Dr. Thomas Peacock, author, historian, educator, and University of Minnesota Duluth professor, discussed the importance of hope at Grand Portage Lodge & Casino on August 30. He spoke with conviction that for all people, hope is a vital precursor to positive change. Earlier in the day, he led a training for ISD 166 teachers on minimizing challenges Native American students face that can lead to difficulties in school.
“I want to talk about hope.”
That’s how author, historian, educator, and University of Minnesota-Duluth education professor Thomas Peacock began a guest lecture sponsored by the Grand Portage Education Department at Grand Portage Lodge & Casino on August 30. Earlier in the day he had led a training for ISD 166 teachers on minimizing challenges Native American students deal with that can lead to difficulties in school.
Dr. Peacock’s talk was more like poetry than lecture, however. A member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Peacock and his wife Betsy Albert-Peacock, a UMD instructor, have been foster parents for many years. They have seen the hopelessness of young people who have been abused—by the system as well as by the people in their lives, and they have led healing retreats to help people find hope.
One of Dr. Peacock’s books is on the history of the Anishinabe people, who have suffered much loss—loss of their land, traditional way of life, intimate knowledge of the earth, connectedness as a people, customs, identity, and language.
Hope involves believing that people are fundamentally good and believing that things are going to get better, Peacock said, and it requires experiencing love. “Without love, there really is very little purpose to our being. Love transcends everything. Love is fundamentally important to hope.”
“Sometimes in order to have hope, you need to forgive,” Dr. Peacock said, “and sometimes the person you need to forgive the most is yourself.” Sometimes moving on also involves forgiving the people who have hurt you, he said.
Dr. Peacock outlined seven dimensions of hope:
1. Hope is having a future orientation.
Grand Portage Education Director Haley Brickner read a narrative by Dr. Peacock on how his ancestors found refuge from the Great Cloquet Fire of 1918 in the nearby river. Over 400 people died in that fire, but not a single one of them was Native. He interviewed one of the survivors, who recalled standing neck deep in the river as the boys and men threw wet blankets over them and seeing deer, bears, and raccoons all around her.
Dr. Peacock thinks of those survivors when he fishes there. He also thinks of the many people he has known who have died, “killed in accidents and all of the other things that make growing up on the rez hazardous.” Now, as an elder, he senses a purpose for his own life: telling the story.
2. Hope is about goal-setting.
Dr. Peacock outlined two types of goals: concrete goals such as going to college and transcendent goals such as surviving difficult circumstances. People who have suffered loss tend to have transcendent goals, he said.
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was about transcendent goals: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed – ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” According to Peacock, “one day” arrived when Barack Obama was elected president, but it was possible because of the hope of people before him.
3. Hope is about being connected to others.
“Relationships are critical to having hope. …Hope is something to be shared with others, to be lived out in our relationships with those we care for and those we work for the betterment of,” Peacock said.
Haley Brickner read another passage Dr. Peacock had written, about attending family day at a Native American addiction treatment center. One of the clients who was graduating was asked to talk about all the suffering his chemical use had caused. “Hearing the stories was very painful, very emotional for all of us. We’d all been there, done that. Many of us, I’d dare to say all of us, were in tears. The young man’s family was sobbing openly as he told his story. Something happened that day that had never, ever happened to me before. It was almost like we reached a point where we needed an emotional intervention of sorts, because the air hung heavy with our collective pain.
“There came a moment when it felt like the Creator’s love entered the room, where he put his hand on our shoulders, each and every one of us. I felt the Creator’s strong hands on me—loving, supporting, and reassuring hands. Mostly, however, I felt love. And I know others felt something, maybe the same thing, because when I looked up I saw, for just a moment, I saw the love of the Creator on the faces of every person in that room. As though all the pain we were feeling had been sucked out of the room, for just that moment.”
Peacock described the pain the Native people in the room were feeling—the pain of burying parents and children too young to die, of car wrecks that had killed brothers and sisters and cousins, of being dirt poor and homeless and living with relatives who would prefer they lived somewhere else, of “being treated like crap by a society that doesn’t seem to care, that would prefer to blame the victim…of feeling like crap all of the time. For just that one moment, however, I saw nothing but pure love on their faces, as if all their troubles were erased, for just that moment.
“And I knew I, too, was loved and that I belonged. Standing there in the circle, in the circle of circles, each of us was loved, for just that moment.”
4. Hope is about faith.
“…I know that hope is impossible without faith – faith in oneself, faith in others, but most importantly faith in our Creator,” Dr. Peacock said.
5. Hope is important to learning and well-being.
“When we are in the depths of despair it is nearly impossible to learn anything new,” Dr. Peacock said. “Living in despair can lead to physical problems, to obesity, high blood pressure, tension headaches, stomach problems…. Living with hope boosts our immune system.” With hope, we are more physically active and more mentally clear.
6. Hope affects imagination.
“Having hope affects our ability to imagine,” Dr. Peacock said. “When we have hope, we have bigger thoughts, we dream bigger dreams.”
7. Hope is the act of doing.
“Hope must be acted on through giving back, by accepting responsibility, and through acts of generosity,” Dr. Peacock said. “The journey to finding life purpose is found in giving back. Hope in and of itself means little without taking action to make hope real.”
Dr. Peacock talked about taking groups of young people to places like Wounded Knee in South Dakota where Native women and children were slaughtered by the U.S. Army in 1890, concentration camps in Poland, and resettlement camps in Australia where Aboriginal children had been taken from their parents.
“Why do I do these things? …I want them to see and feel the despair to the depths of their souls so they will come to know hope. So they will dream it, work toward it, and live it. So they will see its good works in our treatment centers, family and language camps, ceremonies, and summer pow-wows. …So they will hear it singing in every songbird and in every leaf dancing in the wind, and in every field of buttercups and Indian paintbrush and clover. So when they close their eyes they will well up with tears when they think of all of the wonderful changes they have helped make real because they know only too well the depths of despair we came from. So they will know the promise of the future.”
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