The war cry was inevitable, appearing on banners, billboards, bumper strips and T-shirts within hours of the judicial demise of Roe v. Wade. But war cries don’t win wars, and war against an institution as ancient and entrenched as patriarchy calls for levels of patience, wisdom and tactical brilliance rarely found in conventional warfare. History teaches us that cultural traditions that have taken thousands of human generations to establish and defend are difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. So why reverse them? As lovely as the idea may seem, could patriarchy really be replaced with matriarchy throughout the modern world? And why must one gender dominate the other? Consider instead what might be called “The Haida Way.”
The Haida are a small 13,000-year-old Indigenous civilization occupying a 230-island archipelago in the North Pacific, in sight of Alaska but an autonomous region of Canada. Surface power in their nation—known as Haida Gwaii—resides in the Council of the Haida Nation, the islands’ federal government. That’s the power that governments have to deal with, the power that media covers and lawyers interpret, and the power that protects Haida sovereignty and independence. The president, and most of the hereditary chiefs of Haida governance, are men. It’s that way only because the Haida Nation must confront and negotiate with the global patriarchy in one way or another almost every day. But true power within Haida civilization is covert. It derives from deep guidance transmitted by spiritual ancestors through small, select committees of living elder women, known as “women of high esteem.” These women were described to me by one of them, April Churchill, as “women past their moon.”
Before a chief or other male makes an important decision or steps out of the community to broker power, he spends time with his five-or-six-member committee of elder women who counsel him on how to deal with external power and forces. April describes the Haida way of power this way:
“The man will step forward to speak for the clan, but behind that man is a group of women who have known him all his life and have a knowledge and strength that he wasn’t born with. It is those women, women of high esteem, who sit behind the men and give them advice. And it is the wise men, our chiefs, who take the counsel of women who are the fiber and the strength behind them. They know that their women are powerful because they are the ones who for centuries have been enforcing stewardship and sustainability. We are caretakers of the land and progenitors of the nation.”
This method of power transmission may seem excessively spiritual, even a little woo-woo, to the modern Western mind. And it may sound like a compromise, but it’s not. And it has some material support.
A central purpose of all Indigenous oral traditions is to keep wisdom alive. In most aboriginal languages, there is a word for the people who store and transmit the wisdom of ancestors that was given to them orally by their elders. “Wisdom keepers” are selected by their community because the people who interact with them every day regard them as wise enough to recognize ancestral advice that still makes sense, that still works. They can pass that wisdom on as guidance and toss anything that turned out to be bad judgment into the dustbin of history. The selection of wisdom keepers differs from community to community. The women-past-their-moon model is not uniquely Haida, but it’s rare.
The system seems to work in Haida Gwaii because Haida men in power truly believe that it is only through elder women—women who have been near them all their lives, women who are so often derided in modern cultures as “crones” or “past their prime”—that wisdom that truly works can be objectively selected and accurately transmitted.
There’s a strong possibility that Haida men are right about the compromise they live with, an even blend of matriarchy and patriarchy, because something is certainly working for the Haida: Their methods and expressions of power in Canada and British Columbia have brought them levels of self-determination, sovereignty and land title that are the envy of colonized nations still fighting, mano-a-mano, around the world against patriarchal imperial powers.
Mark Dowie, author of “The Haida Gwaii Lesson: A Strategic Playbook for Indigenous Sovereignty,” lives in Inverness.