A Liberal
Dose
September
29, 2022
Troy D.
Smith
“The Good
of the Many or the One: Why Not Both?”
Several things have sort of coalesced and crossed over
for me the last few days, creating a sort of pattern.
This weekend my wife and I attended the WilCo (Wilson
County) Pow Wow, which is directed by our friend Cindy Yahola. We both love the
pow wow experience, being surrounded by Native culture and indigenous
community. I found myself thinking about what an honor it is to be invited into
that community, which has a very real, unique, and palpable feel to it. I often
stress to my environmental history students how much we can learn from
indigenous people (in the present, not just the past)… not only because of the
way they care for their surroundings, but because of how good they are at
coming together as a community to do so, even though their communities are made
up of human individuals just like everyone else’s.
Just this week, in my basic early U.S. history course,
I have been talking about American Indian culture and how it differed from that
of the colonists. It is a paradox, in a way; Native people were (and continue
to be) very communal-minded, with a strong sense of working together as a
group, for the good of the group, while simultaneously being extremely
individualistic. No Indian leader had the authority or power to MAKE one of
their people do something, he had to CONVINCE them to do so. And they did not
have to comply. Each person was free to make their own decisions. And yet their
culture was such that, in most cases, people chose to act for the good of the
tribe rather than for themselves.
For example, most tribes had a communal corn field
that everyone worked in, and everyone shared from. At harvest time each family
was given what it was estimated they would need to get them through the winter,
and what was left over was put into a community storage building so that anyone
who ran short could draw from it. No one came in and took it all, because
everyone had the good of the tribe in mind. At the same time, though, the tribe
had the good of the individual provided for.
Thinking of this reminded me of the discussions in my
American West class recently, where I have pointed out that -from the
Revolutionary period onward -there had been basic disagreements over whether
America should be more about protecting the rights of the individual or the
rights of the majority (the community, or the “general welfare”), and that in
our movement west and the way we imagined it later, the emphasis seemed to be
on the lone frontiersman or cowboy solving his own problems and making his own
way. Yet, in reality, community was just as important. “Settlement” isn’t done
by one person. Even working cowboys “rode for the brand” and were loyal to
their outfit and their compadres. There has been, and continues to be, tension
in America between these two ideas which only seem conflicting on the surface.
The real answer, as Native people have always known, is to do both together at
once, seamlessly.
Finally, the book we are reading for Sunday school
talked today about the fact that American Christians have tended to let western
thought, centered on individualism, color their faith to the exclusion of
community. There was a great quote from a Methodist bishop who said he did not
want to belong to a church that did not acknowledge the individual relationship
with God, or to one that did not acknowledge the Bible’s many scriptures about
helping others. He wanted a church that does both: in his words, that has two
oars, with both of them in the water, and is going someplace.
That’s the kind of country I want. Maybe you do, too.
We should listen more to the first Americans on how to
achieve that.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee
Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
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