A Cultured Life

Mike Tarbell, Native American Educator
By Nelson Bradshaw

Mike Tarbell is a Native American educator as well as a Native American. He is almost 100% Mohawk, one of five tribes in the Iroquois Confederation. The others are the Oneida, the Cayuga, the Seneca and the Onondaga.

Mike’s work is in telling stories, teaching and lecturing about Native Americans. He speaks regularly before an audience in Boston. Sometimes he gets other kinds of performance bookings, too. “Next year I am going to take a dance troupe to Russia,” said Mike. “We’ll do songs and dances and stories.” Mike teaches for Stamford BOCES (Board of Cooperative Educational Services) and SUNY Cobleskill. “I offer a quick college-level course that covers 15,000 years of the history of Native Americans in upstate New York.”

But the center of Mike’s professional life is the Iroquois Indian Museum in Schoharie County, near Howes Cave. The main building of the museum is a three-story structure designed to look like a longhouse of the sort used by the Iroquois people for hundreds of years. The museum is far bigger than any Iroquois house was, but is true to the proportions and geographic orientation of the originals. Longhouses, when they were the homes of the Iroquois, could have been any size, though, in theory—when a woman in that matrilineal society married, she would bring her husband into her mother’s home. The house was extended to accommodate the new family.

Inside the museum there are archaeological, cultural, craft and art exhibits, as well as a children’s museum, a turtle pond and a 45-acre nature park. There is also an amphitheater on the grounds for cultural performances and two log homes that were transported from Six Nations Reserve, Canada.

Mike will custom design programs on occasion. “But, basically,” he said, “what I offer is called ‘Meet the Iroquois,’ a presentation about that people’s contemporary society. I use the Iroquoian art collection to teach that one. I have another program that looks at the historical and archaeological records.” Mike analyses tools from the museum’s collection for that program. Many ancient tools, or at least the remaining stone components from such tools, buried thousands of years ago, have been dug out of two local archaeological excavation sites used by the museum.

The archaeological record at Mike’s command is rather fascinating. It reveals much about local Iroquoian society, as one might expect. But, it also contains information on the migrations of other native groups, going back as far as 15,000 years. The different tribes can be identified and separated out by the various materials they used to make their spears and other tools. “Also, we can look at certain objects and tell how fast the group was migrating,” Mike added. “If they were moving fast, say they were chasing something or being chased by something, their tools wouldn’t be pretty. They would be just efficient and effective. That is because they would have to work fast. It wouldn’t matter to an animal whether it got hit by a straight spear or a crooked one. The effect would be the same.”

The good archaeological dig sites can be attributed to the geography of the region. “We have about eighteen feet of loam soil here, representing around 15,000 years of history. The archaeological evidence in this part of New York is very, very strong.”

Mike’s career as a teacher and storyteller may be rooted in tribal tradition as he learned it from his grandparents. “I suppose it goes way back to when my grandmother was giving me stories,” he said. “Even then, I was being groomed to be a keeper of the history.” Then, in the summers, he would hear his grandfather repeat stories word for word to one audience after another. “He had total recall,” Mike remembered.

After high school, Mike was considering a teaching career, but went off to fight in the Vietnam War first. That was in 1967. After two years of fighting with a helicopter crew and being a scout for the infantry and other extremely hazardous assignments, Mike came home.

He returned home with some wonderful memories of great people he had fought alongside and trusted with his life. In war, Mike explained, very strong bonds are formed between the warriors. There were local people in the highlands of Vietnam on that country’s borders who Mike got to know and grew close to. Those indigenous mountain people saw in Mike a kindred spirit. They protected him while he lived and fought in their midst. Those mountain borders were especially treacherous because it was hard to tell friends from enemies there. Mike remembers his mountain friends with affection and gratitude.

But his mind was not possessed by good memories when he got home. The bad stuff haunted him. Too many bad dreams were broken off inside him. He came back deeply scarred—like so many other Vietnam veterans did. It took Mike about 20 years to recover his optimism. “There is no magic pill you can take for the effects of war,” Mike summarized. “There is just working through it.”

When he had worked through Vietnam, in the early 1990s, Mike went to college and earned degrees in the Humanities, English and Native American Studies. He put those degrees to work at the Iroquois Museum. “When I came here,” recalled Mike, “it was to do programs that the museum wanted to offer to 4th and 7th graders. My job was to present the programs. But over the years, I came to realize that I could improve the programs and correct history at the same time. I could interpret the past better and put my own ancestors in a truer light. That became my charge.”

Mike believes that the Iroquois culture has much to teach the larger American society in which it is embedded. “Great things happened here that have an impact on the world we live in today,” said Mike. “Those things came in the form of a governmental style—democracy. That is, democracy as a natural thing in a natural setting. Humans are social. If you can get close to people, and they take you into their confidence, you will be privy to new insights. They trust you, too, if you accept some of their traditions and become a part of their lives. What I am doing is teaching about a people who lived here once and lived under a great law of peace.”

One of the many activities at the Iroquois Indian Museum is a Labor Day Weekend Cultural Festival. For more information about that event or any of the other programs at the museum, call 518 296 8949 or visit www.iroquoismuseum.org.