Navigating Generational Seas: Embracing the Kaswentha Principle

I said thank you to my mother today. I know that seems insignificant to some of you, but for me, it isn’t a very common occurrence. As a Gen X woman, I am well aware of all the feral kid memes. It’s funny to look back at that now and laugh, but it wasn’t at the time. Those of us who become parents go from wishing our parents had treated us differently, to trying to make up for all the mistakes we make with our own children, but there is a generational divide that will always be there blocking our ability to truly understand each other. Today though, as I was standing in the barn yard feeling my nerves unwind their knots to the soothing sights and sounds of the animals who work here with me, I was thankful for my mom’s willingness to allow pets. So I told her so.

I imagine this generational gap isn’t something our ancient Christian mothers and fathers had to contend with. The world advances at such a rapid rate now, that my children will know a life I cannot even imagine. If the boomers and the hippies had sat down together for an honest and open chat, I think they would have found the common ground to change the world. God gave them an awakening to rage against the consumer in us while the world was just trying to enjoy some prosperity after a long drought. The breaks could have been put on, and a collaboration of great proportions could have channeled our success into the world my generation grew up in, but that didn’t happen, at least not on my end. My end tightened their grip on the rules in a downward spiral that led their kids to cult camps to beat the rebellion out of them. Thank God my parents weren’t rich. I clearly qualified to be sent.

Today we simultaneously pat our backs at the creation of child labor laws, yet continue to support and fund these teen “rehabilitation” programs because it’s become too big a business. None of this is new. It didn’t start with the industrial age but with our backward view of authority fostered by twisting the scriptures to meet our agenda.

Pilgrim writers universally reported that Wampanoag families were close and loving more so than English families some thought Europeans in those days tended to view children as moving straight from infancy to adulthood around the age of seven and often thereupon sending them out to work. Indian parents by contrast regarded the years before puberty as a time of playful development and kept their offspring close by until marriage. ( Jarringly to the present day some pilgrims interpreted this as sparing the rod.) “1491” Charles c. Mann

My point is, I hope we can learn to loosen our grip on our children. I don’t know about you, but my kids are pretty amazing people who are being prepared to face an unknown world where I will be gone. They are going to be right about the choices they make, and they are going to be wrong sometimes just like me and every generation before. As for me, I am going to bet on my kids. I want to go as far with them into the future as the Lord will allow me to go. It’s not for me to choose the path they decide to follow. Nor the path of anyone else. This is the reason “Paddle your own canoe” has become the mantra of the North 40.

Native Americans recorded their history with wampum belts and marked the significance of their 1613 treaty with Dutch colonists in a specific two-row belt previously used in diplomatic relations between neighboring tribes.

“Kaswentha may best be understood as a Haudenosaunee term embodying the ongoing negotiation of their relationship to European colonizers and their descendants; the underlying concept of kaswentha emphasizes the distinct identity of the two peoples and a mutual engagement to coexist in peace without interference in the affairs of the other. The Two Row Belt, as it is commonly known, depicts the kaswentha relationship in visual form via a long beaded belt of white wampum with two parallel lines of purple wampum along its length — the lines symbolizing a separate-but-equal relationship between two entities based on mutual benefit and mutual respect for each party’s inherent freedom of movement — neither side may attempt to “steer” the vessel of the other as it travels along its own, self-determined path.4 A nineteenth-century French dictionary of the Mohawk language defined the very word for wampum belt (kahionni) as a human-made symbol emulating a river, due in part to its linear form and in part to the way in which its constituent shell beads resemble ripples and waves. Just as a navigable water course facilitates mutual relations between nations, thus does kahionni, “the river formed by the hand of man”, serve as a sign of “alliance, concord, and friendship” that links “divergent spirits” and provides a “bond between hearts”. “The Meaning of Kaswentha and the Two Row Wampum Belt in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) History: Can Indigenous Oral Tradition be Reconciled with the Documentary Record?” Jon Parmenter, Journal of Early American History 3 (2013) 82–109

Seems like a great principle to found a nation on. Freedom. The same thing that Jesus came to give. Freedom. The reverse of what my father’s generation did with the “rebellious” teens, the humans who were just trying to find themselves and their place in a world you wouldn’t live to see. But instead, you have created your army of youth prepared to lay down the law on a nation by force. You cannot dictate the lives of an entire generation by the letter of the law! Legalism suffocates love. The whole Bible is split into two parts to emphasize this point!

Is it possible the most important lesson we could have learned from the natives of this land is that we could be natives too? “Braiding Sweetgrass” tells the story of plantains. How they came on the shoes of the colonists but became native to their surroundings instead of invasive. I understand it sounds so cruel to call humans invasive but what is invasive in one area, is often beneficial when it grows where it belongs. Maybe God wasn’t sending us to redeem the new world, maybe He brought us to the wilderness to remind us of His creation and our place in it. To remind us that is we who need to be redeemed.