I can't sleep. I was just thinking about how once I get back from LA that I will get to have a break from classes, thanksgiving break. I have resolved that I do not support thanksgiving day. I came to this conclusion a long time ago and have since stopped celebrating the holiday. Here is the reason:
Seeing the basis that the entire holiday was founded, people usually ask me why I am so unpatriotic towards the idea of the genial helping of the natives towards those poor starving Anglos. After long thought I decided that the entire basis of the holiday was and is a sham. As a native person myself (I'm registered through tribe and everything . . . and my native blood is actually the reason Mr. Gates gave me a scholarship,) I feel that it seems a little contradictory for me to support the Anglo in his bountiful celebration provided by the harvest of my people when during the next 200 years, Mr. Anglo would make it his priority to crush out and kill all remnants of my culture. The way I am interpreting it . . . natives gave their harvest as a gift to share (as the story goes) and apparently the Anglos were picky and didn't like it, or maybe they found a hair in their food, so they reaped savage slaughter upon all natives in the coming future (this is the part of the story they don't tell you . . . the curtain just falls as the meal is served and we all assume it worked out fine.) So the question is why would any reasonable person think that I would want to support that?
Why would anyone support the restrictions of a person's rights until the reforms of the 1970's and beyond? Maybe I am just taking the entire issue out of hand, but ever since I was eight and was forced to be subjected in a school play to the stereotypical generalizations that have been and were made about my culture, it just infuriates me a little bit that people always conveniently forget that their thankful nation was built on greed and plundering at the expense of the native peoples. I suppose that is why all those people with Anglo-dominant views towards immigration puzzle me. I just want to say: hey, if you're trying to keep the roots of founding America . . . you might as well go back to Europe as well. However, that's an entirely new issue, in which I have not the time or effort to discuss.
8 comments:
Like WOW!. In Canada we simply celebrate Thanksgiving (over a month ago)to thank God for provision. Not that today in Canada many thank God for much. ;-)
Anyway, like with all newcomers who arrive in a new place there are creeps looking for personal gain. Those who endured formidable hardship to get to new places first were the first to develop networks to archived the most material and financial gain. So remember the very reason driving exploration was really people eager for money.
Others who arrived would be genuinely appreciative and loving of the people. Like in some research I was doing on missions a while back I realized there is a side of the story people are not told (Don't wish to hear). Anyway long before protestant missionaries were swarming the coast lands of the worlds (There never was a swarm anyway) there were these trade merchants. It was the trade merchants who went in first and then when the protestant mission movement began they took advantage of these means of passage. Sure they were not welcome in some places. However, much of his history shows that they were well received because their character and integrity was not as much in question - like that of the boozing womanizing sailors in the employ of the trade merchants to sail the seas. They found the missionars acceptance of them, lifestyle refreshing. Even today places like Saudi Arabia (Among other middle eastern countries) are more open Christian foreign oil workers coming than those who are not. Their paper work is stamped faster. They do not like the beliefs of this faith, but they prefer them in their country with their family values, moderate to no-drinking patterns and no drug habits. As compared to the single men looking for an adventure and big money.
Anyway, you will not hear this on the news. But it is some interesting research mission agencies are well aware of and I am not ashamed to say we use to our advantage (And they know it).
Anyway Eve, I'm sorry for savagery on Indians. I truly am. But we must remember that culture changes with time anyway. Culture is really a catch phrase for PAST behaviour, systems, and patterns of thinking.
Says almost nothing about the future of a people. This is what campus people forget as we bow at the "holy cow" of "don't change culture" Often the people themselves embrace the change because they want it. This is especially the case in the last 70 years in places like Africa and Indonesia And Asia (By indicating these places I'm indicating most of the world's population)Also, some things about cultures are just plain savage and barbaric or simply do not work so the people abandon them. Like human sacrifice. Widow burning in India in the past, or drowning a kids who cut his top teeth before his bottom (I forget which set) Every animal sacrifice the Agni make on Royal stools, burials of the king or chief etc -All were human sacrifice until slavery was made illegal.We know it still happens in the bush today.
And African still have hundreds of thousands of slaves today. 30,000 child slaves where I lived.Forced to harvest coacoa in the bush on remote plantations.
Even the debate over female circumcision today. I knew many women who argued very much in favor of the practice and protesting "Western" womens groups coming in to change their culture.
(Were not being duped by men - this is driven practiced and promoted among the the women - You have to realize the Agni I worked with we matriarchal in heritage and linage- This is rare on this planet.)
So really we all have an agenda no matter if we are liberal or conservative. Bottom line is conversation and communication is the exchange of ideas - I would go so far as to say it is all "proselytizing". Every thing we write or talk about is with the view to share our "world view". This happens whether it is intentional or not. The only way to stop changing other cultures is to not communicate with other people. For example, when I was asked "What right to I have to change their religion". I point out two things. 1. What right do you have to impose your world view on me? You just tried to teach and proselytize me to your world view and you were quite arrogant and firm that I should adopt,accept, ane be enlightened by your beelif system. What right do you have to change my religion? 2) Who forced you to beleive what your beleive? (The comment is no one - in a proud independence) Can I force you to become a Christian? NO!Well Africans are as smart as you are and only accept what they see more hope in or beleive to be true.
Did you know they also resent the fact that you try to put them in box that blocks them from the opportunity of making the same choices you make every day about how to do things, what to believe.
Anyway, Eve, these are extremes, but some things have changed for the better, and by the will of the people. Not all change was forced on all these "Cultures of the world." These comments are by no means to suggest there are not horrific stories to tell. But I also know it was not the belief nor practice of all the people to look down on others and take advantage of their hard situations. We don't celebrate these things because of the idiots, but for the sake of the appreciative.
What amazes me to this day, being a product of the university of the west as well, is how much Christianity has in common with animism. Yep You heard me say it.
The Agni cultural practices(Minus the human sacrifice of the past) require very little change in practice, and some only a change in perspective to remain intact and still be christian. The worst case I have read about was around 85% practice intact. This means that no more than 15% change in outer practices and forms are required to take on a Christian world view.
The old Animist Agni men and I have a bond around the fire at night.
Not because they convert - No because we have a similar belief in the existence and influence of the spirit realm and they beleive in God as creator. Most of my neighbors don't share this common ground.
This is like way to long. Oh My
Anyway, I sympathize with you Eve, but remember the bozo's are not who we are trying to enshrine and remember in such days.
Have a goo one.
Oh, And forgive my usual typo's I have to run
I understand you points and everything. After I just get tired of seeing those same "themes" pushed around at this time of year, the pictures study pilgrims shaking hands with the Native. After going through all those years of public education it was always the same story of the Anglo-immigrants making peace and sharing harvest with those nice Indians. Then, they skip over everything else. Out of all those years, I was never taught about the Natives and "their struggle." I heard enough about the whites and enough about the blacks and their civil rights movement, but nothing about the Native movement that didn't occur until 20 years after the civil rights movement. The only reason I knew about any of these things is because I was a native, I had been to a reservation, and I knew what hell it was there.
I mean I dressed up in my traditional pow-wow garb and people, asked me what I was supposed to me and when I told them they said "you don't look like the pictures." So really, can you understand how something like that made me feel? It was like everything I was ever told was a lie.
What you imply about the change of culture, melding and becoming something new, is true. But this didn't happen with the Natives. They were given 160 acres of land to become farmers, if they didn't produce something after like 10 years their land was taken away from them, again. They were forced to practice their religion, and were thereby "converted" through force to Christianity. Their children were dragged hundreds of miles to be placed in "schools" to basically be taught how to forget their parents, their family, their heritage, and become Anglos. My Grandmother was shipped off to one of those schools, and the only reason she knows her family and parents now is because she broke out and ran away and forged her way home.
She lived on those, now less than 160 acres, until 1970 when the US government took back that land at a price 10000 less than it was worth and when she tried to fight it, the federal government told her basically “too bad, but we really don’t care if you live or die, because at least then there will be one less ‘red-man’ that we have to deal with.” Her land was situated along a stretch of what is now Grand Lake. After she was evicted, it was turned into a RV park. Just doesn’t seem right does it?
European immigrants came here for religious freedom, a new life, a new frontier . . . everything. However, they did all of this at the cost of the native people, and this was the point I was trying make, that everybody just kind of forgets that, or even worse they don’t know about it to begin with. 200 years ago, assimilation was the goal, but assimilation didn’t occur. The whole idea failed. Therefore my ancestors were pushed from upper Michigan to a reservation, 160 acres a family that has now been cut so much over time that more that more than half of that original “federally designated” reservation land is no longer owned by natives and their families, but by Anglos and RV parks and federally mandated factories.
I hope you can now see my dismay for thanksgiving more clearly. Yes, it is a time to be giving thanks for the provisions of life and happiness (I would put that also as giving thanks to God . . . but as a Unitarian I don’t think it is for only that.) However, I don’t think many celebrate it as that, nor is it taught as that. Therefore, because of its conversion from something essentially good to over the years being something completely distorted, I gave it up, just like I gave up “Christmas” (but that’s an entirely different story that follows about the same plot.)
Oh- and your typos weren't that bad. Bravo.
Oh, I would also like to add that I enjoyed your comments on the "other" cultures of the world. They were refreshing, and it was nice to know that somebody else inthe world new that things like that existed. I wrote a senior research paper back as an undergraduate on the topic of bride-burning in Calcutta. When I had to present it, nobody even knew that this was something that was actually happening. They thought it was a hoax, and didn't believe me until my professor confirmed it.
Anyways, I know that I what I wrote my sound demanding and maybe slightly cruel, but I would like to add that whenever I write I always sound a little more dominant than I do in life. I have a strong voice when it comes to words on paper (or this case screen) and sometimes come on a little intense.
I don't intend to come off as an "anglo hater" or something, its just that, racial implications aside, they (as a whole) hit my nerves. Its just that audacity of a certain single mindedness that grinds my bones.
Also, I've been a little too "revolutionary" lately. I'm tired of people sitting on their bums. Its annoying.
Hi Eve
I posted yesterday and I see it did not actually come up--HUMMM
Anyway, Your not an Anglo- hater That is good. Notice my nice very very white skin in the photo up there? What as a sheet of paper unless I'm sun burned.
Blogs are an out let. I do that all the time. I Write things and wonder after; "Man people must think I am rabid about a lot of stuff"
Anyway, yesterday I commented that I appreciated you inside look into the realities of being native. I wish to in no way minimize the horrors caused by the the assimilation experiments. That is what they were "Soical Experiments." Driven mostly by the experts in the fields we study our our great universities I'm sure. And Yes the feet under them on the ground was lay things like the catholic boarding schools. It makes me sick to even think about it. But I am so glad the majority of missionaries today love and value other culture's relish in them even. Anyway, Be content with who you are. God made the rainbow of nations. We are all his people not some. I like what John was shown about heaven. in Revelation 7:9 Around the throne are people of "every tribe, language, people, and nation. That makes me happy. Anyway, not meaning to preach to you.
But a quick story. The Agni love albino's. Every albino girl was automatically the kings or chiefs wife. As Albino's they have red hair, white skin with freckles. Well I was the first genuine white guy with freckels they had seen. All up my arms etc. They were always feeling my arms and even my legs (The Kids) Ya! It was kind of creepy. Anyway, the first two villages I worked in (about 50 km in the rain forest)I was introduced as a red skin (meaning they thought I must be an Indian) as I did not look like any other white person they had ever seen.
Thought that might be worth a laugh
from an "Anglo white..ie".
Anyway, I appreciated you inside look at being "native" especially in your comments.
Have a great day!
Thanks for your comments. I don't really like to bring up the whole skin color issue (though I suppose using the word 'Anglo' kind of does) because, I have fair skin. It turns brown for the spring, summer, and fall months, but during the winter, when out of the sight of the sun, I go pale. I am fortune, however, to have never sunburned in my life, which is something I am very glad for. Nonetheless, your comments were insightful.
Also, I just wanted to add that I use the word "natives" a lot because its one that most of the tribal people don't throw a fit about. As you might know there is a lot of controversey over what is "appropriate" to address them as . . . from what I have found out, the issue has still never been resolved.
Interesting about the "designation" issue. I was not aware of the debate.
In Ivory Coast the preferred French word was simply "Ethic" as "tribe" of course was a major uneducated taboo.
It confuses me sometimes . . . no, it confuses me all the time. I just kind of reverted to very low-key words after hearing too many times of hearing too many people complaining. I don't know what is useable anymore, but I do know is that it is among common consensus that tribes do not appreciate the word "Indian" for its total blantant inaccuracy and the basis of its "origins".
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