ND: A personal question: is Cook, your last name, a tribal band name?
KC: We all had Mohawk names only, until recent times. But as they did with other Native Americans, Indian agents would come and give us those names. My Cook name has a past to it. I have an ancestor Louis Cook who served in the Revolutionary War, and there's also a Cook in the family genealogy, a young Scots boy, who was taken out of Deerfield, Massachusetts. He survived a raid of the Mohawks on Deerfield, and they took him back to the Mohawk villages, because in those days that's what we did to replace relatives we lost, we would adopt non-Native people. And if you recall, in the colonial period, the Mohawk people lost about two thirds to disease and to war, and so we had adoption as the right of the women to make new relatives for the ones they had lost. This young boy, Skawerorane he was called, had red hair and long neck and when they would tease him he'd blush. The name Skawerorane means the comb of a turkey's head, red--when he'd blush he'd get red.
There are three families of Cooks. One of them they call the Boots Cooks, one the Turkey Cooks, and then another line of Cooks descended from Louis Cook, who was this character in the American Revolution. I have both those Cook lines. I have my family genealogy that goes back to the 1600s, thanks to records kept by Jesuit missionaries, and in there are all the family names. Very early on in the colonial period Mohawk people took on names for a variety of purposes or ways. Out East, we would just take the name of someone we knew, or however. Out West, though, they would shorten their Indian names, so some of the families have names like Smoke, Bush, Swamp. My sister-in-law, is Lakota from South Dakota; her maiden name is Afraid of Bear, after the name of an ancestor who was healed by bears. His name really meant "And he's not even afraid of bears," but the Indian agent shortened it to Afraid of Bear. Her dad tells the story of the Indian agent begging him to take on "Allen" as a last name, an English name. Thanks to him, that Bear name, and the memory of that grandfather who had the bear medicine, survives.
Names are very significant among our people. They're property of the women, the Indian names when you're born. We're not like in American society, where when you're pregnant you go get a baby book and look for names for a boy or a girl. In our ways, a traditional name is the property of the women of the clan mothers. They hold a bag of names, and the name isn't thought of until the baby's born, partly because babies didn't always survive, and still don't always survive. There was a time frame where the baby wasn't named, and they're not named until the next ceremony where names are given. There is a ritual giving of names that still continues in our families, old names that are held. And there's only supposed to be one person holding one name, so that you don't confuse the Creator or Creation.
For example, when you go pick medicines, you have to give the plant your Indian name, so it will know who you are. There's supposed to be only one Te Katsitsiakwa, which is my name, a Wolf Clan name. That name belongs to the Wolf Clan of mothers. When I die, that name will be removed from me and returned to that bag of names that are held by the clan mothers. You give honor and respect to the name you're given. Some names are retired, because they were dishonored names. There are a few rare names that they bury, because they were people who were bad people, and they don't want this name to go on. That's about one of the worst things you can do, is to lose your name.
ND: Are there a certain number of names?
KC: Oh, there are thousands of them, and there are so many people being named again now that they even come up with new names. Part of my job as a midwife is to help the family find the baby's name based on when the baby was born. Because you have to check with the clan mothers if it's OK to use a certain name, sometimes now the family will state a preference, they'll say well we really like this name. I don't like it when they do that, because of the old way of not even thinking about names until after the baby's been born. But recently I had a birth where they had already cleared through the mothers a name of a little girl that meant "She's shaking the door, she's at the door and she's trying to open it and she's shaking it, she's rattling the door," and I thought gee, you know, she's not even here yet and already they have a name for her.
And so it came that time, this baby girl was supposed to be born, and I remember being in my house not far from where the mother lives, and all of a sudden a big wind kicked up. I opened my kitchen door and looked out and I saw this streak of lightning that isn't the normal kind of lightning, but we call it electrical storm, electrical lightning. That's how jagged that thunder is, and the thunder beings are really important to us. They're the ones that purify the waters, and we're always grateful to them. We call them our grandfathers. When I see that in the sky I know that the thunders will bring a baby sometimes, or a baby that's maturing inside the mother, if she's driving down the road and she hears a strong thunderclap, that baby will even change position. I tell my mothers be careful around the time of a thunderstorm, you want to stay in your home and be real quiet, so that the baby doesn't get scared. Anyway, when I saw that thunderbolt in the sky, I thought one of my mothers is going to have her baby tonight, that thunder's going to bring that baby. And sure enough, that baby was born by the next afternoon. Through the night the mother went into labor and it was about three in the morning she called me, after that thunderstorm.
When I went to her home for a post-partum visit her mother was there, and she mentioned how gee, I saw this lightning hit this field behind our house and it was like the whole house was shaking and the door was knocking, it's just like this baby's name, "She's shaking the door or rattling the door." Already they had through some kind of way a knowledge that this baby was going to have this name that way, so I guess I kind of changed my mind--that sometimes it's OK to have a name if the parents are really of that mindset. The baby fit that name.
So names are a big thing, very serious business among my people. I have an English name that I never use, only my documents have my English name. I was named for my godmother's baby twin girl, who died at three-and-a-half. I was the next baby born in the family, so they gave me her name, Cheryl. Cheryl and Terryl were these girl twins. And my auntie was at my birth. My father really thought a lot of his sister and, knowing that she lost a baby girl, wanted her to be at my delivery. She's gone now, but she used to tell me about how I was born, how he gave her the right to name me, so she gave me that name, of the little girl she lost. Then they gave me the name Elizabeth after my grandmother, who delivered me, and then they named me Te Katsitsiakwa. It means "She's picking up the flowers or the medicines." So there's a lot of Katsi names--we shorten it to Katsi.
ND: There's a wonderful interconnectedness with the ancestors and with those not yet born, connection with nature, identifying people by action verbs or identifying them with other parts of nature and objects. These are things that are not prevalent anymore in modern Western culture. They seem to be a part of indigenous ways. Your talking about that brings a sense of interwovenness and interconnectedness, and a natural feeling of community.
KC: I've seen English names, Scottish names, German names...I have a chiropractor I know, Herziger. I said, "What does your name mean in your language?" He says, "It means sweetheart." (laughter) And so your names have a meaning, you just forgot. It's true you have to have that interwoven relatedness to everything, because nature itself causes the baby to be born. One of the jobs of a midwife is to look around at what's going on in the world when this baby's being born: what kind of moon is it, what's the weather like, are there any birds around? Sometimes a labor can be over the course of a day, a day and a half, even three days I've waited for a baby to come. During that time maybe you're going to see a snake cross your path, and that's kind of a warning to the midwife. Or you're going to see a bird come to the window and give you a message. It depends on the kind of bird it is: there's a big difference between what an owl is going to say to you and what a hummingbird is going to say. That's one of the jobs, to look around and to think about what the elders have said.
I remember being at one birth where the baby was a special person who was coming through a woman who is now gone due to her sacrifice for the people. At the time of this young boy's birth he had a mark on his chest. It looked like an eagle. I had remembered one of our elders talking about, someday a boy is going to be born and he's going to have this mark of an eagle on him, and you'll know that he's destined to be a leader.
That's one of the things that I feel compelled to do, to listen to the things that the older ones talk about. I've been doing that since I was fifteen years old and I'm forty-seven now. Over the years I've found that it's true--all our teachings, our prophetic tradition, the stories and the knowledge that get handed down in the context of ceremonies, of our longhouse culture and ways...
And we're just regular people too. We shop at P & C and supermarkets and take our clothes to the laundromat and drive in cars and live in houses funded by the Federal Mortgage Program, HUD, and watch the same satellite networks you guys do. But on top of that we have the reality of our culture around us, in us, and all about us. We try to pay attention to those things we were told from the beginning to pay attention to, and they're all about being grateful and acknowledging the life that we have.
We have a thanksgiving address that is recited by one of the men before any political, social, or spiritual doings is conducted. It's called "the words that come before all else." These words begin with thanking the Creator that everyone's in a good mind, and healthy, and everybody could be here in good shape, that we all got to this Bioneers Conference and nobody got in a car wreck, and everybody seems to be in a good way, and strong, and we hope that even after this meeting is over, everyone will go home and find their families healthy, and nothing bad happened to them or their property in their absence. That's how we talk to one another when we first get together. Then we start from those things on the earth: the water, the earth itself, the winds, the rains, the grasses, the medicines, the bird life, the trees, the berry plants, all of those things we give a greeting and acknowledgment to and explain the function of each one within the web of life. And from there go up like a ladder into the sky world: the stars, the moon, the sun, and the four beings at each of the directions, who hold our world up.
It's quite long to sit there listening to these beautiful words. In listening to this speech, that has a cadence and rhythm to it, it's almost an induction of a trance state, where you can get to that higher level of thinking and of experience and feel your relationship to all of these things. You hear that from the time you're in your mother's womb, she's sitting there in the longhouse. You hear those words until you're old, until they've put you in the center of the longhouse when you're making your final journey to the spirit world--those words are said. They're very comforting after a time, because of the beautiful way they'll thank the Mother Earth for continuing to follow her original instructions, that she continues to provide food and clothing and even laws to help us understand how to live as human beings in this world, that she gives us a place to put our feet.
And we thank the waters. The waters of the rivers and the waters of our bodies are the same water. Like David Suzuki was talking about, the mother's milk and the water and our blood is all the same water. It puts you in that state of relationship. In some families, when the baby is born, it's the job of the grandmother or the father to recite that thanksgiving address, Ahenton Kariwatehkon, to greet the baby into this world.
In my community, we've been organizing the families and the women to recover birth as the way to keep our people strong, to give our children a sense of continuity. Different families recite different speeches to the baby, and some will use the framework of the thanksgiving address to explain to the baby where it is in its relationship to this earth. There's a Cayuga speech to a baby that goes, "I give thanks, for peacefully you are born. I pray hopefully that peacefully your life will be ongoing, because it is that I think of you clearly, knowing you will always be loved." When you hear that speech--it came through a family through many generations--you begin to get a sense of how babies were born before we had hospitals. And the word peace is a very potent word. Especially in relationship to a birth, it already gives me a feeling of how that birth went.
I'm not against hospitals. I am for the ability of the women to make their own choices. Paul Hawken told a beautiful fairy tale at the Bioneers Conference. He talked about an almost "toad" woman who asked a prince to choose whether she would be beautiful at night and ugly in the day, or ugly at night and beautiful in the day. The prince's answer to her was, "You choose." Paul Hawken said, that's the way our culture has to go: to allow the woman to choose. In our community, our Mohawk culture and our very belief system have been denigrated, have been made against the law, have been the objects of government policies directed at them to eliminate them, to serve the interests of a production-based industrial economy.
We're now recovering from that time when we were told that who we are and what we know is of no value. In fact, we are responsible for a lot of the knowledge that is used in hospitals today. A lot of the anesthetics, a lot of the medicines that are used come from the traditional pharmacopoeia of native people. When the explorer Jacques Cartier came down the Saint Lawrence River, his boat was frozen in the ice and his men were dying from scurvy, which at that time Europeans believed was caused by bad air. It was my Mohawk people who walked across the ice and took them the tip of the pine needle, and made tea for them, and it was the antidote to scurvy. Our people knew and understood the nutritional basis of the disease scurvy, way back in the 1500s.
The Christian missionaries categorized us as heathens and savages, and Queen Isabella of Spain and her legions came to this world believing that if you weren't a Christian, then you didn't have a spirit, you didn't have a soul. They used that belief system to murder the native people of this hemisphere. It's a sad history, but our people are resilient or we wouldn't be here even now.
One of the ways in my own humble life that my own family has kept the power of the women is for the women to take responsibility for one another, to love one another enough that we would do that for each other. It's not the dominant way right now, I'm just holding onto it. We started the first birthing center in all of Ontario, called Tsinonwe Ionnakevatstha/Onograhsta, "the place where they will be born," and, with a grant from the Ministry of Health, Aboriginal Healing and Wellness Strategy, started a birthing center. We're training four aboriginal midwives in the community, in the birthing center, through a direct entry apprenticeship model that is culture- and community-based. I'm trying to expand that model up the river in my own community, as remediation for Mohawk women who have endured the contamination of their bodies and their breast milk.
Our grandmas tell us we're the first environment, that our babies inside of our bodies see through the mother's eyes and hear through the mother's ears. Our bodies as women are the first environment of the baby coming, and the responsibility of that is such that we need to reawaken our women to the power that is inherent in that transformative process that birth should be. It's exciting to see a young woman enabled and working with her midwife to know how to make a decision, to learn how that's done. It's one of the best outcomes, to have a young mother tell me what it is she's decided she wants. My role is to support her choice. In that humble way, I try to keep alive the work that my grandmother did, she who delivered me in her big white iron bed at her farmhouse, and who learned what she knew from her mother. I'm third or maybe even fourth-generation midwife in my community. I'm delivering babies to children of babies my grandmother delivered, and so the continuity of that is very meaningful.
When you still have extended family as we have in my community, I watch these ones that I've delivered grow up, and always pay attention to them, ask them how they're doing. I think of one young man who came into an all-night ceremony that my cousin and I were at, sitting there. Here's this gorgeous young man who probably the last thing he wants to do is go sit by some older ladies. He sat in front of us all night in that place, in that ceremony, and honored us because he knew that we had delivered him eighteen years ago. And he always comes and greets me. It's nice to have that kind of relationship with young people. And so those are some of the ways that our people knew about and that we're trying to keep alive.
We have so much toxic contamination of our environment, we can't eat the fish anymore. There are places on our Reservation you can't even grow foods because of the uptake of fluoride in leafy vegetables or uptake of lead from the ground into corn. It's really stressful to live in a place where your teachings, your traditional teachings, have been violated in this way. Your very identity as Kanienkehaka or Mohawk people has to do with keeping the agricultural cycle alive. That cycle of continuous creation is the very basis of what we know as human beings. That's why we're here on this planet as Kanienkehaka, to keep the way of the teachings of our original ancestors alive, to continue to do those things, our original instructions. Birth is a part of all of that, and all the things we choose to work on as human beings are based on the gifts that we receive when we come into this world.
There are teachings in that birthing experience that can tell you about the purpose of that child's life. One of my roles as a midwife is to notice, from all the different signs in the birth, what this baby's here to do, and what ceremonies the mother and father have to do to make sure that baby grows a certain way, what attentions need to be paid to this child, any particular weaknesses or strengths. Based on the knowledges from different medicine ways, you have an interpretive framework to use. That's essentially what we're trying to maintain and build upon and carry with us as one of the things we use in our families so that our people can live.
ND: I was wondering how you teach resilience to children, that resilience to overcome.
KC: Our generation recovered enough from our oppression to form our own Freedom School, to integrate into public schools a culture-based curriculum and Mohawk language. Extended families are still part of children's everyday life, and so the resilience comes out of the culture itself. We know that while our environment is toxic, we do continue to relate to the environment. It's like David Suzuki was saying, we're not separate from it, it's inside of us. The air that we breathe is part of those four winds that we communicate with in our ceremonies. The fireplace and the sun, that heat, that life, is a part of us. My own prayer, niawen ohontsia, tsisaterientare tsi niio, thank you to the Mother Earth, she knows the way... niawen karakwa, tsi senoronkwa ne onkwehonweh, thank you to the sun, you love the people ... When our children grow, hearing these teachings and these things, they always feel related.
I know that when I was born, I was delivered at home by my grandma to a woman, my mother, who was told never to have children because she fell on the ice when she was a young woman and it damaged her mitral valve in her heart, because there were no antibiotics in 1927 on the Kahnawake Mohawk Reservation. Her father was the first Mohawk physician on the Reservation and he easily could have performed abortions for her to protect her life, but she chose to have four of us, and I was her fourth one born at home. And because my grandma was more concerned about the state of my mother's health after the birth she bundled me, put me in a basket, and put me aside. About an hour later, when she circled back around to me, the story is that I was bleeding, my bundling was bloody, and when she unwrapped me she saw I was bleeding from the cord stump. We know today that a baby can have a hemorrhagic disease of the newborn, because it lacks a clotting factor in its blood at birth, and the solution to that is a shot of Vitamin K. At that time my grandma used her common sense and took a needle and thread and sewed up my cord stump.
As I was growing up in her care, my siblings and cousins would tease me, you better not make grandma mad or she's going to take her thread back. So I always had this sense that something was there in my belly button that my grandma put in there at my birth. As I was growing up in her home, because my mother was often hospitalized for her heart illness, I would look for that thread. And when I was a young woman and became a mother the first time, I realized that that thread she put in me was the desire to serve my people that way as a midwife. And so I began my journey in life to train in that knowledge and to continue to build by family.
I have five children, all of whom were planned homebirths, and I found that the word in our language for midwife--because midwife is a German word, it means "with woman," mit wif--our word is iewirokwas. Of the words we have that's the one I find to be the most beautiful. It means "She's pulling the baby out of the water, or out of the earth, or a dark wet place." And that certainly represents the perspective of reproductive ecology that our people have about integrating the natural world in the birth process, because it's all natural, it's all nature. Birth itself is one of those closed systems that nature created over time so that the baby not only suckles at the mother for its survival, but that act of suckling, saves the mother's life, because it prevents the uterus from hemorrhaging. To see the system work in its natural ways is a beautiful thing. To be familiar with those aspects of it, and to know how it works, it's really scientific and it's really beautiful.
For example, we know that oxytocin scientifically is the hormone responsible for the contractions as the baby suckles at the breast, to save the life of the mother. Nurses in the hospital will tell women, oh honey, this induction we're going to do with pitocin--this pitocin is just like your natural hormone that makes you have a baby. But now we know that the pitocin, while it does go to the uterus and is taken up by receptor sites on the uterus and causes the uterus to contract, doesn't have the behavioral effect of the oxytocin naturally occurring in the mother's bloodstream. So the mothers are not learning that part of the birthing process from these chemical labors, from these inductions. That's not to say it doesn't have its place in the care of women. We know now that babies should be born about 42 weeks, and it's based on research of hundreds of thousands of probably mostly non-Native women. We don't have any research particular to Mohawk women. That's one of the components of the Iewirokwas Program under the organization Running Strong for American Indian Youth, funded by the First Peoples Fund of the Tides Foundation: we're working within the community to empower women one at a time through the transformative process and possibility that birth has to offer. They become active players.
An empowered community is made up by empowered individuals and empowered families, and to me empowerment is feeling at home with who you are, and that begins with the moment of birth. So my own birth story is a great source of strength to me. And so when you ask the question about our children I have to go the long way around and say it all begins with the way they get born. A mother can not pay attention to her child, based on the birth process, but when I give care to my mothers, I always work with them so that even if they end up with a "chemical" labor, they can understand that their first priority is their relationship with this baby, so that everything is done, that the family understands that they can't be having a home where there's a lot of stress, so that this new mother can focus on her baby.
Everything we know in midwifery we learned from the corn. All our knowledge comes from the corn, and inside of each kernel of corn is many generations of knowledge. Part of my training as an aboriginal traditional Mohawk midwife was to raise fields of our original corn. The songs, the ceremonies that go with the growing of corn in the field also have to do with the gestation of the human baby, and so the corn plays a big part in the birth process also, and is also a good quality protein when mixed with beans for the mother to eat. In this day and age when we can't eat our fish, it's a source of clean and easily available good quality protein. And so we're trying to find ways within our own tradition to survive.
The kind of environment that we all see around us weakens us over time. It's very hard in some of the scientific research that I've been involved in to use the tools of science, which require thousands and hundreds of thousands of cases to show cause and effect, in a community of 10,000 Mohawk people. Even with those higher numbers it's hard to show cause and effect relationships. We see from the research done on the animal people, the alligators of the Everglades, and the frogs and turtles and owls in nature, the things that have happened to them from their continuing to consume fish. It weakens all our physical systems: our reproductive system, digestive system, immune system. Our framework, our foundations are weakened because of these chemicals. So to minimize our exposures and to eat lower on the food chain are good ideas for anyone in this environment.
I sing prayer songs in my practice, in my community as a midwife. The words of these songs are simple thoughts, like saying aho, ionianare, it's good, it's good what happened here at the Bioneers Conference. Everything in our experience as human beings begins with a thought, and so many beautiful thoughts were shared that I want to express my gratitude for all the speakers and all the things that have been done and said, for the ways that they are and the work that they do. In these songs are the words unpaho wicapi wiakpapa miye yelo, which are Lakota words that mean "Shining bright is the morning star, that's you glittering bright," to strengthen the individual people in work and the things that they want for their people and their families and their country--that they can take these things that they've heard at Bioneers and use them in their everyday lives, and not let the moodiness and the despair and the hopelessness and the depression and the discouragement of hearing the realities of all of these things that are going on in the world threaten that sacred web of life. And so the words are simple, and all have to do with the strengthening of the human being.
Neil Harvey and Jeff Wessman are Associate Producers with New Dimensions Broadcasting Network. Synchronicity seated them next to two Talking Leaves staff members at the 1999 Bioneers Awards dinner; this collaboratively-published transcript is one fruit of that meeting (the other was fresh sliced apple). Visit www.newdimensions.org to find out more about their work. American Indian Youth Running Strong, of which Katsi and the Iewirokwas program are members, is headquartered at 8815 Telegraph Rd., Lorton, VA 22079; (703) 550-2123; [email protected]; www.indianyouth.org.
©2000* Talking Leaves
Spring/Summer 2000
Volume 10, Number 1
Listening to Elders and Children