American Indian Reflections: December 2005 Archives

FUERZA is a diversified group of artists led by community artist and activist Mario Torero. Based in San Diego, CA, Grupo FUERZA grew out of the Chicano Park Art Movement of the 70's, influencing the cultural landscape of the San Diego region.

After 33 years of struggle, and considering the 500 years of Latin/Indian evolution, FUERZA is moving forward with the concept of re-joining the Aztec/Mayan Cultures of the North with the Inca Culture of South America, through the Concept of Aztlan. Aztlan is an Aztec/Mayan spiritual belief that the representation of our creator, Quetzalcoatl, would return to earth around this time as he has done every 500 years.

The legend conceives that the liberating spirit of Quetzalcoatl would arrive in the Promised Land of Aztlan, presently, the Southwestern United States. From there he would spread throughout the original anscestral lands, reuniting all indigeneous peoples of the Americas.

FUERZA's contribution to this reunification is to rejoin the indigenous peoples through an arts and cultural exchange.

Kari Lydersen writes: Last spring, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) won an unprecedented victory when their boycott and protests convinced Taco Bell and parent company, Yum Brands, to ensure companies from which it buys tomatoes will pay their field hands one cent more per pound and adhere to a relatively progressive workers' rights code. This fall, the CIW launched a campaign demanding McDonald's sign a comparable agreement, hoping that McDonald's, even more so than Taco Bell, could help raise wages and improve working conditions across the board.

Many Florida Unitarian Universalists had followed the struggles of the Immokalee Workers, and were elated with the agreement with Taco Bell.  But the tactics of MacDonald's is cause of great concern.

Read Kari Lydersen's article to appreciate this new tactic of corporations in their public relations war to appear to be "good citizens" while they seek to degrade the people who harvest the tomatoes, and other crops that make their business possible.

Sharon Welch quotes Vine Deloria, Jr. "We are in the process of establishing a new kind of American identity, apart from the Pilgrim tradition and it is a very painful process of sorting out our values. We must not take any easy or superficial answers."

I was stuck with this formulation. What is the Pilgrim tradition that Deloria argues is the source of the "old American identity?" It was a racialist identity. It was based on voluntary association with a covenant community, and by extension to society (Mayflower Compact was the Pilgrim's attempt to bring the non-convicted majority of Mayflower passengers into a covenant with the faithful who spearheading the venture. They had hired skilled workers, servants, and soldiers to support their colonizing effort.)

The limits of the traditional American understanding of democracy and who is part of the community is contained in the Pilgrim identity. And that identity is very much a part of the historic Unitarian identity. It is not uncommon for a Unitarian Universalist minister to talk of the Pilgrim's and Puritans as "our spiritual ancestors." And while we may be selecting only the covenant congregation, and the tradition of a learned clergy as worthwhile for our own time, there is a shadow side to that claim. The founders of New England believed that God had privileged them with a destiny, and they believed that the community that they were founding was a "City on a Hill." Much mischief has been done by Americans to this world as a result of those illusions.

Welch is arguing for an inclusive democracy, which she argues requires a move beyond "speaking for others." Liberation theologians assert that the spokespeople of the dominant culture assume that their values, and ideas are universal and apply to everyone. Men can speak for women. White people can speak for humanity. Americans can speak for the world.

I have seen communities transformed when participants begin to grapple with the question of identity, to see the limits of their old way of thinking of themselves, and begin to stretch themselves toward a new more authentic self. A new American identity? A new way of being a nation in the world? Beyond grandiosity and racialism? That is a vision that stretches the mind and the heart.

Check out:

"After Empire: The Art and Ethos of Enduring Peace" (Sharon D. Welch)

"Treat the earth well:

It was not given to you by your parents,
It was loaned to you by your children.
We do not inherit the Earth from our
Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children."

Ancient Proverb shared among many indigenous people of North America

"Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent. Today with an information `superhighway' now looming on the horizon, we are told that a lack of access to information will doom people to a life of meaninglessness -- and poverty. As we look around and observe modern industrial society, however, there is no question that information, in and of itself, is useless and that as more data is generated, ethical and moral decisions are taking on a fantasy dimension in which a `lack of evidence to indict' is the moral equivalent of the good deed."