If You Have Come Here to Help Me

 

Murri artist, activist and academic Lilla Watson is often credited with the quote, 

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” 

However, while Watson who is an Indigenous person from Australia spoke the quote at the 1985 United Nations Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi, she explained that this quote was co-created in the 1970’s by an Aboriginal Rights group in Queensland, Australia that she was a part of. This quote is used widely now in reference to Truth and Reconciliation work that is being done in Canada and in many other places as well.  And for good reason.  It goes to the heart of the dichotomy of us and them, the helpers and the helped.  It challenges the embedded notion of hierarchy and speaks to collective healing in which we all play a part.  It is a paradigm shifter.

As more Canadians become aware of the history of the land that is now called Canada and how this country was built on the dominance over, theft from, oppression of and exclusion of Indigenous Peoples whose ancestors have lived here since time immemorial, they want to do something to change the future.  After taking in some of the truth and processing the emotions to some extent they want to move to action.  They acknowledge their privilege and they want to help.  From a worldview based on hierarchy and a Christian theology, “helping” seems like the thing to “do”.  I too have asked the same much-asked question, “What can I do?”

So, what can we make of “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time”?  I have never met the people who created this quote and so I am guessing what they meant.  I am trying to understand it as a non-Indigenous person.  The first thing that comes to my mind is the embedded hierarchy in the notion of help.  From the abundance of privilege, helping can be very easy.  It can be an e-transfer. Helping can make people feel better because they have done something.  It is a good first step.  But when the help is given in isolation, the feeling better does not last.  We don't even know if it did any good.  It is certainly better than nothing but are we changed by the action? Are we likely to take another step?

I recently attended a Virtual Rally for Grassy Narrows First Nation (advertised above) who have been dealing with mercury polluted water in their territory for decades now due to the actions of a paper mill.  At the rally we heard from various speakers from Grassy and actor Adam Beach.  At one point, an energetic Jewish woman from SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice, surg.org ) which is self-described as “A home for white people working for justice”, asked for pledges to help Grassy using on-line polling and the force of her personality.  Thirty-five thousand dollars was pledged in about fifteen minutes and then instructions were given on how to transfer the money.  The money is earmarked to help people from Grassy Narrows get to Toronto this summer to gain more support for cleaning up the water from citizens and the provincial governement.  A social media blitz was also part of the rally since many voices together speak louder to politicians.  Later, a phone blitz was carried out.  A financial donation, a tweet, Facebook post or email and a phone call or two are all easy things to do.  The important thing was that we were doing them together to get the governments to clean up the water and to compensate everyone who has suffered at Grassy Narrows FN.  After all, the water is here for all of us and those yet to be born.  We have a responsibility to the water to reverse the damage done.  Thousands of people have benefitted from the paper mill through jobs, shareholding and all the paper we use and hundreds of people have suffered irreversible damage from the mercury.  We are all complicit in the dumping of mercury in some way.  This joint rally gave non-Indigenous people an opportunity to meet their responsibilities for reciprocity with the water and the people of Grassy.

 

The second question that springs to my mind comes from the idea of liberation.  If white people are the oppressors, then what do they need to be liberated from?  My parents emigrated to Turtle Island from England.  All non-Indigenous people have emigrated here from somewhere else in the last four hundred years.  There were reasons that they left the lands of their birth and came here hoping for something better.  Poverty, war, and persecution are probably in the top five reasons.  As I learn more about the history of England and Ireland where my ancestors are part of the very soil, I discover that it is a history of conquest and domination. Even the English language is a hodge podge of the words of the conquerors and the conquered.   Different nations over different times “ruled” those lands until they set out to “rule” the rest of the world.  My ancestors are made up of conquerors and the conquered.  And here in Canada, the oppressors. That is one story that my DNA would tell as well as being Celt, Old English, Viking, French and who knows what else.  I can only speak for myself but the sense of always waiting to be “conquered”, always looking for danger, lives and breathes in my nervous system.  That is the inherent problem in hierarchies.  People are trying to climb to the top which means unseating others while standing on the heads of those further below.  Just because this is all we have known and remembered doesn’t make it the best structure.  Liberation from this means working together, just as the quote suggests.

As I explore these ideas I am not suggesting that non-Indigenous people are suffering as much or more than Indigenous people in Canada.  We are likely not even aware that we are suffering, that we are not free, that our position of privilege is not good for anyone, including ourselves.  We are likely not aware of the ancient traumas that we carry around with us.  We are likely not aware of how much we can learn from Indigenous ways of knowing and wisdom.

It seems to me that when the traumas of Europe encountered the abundance of land, food and waters on Turtle Island, the traumas were not healed.  It wasn't as if we breathed a sigh of relief and said, "Now we can stop fighting.  There is enough for everyone here."  Instead the traumas morphed into greed and the accumulation of wealth into the hands of the few and destruction of our Mother Earth who offers so much. The fear-become-greed has led us to the brink of destruction.  No solutions that come out of this trauma are going to change things significantly.  Solutions that come from an Indigenous worldview in which the land, waters, air and all the forms of life are Sacred could change everything.  Perhaps, non-Indigenous people can be liberated from a self-destructive worldview as they work with Indigenous people.  It seems that this is what we are looking for as we come to grips with Climate Change.

Of course, this will take humility on the part of non-Indigenous people.  We will have to take ourselves off of the top of the hierarchical pyramid and stand in circle with those who were “below us”.  We will have to listen carefully, listen with our hearts, listen with our souls to what those we seek to “help” have to teach us.  Our theologies, theories and economies seem to have forgotten that all of life is Sacred.  How will we be liberated from these on our own?  In time?  Coming to understand that our liberations are bound together may open our ears, our minds, and our hearts.  And then we can truly work together to co-create a future that is good for all of us.  This is what we can do.