August 29th, 1911 - An Important Day in Native American History en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishi#Walking_into_the_modern_world I feel the need to address the people who seem to think that Im too trusting. After years of systematically being shamed by white folks into not looking into my mothers Cherokee heritage I have finally dropped all shame and run to where my heart has been calling me since I was a child. I have learned so much and found that my way of thinking and trusting is sacred to my people- to a fault. I just spent three hours in a sweat lodge, mourning my 8,000 Cherokee ancestors murdered by Andrew Jackson on the Trail of Tears, and invoking the Great Spirit to wage a holy war on the f**kheads ruining this country. I know what pain is. In two generations they wiped out my peoples memory of their language by ripping children away from their Cherokee-speaking households and dumping them in the foster care system, as recently as the f**king 50s, and the rate of natives speaking Cherokee in their own households dropped from 75% to 5%. Because of this I will never be able to hear my peoples language except from scholars and the few devoted elders, and I mourn that every day. To this day they live in agonizing poverty, my local band of Tuolumne Cherokees is scratching their heads, trying to scrape together enough money even to have a decent pow-wow so they dont have to meet just at the library like a bunch of nerds. And the Cherokee is traditionally the tribe most likely to put faith in humanity, to give benefit of the doubt, to go “hey maybe these people arent so bad,” they were the ones to buy into the respectability politics of the day, adopt European culture, try to be “white enough” not to be killed like all the other tribes. The other tribes tried to stop and warn us but we went ahead anyway and tried to assimilate. It didnt work out. Just ask the hundreds of thousands driven from their homes by the army and forced to march from the east coast in the dead of winter to the new lands in Oklahoma, ask those who died of exposure and starvation and exhaustion if they thought that giving their oppressors the benefit of the doubt would ever work again. I am the last person to trust a white man unless he f**king earns it, so if I say someone is a good man, you can take my word for it- trust is hard earned by me. I cannot help but give the benefit of the doubt instinctively, but from personal experience of being hurt by too many men and women of European and all other descents, and from the hard agonizing learning of my heritage and the tears I have shed for them today and in my education, my heart has been hardened on the outside. And yet still I recognize that we were all born ignorant trash and even the so-called “enlightened” have so much more to learn before we can achieve a world thats worth living in. So take a look at yourself and your values of trust and consider whether shutting the entire world out is worth it, because working together we can still turn this mess around. That is what I took away from my time in the sweat lodge today and I hope you think the same.
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 03:24:20 +0000
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