The good of the many or the one: Why not both?

A Liberal Dose

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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 some place.

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.      

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