Aug 24, 2015

Hi,

Still crankin' away. But I thought you might be interested in some insight into how power works for the Haida people, who seem to have found a unique and creative way to organize and express it in their day to day lives. 

Surface power, the power that governments have to deal with, the power that media covers, and lawyers interpret, resides in the Council of the Haida Nation (their federal government). But true power in the Haida Nation is covert. It derives from deep guidance transmitted by spiritual ancestors through small, select committees (one behind each powerful man) of living elder women, described to me by one of them, April Churchill, as "women past their moon.”  Before a chief or other patriarch steps out of the community to broker power, he spends time with his five or six member committee of elder women, who counsel him on how to deal with external powers. This method of power transmission may seem excessively spiritual, even a little "woo-woo" to the modern western mind. But it has some material support. 

A central purpose of all indigenous oral traditions is to keep wisdom alive. In most aboriginal languages there is a word for the people who store and transmit the wisdom of ancestors that was given to them orally by their elders. Wisdom Keepers are selected by their community  to be keepers of wisdom because the people who interact with them every day regard them as wise enough to sort out ancestral advice that still makes sense, still works. Pass that wisdom on as guidance and toss anything that turned out to be bad judgment into the dustbin of history. The selection of Wisdom Keepers differs from community to community. The women-past-their-moon model is not uniquely Haida, but it’s rare.  

 The system seems to work in Haida Gwaii because Haida men in power truly believe that it is only through elder women, women who they’ve known all their life, women past their moon, derided in most cultures as "crones" or woman past their prime, that wisdom that truly works can be objectively selected and accurately transmitted. 

What I describe in the rest of this book attests to the strong possibility that Haida men are right about that. Something is certainly working for the Haida, whose methods and expression of power in Canada and British Columbia is paying big dividends for them.