Our Youth All Have Orenda Inside Them

 As a parent, and also an educator, my days are filled with interactions with today’s youth.

What I have found, repeatedly, even in my own kids, is the tendency to blame everyone and everything besides themselves when something doesn’t go their way.

When my daughter struggles with math, she has a tendency to blame it on the math page for being too difficult.

When my son loses a race in a hockey practice, he attributes it to the other kids who got in his way, not a lack of effort on his part or that he simply wasn’t the fastest.

The students at the school I work with also tend to have excuses about why work isn’t where it should be, or isn’t completed when it should be. They sit there, stationary instead of working, and when questioned tell me, “I don’t have a pencil.” For some reason, they don’t work towards fixing the problem, but sit there waiting for their problem to be solved for them.

In psychology, all these examples refer to times that my kids or students had an external locus of control.

Basically, it means that they feel like what happens in life is out of their control. When people navigate life thinking that they are the victim or the pawn in the universe’s or fate’s plans for them, then they have an external locus of control.

It is very easy for kids to default to this line of reasoning when they are faced with events that they don’t like, or things that they find difficult, but it isn’t the healthiest way of dealing with the difficulties that are sure to come up throughout the course of their lives.

The opposite would be an internal locus of control, or believing that individuals have power to change the circumstances around them.

The Huron language has a single word, Orenda, used to explain this concept.

The indigenous people of North America believe that there is this power, innate in every person and every living thing, that enables it to use its willpower to overpower fate or destiny.

The hunter has orenda to help him find the animal and bring food to his family, but the prey also has orenda to avoid its fate and keep it safe. The result of the hunt is based on whose orenda is stronger, the hunter’s or the prey’s.

One website defines orenda as:

(n.) the invocation of the power of human will to change the world around us. A voiced summoning of inner strength to change fate.

It also has connections to their religious beliefs, as prayers and songs were also orenda, as they felt they had the power to change the weather or the outcome of the harvest with a combination of their songs or prayers with a strong orenda.

It refers to the power of man’s will to oppose destiny and change his life or the world. When uncontrollable outer forces appear to impose a direction, orenda is the mystical inner force, a spiritual energy one invokes to change fate.

It is similar to the notion of the force in the Star Wars universe, where it is a part of everything, and those who can control it are actively doing something, a mystical, not completely understood something, but are changing things around them because of their belief that they can.

A source written in 1947 has a quote about this unique Huron word that I found especially poetic:

The soft murmur of the running stream, the glory of the sunset, the flickering flame of the council fire, the song of the bird, the strength of the bear, the swiftness of the deer, the love of a man and woman, the first cry of the newborn babe, the good words spoken from the heart and the courage of the human being to find a better way of life- all these things are orenda.

Personally, I feel that too many of today’s youth are missing their orenda.

They go through life frustrated that things aren’t as they want them to be, and instead of changing something, anything, large or small, to change their fate, they just complain.

Where is the passion, the fight to change the problems in front of them? Where is their power to oppose their destiny, if they don’t like what their destiny appears to be?

I don’t need the mystical portion of orenda as much as I need the kids I see every day to believe in their power to have an impact on their own fate and future.

In our classrooms, we need our students to find the orenda within themselves to push harder, to take responsibility, to change their fate, their grades, or even their problems with the kids around them instead of blaming everyone else but themselves.

Teachers and parents can help them on their journey, like my teachers helped me.

In a high school career of mostly A’s, Spanish was my Achille’s Heel.

I kept progressing through the levels, and I got up to AP Spanish, but I had my doubts about if I would pass the AP test. My Spanish teacher was a realist, and as the time came to decide if we would take the AP test or not, she decided to go one by one in the classroom, and tell us how she thought we would do on the test.

For some kids it was a vote of confidence, as she told them she thought they would pass, and she recommended they take it. For others, she was honest and told them that they weren’t likely to pass, so it would be better to not take the expensive test.

But when she came to me, she said she wasn’t sure. But if I worked really hard, she thought I might pass.

This seems like a strange thing to praise a teacher for, because it doesn’t sound like a vote of confidence, and it wasn’t, not really.

But it was something I needed. She gave me ownership of my future.

She didn’t offer to tutor me after school, she didn’t give me some excuse about how it is difficult to learn Spanish when it isn’t a part of your culture.

There was no out. Just telling me the truth.

I had to choose what I wanted to do.

Continue reading on Medium:

https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/our-youth-all-have-orenda-inside-them-e34d99c61c