Osage elder and scholar Tink Tinker is the first elder-in-residence at Harvard University in a new program created by the Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP) and Memorial Church.
Tinker intends to advocate for Native students who want to speak back to colonial institutions and while he holds both a Master of Divinity and a Doctor of Theology, the professor emeritus at the Iliff School of Theology asks that students simply address him as “Tink.”
Just “Tink” as a title reflects the Indigenous scholar’s view that people are not more important than water, land, animals or anyone else. He describes this worldview as “collateral egalitarianism, as opposed to up down hierarchy” and said that he cannot make any claim to honorific titles like professor or doctorate if he’s going to argue for collateral egalitarianism.
“And it’s hard at Harvard, because everyone wants to be protective of their titles [but] actually the Indians on the faculty are more in my camp, and so I notice undergraduates even call them Phil [Philip J. Deloria] and Joe [Joseph P. Gone],” he said.
“The ultimate hierarchy is the religious one,” Tink commented, summarizing his studies of the New Testament for his doctorate, where he learned Greek, Hebrew and Latin. “You have that white male sky god at the top and then male over female, parents over children … that hierarchy empowers conquest, domination, and all the forces we have struggled against.”
Tink’s first visit this fall was with Native students at a powwow where he saw his grand-niece Lena Tinker, a senior at Harvard studying history and literature. He also met with groups of both graduate and undergraduate students, getting to know them during his first week in residence.
During future visits, he will give public presentations, do more visiting and help the Harvard program work out what this role of elder-in-residence might entail. “They don’t just want academic intellectuality from me,” he noted, “but they want the broader tradition of American Indian peoples.”
An Indigenous scholar does not represent an Indigenous intellectual tradition, Tink said, although there are some areas of overlap, as he noted Dr. Robert Warrior has argued.
Tink explained, “Morris Lookout, my clan father, he always was pretty sure that I was bright and knew a lot, but whenever I went to visit him and stay with him he would sit me on the couch and talk to me pretty much three days straight … [that’s] an example of the Indian academic coming back to the reservation and have to relearn, and I’ve done that.”
He has not only done so in the Osage, but with many tribes, visiting with traditional people in California, Washington, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia and other places.
“When I talk about the American Indian worldview, I’m talking about something that functions as a baseline in every Indian community,” Tink explained.
One thing he hopes his students will pick up is a way of talking about Indian life and resistance through worldview, rather than ideology. “How do you empower Indian agency for Indian students in a university context?” he is asking as he moves through this residency.
He believes students will be able to gain enough agency to help begin to shift the Eurochristian worldview, helping people to “absolutely stop seeing the world as a resource and begin to see the earth as relatives.”
Worldview, in Tink’s estimation, is a solid way to do this. He gave an example from the Osage language, noting the word often claimed as referring to “God” or “Creator”— wakondah, in his spelling.
“That word in no way shape or form ever signified some sort of hierarchical heavenly being, male or female, and we’ve lost what it actually meant, which is very, very powerful,” he wrote in an email. “We’ve lost it to the missionaries [but] if you take the word wakondah, which is the short form for wakontonka then we have to take apart and it’s two syllables wa and ko^ and I’m going to posit that wa is a particle which means the one who ko^ gives life or takes life, and every person is wako^, gives life and takes life.’”
He continued, “women are the preeminent life givers in every species, men are involved in that giving of life as well, and taking of it. Trees give life and take and take life, mountains give life and take life, rocks give life and take life. People only think rocks don’t move, they actually move just much more slowly because they’re much more settled in their relationships with the world around them.”
Tink is writing about his ideas on worldview in an essay examining why the ideas of “nature” and “rights” are problematic, given that they both separate humans from other beings in the world. He will share these ideas at upcoming presentations and with students while at Harvard.
In the meantime, he is continuing to write and looking forward to helping Harvard develop the new elder-in-residence program over the course of the year, “figuring out what to do with this person,” he said with a smile.
Additionally, he is making sure to be available to students to work through their ideas, just talking over the phone or FaceTime from his home in Denver. With these visits, Tink intends to be an advocate for students, providing a layer of comfort to those adjusting to life at an institution far away from home, and supporting those who want to speak back to the institution.
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