MASCULINIDANS-8

16 December 2010

Conversation between Janice Hill and Sam McKegney in Jan’s office at Four Directions Aboriginal Students’ Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.

JAN HILL (Turtle Clan, Mohawk Nation) has worked in the field of Indigenous education for more than twenty-five years in such diverse roles as coordinator of adult education programming and principal at the Ohahase Education Centre, as adjunct faculty member and co-director of the Aboriginal Teacher Education Program at Queen’s University, and as academic dean of First Nations Technical Institute in Tyendinaga. She is currently the director of Four Directions Aboriginal Students’ Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples.

JANICE HILL: The way I have been introducing myself lately is: Kanonhsyonni yonkiats. Wakenyaton, tanon Kanyenkehaka. Tkiyentanehken (Tyendinaga) tkiteron. That’s how I was taught to introduce myself traditionally and basically what that says is, “My name is Kanonhsyonni”—or “Kanonhsyonni is what they call me”—and “I’m Turtle Clan from the Mohawk nation and I live in Tyendinaga.” My English name is Janice Hill and I’m the director here at the Four Directions Aboriginal Students’ Centre.

I’ve been an educator all my life by vocation and by choice. I’m Turtle Clan, and in our tradition, in our culture, our creation story talks about the fact that the world was created on the back of a turtle. So what I’ve been taught is that turtle was there at the beginning of time and saw creation as it came into its fruition, and our teaching is that, when you have knowledge, you have a responsibility to share it. It’s to be shared, not to be hoarded. And so turtle, being there at the beginning of time and seeing all of that, had a responsibility to share that knowledge. That’s how I’m a teacher by birth, I guess. And then I’ve been trained as a teacher—I have a Bachelor of Education—so, by choice as well. And, really, my whole working career has been spent in education in some form or another.

I’m also the mother of two sons, both of whom I’ve raised by myself. So I have a lot of thoughts around men and their changing roles, partially because of my sons’ absent fathers and also because of my struggle with trying to teach them to be men, being a woman. And my teachings tell me that up until the age of five, children belong to the women, because it’s our job to teach them to be loving and nurturing and kind and to teach them about all those emotions and feelings—how to be empathetic and compassionate. That’s our role as women to give that to our children, male and female. And, really, their fathers, in our culture traditionally, didn’t have a lot to do with the small children, up to age five or six or so, and then they became more involved later. At the time of puberty, or when young boys changed, the mothers didn’t have much of a role anymore because those boys were men, and then they had to be passed over to the men to learn man things. And I know I may be really good, but I can’t teach my son to be a man because there’s things that I don’t know and never will know and choose not to know because it’s not my responsibility.

The unfortunate thing is that most men in our community don’t know those things either, and there’s been a whole range of reasons why that’s happened. It goes back probably to contact or maybe even before that when our communities were not healthy. More recently, men aren’t learning those roles themselves because there’s nobody to teach them, or very few people to teach them, which goes back to the residential school era. Our young children were taken away from their families so they didn’t learn how to be parents and they didn’t learn how to be healthy young men and women because there were no role models for them. The priests and the nuns couldn’t teach them how to be good Mohawks or Ojibways or Algonquins, you know? I mean, they didn’t want them to learn those things—that’s why they were at the residential school, that was the whole point. And, in that way, they succeeded, because here we are all these years later struggling to find our way back to those teachings.

It’s not black and white. It’s not like the women teach this and the men teach that in isolation of each other because when we’re talking about men’s roles and responsibilities, it’s the responsibility of the women to sit there and listen too, partly because you’re going to mother boys and girls that need to know this stuff, but also because you need to know this stuff in terms of having a healthy relationship with a partner. What is your responsibility and what is his responsibility and where’s the line and who does what? To know those separations of responsibility in a respectful way, you know? I know that Mohawk women get a bad rap for being bossy and domineering and perhaps we are—well, we are, not “perhaps,” we are [Laughter]. And I think that’s been to the detriment of men in our community.

In my community, the transition to the twentieth century and the twenty-first century hasn’t been as easy for men, I think, as it has for women. Our community is like a circle and everything inside the community is the responsibility of the women (so the social aspect of being a community is the responsibility of the women) and everything outside of the circle (so politics and war and dealing with foreign nations and anything like that) is the responsibility of men. Now, as I said to somebody the other day, we don’t have anybody to war with anymore, so that takes away that responsibility. And men don’t hunt as much, you know—and there’s not the possibility if they’re urban or don’t have access to hunting grounds or haven’t been taught how to hunt and fish—so that takes away that responsibility. And in terms of being political leaders and dealing with outside governments, that one still exists but even that platform has changed so much because of our relationship with the levels of government: municipal and provincial and federal. That’s way different than when we were bargaining with the English or the Dutch or the French in nation-to-nation negotiations.

OUR COMMUNITY IS LIKE A CIRCLE AND EVERYTHING INSIDE THE COMMUNITY IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE WOMEN... AND EVERYTHING OUTSIDE OF THE CIRCLE… IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF MEN.

We’re the only people in this country who have a legislative act that governs every aspect of our lives. How we interact and where we can live and what we can do and what we can’t do and what our status is and what our rights are, these are all governed by the Indian Act. And to my knowledge, there’s no other population of people who are affected in that way. And that has changed our relationship, in the eyes of Canada, anyway, from being an equal negotiating nation of people to being subordinate. We’re the responsibility of the government instead of being equal to the government. So, our men don’t get to negotiate on the same platform as traditionally our men did, which makes that whole political role null and void. So then what? That void has been created and they haven’t been taught to change that role in a different way, more positively.

There’s so much in our culture that our men are not learning. When a girl becomes a woman, we’re taught that it’s her aunties who take her away and teach her everything she’ll ever need to know about being a woman. Like, we’re talking ten years old, you come to the change in your life and you spend the day with your aunts. I’ve had women say to me that they’ll never forget that day and that they were never told anything since that they weren’t told on that day about how to care for their own bodies, about how to care for their partners’ bodies, about how to have good relationships, about how to care for their children, about what their roles will be in the community, and if we know their gifts at that time, to talk to them about what their gifts are and what kind of responsibilities that will mean. We tell them as much as we can see and know on that day. And men have that same responsibility with boys. These are the things, this is how you take care of yourself, this is how you take care of your woman, and this is how you care for your girl children, and this is how you care for your sisters and your mother and your aunties, and this is what your responsibility is to them from protection to providing to everything you can think of, right?

And they’re also responsible for telling girls, “This is what men are like,” and that sometimes you have to be careful of men because if men are not healthy, this is how they can be too, you know? And about carrying yourself with dignity and respect and remembering that the body is a sacred vessel. We’ve been talking recently about sexuality and how disturbing it is that our children are so young and already exploring those things when they’re nine and ten years old, things that, well, people in my generation would never have thought of doing, you know? And so it’s telling them to be mindful of who they are and where they come from and to remember what they’re playing with. It’s to teach those girls how to carry themselves with dignity, but it’s also to teach those boys how to treat themselves and how to treat those women with dignity.

If those teachings were being carried on and going forward the way they were supposed to, I don’t think we would have domestic violence and rape and abuse because in our law, under the Great Law of Peace, the most heinous crime is a crime committed against a woman or child. You can be killed for hurting women. If you rape a woman, or hurt a woman or a child, you’re done, there’s no compensating for that because those are the worst crimes you can commit. And the third one down is a crime against your people, if you do something that takes away from the people. And our children aren’t learning those things and our men aren’t learning those things, and I think that’s a big reason why so many men are incarcerated, in trouble with the law, because they just don’t know their place.

YOU HAVE TO END THEM BEING A BABY SO THEY CAN PASS ON INTO THEIR BOYHOOD, AND END THEM BEING CHILDREN SO THEY CAN PASS INTO THEIR MANHOOD.

I look at my own sons and they’re very different people. My oldest son is more fortunate than my younger son because he at least had some uncles and older cousins around when he was growing up to help, for him to spend time with, to learn how to work, and to learn how to be responsible. They’re not really traditional men so they couldn’t teach him a lot of that, but he was raised in the longhouse because I have been involved in the longhouse community for his whole life and so he learned the culture from many people there. My youngest son is not so fortunate because all the men who were there for my oldest son have had families of their own or they’ve gone on and it’s been difficult to find uncles for him to learn from this time. It’s very disheartening for me to know that I’ve been in my community the last year trying to find men who would commit to teaching him the things he needs to learn and our community is not that large and I’m having trouble. I’m struggling trying to find men to teach him what he needs to know. And I can’t teach him those things, no matter how smart I am, no matter how much I learn, I can’t teach him those things and I can’t teach him to be a man. I can teach him to be a good human being to the best of my abilities but I can’t teach him how to be a man.

One of the things we talked about recently here at Four Directions is the need for rites of passage, the need to have ceremony and recognition as boys go from one stage of their life to another. You have to end them being a baby so they can pass on into their boyhood, and end them being children so they can pass into their manhood. And if they’re not provided with the teachings they need to do those things and if they’re not provided with the ceremony and the understanding that it’s time for them to move into the next stage of their life, they never move out of that earlier stage. So we have grown men who are really like babies because they’ve never been taught it’s time to leave that behind now and move on.

One of the other women here and I were talking. She has boys, as well. And we see it in our boys. My youngest boy is twelve right now so he’s right where he needs to be going with men. I’ve done all I can for him at this point in his life in terms of teaching him the things that I have to offer, and now is the time that he needs to have the ceremony to understand that he is not a child anymore. He’s a young man, and he needs to move into that role and leave this role alone, and understand that our relationship is going to change now. Because I’m his mother, I’ll always be his mother, and I’ll always love him, but he can’t be my baby anymore. He has to learn how to be a man now. And if I don’t do this for him, I run the risk of him not growing up as a healthy man. And what Oneida Elder Al Doxtator talked about the other day is that those men are the ones who look for their mother when they’re looking for a partner. Because they’re still looking for mother’s unconditional love and not understanding that the relationship they need to be looking for is an equal relationship—not look for somebody who’s going to take care of you and look after you and do everything for you, but someone who’s going to walk side-by-side with you and be your equal, you know? Someone who you will care for and will care for you equally, not somebody who’s going be your mother because you haven’t realized it’s time to move away from your mother and move into your own being.

I’m at that place with my youngest son now, and because he’s a different kind of boy than my oldest son was, it’s glaring me in the face and I know that he really needs this in his life. So my struggle is trying to find someone to do those things with him and for him, to teach him what he needs to know because he is the type of boy who will need the ceremony and need the teaching and need a guide or a mentor to help him so that he can move into it in a healthy way. So that he can be a man, so that he can be a leader, because I believe he has the capacity to be a leader. He can be empathetic. He can be compassionate. I’ve been told by many people that he’s good medicine. I’ve had friends who are not well and, just being with him, he was able to lift their spirits. So that’s one of his gifts is he’s good medicine for people. But he needs to learn how to use that in a good way and what his responsibility is going to be with that medicine that he carries.