Shinnecocks Didn't Need a Bill of Rights for Free Speech

The People have a right to know. Back we were young and dumb we probably thought that was a profound American truth, written somewhere in the Constitution, wasn’t it?

As we grew up, we adjusted or precepts: The People have the right to know what we want them to know, such as times in school when we didn’t complete an assignment or didn’t feel like gym. Teachers didn’t need to know that, now did they?

When we were older still, even if we didn’t dare voice it, we probably drifted into some snarly other being in our mind about people and their rights: The People have no right to know anything, especially prying parent-people.

By the time we morphed out of that phase, we had actually read the Constitution, graduated college, joined the journalism tribe and became an advocate for free speech: The People have the right to know something, know anything that’s stacked with facts. That led us to where we are today, a sometimes exasperated journalist — tribal, if you please — bumping heads on occasion. All for the People, of course.

Take the other day, for instance. We wrote an article for a tribal publication that wound up putting us on that collision course. The first thing we did was to voice a protest. The article was crisp. It brimmed with facts and figures. It was descriptive to the nines. The People had a right to know. (Yes, we went there.)

That defensive maneuver hardly mattered. We wound up squashing our perfect epistle ourselves, satisfied that at least we’d taken a stand on behalf of the most traditional law in all of the Shinnecock culture — the right of free speech. We know this because we invented it long before an amendment was a glint in a constitution’s eye. We are born into it, nurtured on it, thrive on it and exercise our right to free discourse at the drop of a hat. We can orate, argue, discuss and orally disseminate like no others. Any outsider who has ever had the experience of attending one of our tribe meetings can attest to that.

But this is about the article that we squashed, not a tribe meeting. We tossed the article ourselves because the greater truth is, we are a member of the Tribe. As such, we were taught to heed voiced concerns. Our survival depends upon each and every one of us expressing ourselves, each and everyone of us lending an ear, or two. We are weaned on the wisdom that the fight for survival is not about one individual, or one slightly dented ego, or one article with which a few somebodies took issue.

We are The People of a long march through time, one foot in front of the other, at least until the horse and buggy came along and we were able to hitch rides. These days we’re driving, and who knows how the next seven generations will move towards another millennium.  Fly, maybe, as in a gaggle of geese, in formation, flapping onward to the next century.

In our world, we move together (mamoweenene).