Please Stop Sexually Abusing the word “Tribe”, AKA Newsflash to the White People – You are NOT a “Tribe"

To the young, (mostly white) “we’re here, we’re kinky, get used to it!” crowd, and the “We built this shit!” crowds:   Please stop non-consensually butt-raping the word “tribe”.   That poor word has now officially been molested and sodomized worse than a Catholic choir boy.   It has been abused and mis-used to the point where it requires reconstructive genital and anal surgery.   Please allow it at least 12-18 months for healing, repeated reconstructive surgeries, and physical therapy.   Please.    

Because, here’s the thing.   If you were raised in White American culture in the 20^th century, the odds are that you have no idea what “tribe” actually feels like and means.   The closest I’ve ever seen to it in White America is in poor southern trailer parks – where the sense of belonging and blood relations come pretty darned close.   I’ve seen glimmerings of it in Gay Leather culture – among the elders who have been around long enough that they’ve lived through twenty or thirty years of oppression, fear and triumphs.   

But the current generation of “Tribal” people in the scene?    Please.   Stop.   You’ve seen something about it on Twilight, or you read a few books about Native Americans, or you fell in with the “cool kink tribe”.    You know the Oxford dictionary version, or the Urban dictionary version, or the Internet Dictionary version.   You use it to give yourself a sense of belonging to others in your culture.   I get that.   Really.  

Please stop doing to “tribe” what Twilight did to Bram Stoker.    Please?   (The glittery jizz all over his face is never going to come off!)

I grew up in a tribe.   I’m born to the People of the coarse ground corn, one of two River Valley tribes autonomous from the Powhattan Confederacy.   We retained our tribal government throughout the repercussions of Metacomet’s war and the Anglo-Powhattan wars – we have never been reservated.   My blood line is the East Band’s, and I’m the child of Etokah and Matokah.    I know the tribal laws, both modern and historic, and I know the reasons for them.   Our history, our blood, our circumstances and our genetic memory bind us into one people.  

My tribe is aware of who I am, where I am in things…and they are also aware of their blood relations to me, the obligations we share, and our blood’s responsibilities to its own.  Some of them I like, some of them I love, and some of them…I wish they would just finish OD’ing on nasty beer and cheap drugs.   I, like my cousins, are bound by literally hundreds of generations of shared language and ways of thinking.  

I know my place within the tribe.   I know where I stand, what our tribe moves towards, and how I relate (by blood and by history) to every member of my tribal line, and to the lines of several of the other Tidewater tribes under the Powhattan Confederacy, and the Algonquian settlement.   Even when they irritate the shit out of me, I know on a level as real as the earth under my feet that they are the foundation of my life and what I am.  

A tribe isn’t a group of people loosely connected by a social convenience, convergence, or preference.   It’s blood and history.   It’s made of cold shared suffering, and warm (if acidic) shared triumphs.   It’s knowing that if you’re gonna be poor, at least your cousins are too.    It’s hundreds of years of shared culture – by which I mean shared context.   Hundreds of years of it. 

There’s a structure to being in a real tribe – and it has nothing to do with man-made rules and “positions”.   It evolves over generations.  When I go up to any blooded tribal in the country and say that someone in the Pamunkey is my “cousin”, or a Mattaponi is my “Aunt”, they know exactly what I mean.   When I call my elders “grandfather,” and “grandmother,” they aren’t always related to me by birth.   They know that – they’re related to me by being tribal.  

Most of the people in my tribe could give a shit about fancy titles and the other RennFaire trappings people keep tacking onto their “tribes”.    To them, the history of what we are is part of life, and the reality is hard work and making life better for their kids.   There’s no puffery of “well, he’s not Tribal leader anymore!”, or “She’s offended the tribe!”     

When the tribal matriarch of my era was “offended”, she beat my ass with a switch, after sending me out to choose the right sized one from the tree.   Then she told the head of my line of the family clan, who beat me again – this time with a belt.   When the matriarch of my mother’s era was offended, she used a tire-iron, or called the head of our line over to the house and told her what little “Jody” was to get for her attitude.   There’s no titles or rules for it – that’s just the reality of our tribe.      

Look, I get the fascination.   I even understand the intention.  I’m trying to be nice about this.   I really am.

 I don’t use the word “’hood”, or “gang” for things in my life.   I don’t call my family “m’boys”, and I don’t call my daughter “chiquita”.    Because those aren’t my language, or my culture.   I don’t know really know what they mean, viscerally.  I don’t talk about what it’s like to be in gangs, because that’s not my culture.   Given my profession, I know intellectually a LOT about inner city neighborhood power structures and gang structures…but I would never claim to make one out of my kinky family.  

Please, stop co-opting words.   Tribes?   Those are my people.

They aren’t yours.

Please stop playing pretend.   It really is starting to offend those of us who ARE tribal, and who have lived through the last 200 years of being tribal in America.  

Thank you.