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The Akwesasne Cultural Restoration Program: a Mohawk Approach to Land- Based Education

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The Akwesasne Cultural Restoration Program: a Mohawk Approach to Land- Based Education Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 3, No. 3, 2014, pp. 134-144 The Akwesasne cultural restoration program: A Mohawk approach to land- based education Taiaiake Alfred University of Victoria Abstract This article tracks the creation of a cultural apprenticeship program in the Mohawk community of Akwesasne. The program aims to give youth in the community the necessary skills, knowledge and experiences in land, language and culture to help the Mohawks of Akwesasne retain and regenerate land based practices in the community. The program arose from Akwesasne’s participation in the Natural Resources Damages Assessment (NRDA) process. This is the legal process that resulted from the 1981 “Superfund” legislation in which corporations must provide redress to communities that have suffered from the egregious pollution of their local environments. Although constrained by the legal requirements of the process, the Mohawks of Akwesasne re-envisioned the process within a context of their own nationhood by focusing on these two questions: How has industrial pollution affected the Akwesasne Mohawks’ people’s way of life? And, what can be done to restore that way of life? This article explains how the research was carried out of the NRDA process and used to negotiate for the funds necessary to establish the cultural apprenticeship program. Keywords: Mohawk; Akwesasne; cultural restoration; cultural apprenticeship; Indigenous nationhood 2014 T. Alfred This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Akwasanse cultural restoration program 135 We used the river and the land for our livelihood, cause we fished and whatever fish we didn’t eat, other people ate. And we did a lot of our own gardens and ate whatever we produced. We used to live off the land before. We had no welfare back then, we had to live off the land. In my elders’ time, everybody fished and gardened, the whole village, and a lot of people came and bought stuff from us. After that, everything changed… - Akwesasne Elder Early in 2014, the Mohawk community of Akwesasne began a land-based and language-infused cultural apprenticeship program that gives learners the opportunity to apprentice with master knowledge-holders to learn traditional, land-based, cultural practices, including hunting and trapping, medicinal plants and healing, fishing and water use, and horticulture and black ash basket making. The Akwesasne Cultural Restoration (ACR) program was designed through a collaborative community-based effort to counter the cultural impacts of environmental contamination that occurred in the area from the 1930s through the 1980s. The program came about after a ten-year process of research, community consultation and program design as the community’s consensus response to cultural loss as a result of industrial chemical contamination. Program funding is part of a legal settlement reached through the 1981 “Superfund” legislation, that enables redress and compensation for communities affected by egregious pollution of their natural environments. The legal process to seek redress is structured by United States Federal Law through the Natural Resources Damages Assessment (NRDA) process. The Mohawks of Akwesasne, as part of a “trustee” group which also included US federal government and New York State agencies, put forward and defended their understanding of cultural loss within the context of their nationhood and in contention with the corporations responsible for the contamination: General Motors (GM) and the Aluminum Company of America/ALCOA. The community’s articulation of a culturally grounded, consensual approach to redress centers on a unique concept of, and approach to, cultural restoration. This article describes the ACR program and the process the community undertook to secure funding for a settlement, conceptualize an approach to restoration, and design a model and structure for implementing a Mohawk vision of land-based education. As Principal Consultant on the project, my role was to conduct research and prepare reports forming the basis for negotiating a legal settlement agreement, and to advise the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe’s NRDA team.1 In later phases of the work, including negotiating a settlement 1 I acknowledge and express gratitude to Ken Jock and the whole of the SRMT’s environment division for allowing me to be a part of this important work, especially NRDA coordinator Barbara Tarbell for being such a passionate and effective leader in defending the community’s vision in this process, and to Jari Thompson and Amberdawn Lafrance, two dedicated staff members who were crucially important of this work getting done and this process moving forward. I would also like to acknowledge my two collaborators on the Anthropological Report – Drs. Theresa McCarthy and Stella Spak. 136 T. Alfred and designing the ACR program, the NRDA team and I worked with around fifty community members: some as researchers and others as participants in public consultations. The consultative work focused on two questions fundamental to understanding both the pollution’s cultural impacts and potential restitution measures: How has industrial pollution affected the Akwesasne Mohawks’ people’s way of life? And, what can be done to restore that way of life? We started off in 2004 with community meetings to introduce our work and our team, and to allow the community members to voice their perspective on the work we were setting out to do. Based on this engagement with the community, we designed a research approach. The research began with an investigation, in a scientifically rigorous and formal academic manner, of the effect contamination has had on the traditional land-based culture of Akwesasne. We used all the knowledge resources available in the community, including written sources from history books and newspapers, personal testimonies, scientific studies and oral histories - documented as part of this project. We did all of our work under the guidance of an advisory committee made of up respected people from the community who have knowledge and interest in the area of the environment and traditional land-based cultural practices. The investigation phase concluded in 2006, with the submission of the team’s findings contained in an anthropological report to the companies and the other parties in the process. The report concluded that GM and ALCOA had released contaminants such as PCBs, heavy metals and fluoride into the environment and that, as a result, the community’s way of life was affected, starting in 1955.2 Prior to 1955, almost every family in Akwesasne was reliant on the land, the river, and the harvesting of fish, plants and animals - called “traditional resources and resource- based cultural practices.” One elder’s answer to the question of whether or not the release of contaminants into the river changed his way of life is illustrative of the sense most Mohawks that we talked to in our work had: I had to start working away from here; there were no other jobs available. If I hadn’t left here, I would have been like my father, I would’ve hunted and had the knowledge to become a fisherman, and to trap for muskrats. My father taught me everything, how and where to hunt if I wanted to, and if we were able to… Overall, we found that traditional cultural resource practices have survived but, as a community, because of pollution, Akwesasro:non have been denied the opportunity to provide their families with healthy foods, to fulfill their traditional obligations toward the land, waters, plants and animals, and, denied the opportunity to pass on practical, spiritual philosophical and language- based knowledge of what it means to be Mohawk. In the past, life in Akwesasne centered on the 2 Contaminants released into the natural environment include the PCBs Aroclor (1248) and Therminol, polychlorinated dibenzofurans, dioxins, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, fluorides, cyanide, aluminum, arsenic, chromium, and styrene. There was also evidence indicating a probable release of heavy metals, including lead, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, and methylmercury. Akwasanse cultural restoration program 137 river, which provided the people with their main food sources; fishing as an economic and cultural activity was central to the identity of the people. The river also provided the people with a source of clean drinking water, transportation, and recreation, in swimming. Being cut off from the physical, psychological and re-creative sustenance provided to Akwesasro:non by the river has impacted the people negatively in many ways. People have suffered great harm in losing the ability to fish and use the water of Kanienterowannene, the great flowing majesty (as the river is called in the Mohawk language) and the other rivers that flow through Akwesasne. This remembrance by another Mohawk elder invokes the sense of practical and personal loss felt by those who experienced the devastating transition from the traditional lifestyle to their modernized post-contamination existence: My grandmother taught me how to row and how to make the boat go sideways so we wouldn’t drown, so our boat wouldn’t capsize… When it rains we would try hard to get to an island and turn over the boat. The winds would be so strong that we would have to take cover under the boat. After the storm had passed we would then get back in the boat and keep going. Sometimes we would have to hide there for a long time before we got going. We took a lot of abuse to get what we needed… This is how we managed to get around on the river, and there were many times in the early hours of the morning I would stand out there and watch the fish as they swam around. Today you will never experience this sight when you go down to the river.
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