinte. He remarked that this Treaty'guaranteed that all Indians would always be able to hunt within the sound of a gunshot from any lake or river, and would be able to camp within sixty-six feet of their shores or banks.' However, he further stated that there is'no written record of any such promise' and that the documents 'confirming the tradition' of the Treaty 'remain elusive.' He speculated that '(m)aybe' the documents 'do not exist - - and maybe the Treaty was not as the tradition recalls. '(2)

"In June 1995 additional documents pertaining to the Gun Shot Treaty became available in the provincial Archives of Ontario by an acquisition of private papers, called the A.E. Williams/United Indian Bands of Chippewas and Mississaugas Papers.(3) Written documents, based on Aboriginal oral tradition, pertaining to the Gun Shot Treaty of 1792 at the Bay of Quinte are in these Papers. These written documents are in Ojibwa and in English. The purpose of this research note is to draw attention to the existence of these documents in the Ontario Archives."

What caught my eye was the footnote at the end of this document:
"19. There is no concept of the English word 'surrender' in Ojibwa. The Aboriginal understanding in concept and language would have been the word 'share'."

This website also contains the Ojibwe translation of the written treaty, and as I look through that, I find several points at which the settler negotiator writes English words which convey the meaning of “surrender” but the Ojibwe negotiators have changed the wording to convey the meaning of “sharing” of the land.

On the website, pages 303 to 306 show how the words “share” and “surrender” were stroked out and changed, reflecting a difference of opinion in how those words were understood in each language.

I phoned Dr. Dean Jacobs of NIN.DA.WAAB.JIG at Bkejwanong First Nation (Walpole Island) who said: “We were sharing, in spirit and intent, when we negotiated treaties. The white man talks about ‘the letter of the law’, but the whiteman’s courts are beginning to back us up.”

I have also spoken with Ojibwe speakers about this, and they suggest that translating is a problem because of the difference in the way land is viewed by the two cultures.

The Indigenous view of land is that it is sacred, held in trust to be shared with others, and preserved for the use of future generations.

The Settler-Immigrant view is that land is a commodity to be bought and sold, and whoever "owns" the land has complete control over how it is used, bought and sold, etc.

Thus, when my people say "surrender" land, we mean to "hand it over, give it into another's power or control, relinquish possession of, especially upon compulsion or demand" (from the Oxford dictionary meaning). The Indigenous people, however, would consider conversation or negotiation about land to mean that the land would be shared so that both groups could make use of it, but both groups would also be expected to preserve the land for future generations.

Thus, we can see how this "miscommunication" leads to colossal misunderstanding between people of the two different cultures, and leads to the comment that "there is no concept of the English word 'surrender' in Ojibwa. The Aboriginal understanding in concept and language would have been the word 'share'." The reason there is no such concept of “surrender” is because of the totally different worldview in each culture about land and use of land.

As you know, I have been studying the Ojibwe language for over 40 years, and what I am beginning to see is that learning the language opens my mind to how lost and ignorant our ancestors must have been if they did not understand the First Peoples' languages and only relied on their own understanding of their own languages.

My Ojibwe teacher so often says things like: "You could say this, or this or this, and the meaning may be this, or this, or this." I have come to see this as the subtlety of the Ojibwe language. It means you have to, in a sense, "feel" what the words mean, as well as "know" what the words mean.

And doesn't that point up another great difference between us - that First Peoples sense their relationships as encounters which include recognizing feelings among people; we Settler/Immigrant people don’t see “relationships - we simply see “business transactions“.

(end)