Resurrecting the calumet

For many people, the Great American Kaepernick Conundrum looks more like a spoiled brat dishonoring genuine sacrifice than a meaningful protest. The other side views Kaepernick's crusade as a righteous moral and political fight against inveterate police violence and institutional racism.

Probably no one who supports one side or the other in this mess can be persuaded to move off of their position, and that's largely because, in an era of extreme political partisanship, we default to the ideological warpath. We throw on our identity war paint and go looking for scalps rather than reasons to sit down on a buffalo robe and pass the calumet around.

And if you don't know, the calumet, or peace pipe, was an important cultural symbol for many hundreds of years in North America.

Elizabeth Fenn, in her extraordinary history of the Mandan peoples, "Encounters at the Heart of the World", points out: "The calumet was no ordinary smoking implement. It was attached to a ceremony that allowed outsiders to enter a village and interact peaceably with its inhabitants... But that was not all. The calumet ceremony could include a ritual of 'adoption' that established ties of fictive kinship between otherwise unrelated peoples. This opened worlds of possibilities."

Indeed it did. The calumet allowed people of wildly variant backgrounds, cultures, and languages to unite in common interest for mutual benefit - usually trade, but often inter-marriage or political-military alliance. The peace-pipe ceremony is believed to have begun around 1300 with the Pawnees. Spanish traders found the ceremony among Plains Apaches in 1634, and in 1673 the Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette found the calumet among the Illinois Indians, remarking that they used it "to put an end to Their disputes, to strengthen Their alliances, and to speak to Strangers."

We have no functional equivalent of the calumet these days.

And sadly, in our age, there is an admixture of corporate cynicism poured into the recipe of our disputes. Witness Nike, Inc., who couldn't wait to co-opt the whole sordid anthem drama to sell more shoes and apparel, which is precisely, if you haven't noticed, the way America works in the 21st century. We stoke the fires of division - political, racial, economic - and then someone slaps a brand on all of that discontent for increased market share. And then we call that slickly packaged profiteering "social consciousness."

And maybe it is. Maybe that's just how it's done by advanced civilizations. But there are plenty of reasons to doubt the wisdom of it.

What troubles this space is the narrative that underwrites Kaepernick's original protest, which was centered on police violence against minorities. Who knows what it has evolved into now, but the initial narrative rings true for far too many Americans - good people trying to survive with what they have and who firmly believe America is out to get them for the color of their skin, or their socio-economic circumstances.

It's a mistake to wrap ourselves in the flag and toss those grievances off. Too many people in America firmly believe them to be true and have at least some evidence to support their position. The degree to which it's true remains debatable, and should be debated in good faith, but we owe it to our countrymen, and ourselves, to listen very closely and conscientiously if we care about resolving the issues.

Which we should care about, because resolving those issues is critical for the health, happiness, and prosperity of our republic. Because our children and our grandchildren will ultimately have to live with the downstream consequences of not paying sufficient attention to the voices of our countrymen when we could have and should have.

And maybe that was Kaepernick's only motive. But he chose an unfortunate way to demonstrate his concern, because the flag and the anthem are sacrosanct in the eyes of many. There are graveyards full of young Americans, all around the world, who gave everything they would ever have so that people they never met could live free from tyranny. They believed in the dream, and it is a vicious trespass to denigrate their memory with the arrogant assumptions and perfect hindsight of a cynic.

There are people in our community walking around with shrapnel still in their bodies and scars on their hearts and minds, who fought under the promise embodied by the anthem and the flag, and who sacrificed dearly in the tireless effort to secure the ideal republic those totems represent. The flag and anthem remain living symbols of promise, and of the sacrifice required to bring that vision to life.

And that's a very precious thing to go wiping your behind with for sneakers and a T-shirt.

If like-minded protestors will only rise for the anthem - or the flag - when there is no further injustice in the United States, they will be on their knees forever. And if flag-wavers don't meaningfully address the complaints of our countrymen with open hearts and creative ideas, it's likely ALL of our collective progeny will one day be left sifting through the smashed columns of symbolic buildings and the once-beautiful dream they represented.

"What the calumet accomplished was astonishing," Fenn writes. "In a world of rivalries, uncertainty, and competition, it let strangers, even enemies, mingle peaceably. It forged alliances. It generated trade. It built relationships."

I've got plenty of tobacco and a fine pipe. Who has a light?