Circle of Giving - Transcript
[Jodi Rave Lee]
A good fabric store always has plenty of calico prints, eye-popping colors ranging from greens and purples to yellows and blues. I recently bought 20 yards of calico in five patterns – blue-petaled roses, fluorescent orange tulips, powder blue florals. The sales clerk who cut the material smiled and asked me what I was going to make. I said I wasn’t going to make anything, that I was going to give it away.
As she cut some tangerine cloth from the last bolt, she again asked, “What are you going to make?” Again, I told her, “I’m going to give it away.”
She asked no more and I could really tell her no more. I’m not even sure who I’ll give the cloth to, or when I’ll give it away. And I’m not sure what will be made of it once I pass it on. I suppose it could be made into a dress for a sweat lodge or used to make a quilt, or the next person could give it away. That’s just part of the circle of giving among Native people.
The adage that it is “better to give than receive” in an ingrained part of many Native cultures. Despite the fact that many Native peoples live in some of the poorest communities in the country, they often give whatever they have, whenever they can.
The Two Bulls-Winters-Between-Lodges family on the Pine Ridge Reservation recently honored me by adopting me as a sister into their family in the Lakota tradition of the “hunka,” or Making a Relative ceremony. They honored me with gifts, a purple silk star quilt, an eagle plume, turquoise jewelry, a gold embroidered shawl. Above all, they offered friendship and extended family ties.
The giving Lakota family also honored others, and anyone who attended the gathering left with a gift in hand. Later that evening one of my newly adopted nieces in search of a bowl at her mother’s house, joked that her mother gave away enough bowls for an entire community but never kept any for herself.
While many non-Natives might judge indigenous people as having few material possessions, Native people often judge each other not by what they own, but by what they give away.
Next summer my cousin will be the headman dancer at the Twin Buttes celebration, an annual powwow on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. Since it’s an honor to be the headman dancer, my cousin will have a giveaway. My mother recently reminded me of this. We’ll have to start collecting for his donations, she told me when I came home recently.
I’ll have to buy more goods. I already gave away the Pendleton blankets I bought for no reason this year. When my friend’s mother died, I gave them to her. At a local powwow someone gave me some red polyester material. I have some yellow fringe so now I can make a shawl.
As for the calico? What am I going to do with it? I’m going to give it away.
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