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Make a Beautiful Way: The Wisdom of Native American Women
Make a Beautiful Way is nothing less than a new way of looking at history—or more correctly, the reestablishment of a very old way. For too long, Euro-American discourse styles, emphasizing elite male privilege and conceptual linearity, have drowned out democratic and woman-centered Native approaches. Even when myopic western linearity is understood to be at work, analysis of Native American history, society, and culture has still been consistently placed in male custody. The recovery of women’s traditions is the overarching theme in this collection of essays that helps reframe Native issues as properly gendered.
Paula Gunn Allen looks at Indian lifeways through the many stitches of Indian clothes and the many steps of their powwow fancy dances. Lee Maracle calls for reconstitution of traditional social structures, based on Native American ways of knowing. Kay Givens McGowan identifies the exact sites where female power was weakened through the imposition of European culture, so that we might more effectively strengthen precisely those sites. Finally, Barbara Alice Mann examines how communication between Natives who have federal recognition and those who do not, as well as between Natives east and west of the Mississippi, became dysfunctional, and outlines how to reestablish good relations for the benefit of all.
Paula Gunn Allen looks at Indian lifeways through the many stitches of Indian clothes and the many steps of their powwow fancy dances. Lee Maracle calls for reconstitution of traditional social structures, based on Native American ways of knowing. Kay Givens McGowan identifies the exact sites where female power was weakened through the imposition of European culture, so that we might more effectively strengthen precisely those sites. Finally, Barbara Alice Mann examines how communication between Natives who have federal recognition and those who do not, as well as between Natives east and west of the Mississippi, became dysfunctional, and outlines how to reestablish good relations for the benefit of all.
133 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 11, 2009
Make a Beautiful Way brings together four distinct voices from four distinct Native American cultures, but their message is the same: Native women should be heard once again as they were heard and respected before colonialism. The supplanting of the matriarchic rule was a fundamental blow in the weakening of the Native Americans’ hold on their land, culture, and lives.
The first author in the collection is Paula Gunn Allen, of Laguna/Metis descent. She offers a colloquial stream-of-consciousness essay, speaking of her first powwow, her Uncle Ook’s stories, Native humor on bumper stickers, and the flawed and bipolar views the media has formed of the Indian: there are the impotent but mournful “Enviro-Indian” and the “Pissed-Off Indian” with an undying fighting spirit. The third is the “Real-World Indian” who seems largely invisible to the public.
Second is Lee Maracle, of the Sto:Loh nation with “Decolonizing Native Women.” She authors a direct, unequivocal assertion that the loss of matriarchy is equal to the Natives’ loss of power and self-determination. Maracle feels that “it was the uprooting of this matriarchal system that opened the door to inequity, shame and violence in our world.” She criticizes liberal feminist thinking as applied to Native circumstances, arguing that women’s power starts in the home and that casting into the outside world weakens both male and female authority.
The third essay’s tone and character are reflected in its title, “Weeping for the Lost Matriarchy.” Kay Givens McGowan, from Chocktaw and Cherokee lineages, follows the faltering determinism of Natives in their relations with the U.S. government, claiming that Native women were “the culturally designated victims, par excellence, of internal colonialism.” McGowan outlines the benefits afforded to Native women prior to colonization - including sexual liberties, familial support, and economic clout. She contrasts it with the present, wherein Native women have suffered through cultural and ethnic genocide and now are threatened by disease, poverty, and sexual assault.
Finally, in an essay that synthesizes the emotions expressed, Barbara Alice Mann looks at the carefully engineered rift between Eastern and Western Indians. The distance between them is more than just geographical; their historic dealings with the government separate them, as do traditions, skin color, and federal funds. The Eastern Indians are viewed as having lost their culture, a myth perpetuated by the government in order to “legally” seize their lands and deny them legitimacy. In fact, she argues, those who remained in the East were the most tenacious about staying true to their culture. “Demonstrably as many of the [Native Americans:] hid out as acceded to Jacksonian Removal, so that the Ohio Longhairs had a traditional name for those transported west: Slow Runners. By and large, it was the most assimilated elements of the Eastern Natives who were removed.”
Make a Beautiful Way is a brief, compelling, and idiosyncratic look at Native women’s plight in the modern world that plainly reveals the strength that still lies within them.
Review by Jo Ristow
The first author in the collection is Paula Gunn Allen, of Laguna/Metis descent. She offers a colloquial stream-of-consciousness essay, speaking of her first powwow, her Uncle Ook’s stories, Native humor on bumper stickers, and the flawed and bipolar views the media has formed of the Indian: there are the impotent but mournful “Enviro-Indian” and the “Pissed-Off Indian” with an undying fighting spirit. The third is the “Real-World Indian” who seems largely invisible to the public.
Second is Lee Maracle, of the Sto:Loh nation with “Decolonizing Native Women.” She authors a direct, unequivocal assertion that the loss of matriarchy is equal to the Natives’ loss of power and self-determination. Maracle feels that “it was the uprooting of this matriarchal system that opened the door to inequity, shame and violence in our world.” She criticizes liberal feminist thinking as applied to Native circumstances, arguing that women’s power starts in the home and that casting into the outside world weakens both male and female authority.
The third essay’s tone and character are reflected in its title, “Weeping for the Lost Matriarchy.” Kay Givens McGowan, from Chocktaw and Cherokee lineages, follows the faltering determinism of Natives in their relations with the U.S. government, claiming that Native women were “the culturally designated victims, par excellence, of internal colonialism.” McGowan outlines the benefits afforded to Native women prior to colonization - including sexual liberties, familial support, and economic clout. She contrasts it with the present, wherein Native women have suffered through cultural and ethnic genocide and now are threatened by disease, poverty, and sexual assault.
Finally, in an essay that synthesizes the emotions expressed, Barbara Alice Mann looks at the carefully engineered rift between Eastern and Western Indians. The distance between them is more than just geographical; their historic dealings with the government separate them, as do traditions, skin color, and federal funds. The Eastern Indians are viewed as having lost their culture, a myth perpetuated by the government in order to “legally” seize their lands and deny them legitimacy. In fact, she argues, those who remained in the East were the most tenacious about staying true to their culture. “Demonstrably as many of the [Native Americans:] hid out as acceded to Jacksonian Removal, so that the Ohio Longhairs had a traditional name for those transported west: Slow Runners. By and large, it was the most assimilated elements of the Eastern Natives who were removed.”
Make a Beautiful Way is a brief, compelling, and idiosyncratic look at Native women’s plight in the modern world that plainly reveals the strength that still lies within them.
Review by Jo Ristow
June 23, 2012
One of the most important books I have read, pretty much ties together the source of my unease living in patriarchial systems, as well as having an inherent interest in the quality and fairness of food. A collection of four essays describing traditional matriarchal culture in comparison to the role of women today. This book weaves together the premise of colonial dominance ensuing the reversal of womens powah from the perspective of American Indian women who have researched or inherited knowledge of traditional systems. Hint, today is not (necessarily) the Way it is supposed to Be..) So, if you bristle, as I do, from the notion of manifest destiny recycled into the man-tra of 'everything is as it should be', you might also appreciate this book.
February 3, 2018
I so wanted this to be more than a rant. Of course, it's a justified rant, but can there not also be solutions? Suggestions? Possibly some roads to reconciliation? All I got from it was anger. So disappointed.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews