In the Land of Quiet Waters Flows a Strong Current
article by Kelsey Merritt
Image by Kelsey Weyerbacher
The heritage narrative that dominated Jill Mackin’s childhood was that of her father’s European family history. Just as dominant, however, were the silences regarding her mother’s Native Turtle Mountain Chippewa (Ojibwe) lineage. A trend that Mackin says, “speaks to the broader heritage of our country and our continent” regarding the silence surrounding Native identity.
Raised in Choteau, Montana, a small town with a population of just 1,619 in 2017, it was not until later in life that Mackin discovered the many community members who, like her, have Ojibwe-Métis heritage— connections and history that were not previously acknowledged. “The identity or the heritage [of Choteau] is that we are a farming and ranching community. But, the Rocky Mountain Front was significantly home to the Ojibwe, Métis, and other Native peoples.” Like many small communities throughout Montana, the history of agriculture prevails, and too often, the history of the Native peoples who lived and existed in the lands prior to the colonization of the area are silenced— much like Mackin’s Native heritage.
These silences have become deafening as many persons of Native heritage struggle to identify themselves as Native peoples. As a doctoral candidate at Montana State University specializing in Indigenous food systems and land practices, Mackin has been witness to many Native students coming to MSU’s campus and feeling disconnected from their identity. The biggest issue, she says, is the question of: Am I enough?
“Who is the real Indian? Is that my grandparents? Was it my grandparents’ grandparents? Is it those people over there— those who speak more of the language, grew up on the rez, hold more of the teachings? The issue revolves around the losses we’ve endured, how we have changed, and what constitutes being a ‘real Indian,’ especially in a time when most Native Americans are growing up off the reservation. Racism and institutional racism, in the form of assimilation and termination policies, have resulted in significant losses of relatives, language, stories, and connections to place. But cultural resurgence and healing [are] ongoing and our culture is evolving, as all cultures do.”
At the basis of our country’s long-standing representation of Native persons has been a repeated stereotype of what constitutes being “Indian enough.” But, as Mackin stresses: “Culture and peoples are not static things. We change and evolve. European and Indian intermarriage can be traced back to the late 1500s in my family. Mixing does not mean you are not Indian or that you are only part— you are just mixed of more than one heritage. We’ve changed, but what hasn’t changed is the blood-quantum definition of who is Native.”
The continual controversy surrounding Blood Quantum requirements shows no sign of stopping until a solution can be found. As a form of measurement, blood-quantum determines how “Indian” an individual is. The federal government uses this “Certified Degree of Indian Blood” in the form of an identification card determined from tribal documents by a tribal official or government employee. Native tribes differ in how they utilize the blood-quantum to determine citizenship— a complicated process and decision in every sense. Mackin sees the problem for what it is: “It was always meant as a termination policy, but some progressive Native communities are redefining membership based on a collective package of blood relationship, community involvement, language, and cultural knowledge. The silence around blood quantum on both sides is about competition for scarce resources— federal and tribal resources. There is a desperate need for decolonization in this regard and for healing to begin around ‘who belongs and who doesn’t, and that work belongs to everybody, not just Native people.”
Jill at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Alberta, Canada.
Water ceremony, Headwaters of the Ogima-ikwe ziti (the Missouri).
Mackin’s own journey back to her Native heritage came from a deep desire to understand the story of her mother’s side of the family and to reclaim the culture and traditions that her ancestors had known and her family had lost. She was raised Catholic— as part of the legacy of the missionization of Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and she became heavily involved in church leadership, obtained a Master’s degree in Catholic Theology, and did social justice work in Haiti; Mackin even considered taking religious vows. While her life in the Church was fulfilling in the love of community and humanitarian work, there was a disconnect that she felt in her prayer life. Mackin says, “there were experiences and blood memory things that would come to me— my connection with land, water, sky, and animals. It didn’t line up with the Catholic worldview, so there was some discontinuity there for sure. I began praying in my adult life for a connection to our Ojibwe teachings and connection with one of my relatives who carried that knowledge. And I prayed for that for a lot of years. Maybe 15 or 20. And then it came in a dream. It came in a dream that told me who I needed to seek after. It came in an invitation from a relative to the Midewin ceremony.”
A thousand miles from Bozeman, the nearest Ojibwe Midewin ceremony at the time took place at the Minweyweywingan Lodge (Good Sounding Lodge) in Manitoba at the Roseau River First Nation. The ceremonies follow the seasons and occur four times a year, resulting in 8,000 miles of driving a year for Mackin and her family. The Midewin society is also called “the path of the heart.” Following the colonization of the Ojibwe peoples, Mide ceremonies were illegal in both the US and Canada for about one hundred years, as were other Native ceremonies beginning with the Ghost Dance, which was banned in Sitting Bull’s time. Mackin feels certain that “if we didn’t have the American Indian Movement, I don’t know if our ceremony would have survived. Many of the leaders in our lodge were also leaders in AIM, and they did the important work of bringing our ceremonies out from underground.”
Mackin’s Mide lodge conducted the funeral of Dennis Banks, who made his journey to the spirit world on October 29, 2017. Banks was a co-founder of the American Indian Movement in 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in an effort to represent urban Indians in areas of systemic poverty and police brutality against Natives. The movement grew to encompass a massive platform, including economic independence, the revitalization of culture, protection of legal rights, and autonomy over tribal lands.
Mackin is deeply grateful for Mide ceremonies, as she says: “I am strengthened by attending my ceremonies. It is so good to be with a lot of people who are doing that healing work of the lodge for all our relations.” As a site of her own journey towards healing, the ceremonies fulfill the disconnect Mackin felt in her family’s collective heritage and her own understandings of the world, both spiritual and physical. In July, while she was conducting research at the Glenbow Archives in Calgary alongside her elder, Edna Manitowabi of Manitoulin Island, Ontario, she recalls Edna impressing upon her the teachings of the lodge saying: “This is your inheritance. Put it on. Wear it… let it change you, your attitude— the way that you sound, speak, and move.” For Mackin, “Leaving the Catholic Church and finding my way to that lodge was an act of decolonization because I am part of breathing life into ways of being, knowing, and doing that are important and need to be a part of our world. I have long held knowledge and connection to my European heritage, but what was nearly lost to me and my children was our Indigenous heritage. I feel like I also have a responsibility to my ancestors to carry forward that worldview— the gifts, the ceremonies, the lifeways, the foodways— that belong to that side of the family and were nearly destroyed by the violence of the past.” And beyond healing the past, there is a purpose in the present to this cultural recovery. “There is an Ojibwe prophecy which recognizes the time we are in and the importance of our teachings. We are told that “when the Earth is burning,” we will have a choice to go back along our path and pick up our teachings for the healing of all peoples and Mother Earth or continue along a scorched path. Indigenous knowledge of living in sustainable and reciprocal ways is vitally important in the present moment.”
For the last three years, Mackin has been involved in the Native Land Project (NLP) as a team member focused on Indigenous food sovereignty. An applied research initiative of Montana State University, the NLP aims to “document and generate research on Indigenous land and planning that is useful to planners and others working on issues in the interest of First Peoples in the Northern Rockies region.” In July of 2019, the Blackfeet Nation of Montana was awarded a $1 million federally-funded grant from the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, which the Blackfeet Tribe, Montana State University, and others are matching with another $1 million to support five years of research within the tribe’s Agricultural Resource Management Plan. Aaron Bolton reported for Montana Public Radio that Mackin’s work within the NLP could help “leverage funding for initiatives like the construction of a local USDA meat processing plant.” Her goal is simple: access to healthy food for Native people through food sovereignty.
“I came to my doctoral work because it was clear to me that we are hooked on a fossil fuel-powered food system. It is not sustainable. None of us will exist in Choteau, Miles City, Bozeman, anywhere unless we gain control of the food system at a local level. You are not sovereign unless you have control of your food system. People like Monsanto and Sysco Food Systems have food sovereignty. We do not. We have a lot of work to do.” And Mackin has been working— working to develop an Indigenous food sovereignty network “to provide knowledge, policy, and connectivity to support the important work Native and rural communities are doing to take control of their food systems. We are building a food sovereignty solidarity project.”
Amidst her hope lies her reality, as Mackin acknowledges the “healing that needs to happen at individual and community levels is all connected to healing Mother Earth.” And that healing is continually occurring within herself, too, as she walks her journey back towards her Native heritage.
Jill and her life partner, Bill Mackin.
Paul, Clare, & John Hendricks— “happiness is having your children gathered in your kitchen.”
A mother as well as partner, researcher, Ojibwe woman, and more, Mackin is blunt about the journey she has been on: “My kids have been along the journey as I go deeper into an understanding of [our Native heritage]. It has been hard for them because of society’s phenotype association with heritage. Their father is also European, so they feel self-conscious about identifying as American Indian, but they’re not alone.” The haunting question remains of ‘Am I enough?’ for so many Native people. When asked how she models her heritage for her children, Mackin stopped to think before opening her hands to say:
“I just try to witness to my kids: This is who we are. That story is there for you. And that spiritual walk is there for you— those lifeways and foodways— all of it is there for you and it is good. I don’t force the issue that they need to own it. They will all find their own identity. But I am setting it before them with love.”
I have known Jill for nearly six years, when I worked with her for a short time. She is a woman of grace and humility that I return to time and time again for knowledge and honest answers to complicated questions. As a non-Native woman myself, I often worry that I could do more to be an advocate for Indigenous voices, but wonder how to. I ask myself how I can be authentic without speaking over or speaking for Native women, and how I can best support the many issues Native women face. I was nervous to sit down with Jill for this interview. Not because I was anxious about what she would say, but instead because I was worried I wouldn’t do her story justice in communicating it here for you, the readers.
“We may have grown up just miles from each other here in Montana, but the way we see the world may be immensely different”
But, just as I knew she would, Jill met my anxiety with a thoughtful response:
“One of the things I always say when I’m beginning a public talk is that I want to disarm people, because there is this latent emotion of what we have all inherited— we have a collective heritage in this colonial space and colonization is ongoing— but what I want to acknowledge is that the history of colonization is not the fault of anybody in whatever room I’m speaking to… However, it is the burden of all of us, no matter what our origins. Are we going to live with ongoing violence over race because we haven’t contended with it? Because then those legacies of the history are on all of us. And it’s our shared work to heal this colonial heritage.”
That shared work is one I think we can all endeavor to embark upon as we consider our own heritage in the pages of this month’s Montana Woman. As Jill Falcon Mackin stresses, the one thing we all really need to do is simple: Listen.
“Everybody wants an Indian on their Board of Trustees. Everybody wants an Indian on their program at every conference and event gathering. And, what’s the point [of that]? I think the point is found in relationships. When you develop an authentic relationship with someone from a different worldview and are able to constructively discuss whatever the topic may be— education, conservation, public policy— then you are allowing space for different worldviews.”
Water ceremony, Headwaters of the Ogima-ikwe ziti (the Missouri) .
Jill with her daughter Clare Hendricks at the United Nations, NY. Clare was a delegate to the 62nd Commission on the Status of Women.
The consistent themes of love and healing were repeated in our interview, as the autumn weather settled in around us on her back porch. When I looked at Jill’s hands, they sat next to a pile of notebooks and papers, a laptop where she had been writing her most recent dissertation chapter before I arrived, and multiple books with notes left in them. I considered the sheer volume of work this woman does: from multiple committees and boards to leadership positions in different programs and organizations, and recent articles written. When I asked how she accomplishes all this, she was quick to respond: “I think that I have a very good life partner in Bill, and my children who are all a gift to me. I spend time out on the land every day, walking, singing to the water, harvesting plants. My prayer life is strong. I greet the day each day with gratitude and my Mide rituals.”
Mackin sees hope, however, in the ways small communities like the one she grew up are acknowledging this difference: “I think Choteau has taken some important steps in interviewing some of the elders before they passed through the Métis Cultural Recovery Trust, an organization founded by people of different heritages. Through the work of the Old Trail Museum, elder Al Wiseman, and many others, they are claiming a more honest story about the past. I think that acknowledging some of the difficult things [is next].” As her own Native story was silenced for so long, Mackin sees the silences surrounding difficult subject matters continued: “The stories don’t always reflect the horror of what colonization is and has been.” She stresses that “to acknowledge that tough stuff is important healing work. So is the acknowledgement Native peoples and their rich cultures still exist.”
In all she does, Mackin works to show that “we have to acknowledge the difference in worldviews. We may have grown up just miles from each other here in Montana, but the way we see the world may be immensely different.” As someone raised in Eastern Montana myself, I saw myself in the words she spoke. I saw the differences between us, but the threads that connect us. I saw the work that has been done and the difficult questions I struggled to ask, but I also saw the vastness that we had yet to cover. There is so much work to be done.