"A wake for an Indian warrior..."
I'm glad that I saw this image, borrowed from the Rocky Mountain News, over at the blog of an Austin lawyer. My maternal grandmother, who raised me and my brothers in the Arkansas Ozarks, was a quarter Cherokee, so I always feel a special connection where American Indians are involved.Marine Corporal Brett Lee Lundstrom was a 22-year-old Oglala Sioux from Kyle, South Dakota who died in Fallujah, Iraq in January. I only read of this yesterday, so I'm a bit late on this one. Take time to view the sequence of images.
As is noted here, under one of the images, "American Indians have the highest per-capita participation in the armed services of any ethnic group." When I reflect on the fact that so many Indians died as their land was taken, this willingness to serve the land that took it impresses me all the more.
When I was five years old, my octogenarian great-grandmother, whose half-Cherokee husband had died many years before, took me and my older brother aside and told us, "I want you to know that you're part Indian. No one has been treated worse that the American Indians. Never forget to be proud of your Indian blood."
I don't know if she was correct in stating that no one had been treated worse than American Indians, but I've never forgotten to be proud of being part Cherokee Indian.
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 3:36 AM
8 comments
8 Comments:
I wonder if so many American Indians serve in the military because they have so few economic choices. By suggesting that, I don't mean to discredit their patriotism. I only mean that it's my privilege not to have to wonder how I'll make a living. It's my privilege not to have to even consider joining the army.
It never ceases to amaze me how invisible American Indians are in the United States. The tribes in Maine took a land claims case to the Supreme Court 20 years ago -- they nearly won most of the state! President Carter had to intervene and broker a settlement that paid them off in exchange for renouncing all future claims. All of that happened, and most Mainers STILL have no idea that there are tribes in the state, let alone do they understand the poverty in which those tribes live.
I say this not to pick on Maine specifically or to suggest that I have always known better myself. But the cultural, social & political problems surrounding American Indians are shockingly complex, frustrating, and darn near intractable.
I think that part of the reason American Indians join the military is economic, and especially for job training. But they often link their enlistment to a warrior tradition, so I take them seriously on that.
Invisible? Yes, partly because there are so few of them compared to the 300 million American population. Also, many are mixed and might not be immediately identifiable as Indian.
But I realize that you mean something a bit different by invisible. I also wasn't aware of the land-claims settlement in Maine even though I try to pay attention to news about Indians. Perhaps I simply forgot, for I must have heard of it at the time.
Some of the invisibility is cyclical. Back in the 60s and 70s, Indians were very visible because of the AIM and actions such as the occupation of Alcatraz Island.
How much that visibility helped Indians is debatable when the most famous 'Indian' these days is Ward Churchill, who benefitted from the radical left's identification with Indian causes despite his not even being Indian.
Real Indians still face the same problems that they ever did.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
Jeffery, Have you read "Killing the White Man's Indian" by Fergus Bordewich? It's an outstanding book for its willingness to dig into just these issues.
I lived in Maine for just a year and a half, but I covered the Indian tribes there for a newspaper, and learned a whole lot of their history. (Had I grown up in Maine, I would probably be oblivious.) What surprised me was the extent to which there was a nearly unbridgeable cultural difference between the Indians and non-Indians. This did not necessarily mean there was hostility; but misunderstandings were common.
Bordewich quotes a retired Indian farmer who asks: "How long does it take to become just a plain American?" Good question. It's too bad, though, that they never had a proper choice in the matter.
Brendan, no, I haven't read that book. My information is a bit scattered, from diverse sources.
For research papers, I read up on the Cherokee while in high school and as a freshman at Baylor. I also took an undergraduate course at Baylor in anthropology that concentrated on American Indians. Additionally, I had a half-Cherokee friend from Oklahoma at Baylor who told me stories. Informally, I read some popular works back in the 70s. While in Jerusalem for a year (1998/99), I read a history of the Cherokee. Around that time, I also had some email contact with the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Sequoyah, who was also named Sequoyah and was living in Talequah, Oklahoma. As you can see, I tended to learn more about my own heritage. I even gave my children Cherokee middle names.
What I know about other tribes has come more from reading the news. I should read more books, but life is short.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
I'm an eighth Creek. My family used to own more than a thousand acres of formerly Creek land. Literally we could track, across the land, where their settlements were just by the plethora of arrowheads, pottery, etc.
I have great respect for all American Indians even though my ancestry is thin. I have friends that are full blooded and proud to an almost exaggerated degree.
One thing that is rarely explored, though, in many films or other works of culture, is the amount of racism that is rampant among American Indians. Most of the American Indians I know are a little bit racist towards white people and some are outrageously so. I can't say I really blame them, per se, but the PC crowd always wants to paint them in proud but dignified colors when in reality many of them hold stringent hatred for all caucasians.
Anyway, just my two cents.
Gabe, I met a full-blooded Indian on the BART train in San Francisco back in the mid-1980s who confided to me that he believed that white people were extraterrestrials who had invaded the earth and were pretending to be human beings.
"But what about all of those mixed people?" I asked him. "If whites are extraterrestrials, how can they and Indians have children?"
"Some whites are human beings," he admitted.
I pondered that one.
I also wondered why he had confided in me before I had told him that I was part Cherokee. I wonder if he recognized some Indian features in my face.
My mom, one aunt, and one uncle are recognizably part Indian, but I thought it was rather hidden in me.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
Jeffery,
Are you CRAZY revealing our secret like that? I mean, next thing you know people are going to want rides in our spaceships and the cure for cancer.
Keep it on the low down, man.
Hey, Gabe, I was pretending that the idea was absurd, but you've now gone forth and announced it to all and sundry!
Our only recourse, a stark choice:
1) man our spaceships and flee
or
2) assert our rightful rule over this fine planet.
Hmmm ... tough decision...
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
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