Culture

Native American students display resilience of heritage

The line of dancers snakes around the center of the room, their rhythmic steps quick and light. Bystanders watching from their seats join in and the circle expands. The leader winds them into a tight spiral. The feathers in his headdress shaking, he lets out one final sound. ‘Nyweh,’ he sings and the dancers break off and scatter back to their seats.

‘Nyweh means thank you,’ said Corinne Abrams, a senior public health major. ‘We thank our Creator that we’re healthy enough to dance, that we can all be here.’

Abrams, a member of the Native American Students at SU, joined in on the group’s social dance inside Room 201 of Goldstein Student Center. Yesterday marked Columbus Day, officially recognized as a federal holiday in United States since 1937. But the group celebrated a different kind of day.

Several members gathered on the Quad. They taped off the area to declare it as Onondaga land. The group surrounded themselves with poles connected by one continuous sticker bearing the purple Hiawatha belt, the official emblem of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, located in Central New York and Canada.

‘We’re doing this to let everyone know we’re still here. We’re not nonexistent,’ said Jessica Martin, a sophomore history education major. ‘We’re still thriving.’



Each year, the group organizes an awareness day for indigenous survival awareness on Columbus Day. In previous years, the event focused on the consequences of Columbus’ invasion — genocide, slavery and colonization, Abrams said. Over time, event has evolved to celebrating Native culture and history.

‘We definitely emphasized not letting it be about Columbus,’ said Ira Huff, a junior English and textual studies major and president of the organization. ‘We want it just to focus on us.’

In his quest to find a direct route to the Indies, Columbus stumbled onto the indigenous people of the island of Hispaniola, comprised of present day Haiti and the Dominican Republic, said Philip Arnold, associate professor of indigenous religion at SU. The cordial encounter took a hostile turn when he spotted a gold tooth in the mouth of one man.

‘He set up a tribute system where the natives would bring gold to him, and if they didn’t bring enough during his visit, he’d chop off their hand.’

Columbus set the stage for a slew of conquerors and settlers who quickly and aggressively followed in his footsteps. They spread disease and slaughtered millions of indigenous peoples. He remains, to students like Huff, an enduring icon of invasion.

‘Nobody said he was a bad man or a horrible person or anything like that,’ said Huff, who grew up on the Tonawanda Reservation of the Seneca Nation. ‘It’s just what he stood for. He stood for what would become our losses — losing our people, our culture, our language, a part of ourselves.’

For Huff, setting up on the Quad helps make the presence of the Native American Students at SU more visible on campus, shattering the mythic veneer of Columbus’ legacies by openly celebrating their peoples’ continued existence.

This year, the group arranged for the Haudenosaunee Dancers and Singers, a dance troupe comprised of members from the Six Nations, to lead the social dance.

Seated toward the back of the room, juniors Victoria Pruitt and Melia Robinson watched the group launch into the next dance.

‘This is really spiritual for them,’ said Pruitt, a magazine journalism major. ‘I wish I had something like that.’

In single file, the dancers take measured strides toward the center of the room, matching the steady heartbeat of the drum. The drumbeats grow faster and louder and the dancers glide around the room.

‘The dancing is a very meaningful custom for them and a way that they’re tied to their culture. It’s really beautiful to watch,’ said Robinson, a magazine journalism and information management technology major. ‘I hope that in future years, people will be more curious like us.’

kkim40@syr.edu





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