Because of our traditions, we've kept our balance for many, many years

Manahatta was one of the plays that we watched in Ashland this past June.  It was not in the top-tier of plays that I have enjoyed there over the years.  It certainly had an innovative storytelling by showing the past and the present in parallel.

One of the themes explored in that play was about language and traditions.  The smart daughter gets to a Wall Street firm while her family continues to struggle.  The struggle is not only financial, but also about the language and traditions and everything else that adds up to the identity of the Lenape people.

These struggles are not unique to the US, but are universal.  Canada's First Nations. The indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand. In South America. In... everywhere.

In many cases, the language and the traditions were even systematically wiped out by oppressors, who were almost always the invading whites.  Some, like Canadians, have sincerely apologized, and reconciled with the horrible past.

And then there is contemporary India.

Purnima, whose born name is Pukutti, comes from a hamlet deep in the forests of Niyamgiri, where her tribe has lived for centuries, rarely venturing beyond the market towns at the foot of the range. As a small child, she helped her mother sow the dongar, the shifting hillside plots from which the Dongria take their name. They grew millet, bananas, and beans, and at night the children watched for animals—wild dogs, bison, sloth bears, and sometimes tigers. For the Dongria people, “the mountain is God’s abode,” Purnima told me recently. “For many generations, we’ve worshipped these hills, streams, and trees.”

So far, all seems good, right?

There was no school near the family’s home, and Purnima, like many Dongria children, at first received no formal education. The year she turned seven, an official of the Dongria Kondh Development Agency arrived to enroll tribal children in an Ashram, a new government-run residential institution down in the plains. Purnima’s parents did not want her to leave, and they refused to let her go, until the official promised them rations of rice from the local council.

The parallels with Manahatta, and the Canadian First Nations immediately blips in the radar.  The sister, Kuni, who stayed in the forests, and who is illiterate, was one of the many tribal women who were in the forefront of the struggle against a a U.K.-based mining firm that wanted to mine bauxite from the hills and manufacture aluminum.

One night in early May last year, Kuni was asleep in the home of her new in-laws when members of India’s Central Reserve Police Force crept up to their village, Gorata, to arrest her. Kuni says she awoke to the sound of a girl crying, “The police are here!” Then armed men were in the house, hustling her family into the night. Kuni was seized by women constables, who forced her down the trail leading out of the village, to where a convoy of trucks and S.U.V.s were idling.

The authors reporting the tale of these two sisters write:

To close observers of the struggle, Kuni’s arrest is a signal that Vedanta, emboldened by the corporate-friendly national government of Narendra Modi, is setting up a new play for the bauxite in Niyamgiri. To Kuni herself, however, and to others in her tribe, the threat is not that they will be driven off their land but that they will be drawn off of it, like Purnima was, one child at a time.
“Our people are alert to the cause of our land. If the situation demands, we will rise up again,” Kuni told me, and later added, “Our fear is that so-called education will uproot our people. The companies know that ‘educated’ people want to leave. They want jobs elsewhere. That’s why they take our children so far away.”

And how is the residential school system that the other sister is in?

In September of last year, the anthropologist Felix Padel visited an Ashram school in Chatikona, south of Niyamgiri. What he found was, he said, “quite shocking: the girls aren’t allowed to wear their jewelry, and their hair is cut short on arrival, supposedly to get rid of lice.” Teachers seemed well-intentioned, he said, but spoke “in terms exactly reminiscent of colonial-era missionary schools, as if it’s a huge effort to pull these girls out of their traditional culture. Why should that be wished for?”

Is there a different approach that can be attempted?  Kuni suggests that there is:

“Dongria girls need an education, so they can fight for their rights and their land,” she said. “We do need schools, but over here, so they accommodate our knowledge system—what we learn from the Earth and from our community.” Absent that, the transplantation of children seems to her a harbinger of the eventual physical displacement of the Dongrias altogether. “When Vedanta leaves,” Kuni said, “then we will all go to school.”

It is a tragedy that the lands where indigenous people have lived for centuries are also the lands that are rich in resources that salivates the profit-seekers.  Another resource curse!

Caption at the Source:

A woman in traditional Dongria dress.

Of course, the title is from this wonderful song.