"Ya wanna hear a story?"
I always love hearing from Walt Klamath, so I said, "sure"
The story he told went something like this....
Nobody dares get between a mama bear and her cubs. She's very
protective of her children and will closely watch over them and keep them
from harm. But she also lets them explore their home area as they play
with eacht other. When the cubs are playing and exploring, they
somethimes make mistakes and hurt themselves. But usually they learn
from those mistakes and don't make them again. It's the same with Indian
parents, they raise their children by watching over them and keeping them
from danger, but at the same time they let their children learn from
experience.
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I have seen and many people have told me about how many American Indian
families teach their youth by giving them good examples to follow and by
letting their children learn for themselves, rather than directly
instructing and teaching their children. This custom is consistent with
one of the two major findings from my Masters Thesis, which involved an
analysis of some of the data collected from amany of your friends
andrelatives as a part of the Oregon Family Study. This article is
written to share these findings in a demonstration of my committment to
share all the findings possible with the Siletz community.
The Masters Thesis invovled the comparison of data from the twenty-five
families contacted with the assistance of the tribe with twenty-five
Non-Indian families with similar eduation, income, and age
characterisitices. I was trying to find out if a few selected variables
had any relationship with the amount of activity the parents had with
their children.
The first thing I found was that for mothers and fathers in the American
Indian families, the amount of contact they had with their children was
much lower than the amount of contact the Non-Indian parents had with
their children. Somebody else might have concluded, "...So they have
less contact, they must love their kids less." I was not ready to
acccept such an easy answer. I brought these results to Indian friends
and reviewed what little literature there was available on Indian
families. I consistently got the response that this was by no means
evidence of neglect and a lack of love and concern, and that this only an
indication of what has always been there. The "lesson" described in the
story above might never have been observed or even reported by Indians or
Non-Indians, but it was there.