Counting down to my son’s wedding and the chance to see all of my grandchildren. We leave Wednesday and I can’t wait.
Jamie
CHAPTER NINE
What is an Elder-Based Culture?
Throughout this book I’ve made frequent references to our need to return to an Elder-based culture. It occurs to me now, at the end of this writing journey, that I haven’t actually defined that clearly for you or myself. Elder-based culture-it certainly sounds good, but what does it mean?
On the surface, the meaning is obvious. Elders are the old ones, the members of our families and communities who have already passed through most of the life stages except one-death. In smaller traditional native communities, these Elders have real status. Our experience in Indian country bears witness to this. The Elders are given first voice on issues. The children of the community are taught to bring food and drink to the Elders at any gathering before taking what they want. Elders are consulted on important policy issues and mediate conflict between younger tribal members. When we look again at mainstream American society, this status is not so apparent. Oddly, like our youth, the Elders have lost their rightful place in the world.
In the current culture, the Elders have become Elderly, often seen as frail, sickly, unable to contribute, and a burden on society and their families. This is a very sad indicator of the decline of a culture. I recently saw a Cheyenne quote on a website that said, “A Nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground, then it is done. No matter how brave its warriors or how strong its weapons.” Perhaps the same could be said about the nation’s Elders. When the Elders are left out of the vital loop of life, no longer charged with the challenge of contributing their wisdom, understanding, and knowledge to the younger generations . . . they simply get old and culture declines as a result of it.
In early tribal cultures, the task of surviving from one day to the next was so arduous that the younger members of the tribe, those of childbearing age, were expected to provide for the food and safety needs of the others. The grandparents and older aunts and uncles were the primary caregivers of the little ones. It was also recognized that these more experienced members of the tribe had both more patience and more wisdom to give to the children. The circle of the family rippled out around the children in a sphere of care and influence. In Lakota country, this extended family is called the tiyospaye.
In many of the modern Indian communities we visited, this is still very much the general practice. Sadly, there are also a huge number of little ones in the care of grandparents because the parents got caught in the deadly web of alcohol, gambling, or violence. This is true not only in Indian country but in all communities. When the grandparent takes the full role of parent, they lose their place as grandparent and Elder.
This topic, the erosion of the Elder status within families and communities, certainly deserves its own deep exploration as it echoes through the generations. Like our youth, the Elders have increasingly become a target of the drug companies. Recently a friend’s mother was in psychiatric care for depression. Over several months her medications were switched, rotated and stacked, one upon the other, until the poor woman finally went into a toxic overdose. She ended up in a coma in the hospital. Many Elders are under the care of multiple doctors with several medications being prescribed and no one overseeing the entire regime.
Like youth, our Elders need challenge. John Ratey (2001)1 in A User’s Guide to the Brain, wrote about an interesting research project done by David Snowdon, a University of Kentucky professor. He studied a group of nuns living in a monastery in Mankato, Minnesota who were living into their late nineties and early hundreds with strong minds and bodies. Snowdon wanted to know why. He discovered that the nuns, operating on the belief that “an idle mind is the devil’s plaything,” had numerous weekly programs intended to stimulate the mind. They held reading groups and debates, brought in speakers, wrote in their journals, and had study sessions. Ratey (2001) wrote, “Snowdon, who has examined more than 100 brains donated at death by nuns in Mankato and other School Sisters locations across the nation, maintains that the axons and dendrites that usually shrink with age branch out and make new connections if there is enough intellectual stimulation, providing a bigger backup system if some pathways fail.”
It appears that the brain, like a muscle, atrophies without active use. If we shuffle our Elder parents and grandparents off to the side, limiting their involvement in our lives, the effects on their health and brain functioning can be disastrous.
This poses a great challenge to our culture. Our families are scattered like leaves in autumn. Even in my own life, my grandchildren live ten hours away. It is painful for me to not be available to assist my daughters during these early years of their marriage when they are both in college and still trying to find their way in the world. My place is near them. I feel that in my bones, and the telephone is a very poor substitute. As I’ve worked on this book over the past several years, it’s become clearer to me that to create a true Elder-based culture, families need to stick together. Holidays twice a year simply don’t cut it.
In this new millennium, the Elders are living longer, living alone, and living far from their families. We have this strange belief that when we finally get the kids out of the house, it’s our turn to play. Just as our culture is rife with social assumptions about our clueless kids, we have social assumptions that the relatives should butt out of the lives of our young ones. Strange. Like the missing rituals for adolescent rites of passage, it occurs to me that I have no clue what an Elder-based culture would really look like.
We operate under a notion of independence that makes no sense and serves us poorly. We act as if we don’t (or shouldn’t) need each other, and then wonder why we feel isolated and alone. However, creating this Elder connection is not the same as the undeveloped adult running home to have Mom and Dad take care of life for them. Except for a few very close-knit and small native communities I’ve visited, I have no model in the current culture to draw on.
During one of our collection trips to southeast Alaska, we met a Tlinget woman named Marge. Marge was probably in her early sixties, a beautiful and vibrant woman. As we talked with her, she told us that she was being prepared and initiated by her Elders to become an Elder herself. Marge was not taking this action lightly. Being an Elder in her community, she explained, was a true commitment and responsibility that is not simply given but must be earned. As I listened to her, I realized that, rather like the president of the United States, the fate of the younger generations rested on her ability to make wise and careful choices. In Lakota country, people are taught to consider their decisions based on how that decision would effect the next seven generations.
As we’ve seen through these discussions on levels of development and the maturing brain, we don’t automatically get wise when we get old. We must strive for it. To become an Elder we must also be initiated into that status.
On our final night in southeast Alaska, we had supper with Marge at her house. After a wonderful meal of freshly caught halibut, Marge explained that she would like to perform a song and dance in honor of our visit. She put on her own mother’s button blanket, took up an eagle feather, and did a slow-moving dance in her living room while she sang. Her sincere offering touched my soul deeply. I’d lost my mother just six months earlier to illness and was still grieving her loss. Something about Marge and her slow movements evoked that grief within me. When she finished her dance, I started to sob. I was a little embarrassed but the tears were beyond my control. Marge was very sweet and comforted me.
When I woke up in the hotel room the next morning, my lower back went into spasms. The pain was incredible. I found a chiropractor and a massage therapist, but the spasms only worsened. Thankfully, we were at the end of the trip, and I crabbed my way across airports and parking lots and finally made it home. I was completely taken over by my pain. For the next two weeks I couldn’t seem to do anything to relieve the spasms.
Finally, one night I was explaining to Milt that I couldn’t understand why I was feeling so sad-for no reason, I told him. He gently reminded me that my mother had just died and that perhaps my experience with Marge and my mother’s death were related. His words opened up this deep pool of grief. I started to cry again. I cried for hours, even crying myself to sleep that night.
I missed my Mom. I wanted her back again in physical form, back in her chair in her little house working crossword puzzles and waiting for me to call. When Marge wore her mother’s blanket across her shoulders, sheltered and warm, I think my soul began to cry out for that. After crying the night through, I woke up the next morning and the back pain had completely disappeared.
Hellinger says we need the strength of our ancestors and our parents behind us if we are to stand strong in the world. I once heard him speak about low back pain resulting from not taking the support of the parents and ancestors. When we don’t feel supported, or are unwilling to take that support, it makes us weak. Honoring the Elders is not just a social nicety that says we should honor them. No, it is a deep need in us to have them back us up and make us strong.
In my work as a facilitator of family constellations, one picture I find particularly beautiful is to see a woman standing with seven generations of women behind her, or to see a man with seven generations of men at his back. When we stand in this place, we see that our generation is just a small foothill in the great mountain range of our ancestors. We feel their strength.
One of the Ten Commandments of the Jewish and Christian religions is “Honor Thy Father and Mother.” Too often this commandment is taken as a social rule or courtesy (not deeply felt) that we extend to our parents out of respect. My understanding of this has changed with the study of the orders of love as observed by Hellinger; we honor our parents not for their benefit-but for our own. Our strength in the world comes from the two portals of our parents from which life flowed through to us. We need our Elders-they do not need us.
In many tribal and other cultures around the world, the spirits of the ancestors are treated as real entities that exist and surround us. The Elders take their guidance from this direction in prayer and ceremony, beseeching the spirits to assist them. The true genius and pioneering courage of Hellinger’s work has been in his willingness to consider that the influence of the ancestors and past generations can extend beyond the grave into the present generations. In some religious and scientific circles, this is a cause of uneasiness.
This discussion, while seeming to stray off into the Mysteries, is of particular importance for if we are to define an Elder-based culture. Each member of a system must seek guidance from the ones behind him or her. To the three-year-old, an older brother of ten is an Elder. To a twenty-year-old, the parents or grandparents are the Elders. If you are eighty, your Elders may be in the spirit world. The stairway to heaven is generational, and only those on a higher tread can show us the way.
This natural order is dictated by the soul, not the head. Your head may be full of yes-buts. Yes, but my parents weren’t successful or smart, my grandfather was a railroad worker, my daddy a drunk. The soul doesn’t speak the language of yes, but. It knows life has arrived in this body only from these two parents. The deeper structures of the family system are like a giant reservoir far upstream, the larger body of energy that Hellinger chooses to call simply “the greater force.” The ancestral line and the two parents who give life are like the place in the dam where the water is released and allowed to begin its flow downstream.
The river of life is a river of love. It flows down to us from above. Without our Elders we, quite simply, wouldn’t exist.