Sarah Augustine recounts a moment early in her time on the Yakama Indian Reservation, when she realized that children have an important place among the tribal community, not segregated from their parents.
This blog post is in celebration of Mother’s Day, May 12.
Sarah Augustine, who is a Pueblo (Tewa) descendant, is co-founder and executive director of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery. She is also the co-founder of Suriname Indigenous Health Fund, where she has worked in relationship with vulnerable Indigenous peoples since 2005. Sarah is a mother, grandmother, wife and a relative to many. She likes to can food grown by her family, hates driving and has memorized hundreds of pop songs. Sarah has a wicked sense of humor; typically, no one gets her jokes.
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Not long after I moved to the Yakama Indian Reservation, a friend and I took our toddlers to an “Indian taco” sale at the college where I worked. This delicious meal is a large piece of frybread smothered in ground beef, beans, cheese, tomatoes and all the taco fixings.
As my friend and I entered the small, portable building that then housed the Indigenous studies program, we were surrounded by college students, Native faculty, community members, children — so many people, crushed into a small space. It felt overly warm, given the portable fryer crowding the back door, long plastic tables with benches attached set end to end in rows across the room, and people standing, working and chatting in what seemed like every available space. Children were running around in the chaos, laughing and playing loudly.
My friend and I surveyed the scene, each holding a toddler son. We made a space for ourselves along one table and took turns buying tacos and drinks, then we carefully arranged a way to share the food with our children. It was a logistical challenge.
The plastic tables with benches attached did not have adequate space between the bench and table to accommodate a mama with a growing child on her lap. We had flimsy paper plates filled with hot food — how would we be able to sit there with our children in arms? We stood our toddlers in a corner, momentarily, while we tried to arrange ourselves.
One of the elder women working the sale watched us with a soft smile on her face and called out to our children, “Run, babies, run!”
The women throughout the room burst out laughing, smiling at us kindly.
From our point of view, we were acting responsibly, working out how to get our food and sit down without causing a ruckus, while simultaneously keeping our children safe. From the grandmother’s point of view, we were acting in a way inconsistent with the nature of toddlers. Toddlers want to explore. So let them explore. Everyone knows they are vulnerable and need constant monitoring — in this space, filled with tribal community, we could free them to toddle and grab. They were never more than a few feet from the steadying hand of a mother or uncle, grandfather or cousin.
The grandmother used humor to mildly address the confusion of new mothers. Over time, I learned why our muddle was silly to her. We were in a community space, a space made safe by the tribal mothers and grandmothers, fathers, and elder siblings. We were free to set our children down, let them run and feed them bites from our cooling plates as they zoomed by. We did not have to think of ourselves as alone in this place — there were plenty of watching adults. Our children could toddle safely from table to table, taking bites from all the plates held by parents and grandparents. This space could have been arranged outside, but instead, the meal was served in a space that ensured that no child could wander away from the group. In time I came to understand the meaning of the word tribe, but on that day I felt embarrassed and confused.
I had met the limits of my conventional thinking that places myself at the center.
There was no way to eat in that place with a toddler and keep the situation under my strict control. The only way to enjoy my food, my friend and our children was to release control, to submit to the safety of the collective — to think beyond myself and my own solution. This collectivity carried with it a cost, of course: I, too, must take responsibility for every child in the room, considering each as precious as my own. Any child within arm’s reach from me could be the recipient of a bite of my Indian taco or a mild redirection if the behavior became too rambunctious. This corporate responsibility added a measure of complexity. It took time for me to adjust to thinking beyond myself.
At the college, I also learned to challenge the idea that our children should be segregated from us — that it is “professional” for adults to work in isolation from children, while children are corralled in a space made specifically for them. In the Indigenous view, children are part of our world, and it is their job to watch us, to imitate us, to learn from us. It is not reasonable for parents to be separated from them. Rather, it is the responsibility of the classroom, the workplace, to adjust to the reality that workers are parents, and children are a part of life. More than once, I have held a baby or a toddler while her mother wrote a final exam.
How might our culture change if we held the wellbeing of the most vulnerable, children, at the center? How might our communities change if we believed it was rational and appropriate to incorporate our children into every aspect of our corporate lives? I, for one, would welcome the delight that children bring, as well as the opportunity to wipe noses, feed bites of frybread and remember what is important, all day long.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog belong to the author and are not intended to represent the views of the MC USA Executive Board or staff.
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