When I think of humanity as a Coast Salish person I think of family. My humanness, the way I talk and think, the way I experience trauma and healing, the way I teach and learn, all that I understand to be human, is all rooted in my connection to my family and ancestors. Trauma wasn’t the first thing that Native people passed down intergenerationally, we first passed down our Indigenousness. Humanities in Western education is defined by fields or subjects of human expression: art, music, literature, philosophy, culture, and language—all things considered uniquely human. Yet, in the absence of Western education systems, the things that express our humanness would be passed to us through family, particularly teachings in language and culture. When I research and teach humanities and art at the Coast Salish Institute at Northwest Indian College (NWIC) in the Lummi Nation, my family’s traditional homeland, I think about how family teachings are key to a Coast Salish perspective. My Native family relationships connect me to the cultural identity of this place, which feeds my passion for my work in cultural revitalization and the maintenance of Indigenous identity.

While Western academia might see humanities as a category of subjects of human expression, I see humanities at a tribal college as a huge project in cultural revitalization, where learning and expressing our Indigenousness reconnect us to ourselves, our family, and our place. Arts and humanities at tribal colleges should seek to revitalize, maintain, and continue ancestral knowledges, meanings, skills, reality, and identity, while remaining grounded in the place/land it came from. The humanities and related subjects taught with a wholistic Indigenous lens can prepare tribal college students for vital community roles in cultural revitalization projects, but they also have a positive impact on all students’ identity development and well-being.

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Tribally controlled education systems are an act of sovereignty, Native nations educating our own people. But is the purpose to prepare Native students to survive and thrive in non-tribal institutions and society, or is it to revitalize our languages, cultures, and worldviews? Ideally it should do both equally and intentionally to address the whole of settler-colonial damage.

Boarding school policy explicitly took children away from their homes and communities and sought to replace their language, worldview, art, stories, history, ways of teaching, food, and ceremony with knowledge taught as humanities and related fields in current education systems. Yet, if we look at humanities as a means of revitalization, the separation of children and parents also impacts other areas of knowledge like culturally connected parenting, teaching, and learning, and a natural development of healthy relationships to place, identity, social conduct, gender, and sexuality (Yellow Heart Brave Heart et al., 1998). These interconnected areas of attempted theft and fracture can be addressed through a broader scope of subjects like sociology, psychology, history, education, and early childhood development—subjects that Western education considers social sciences. However, it is not enough to teach a “subject” to take steps towards cultural revitalization because the worldview is not just in the lesson but in how that lesson is taught. If the aim of a lesson or course in a subject is to revitalize anything Indigenous—identity, language, arts, philosophy, culture, sovereignty—then can that truly be achieved though using the tools that come from Western education?

Industrial boarding schools sought to assimilate Native people in part by teaching skills deemed valuable for a modern factory-based economy, undermining traditional cultural mediums such as weaving.

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I wasn’t always connected to Lummi. I am an enrolled Lummi Nation member, but I have only in the past few years come back to the nation to learn about myself and my family. My story is not new or unique. There are many Native people who grew up both in and outside of their communities, looking for a more meaningful connection to their Indigenousness and their people. This phenomenon is a huge ripple in the ongoing radiating impacts of colonization and settlement. Boarding schools and relocation programs tried to, and in several cases succeeded in, separating members of my family from their community and the place-based connections to their identity. But I came back. I have spent my whole academic life trying to understand humanity through humanities and art studies, only to find that what I was missing in my studies was missing in me—life-affirming connections to my family and Indigenousness.

All of this got me thinking about the relationship between Indigenousness and humanness, and subsequently the separate areas of Indigenous studies and humanities studies. The Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report of 2022 initiated by the then secretary of the Department of the Interior, Deb Haaland, concluded that Indian boarding schools in the U.S. used “identity alteration methodologies” by “renaming Indian children” and “preventing the use of [their Native] languages, religions, and cultural practices” (Newland, 2022), acknowledging an important relationship between culture, identity, and language.

This comes to mind when reading Joanne Barker’s work, Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist, where she frames this interaction and history between the U.S. and the first peoples of North America as the questioning of an entire people’s humanity (Barker, 2021). As we do the work of revitalizing our languages, ceremonies, stories, creative expression, and even philosophies, we are working towards an affirmation of our humanity, a self-recognition of what makes us human (see Coulthard, 2014), in spite of, and in resistance to, our humanity being questioned. This makes revitalization efforts more than just getting back what was “lost,” but also an ongoing multi-generational effort to take back our humanity. If this is the work Indigenous humanities does, then as tribal college educators, it is our job to create programs and educational structures that authentically support and drive this work.

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How do we bring back identity affirming learning if our families, societies, and educational systems are not as they once were? Today, we have tribal colleges and K-12 schools which offer an opportunity to look back and revive our pre-boarding school forms of education, address the impacts of colonization and settlement, and empower our generations to continue the work of teaching and shaping Indigenous humanity. This project cannot be done at any other kind of college or school because it is place-based, connected to family, and ideally community driven. Some of my tasks at the Coast Salish Institute are to look at our current courses, institutional mission and outcomes, and to think through the role humanities subjects have in the courses and programs at NWIC.

Our current interim college president, former NSL department chair, and enrolled Lummi tribal member, Dr. Lexie Tom, wrote her PhD dissertation on a higher education teaching and learning model that developed from the Coast Salish traditional structure of inherited rights, which serve as a “road map to our languages, ceremonies, and oral histories that make up our identity.” As Tom further explains, “They are very specific to our families” (2018). Dr. Tom’s model structures our current institutional outcomes and the Coast Salish Institute continues to use this model as a foundation to assess our strategic plan development. It is being used in our courses by current program leads and faculty Greg Mahle (Upper Skagit), Brandon Morris (Lummi), and Don McCluskey (Lummi), along with our Native studies leadership and cultural sovereignty instructors. Many assignments and projects at NWIC encourage students to grow their unique skills and talents by connecting with their own communities, whether they are Coast Salish or not. They are also asked to discuss course topics with family and community members as part of assignments to spark the importance of connecting with their family in their learning journey. This is holistically applied to our faculty, both Native and non-Native, because they are encouraged to connect with their family and the place their family comes from to have a clear understanding of how these connections can impact learning.

Dr. Tom’s dissertation and subsequent work in our Lummi Nation’s education system came from her life-long learning and growth in the Lummi community. She can speak to Lummi traditional forms of education because she is rooted in family structure and traditional teachings. Place-based learning and teaching is beyond learning facts about the land in a place. Place-based learning is our accountability to the reciprocal relationships between the land, people, language, cosmologies, history, and the rooted Indigenousness of the place. In Coast Salish territory this Indigenousness is our family. At the Coast Salish Institute we guide the cultural authenticity of curriculum, develop programs, and take on a wide range of projects that are all place based and community focused. All the work we do is Indigenous humanities, including the work done on genealogy. Genealogy is more than just a chart—it is the relational map of our genetic talents and gifts, our inherited societal positioning, our belonging to our family and community, our rights and responsibilities to teachings, and our rootedness to a place. Our relationship to family is an expression of our humanity and is hence naturally a humanities project.

NWIC’s college mission states: “Through education, Northwest Indian College promotes Indigenous self-determination and knowledge.” The college’s Native Studies Leadership program, developed at the Coast Salish Institute, is structured with the view that Indigenous self-determination and knowledges are sustained though the strengthening and maintaining of Indigenous identity. According to the program description, the college’s identity “is formed by sacred histories, language, origin stories, and the heroes who continue to defend our families and our homelands.” It is not enough to focus on treaty rights, natural resources, land ownership, and tribal institutions to define our nations; it is our very identities that enable our nations to continue into the future.

As the Coast Salish Institute does the work to bring traditional models and values into NWIC teaching and learning, there remains the need to address the impacts of ongoing coloniality and settlement in so much more than just our current programs. We have to address the ways dominant colonial culture structures influence who we are today. We must try to find our original identity, not just to reclaim our past but to ensure our continuing existence.

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Working in the Lummi community allows me to contribute in some way while finding my place here. In my job I am asked to think through what the humanities mean in an Indigenous context. I have been Lummi all my life but came back here a little over a year ago to understand what that means. Prior to my work at NWIC, I spent three years of academic study on Indigenous epistemology and worldviews at Evergreen State College and Cornell University. So, while I am still learning, experiencing, reflecting, and relating to the specific ways of being Lummi, I can at least provide a perspective on the Western structures that impact Lummi today. Western education mostly uses a Taylorism model that “efficiently” teaches knowledge through categorized, broken down, easily digestible, separately prescribed bits of information (Rifkin, 2022). This separation can be siloing and prevent a vital lesson in how these subjects are interrelated and relational. It can also prevent us from seeing how the humanities are in everything we study because of how culture and our humanness shape how we see the world.

I am learning this at the Coast Salish institute. When we discuss an art like weaving, we discuss the culture, history, philosophy, and family of the people who practice it, because “art” in a Coast Salish context is not just how to make something that is pretty, it is a cultural transmission of memory and knowledge. This is likely why there is no word for art or artist in our language. Weavings in Coast Salish communities, both past and present, are practical and beautiful, they are a cultural and individual expression used in every ceremony and are highly valued all at once. So, when I teach our traditional weaving, I can’t teach it as an art medium, I need to include all the cultural teachings my family and mentors have passed on to me.

In Coast Salish culture, weaving is a way for one generation to pass along cultural knowledge to the next.

Earlier this year, we put together an exhibit that told the story of our early ancestors. “Honoring our Treaty Signers” was a project started by the director of the Coast Salish Institute, Sharon Kinley, bringing together the works of Coast Salish traditional weavers of all ages to weave representations of our original 14 Lummi leaders who signed the 1855 treaty of Point Elliot. To prepare each weaver for this project I shared my family and ancestry connection to weaving, as I have many artists in my family who root their art in their Lummi identity. I show them family photos of my great, great grandmother’s woven blankets. I asked the weavers to consider their connection to weaving through their family and then asked them to look at older Coast Salish weaving from books to connect their work to the blankets woven close to the time of the treaty signers. Lastly, I talked to them about their own connection to the treaty signers, what the Lummi values were at that time, and what they were working to protect.

The weavers who contributed were mostly students of mine or my weaving mentors Chief Janice George and Willard Joseph from the Squamish Nation. When I work with Janice and Willard, I see how they recognize the skills and abilities in their students. They share stories and cultural teachings with the students as they are weaving—not in a structured lecture, but in a personal, one-on-one way where both the student and mentors can share in the teachings and the “thinking through” that is done while learning, teaching, and weaving. At NWIC, we talk about this Indigenous method of reciprocal teaching and learning as story-sharing, not storytelling. It requires listening and engaging in a very open way to the experiences we have as students and teachers. Put in an institutional way, not all lessons will come from a book or lecture or even be on a test. Often, the most important knowledge that connects us to ourselves and our cultural revitalization comes from these moments of story-sharing that happen in unprescribed ways, like sharing with family.

In Coast Salish culture, the weaving process itself is a time to not just learn technique, but to share stories, experiences, and knowledge.

If humanities and arts subjects are taught with the intent of worldview revitalization, we need a wholistic Indigenous approach to the humanities. While it is important to prepare students for non-tribal institutions through following a structure that resembles Western education, it is also important that we understand how similar knowledge may have been passed down before we had this educational structure. It can be a challenge to prescribe a specific lesson intended for a specific student when assembling your syllabus or course assessment. How much the teacher knows about the family of the student, how comfortable the student feels sharing their family stories and experiences with the teacher, and how community knowledgeable or rooted the teacher is, all factor into how effective and possible this holistic approach is. These kinds of relationships are needed to impact how someone connects to and finds belonging in their community through their education. Most importantly, this relationship is a representation the student can carry into their community. While Western education might teach subjects, Indigenous education teaches the people. Tribal colleges and K-12 schools exist to teach tribal people, not to teach about Indians. Native educational leaders in Washington State, including my Great Aunt Mary Ellen Hillaire (Lummi) and former NWIC president Cheryl Crazy Bull (Sicangu Lakota), have used this philosophy to reorient Native studies education. This is why holistic Indigenous humanities education teaches more than just how to do something for a career; it teaches how to revitalize cultures and us.

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As I looked over our humanities courses and assembled my suggestions for humanities programming, there were some obvious jobs our graduates could do with their degree in humanities. Coursework in language could prepare students for jobs as language immersion teachers. Coursework in art could prepare students for community projects in traditional revitalization and teaching art in their communities. Coursework in philosophy, cosmologies, and culture could prepare students for work in their nation’s culture department. Coursework in art history could prepare students for their nation’s archival work or museum curation. Coursework in literature and writing could prepare students for the grant writing, story writing, and political writing that is needed for cultural preservation fundraising. The list of coursework to translatable community careers can go on, but the authenticity of our people’s ways depends on how the coursework is taught and its intent. Most importantly, it depends on our ability to grow, support, and uplift our students—Indigeneity in all fields and subjects. All subjects are interrelated and help grow the students’ relationship with themselves and their future role in their community. Learning language builds a student’s capacity to understand and engage with their culture. Art builds a student’s capacity to participate in their culture. Genealogy builds a student’s capacity for a strong sense of belonging to community and family. Indigenous humanities could build a tribal person’s cultural capacity and identity so that no matter what job they take, they are able to see ways of asserting cultural sovereignty in whatever they do.

Jenine Hillaire (Lummi) is faculty at Northwest Indian College where she researches traditional Coast Salish weaving technique and design.

References

Bachelor of Arts in Native Studies Leadership. (n.d.). Northwest Indian College. Retrieved from https://www.nwic.edu/educational-pathways/bachelor-of-arts-in-native-studies-leadership/

Barker, J. (2021). Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist. Oakland: University of California Press.

Coulthard, G.S. (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Heart, M.Y.H.B., & DeBruyn, L.M. (1998). The American Indian Holocaust: Healing Historical Unresolved Grief. American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research, 8(2), 56.

Newland, B.T. (2022). Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report. United States Department of the Interior, Office of the Secretary. Retrieved from  https://purl.fdlp.gov/GPO/gpo178099

Rifkin, J. (2022). The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth (First edition). New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Tom, L.J. (2018). An Indigenous Teacher Preparation Framework. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.alaska.edu/handle/11122/8747