Yakama Auntie Lessons on How to Outfox a Monster

We deserve to be happy in our work and life.We deserve to be surrounded by kind and good colleagues whose energy, words, and examples affirm they respect us.We deserve systems that support us, nurture us, and are designed to propel us and our beautiful visions powerfully into the future.We deserve to sit at the decision-making table and actually have a say in what happens in our communities.We deserve to be treated with dignity in these spaces.We deserve to pull the strings and push the levers that make things happen around here.We deserve to be listened to with kindness and openness—the sweet kind of listening we know and experience from our favorite Aunties—who always help us understand and feel that our presence and contributions matter.We deserve to have teachers in our lives who, like our Aunties, have kindness shining in their eyes and endless supplies of love, care, and encouragement for us.We deserve to be surrounded by Aunties who model for us what it means to be a strong, fierce, gentle loving example of a person who carries our people’s teachings not only in their head, but in their heart as well.If you’ve been honored to witness beautiful Auntie lessons like these, you know you’re blessed. It is such a gift to have a brilliant role model who uses their whole body and spirit to show us what it means to be a good person.In the runway of life, they have impeccable posture in their loving pedagogy. Their balance and strength are an inspiring praxis. Their theorizing the survivance of our people is a graceful stride. We learn from Shísha/Xáxa (paternal/maternal Auntie). We follow her lead. Sometimes we even remember to applaud her.Auntie teaches and models the importance of fighting for our people—on any given day:Maybe they are using their body to block a pipeline or other harmful extraction that harms our Mother, the Earth, and sacred Chuush (Water) whom we know is Life.Maybe they are bringing our languages back into our homes, workplaces, and schools. If you pay close attention, you can see Tiichám (Land) smile with joy when our languages are spoken again. When children speak our language, I believe we can see Tiichám smile a big, radiant smile that crinkles the eyes and shows a dimple—just like Auntie’s smile when her heart is touched with joy and love.Maybe you have an Auntie who is generously teaching the community about traditional foods and medicines, helping everyone who wishes to learn. And what an amazing gift we receive: to recover relations with our more than human relatives. When you receive this gift, you are also learning how to protect and heal yourself and your loved ones through the generosity of sacred medicines who grow all around us. Did you know this? You are surrounded by the sacred. Auntie not only tells you this, she shows you: in helping you slow down and notice the many ancient beings who are all around us; they are precious relatives who have witnessed our people struggle, survive, and thrive in this place, Since Time Immemorial.Maybe you have an Auntie who battles big monsters in settler society: the courts, health care systems, social services, prisons, police, schools, or church.These monsters and their capitalist cousins, banks, corporations, and even the nation-state—are often thought of in settler discourse as “too big to fail.”And even though fighting the monsters seems impossible, Auntie persists. She knows they’re not too big to fail. Every day, every moment, all around us, she sees so clearly how these systems—built on ugly foundations of exclusionary and violent hierarchies—are failing every day.So, Auntie persists, armed with the prayers of our People, strength of our Ancestors, and beautiful teachings from our Coyote Stories. Maybe after school one day she shares one of these precious stories with children and their caretakers all gathered up together in a beautiful strong circle of love and care. In this way, she reclaims our traditional ways of educating our people: intergenerational gatherings, centered on generative knowledges that have always served our people, connecting children with their culture, affirming everyone has an important relationship with place.Maybe one day Auntie shares our people’s story about how Spilyáy Breaks the Dam, in which listeners learn about Spilyáy (Legendary Coyote) helping the people by making sure T’íxt’ix (Swallow Sisters) do not hoard our precious brethren food, Núsux (Salmon). Coyote is a hero in this story, yet he does not act alone (as is often the case in Western narratives that prize rugged individualism). Rather, Coyote must continually consult his Sisters for guidance when he is not sure how to solve a problem. Unlike settler-colonial heteropatriarchy, woven into our Yakama knowledge systems is an unwavering belief in the power and importance of women. Also, although Coyote is a revered teacher in our stories, he is not perfect; in fact, he fails quite often! His antics get him into trouble or sometimes into embarrassing situations, such as when he tries (and fails) to eat the reflection of Álxayx Moon on the surface of Nch’i-wána (Columbia River). He keeps diving and diving and diving into the water trying to grasp the big delicious looking piece of (what he thinks is) one of his favorite treats: grease. Coyote becomes weak with hunger and exhausted from the great effort of diving into the water and searching for the elusive treat to eat. Finally, he has the humility to ask his Sisters to help him. They tell him he is chasing Moon’s reflection and remind him of the proper way to catch Salmon. Spilyáy wisely listens to his Sisters, and in the story he nourishes himself with our traditional foods and then continues in his work teaching, creating landmarks and important places for our people, and the story ends by reminding us to be humble and polite with one another, as we are all interconnected and we all thrive when resources are shared. We are reminded that even wise, powerful teachers need to pause and ask for help when they do not know what to do. Auntie lives and affirms this: the real power and wisdom are always in the collective.I love witnessing Auntie engaging in the blessed tradition of storytelling. It is the kind of education that invites us in, honors what we bring to the setting, and we all can leave feeling hopeful and connected. Auntie’s teaching helps me imagine beautiful possibilities. What if all learning spaces felt like this? What kind of outcomes would be possible?Auntie’s beautiful modeling in her work, teaching, and living lifts our spirits. In this process, our faith, hope, and trust in our people’s future is restored.This is why, in the long run, we know the monsters don’t stand a chance.Auntie, in her beautiful way of sharing everything she has and inviting in the younger generations who are eager to learn, like so many Aunties before her—for thousands and thousands of years on our lands and in this place—our Auntie teachings have always sustained our people.Auntie’s modeling to have faith in our future helps us when we most need it. Every day the settler-colonial monster chases us, creeps into our lives, our relationships. The toxic presence can poison us. And when we feel like giving up, when we feel like we may not have the strength or courage to continue on our sacred path of life, we can always return to the wisdom and encouragement from our beloved Auntie teachings:We deserve to be happy.We deserve to be surrounded by kindness and goodness, by people who respect us at all times.We deserve systems of support that nurture us and help propel our beautiful visions powerfully into the future.We deserve to sit at the decision-making table and actually have a say in what happens in our communities.We deserve to be listened to with openness and kindness.We deserve to live every moment of every day wrapped in a beautiful hand-stitched quilt of understanding, secure in the truth that our presence and contributions matter.I suspect many people reading this may agree that we all need more Auntie Love saturating our lives and institutions.Sometimes in our educational institutions, we can feel isolated and alone. Maybe we are the only Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color. The only woman. The only gender-nonconforming person. The only Queer person. The only parent. The only Elder. The only person with a disability. The only person who doesn’t speak English, the colonizer’s language, as a first language. Even these very terms and descriptions can be isolating or alienating; we are still searching for language to honor our beautiful bodies and intersectional lives.Settler-colonial schooling has a way of doing this—separating us from each other, and even from ourselves. In that way, it’s a bad system, rotten to the core. Designed and sustained by and for heterosexual WASP-y men who worship at the altar of the nation-state and capitalism. They love and have always loved God and Country without even realizing the sacred is all around them, saturated into our Indigenous homelands.My beautiful homeland is a sacred place that has sustained my People Since Time Immemorial, as our Elders recount.The fixedness of brick and wooden buildings, with their manmade ninety-degree angles all around you, all day long—this makes no sense in our traditional teachings. Yet, that is how they do it—white settler men who arrive new to a place, totally short on local knowledge, yet bursting with the arrogance they know what’s best: for our people,our children,our economy,our language,our social systems,our resources,our land,our water,our foods,our religion.And so, they build their brick or wooden buildings, cutting down tree after tree of our pristine forests.What teachings do settler colonists bring? We can tell through their actions: greed,extraction,violence,hierarchies layered with trauma and oppression.It’s bewildering to watch. It’s horrifying to experience. Settler-colonial hierarchies regularly reproduce more of the monstrous system—by design.Huge segments of the population/community are left voiceless, powerless because, by design, those who know least about the land and people are the ones making the decisions . . . in their manmade buildings with sharp ninety-degree corners and artificial light guiding their way: in the army fort, in the mission church, in the boarding school, in the Bureau of Indian Affairs office, inside the Army Corps of Engineers, in the White House, at the police station, in the prisons, in the courtrooms . . .How many white men have sat at their desks and made decisions that would devastate our peoples . . . all without facing us . . . not looking into the shining brilliant eyes of our one-hundred-year-old Elder and dare to tell her he thinks he knows more about Indigenous futures than she does.He has clawed his way up the nonsensical settler-colonial hierarchy and creates policies situating him as knowing what is best for an Indigenous woman’s womb or child, and he can wield his power and control to devastate her life . . . all without needing to face her, all without witnessing the beautiful way she sings to her baby yet unborn.He can take that child.He can even take her womb.And at the end of the day, he’ll rise from his desk, turn off the artificial light powered by the dams that kill our beloved salmon and destroy our most precious and productive fishing sites. These dams and the settler-colonial policies that poison our water, land, and air—they are a sure sign of people who are ignorant of the teachings in our Coyote Stories.And perhaps before leaving his office he’ll gaze at a cheap mass-produced dream catcher he bought at a gas station. He hangs it proudly in his office as a reminder of his vision and desire for his work. He loves the seeming comfort and power of his high place in the settler-colonial hierarchy. He knows to maintain it he must keep consolidating power into his own hands. And so, he does.He is living his dream of foreclosing Indigenous futures.And like the greedy banks that accelerate the tidal transfer of wealth into the hands of the even fewer, he thrives in amassing greater power, more property. In this way, he delights in pushing entire families and communities into and beyond precarity. Doing so is evidence that his system and his policies are efficient and robust.In this way, the settler-colonial monster feeds itself. But it’s hunger for power and capitalist wealth is insatiable. So, on his way home tonight he’ll think of more policy ideas of how to further manage and control the growing number of people living at and below the poverty line. His palms seem to itch with lust after Indigenous lands and resources his greedy hands cannot yet hold.While there are rarely resources available to help the people, there are always resources to build another rectangular building with offices full of desks and ample artificial light powered by the murder of our sacred fish and destruction of our economies. And in some of these offices there is a cheap, mass-produced dream catcher that serves as inspiration if, in a rare moment, the settler-colonial monster should ever pause and wonder: Am I full?Do I have enough?In that critical moment of questioning, all the monster needs to do is look at that dream catcher commodity, and, instantly their desire for more, more, more, more reignites their wicked rumbling stomach. Their greedy hunger for power and resources is sadly matched by the emptiness of their hearts.While I feel mostly disgust for their harmful ways, I also feel some pity. I pity their loss, their ignorance; the monster system has chosen to ignore and abuse their own Aunties. Maybe they will someday awaken to the possibilities of Auntie lessons. Maybe they will stop talking long enough to witness how our Aunties teach precious lessons to anyone who wishes to learn.I feel grateful that my Aunties are revered teachers in my community. My Auntie sometimes tells us the story of Wormface, which teaches both the dangers of being conceited as well as the dangers of greed. In the story, we also learn about the power of humility and the power of the collective. Humble, tiny Skilwisá (Ant) steps forward as a champion in this story; working together, Ants show their collective strength and brilliance in outfoxing beings who mean harm. In doing so, Ants are honored leaders and cocreators of our people’s distinctive Yakama moccasin style, with the flaps on our heels, always a reminder to us of the power of humility and collective strength.Though they haven’t realized it yet, the settler-colonial monster’s oppressive systems have harmed everyone, including themselves. They have silenced their own Auntie teachings, and we all suffer as a result. We are all left with the narrowest of options in a white-supremacist settler-colonial heteropatriarchal nation-state.Without their Auntie wisdom to guide them, they have forgotten how to say, Áwnash chiwátsha (Now I am full).This can all seem hopeless and, in many ways, it is.However, our people don’t do hopeless. Like our beloved Ant role models from the story of Wormface, our people persist, always remembering that within us we carry Auntie’s precious teachings. 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