Tiger Tom’s Gallery – Scenes from the Lives of Nature’s Most Disgusting Vermin
Posted February 29th, 2012
Thanksgiving: A Native American View
by Jacqueline Keeler
I celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving.
This may surprise those people who wonder what Native Americans think of this official U.S. celebration of the survival of early arrivals in a European invasion that culminated in the death of 10 to 30 million native people.
Thanksgiving to me has never been about Pilgrims. When I was six, my mother, a woman of the Dineh nation, told my sister and me not to sing “Land of the Pilgrim’s pride” in “America the Beautiful.” Our people, she said, had been here much longer and taken much better care of the land. We were to sing “Land of the Indian’s pride” instead.
I was proud to sing the new lyrics in school, but I sang softly. It was enough for me to know the difference. At six, I felt I had learned something very important. As a child of a Native American family, you are part of a very select group of survivors, and I learned that my family possessed some “inside” knowledge of what really happened when those poor, tired masses came to our homes.
When the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock, they were poor and hungry — half of them died within a few months from disease and hunger. When Squanto, a Wampanoag man, found them, they were in a pitiful state. He spoke English, having traveled to Europe, and took pity on them. Their English crops had failed. The native people fed them through the winter and taught them how to grow their food.
These were not merely “friendly Indians.” They had already experienced European slave traders raiding their villages for a hundred years or so, and they were wary — but it was their way to give freely to those who had nothing. Among many of our peoples, showing that you can give without holding back is the way to earn respect. Among the Dakota, my father’s people, they say, when asked to give, “Are we not Dakota and alive?” It was believed that by giving there would be enough for all — the exact opposite of the system we live in now, which is based on selling, not giving.
To the Pilgrims, and most English and European peoples, the Wampanoags were heathens, and of the Devil. They saw Squanto not as an equal but as an instrument of their God to help his chosen people, themselves.
Since that initial sharing, Native American food has spread around the world. Nearly 70 percent of all crops grown today were originally cultivated by Native American peoples. I sometimes wonder what they ate in Europe before they met us. Spaghetti without tomatoes? Meat and potatoes without potatoes? And at the “first Thanksgiving” the Wampanoags provided most of the food — and signed a treaty granting Pilgrims the right to the land at Plymouth, the real reason for the first Thanksgiving.
Ultraviolet–Nature’s way to purify water.A clean, safe, and Earth-friendly technology.
What did the Europeans give in return? Within 20 years European disease and treachery had decimated the Wampanoags. Most diseases then came from animals that Europeans had domesticated. Cowpox from cows led to smallpox, one of the great killers of our people, spread through gifts of blankets used by infected Europeans. Some estimate that diseases accounted for a death toll reaching 90 percent in some Native American communities. By 1623, Mather the elder, a Pilgrim leader, was giving thanks to his God for destroying the heathen savages to make way “for a better growth,” meaning his people.
In stories told by the Dakota people, an evil person always keeps his or her heart in a secret place separate from the body. The hero must find that secret place and destroy the heart in order to stop the evil.
I see, in the “First Thanksgiving” story, a hidden Pilgrim heart. The story of that heart is the real tale than needs to be told. What did it hold? Bigotry, hatred, greed, self-righteousness? We have seen the evil that it caused in the 350 years since. Genocide, environmental devastation, poverty, world wars, racism.
Where is the hero who will destroy that heart of evil? I believe it must be each of us. Indeed, when I give thanks this Thursday and I cook my native food, I will be thinking of this hidden heart and how my ancestors survived the evil it caused.
Because if we can survive, with our ability to share and to give intact, then the evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving day in the land of the Wampanoag will have come full circle.
And the healing can begin.
Jacqueline Keeler, a member of the Dineh Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux works with the American Indian Child Resource Center in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in Winds of Change, an American Indian journal.
Reprinted from the Pure Water Gazette.
Mother’s Day Didn’t Always Suck
By Gene Franks
Until recently I assumed, as most people do, that Mother’s Day was always the same syrupy, commercialized, early summer event, replete with platitudes and showy sentimentalism, that we have learned to tolerate once a year. As a holiday, it has always been a trap. Certainly no one wants to ignore his mother on a day set aside just for her honor, but the commercialization and shallow sentimentality of the event make it somehow just another insult to endure.
Not long ago I read an article by Ruth Rosen, a historian at the University of California at Davis, with information that made me take Mother’s Day a lot more seriously. According to Rosen, the whole thing started with a West Virginia community activist named Anna Reeves Jarvis, who in 1858 organized an event she called Mothers’ Works Days. Her goal was to improve sanitation in Appalachian communities. Later, during the Civil War, Ms. Jarvis organized women to care for the wounded on both sides, and she organized meetings for the purpose of convincing men to stop fighting. In a sense you could say that Anna Reeves Jarvis was mother of Mother’s Day.
It was Julia Warde Howe, the writer of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” however, who in 1872 proposed an annual Mother’s Day for Peace. The purpose was to abolish war. For the next thirty years Americans celebrated Mothers’ Day for Peace on June 2.
During the last half of the nineteenth century women worked as abolitionists, campaigned against lynching and consumer fraud, and fought for improved working conditions for women and protection for children. “To the activists, the connection between motherhood and the fight for social and economic justice seemed self-evident,” Professor Rosen says. Mother’s Day for them had a high moral purpose.. “The women who conceived of Mother’s Day would be bewildered by the ubiquitous ads that hound us to find that ‘perfect gift for Mom.’”
How this worthy event, born as an expression of women’s public activism, came to be the day when “the little woman” gets some flowers, a meal at a restaurant, and a sentimental card is a familiar American story. Like everything in America, it’s all about business. Here again is Professor Rosen:
In 1913, Congress declared the second Sunday in May to be Mother’s Day. By then, the growing consumer culture had successfully redefined women as consumers for their families. Politicians and businessmen eagerly embraced the idea of celebrating the private sacrifices made by individual mothers. As theFlorists’ Review, the industry’s trade journal, bluntly put it, “This was a holiday that could be exploited.”
The new advertising industry quickly taught Americans how to honor their Mothers– by buying flowers. Outraged by florists who were selling carnations for the exorbitant price of $1 apiece, Anna Jarvis’ daughter undertook a campaign against those who “would undermine Mother’s Day with their greed.” But she fought a losing battle. Within a few years, the Florists’ Review triumphantly announced that it was “Miss Jarvis who was completely squelched.”
Since then, Mother’s Day has ballooned into a billion-dollar industry.
Like other American holidays, Mother’s Day has become largely a sales event. I won’t add to the syrup by saying we need to restore it to its original purpose. Perhaps we should rethink the whole issue.
Professor Rosen seems to advocate a commemoration of women’s role as public activists. I do not oppose that, but for me, mothers—and I include all women, whether they have children or not, because the mother principle resides in all women—should be celebrated as the great regenerating force of nature. Mother’s Day should be a mystical, ritual celebration of life, with Woman Personified—the bearer of the Immortal Rose, as the poet Garcia Lorca called Her– honored and venerated for her role as a sexual entity, the purveyor and guardian of Nature’s regenerating energy. In short, Mother’s Day ought to be a lot naughtier than it is.
The Mother’s Day celebration seems currently to center on Mom’s role as a pancake maker. I’ve got no quarrel with a good pancake, but it’s the Immortal Rose that keeps the world turning. Let’s face it. We all got here because our Mothers were sexy, not because they kept a tidy kitchen.
Special Mother’s Day Report Report from Gazette Columnist B. Bea Sharper:
Number of births worldwide in 2009 that resulted from lust for pancakes: 0.
Number of births worldwide in 2009 that resulted from lust for Mom: 112,659,446.
