"It's a girl, my lord, in a flat-bed Ford slowing down to take a look at me."
OR: "Who's your baby-daddy?"
This past Tuesday (20 May), CBC Radio One's Sounds Like Canada aired a segment in which show host Shelagh Rogers interviewed the Mohawk-Canadian athlete Waneek Horn-Miller, who first landed in the national spotlight thanks to having been almost fatally stabbed during the Oka Crisis of 1990, when she was participating in a First Nations protest at the age of 14, while holding her younger sister in her arms; she went on to co-captain the Canadian women's water polo team to fifth place at the summer 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, but made a much bigger splash by appearing in an artistically nude (meaning: you can't see nuthin') photo on a cover of the Canadian edition of Time in September 2000. Horn-Miller has since gone on to become an occasional broadcaster, color commentator for the summer 2004 Athens Olympics, and human rights activist with an emphasis on the rights of First Nations peoples. ("First Nations" is the term used in Canada for their aboriginal peoples; in the U.S. the term is "Native American," "Amerindian," or -- with an apparently diminishing acceptance, except as regards casinos located on reservations -- "Indian.") She is the director of the First Peoples' House at McGill University in Montreal, where she founded a High-Performance Camp to attract teenagers (particularly First Nations teenagers) to post-secondary education through sport.
That's a photo of Horn-Miller below, from Shenandoah Films' page for their movie Chiefs & Champions: Waneek Horn-Miller:
The main topic of Rogers' interview with Horn-Miller was her inner conflict over having fallen in love with a supposedly self-described (and fellow former Olympic athlete, IIRC) "white guy from Alberta" to the point where she wants to marry him and have children with him, even though doing merely the former would exile her from the Mohawk nation; any children born from such a "mésalliance" (one suspects that the Mohawk elders at least would consider it a "miscegenation," whether or not they would actually use that term....) would likewise not be recognized as Mohawk.
This sounded like a harrowing enough of a conflict as it went, but the plot, as the cliché goes, thickened:
That's right: this guy (whose name escapes me, and I've not been able to find it on Horn-Miller's website or on the Sounds Like Canada website) will stick with her even if she bangs a Mohawk stud or three to have full-blooded Mohawk babies before commencing to have kids with him and/or adopt Native kids.
Rogers played a clip of the guy saying that he's having "trouble" with this decision (as would most males in his situation who weren't clinically dead from the neck down...), but that Horn-Miller was too important to him to lose.
I have some questions about this whole megillah.
First: Horn-Miller said that Mohawk society is matriarchal, meaning ruled by women -- her own mother was a single mother who raised four daughters (Horn-Miller is the third of four), apparently without stigma, and whether her mother was ever married, or whether she and her sisters have the same father, is not elucidated on her website. She also said that one's "Mohawkishness" is determined by the status of one's mother: if your mom's a Mohawk, badda-boom, badda-bing, you're a Mohawk, rather the same way that one's Jewishness descends through one's mother, not one's father.
However, the fact that the Mohawks will eject any member for merely marrying a non-Mohawk, in the name of "racial purity" or "preserving the race" or however you want to tap dance around it, strongly suggests that the Mohawks aren't really matriarchal at all: in a society truly organized around matrilineal descent, "Who's your baby-daddy?" is a moot point, of possible interest only to the parties immediately involved: mother, child, father. One suspects that perhaps the elder Mohawk men simply washed their hands of the boring, day-to-day business of governing the tribe (the operational side) -- "That's women's work" -- and kept control of the interesting "big picture" decisions (the policy side) for themselves. (Rather analogous to my understanding of how Jewish societies -- particularly ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, which forbid the men from earning a living so they can devote their full attention to religious studies -- work.)
Horn-Miller's fiancé also said in the clip that Rogers played that he couldn't understand why the children that Horn-Miller had with him couldn't be raised as Mohawks, since she's a Mohawk. The fact that Horn-Miller is continuing to make such a big dra-MA! out of this says that she accepts her tribe's restrictions, and fails to see the lie that the tribal power -- and lineage -- stem from the women.
Or does it? Horn-Miller certainly sounded sincere enough when proclaiming her desire to have kids: her fiancé's kids, adopted kids, and full-blooded Mohawk kids begat by a full-blooded Mohawk male; but could these desires, however honest, be serving as a discrete veil for an equally strong inclination towards polyamory, however unconscious and hence unacknowledged by herself? It's a mighty short scented oil-covered Slip 'n Slide from: "I need to have a full Mohawk baby" to: "I'm having trouble conceiving my full Mohawk baby" to: "Nice shoes; baby, let's fuck."
Nothing wrong with that, if her fiancé's on the same page -- though I didn't get the impression from his sound clip or from Horn-Miller's interview with Rogers that he is. It sounds to me as though Horn-Miller is trying to sneak polyamory into the relationship: as in the saw about keeping the camel's nose (especially Joe Camel's über-phallic nose...) out of the tent -- the idea being that once his nose is in the tent, it's impossible to keep the rest of him out of the tent -- unilateral polyamory will swamp, and most likely drown, any relationship.
If this is truly one of the things percolating in Horn-Miller's psyche, she owes it to her fiancé to level with him, and give him the option to walk away, before she buries all of his trust in her underneath one of Montreal's landfills.
But seriously, what's up with all this racial/eugenic bullshit of measuring a person's worth by the "blood content" of her partner and children? Haven't we had enough of this? Isn't the world tribal enough without perpetuating this way of thinking? Is it so im-frickin'-possible to teach a child to value his or her heritage if said child isn't a hundred percent "by blood" of that heritage? (And another thing: I defy anybody to prove that anybody is a hundred percent of any ethnicity. If pedigree collapse happens to everybody -- if everybody is no more distantly related to everybody else than a fiftieth cousin -- then what, pray tell, is the point of attempting to link "blood" to ethnic descent? Isn't that ultimately like picking gnat shit out of pepper?)
That someone who is so deeply committed to human rights as Horn-Miller is should buy into this line of hooey is disturbing, to say the least. Sounds to me as though she didn't hit the books hard enough at uni.
NOTE: Horn-Miller is also featured in a documentary film directed by a fellow member of the Kahnawake Reserve called Club Native, which examines the issue of Natives forming families with non-Natives; it will premiere at the 2008 DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver, B.C. next Thursday, 29 May at 9:00 p.m. Pacific Time.
This past Tuesday (20 May), CBC Radio One's Sounds Like Canada aired a segment in which show host Shelagh Rogers interviewed the Mohawk-Canadian athlete Waneek Horn-Miller, who first landed in the national spotlight thanks to having been almost fatally stabbed during the Oka Crisis of 1990, when she was participating in a First Nations protest at the age of 14, while holding her younger sister in her arms; she went on to co-captain the Canadian women's water polo team to fifth place at the summer 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, but made a much bigger splash by appearing in an artistically nude (meaning: you can't see nuthin') photo on a cover of the Canadian edition of Time in September 2000. Horn-Miller has since gone on to become an occasional broadcaster, color commentator for the summer 2004 Athens Olympics, and human rights activist with an emphasis on the rights of First Nations peoples. ("First Nations" is the term used in Canada for their aboriginal peoples; in the U.S. the term is "Native American," "Amerindian," or -- with an apparently diminishing acceptance, except as regards casinos located on reservations -- "Indian.") She is the director of the First Peoples' House at McGill University in Montreal, where she founded a High-Performance Camp to attract teenagers (particularly First Nations teenagers) to post-secondary education through sport.
That's a photo of Horn-Miller below, from Shenandoah Films' page for their movie Chiefs & Champions: Waneek Horn-Miller:
The main topic of Rogers' interview with Horn-Miller was her inner conflict over having fallen in love with a supposedly self-described (and fellow former Olympic athlete, IIRC) "white guy from Alberta" to the point where she wants to marry him and have children with him, even though doing merely the former would exile her from the Mohawk nation; any children born from such a "mésalliance" (one suspects that the Mohawk elders at least would consider it a "miscegenation," whether or not they would actually use that term....) would likewise not be recognized as Mohawk.
This sounded like a harrowing enough of a conflict as it went, but the plot, as the cliché goes, thickened:
- Horn-Miller said that Mohawk ancestry descends through the mother, since the Mohawks are a matriarchy (she did not use "matrilineal" or "matrilineal descent"). In other words, if your mother was a Mohawk, bam, you're a Mohawk. End of story.
- Horn-Miller said that she and her fiancé-in-all-but-name have had numerous discussions about children; while they have agreed on the possibility of adopting some native children, Horn-Miller also wants to give birth, not once but several times. She wants to give birth to her fiancé's children.
- However, despite the appeal of these two options, Horn-Miller said that she also wants to give birth at least one "full" Mohawk child, and apparently more than one. She said that it is "in her blood" to give birth to babies sired by a full-blooded, fully acknowledged Mohawk father.
- Horn-Miller then said that her fiancé (who surely must be bucking for sainthood) told her that he would support her no matter what she decided, because he loved her and didn't want to lose her.
That's right: this guy (whose name escapes me, and I've not been able to find it on Horn-Miller's website or on the Sounds Like Canada website) will stick with her even if she bangs a Mohawk stud or three to have full-blooded Mohawk babies before commencing to have kids with him and/or adopt Native kids.
Rogers played a clip of the guy saying that he's having "trouble" with this decision (as would most males in his situation who weren't clinically dead from the neck down...), but that Horn-Miller was too important to him to lose.
I have some questions about this whole megillah.
First: Horn-Miller said that Mohawk society is matriarchal, meaning ruled by women -- her own mother was a single mother who raised four daughters (Horn-Miller is the third of four), apparently without stigma, and whether her mother was ever married, or whether she and her sisters have the same father, is not elucidated on her website. She also said that one's "Mohawkishness" is determined by the status of one's mother: if your mom's a Mohawk, badda-boom, badda-bing, you're a Mohawk, rather the same way that one's Jewishness descends through one's mother, not one's father.
However, the fact that the Mohawks will eject any member for merely marrying a non-Mohawk, in the name of "racial purity" or "preserving the race" or however you want to tap dance around it, strongly suggests that the Mohawks aren't really matriarchal at all: in a society truly organized around matrilineal descent, "Who's your baby-daddy?" is a moot point, of possible interest only to the parties immediately involved: mother, child, father. One suspects that perhaps the elder Mohawk men simply washed their hands of the boring, day-to-day business of governing the tribe (the operational side) -- "That's women's work" -- and kept control of the interesting "big picture" decisions (the policy side) for themselves. (Rather analogous to my understanding of how Jewish societies -- particularly ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, which forbid the men from earning a living so they can devote their full attention to religious studies -- work.)
Horn-Miller's fiancé also said in the clip that Rogers played that he couldn't understand why the children that Horn-Miller had with him couldn't be raised as Mohawks, since she's a Mohawk. The fact that Horn-Miller is continuing to make such a big dra-MA! out of this says that she accepts her tribe's restrictions, and fails to see the lie that the tribal power -- and lineage -- stem from the women.
Or does it? Horn-Miller certainly sounded sincere enough when proclaiming her desire to have kids: her fiancé's kids, adopted kids, and full-blooded Mohawk kids begat by a full-blooded Mohawk male; but could these desires, however honest, be serving as a discrete veil for an equally strong inclination towards polyamory, however unconscious and hence unacknowledged by herself? It's a mighty short scented oil-covered Slip 'n Slide from: "I need to have a full Mohawk baby" to: "I'm having trouble conceiving my full Mohawk baby" to: "Nice shoes; baby, let's fuck."
Nothing wrong with that, if her fiancé's on the same page -- though I didn't get the impression from his sound clip or from Horn-Miller's interview with Rogers that he is. It sounds to me as though Horn-Miller is trying to sneak polyamory into the relationship: as in the saw about keeping the camel's nose (especially Joe Camel's über-phallic nose...) out of the tent -- the idea being that once his nose is in the tent, it's impossible to keep the rest of him out of the tent -- unilateral polyamory will swamp, and most likely drown, any relationship.
If this is truly one of the things percolating in Horn-Miller's psyche, she owes it to her fiancé to level with him, and give him the option to walk away, before she buries all of his trust in her underneath one of Montreal's landfills.
But seriously, what's up with all this racial/eugenic bullshit of measuring a person's worth by the "blood content" of her partner and children? Haven't we had enough of this? Isn't the world tribal enough without perpetuating this way of thinking? Is it so im-frickin'-possible to teach a child to value his or her heritage if said child isn't a hundred percent "by blood" of that heritage? (And another thing: I defy anybody to prove that anybody is a hundred percent of any ethnicity. If pedigree collapse happens to everybody -- if everybody is no more distantly related to everybody else than a fiftieth cousin -- then what, pray tell, is the point of attempting to link "blood" to ethnic descent? Isn't that ultimately like picking gnat shit out of pepper?)
That someone who is so deeply committed to human rights as Horn-Miller is should buy into this line of hooey is disturbing, to say the least. Sounds to me as though she didn't hit the books hard enough at uni.
NOTE: Horn-Miller is also featured in a documentary film directed by a fellow member of the Kahnawake Reserve called Club Native, which examines the issue of Natives forming families with non-Natives; it will premiere at the 2008 DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver, B.C. next Thursday, 29 May at 9:00 p.m. Pacific Time.