???Whose culture is it anyway?
John Driscoll
http://www.times-standard.com/local/ci_3101358 ARCATA -- “The path has not been easy, so why should that change now?
Frank Tuttle asked a crowd gathered for the California Indian Conference Saturday.
Tuttle, a Yuki, Conkow and Maidu Indian is the director of community outreach services and program manager for the Consolidated Tribal Health Project in Ukiah. His address at Humboldt State University steered away from the challenges of health care bureaucracy and relationships between federal, state and tribal governments.
Instead, he put the onus for health and preserving traditional knowledge on the American Indian community, and posed challenging questions about how best to do it.
???Our traditional knowledge is at risk of abuse, appropriation and theft,??? Tuttle said.
Tuttle said while Indian people need to continue to publicize the importance of traditional knowledge, Indian communities need to ask themselves if the ways they handle that knowledge is really for the people.
???Whose culture is it anyway?
he asked. “To disseminate? To sanitize? To commercialize?
The theme of the conference is Finding Balance Through Traditional Native Knowledge.
Tuttle said that traditional knowledge resides in the entire community as well as in individuals who possess actual cultural knowledge. These people guard a deeply hidden message about “our traditional selves,??? shared when native people get together.
That is a legacy of wisdom, dialogue and revelation, he said.
But Tuttle was clear that there was a lot of work to be done.
???We’re still seeking balance,??? he said. “That means we’re not there. We’re out of balance.
Classes, workshops and other addresses were scheduled to stretch through the weekend. About 400 were expected to attend talks on Indian literature, science, cultural restoration, tattooing and basketweaving, salmon and casinos.
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