Marie Watt | Companion Species (Calling Back, Calling Forward) I probably heard Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” for the first time when I was around five years old, listening to AM radio while being driven through the suburbs of Seattle in my parents’ kelly-green Datsun station wagon. This would have been 1972 or ’73. I’d like to give my five-year-old self credit for liking the groove of the music, but that would be generous. I don’t know that the song meant anything to me at the time, but looking back, it should have. I grew up in an interracial family: My mom, a member of the Seneca Nation, was raised on the Cattaraugus Reservation in western New York. My father is white, of German-Scottish descent; he was raised on homesteaded land in Wyoming and comes from a family of ranchers and itinerant educators. They met in Seattle, where I was born. Because membership in our tribe is traced matrilineally, I am a citizen of the Seneca Nation like my mom. We also call ourselves the Haudenousaunee, or “people of the longhouse.” Some people may be more familiar with the name the French gave us: the Iroquois Confederacy. The lyrics to “What’s Going On” were originally written by Obie Benson, who happened to be on a bus that passed by People’s Park in Berkeley on a day in 1969 when three thousand people had gathered there to protest the Vietnam War. Benson’s question was framed not only by the protest that was taking place outside the window of the bus, but also by the civil rights movement, the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Alcatraz, which began in 1969 and would last until 1971. The Alcatraz occupation was an effort to generate awareness of the ingrained poverty, inadequate infrastructure, pervasive unemployment, frail cultural fabric, and rampant alcoholism that plagued Native reservations as a result of the failure of federal and state governments to follow through on their treaty obligations with Indigenous nations. Almost five decades later, I am streaming this song and listening to it with deep attention. In it I hear what I interpret as an intersection between Marvin Gaye’s knowledge and traditional Haudenosaunee/Indigenous knowledge about our relatedness. Gaye opens the song by calling out, “Mother, mother,” and addresses his listeners as if they were his family: “Brother, brother… Sister, sister … Father, father.” From a Haudenosaunee and Indigenous perspective, this call would extend to include “Grandmother, grandmother … Grandfather, grandfather … Auntie, auntie … Uncle, uncle.” It would also acknowledge animal relations and other elements of the natural world (plants, water, earth, sky). In the Haudenosaunee creation story, Sky Woman falls (or is pushed) from a hole in Sky World, and as she falls, a motley crew of animals come to her aid, each creature assisting according to its unique talents: turtle offers his shell as land, muskrat gets mud from the bottom of the sea to make soil for things to grow in, and so on. To acknowledge how animals helped Sky Woman settle on
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