Kay McGowan's worldview flows powerfully from her Mississippi
Chocktaw and Cherokee culture. Indians, she explains, are
taught to think for themselves, but always act for the
good of the group. Historically, that's put them at odds
with a mainstream culture where people are taught to think
like the group, but act in their own best interest.
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HALLOWED HALL: Kay McGowan,
an EMU lecturer of sociology,
anthropology and criminology, was
recently inducted into the Michigan
Hall of Fame. Here, she takes time
out after being honored at EMU's
recent
Fall Feast. |
McGowan, a lecturer in EMU's sociology, anthropology and
criminology department, has spent a career acting in the
interest of groups that might otherwise have no voice,
and the impact of her work reaches throughout Southeastern
Michigan and around the world.
On Oct. 21, she was one of 10 women inducted into the
Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in a ceremony in East Lansing.
"It was beautiful, she said. "There were 1,200 people
there at the Kellogg Center and it was beautiful, inspirational.
There were great women from all over the country and all
over the state of Michigan, women who work so hard for
everyone."
McGowan, 59, is living proof that every person's actions
can make a difference.
She's helped launch organizations that work on behalf
of Michigan citizens, victims of sexual assault and domestic
violence. She's worked with others to secure rights for
Native Americans and indigenous people worldwide. She teaches
cultural anthropology at EMU and periodically jets off
to Geneva, Switzerland, to work at the United Nations.
All in a day's work. Four of her five grown children were
at the Hall of Fame induction ceremony. McGowan knows they're
proud of her, but she also recognizes that, to them, this
is just "what Mom does."
"She's been working in this area (of activism) for decades,
and she has a certain reputation among Native American
groups as someone who speaks in their interest," said EMU
Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology Department Head
Peter Wood, who added that McGowan's years of activism
give her even more clout in the classroom. "She's a good
advocate and a very good instructor."
Born in Mississippi, McGowan comes from a Mississippi
Chocktaw family that places a high value on education.
Her twin sister, Fay Givens, has a master's degree in labor
relations. Givens is executive director of American Indian
Services in Lincoln Park and the sisters have worked together
for justice on many fronts. Their grandmother was one of
the first Indian women in the country to graduate from
college.
"Her (grandmother's) attitude was, if we are going to
survive, we have to get their education and keep our culture
intact," McGowan said.
McGowan's family moved to Detroit in 1954, following her
father, who had moved north as part of the federal Urban
Indian Relocation Program a few years earlier.
McGowan was five years old. She said the shock of moving
from the reservation to the city probably had a lot to
do with her becoming a cultural anthropologist.
"In Mississippi, everyone was our relative. You could
go into anyone's house and everyone loved you and you were
welcome," she said. "In the city, they had stereotypes
and prejudices that I'd never faced before. I was old enough
to recognize those differences."
Her tribe is matriarchal; women and men have equal status.
But when she tried to take auto shop in high school, she
was told girls weren't allowed.
"I remember feeling furious as a teenager," she said. "All
of us were going to be driving cars, weren't we?"
She received bachelor's degrees in psychology and sociology
at the University of Michigan. While there, she remembers
taking an American History class, only to find it was European
American History. It was a lonely time.
Even today, her voice conveys the sting of being told "I
thought you were all gone," or that Native Americans make
up a "statistically insignificant" minority.
"That might be the case, but to hear that when you're
an Indian person means you don't count," she said. "Nobody
is statistically insignificant."
Spurred by the frustration of having her own culture overlooked,
McGowan earned a master's and a doctorate in anthropology
at Wayne State.
"I did exactly what (my grandmother) wanted me to do," she
said. "I got our education and the mainstream education,
and I realized that was essential to understand and do
the good work that needed to be done."
In 1974, in the disheartened wake of Watergate and the
Vietnam War, she started the Michigan Citizen's Lobby and
helped people recognize that they still had the power to
change things. One of just three female lobbyists in the
state at the time, McGowan helped convince state legislators
to pass a generic drug bill that was later copied by many
states around the country. She also pushed for an
auto repair protection act, which eventually passed and
protects consumers from unethical repair shop practices
in Michigan.
The Michigan Citizen's Lobby also is the reason Michigan
does not collect sales tax on food and medicine. When the
legislature failed to repeal the tax in the mid-1970s,
the lobby took it to the voters as a ballot initiative
and referendum.
McGowan organized 10,000 people to collect the required
365,000 signatures and Michigan voters repealed the tax.
"When I went to register in Lansing, the woman who registered
lobbyists — her name was Opal Tiernan — said, 'What do
you think you're doing here?'"
"I'm going to lobby for poor people," McGowan said.
The registrar, McGowan said, found that pretty amusing.
"But, when we came back the next year, Opal said, 'I've
been waiting a long time to see women in here.' She had
kept a scrapbook of what we were doing. And she didn't
laugh."
In the late 1970s, inspired by the Del Martin book "Battered
Wives," McGowan helped create an organization known as
First Step, which opened a shelter for victims of domestic
violence.
She remembers vividly when First Step opened its first
shelter. She went to her neighborhood A&P grocery store
in Allen Park and asked the manager there if the store
could donate any food.
"I shopped there every week, so she knew me," McGowan
said. "And I explained that we were opening this shelter.
She filled my cart with cases of food."
A few years later, she helped start the Downriver Anti-Rape
Effort (DARE), a group of women, many of them young mothers
like herself, who took 72-hour on-call shifts and jumped
in at any hour to support rape victims at nine downriver
hospitals.
DARE eventually became a part of First Step but, by then,
McGowan had moved on.
McGowan's work with the United Nations began in 1995,
when she served as a delegate to the Fourth World Conference
on Women in Beijing. A member of three national Indian
organizations, she was invited in 2004 to work on UN policies
on indigenous people. In 2005, she helped draft the declaration
of rights of indigenous people.
Every word, McGowan said, was a fight. But, in the end,
it gave indigenous people the same rights as other people
in the world.
"It's a unique treaty," she said. "It's the first treaty
ever written by indigenous people at the United Nations,
and it represents 350 million indigenous people in 70 countries."
In Australia, it's already led to an official apology
and plans for reparations to the Aborigine people. In Japan,
the result has been recognition of the Ainu, an indigenous
culture the Japanese government initially wouldn't acknowledge.
Each country must decide how far their apology goes, she
said. The United States hasn't even formed the words. The
U.S. and New Zealand were the only holdouts on the treaty,
though it became international law by majority rule.
Though she never envisioned herself as a teacher, McGowan
started teaching at the University of Toledo in 1988 when
a colleague asked her to cover his class for a semester
so he could conduct fieldwork in Ireland.
OK, she said, but just for one semester.
That was 22 years ago.
"It's very rewarding opening that door into anthropology
for students," said McGowan, who started teaching at EMU
in 1997. "There's nowhere else that they get this. They
think it's going to be dull and boring, and we're going
to talk about fossils. They're a little amazed."
From 2000-2002, she worked for the Rosa Parks Foundation,
teaching thousands of African-American students about
the Native American experience. For McGowan, it was a little
like the summers she used to spend conducting self-esteem
workshops for kids at Indian centers.
Working with minority
kids gives her a chance to counteract some of the discrimination
those children feel in mainstream society. It's also a
chance to be a positive role model — an Indian
woman with a doctorate who speaks up when something's not
right and uses all that she's learned to help people.
"I knew it was most important what I did for others," she
said. "The most rewarding things in our lives come from
doing for others. The (educational) degrees were a mechanism
that allowed me to do the things I wanted to do anyway."
