Tommy Toes and Cow Manure

Listening in class yesterday, I keep thinking about the number one value that I had written down. I was trying to decide where it came from. Who taught it to me? Did it come to me on my own? This value isn't usually one that we associate with European values. It has only been during the past few years that Earth Day has become the "in" thing to do, but my respect for the environment seems to have planted itself in me from roots branching out all over. And more and more, I see the lack of respect that we humans have for each other; people pushing in line to get to the salad bar quicker. People weaving in and out of traffic on the interstate just to make it to their destination five minutes earlier. Does it make them feel better to be first? Slow down. Just enjoy time.

My grandfather was one of my biggest influences, and it wasn't really anything he ever said that caught my attention. It was what he did. Every year he had a garden. Some seeds he had saved from the last year's harvest, and some he bought. Some seeds he traded with his brothers and his friends, but before he planted those seeds he had to cultivate the ground. He added what he called "fertilize," but in actuality, it was the most terrible smelling cow manure. I don't know where he got it from, but when I would come home from school on one warm day in spring, the entire hill would smell like a dairy farm. "Yeah it stinks," he'd say, "but the tomatoes love it."

And we all loved his tomatoes. They were the best tomatoes in Henderson county. I've never tasted another like one of those that came from my grandfather's garden.

He would take something natural, something considered waste and use it to replenish the materials in the soil that the tomatoes needed to grow, and then he would add his own sweat. 

Pappaw knew that in order to get the best tomatoes in the county, he couldn't just let them alone. They had to be tended. He weeded. He mounded the dirt around the base of the plant. He made sure every tiny plant had a stake or a cage in which to climb. If the sky failed to provide rain, Pappaw would hook up the soaker hose. By June, the plants burst with red fruit, and all summer long we would have fresh tomatoes for our grilled hamburgers and tommy toes for our salads. Pappaw would give away the excess, and Mom and Grandma would can the rest of the bounty. ...And he would just give them away.

That was one thing that took me a long time to understand. How can he put in all that work, and then just give away all that he worked for? And why work that hard in the first place? He could have put in half the work and gotten more than enough for him and his family. He did it because he enjoyed it. He did it because he respected his fellow man, and he understood that others may not have the means to make their own garden, whether the reason be land, physical ability, or time. But I think that he recognized that he had a talent given to him by God, and he used that talent to provide a service to others. He respected them enough not to ask them for a dime.

In writing this piece, I have come to a new realization about my grandfather. He loved his fellow man enough to give them his time and his product, and I really need to strive more to be like him. Providing service to others has never been my strong suit, always claiming that I don't have the time. The Sacred Tree says, "True happiness comes only to those who dedicate their lives to the service of others." 

Every time my grandfather passed a bulging bag of vegetables to a friend in need, he would do so with a big grin on his face, and I know that he was truly happy.

Looking for North

                  (I'm not exactly sure how authentic the music that I picked out is, but it's pretty.)

While reading our new book, The Sacred Tree, I found it fascinating that there are so many links to Indian culture and Western culture. They both have their differences, sure. And they each have their own philosophies. The journey that a human being is to go on around the medicine wheel where he will find who he is, who he is supposed to be, and how he connects with the surrounding universe. This journey is life-long, and the goal is to be all you can be. Western culture has a faster way of getting there with the personality test. You can take yours here.  Below is an example of the tease they give you so you'll buy the 15 page report. Yeah, it's mine.

You Are an INFJ (Introvert, iNtuitive, Feeler, Judger)

INFJs represent between 1 and 3% of the U.S. Population

INFJs inhabit a world of ideas. They are independent, original thinkers driven by their strong feelings, and personal integrity. Sensitive, committed, hardworking, and perceptive, INFJs are often excellent listeners, skilled at generating enlightened and creative solutions to people’s problems. Thoughtful and careful decision makers, INFJs prefer to have plenty of time to let ideas “percolate” before taking action. Because they value harmony and agreement, INFJs like to persuade others of the validity of their viewpoint. They win the cooperation of others by using approval and praise, rather than argument or intimidation.

INFJs go to great lengths to promote fellowship and avoid conflict. They are also often perfectionists highly focused, and driven to accomplish their goals. Rather formal and reserved, INFJs can be difficult to read, but it is critically important to them that their values, needs and concerns be understood and respected.

Personality Type can be a gateway your ideal career, relationship, parenting and even your sales and networking. You can learn more about your personality type by purchasing a Custom Personality Type Report.

There's only 1-3% of the population in the U.S. who are like me. That might be a good thing. Heh. I'm glad I'm original though.

On pages 72-3 in our book, there is a list of gifts for each direction on the medicine wheel. These gifts are learned for a price. "For each of the great gifts of the medicine wheel there is a price. And yet we learn that the mystery of sacrifice is that there is no sacrifice" (58). The book is telling us that through this journey of our life, we are going to have to slowly learn how to be the best person we can be. It is a life journey. So, this little personality test hardly gives us any answers into our inner-selves according to the spiritual Indian. We have to look into ourselves, figure out what's there, and decide on how to become who we want to become. 

Indian spirituality is alive, but it's not well. Tribes are fighting against Christianity's movement to enlighten all the Indians. Our government has taken away unemployment rights from Indians who tried to practice their religious freedom. In 1993, Clinton passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act only for it to be shot down by Congress. Read all about it here.  

A land dispute in Arizona is at the center of religious rights for American Indians. They claim that the San Francisco Peaks are sacred. From our reading, we should be able to see that American Indian spirituality is integrated with the Earth. It is a human connection to all things in the universe.

This country was founded on religious freedom, but when land disputes involve Indian religion, the property takes precedence and the Indians usually lose. 

The Early Years

<< The Oysterband performing "The World Turned Upside Down."

(That's some good stuff right there, and it seemed relevant to our book, The World Turned Upside Down. Lyrics are here if you'd like to sing along.)

While reading The World Turned Upside Down a few passages stuck out for me. The first one was about an Indian named Mittark. He was supposedly "the first Christian Indian at Gay Head on the west end of the island of Martha's Vineyard." Mittark felt that conversion to the Christian way of life was the way too go. I'm sure constantly defending your lifestyle against the English and just embracing their way of life like they wanted the Indians to do was much easier. There is also the desire to have promises fulfilled. Mittark "looked forward to the Christian promise of an escape from the troubles of the world. 'Here I'm in pain, there [in Heaven] I shall be freed from all Pain, and enjoy the rest that never endeth'" (43-4). But with his choice came separation from his Indian brothers.

Mittark reminded me of Seymour (from the film The Business of Fancydancing), for by accepting the Christian faith as his own, he "endured painful separation from his people" (43). The film didn't say that Seymour was a Christian, but he did accept another part of the way the white men do things. He received a white man's education at a university. Because of that, his friends on the reservation didn't trust him anymore, thinking that he sold them out to be more like the white man. Seymour was a very lonely man, and from the dying words that Mittark uttered, he was a lonely man too.

For an Indian to refute the beliefs of his fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and cousins, is no light act. It must seem to this Indian's family like he is turning his back on them and embracing the enemy. The Indian's family looses their faith in their cousin, but is adopting another culture as black and white as that for the one taking on other beliefs? 

We saw the struggles that Seymour went through. One side, his friends on the Rez, pulling at him to come back, and the other side, his partner, wanting him to accept that he is Seymour's tribe now. How hard that must be for an Indian to adopt two cultures. (One of which has been beaten into the dirt by the other for so long.)

The other quote from the book that stuck out to me was from page 21.

Many Indian peoples had, and continue to have, stories of creation and migration that explain how they came to be living in their homelands. Often shrouded in the mists of time, myth, and memory, these legends my strike us as too vague and fanciful to be useful as historical documents, but they convey the peoples' sense of their past and give us a glimpse into the many experiences that shaped American history before Europeans entered the picture.

The piece in red is what floored me. After reading the trickster tales and understanding them to not only traditional and entertaining but based in belief, I don't understand why these legends can't be used. Yeah, they're fun tails, but because they are told in metaphors and not in the way of how the English record history they can't be used? There is belief in them. Some could argue that the creation story in the Bible is too fanciful.  Any man in is right mind should never put his faith into a supreme being that lives in a realm called Heaven in which no human has ever returned to tell what they do up there all day. Do angels in Heaven sing all day or do they play Parcheesi on golden tables with Chex Mix set in the center? Heaven has never been scientifically proven, but people believe in God because they have faith. Faith is something we all need to get through this life on Earth. I know I have to have faith in my God and myself to make it up I-26 everyday. To take these people's beliefs and dismiss them because they are not of like English mind, is arrogant, and the "but" on then end of that sentence only saves a little bit of grace.

I went in search of a little enlightenment on the subject of American Indian beliefs, and I came across a book. Teaching Spirits by Joseph Epes Brown delves into the "religious" lives of Indians in hopes that others can better understand. And I found this link that might help one come to terms that trickster tales do have a religious base.

1. First, at the time of European contact, all but the simplest indigenous cultures in North America had developed coherent religious systems that included cosmologies—creation myths, transmitted orally from one generation to the next, which purported to explain how those societies had come into being.
2. Second, most native peoples worshiped an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator or “Master Spirit” (a being that assumed a variety of forms and both genders). They also venerated or placated a host of lesser supernatural entities, including an evil god who dealt out disaster, suffering, and death.
3. Third and finally, the members of most tribes believed in the immortality of the human soul and an afterlife, the main feature of which was the abundance of every good thing that made earthly life secure and pleasant.

So, not only are they fanciful, but one might put his faith into them.

Book review by The Dirt Brothers
Amazon link

The Business of Fancydancing

I'm enjoying the film so far, but it's not exactly what I was expecting. It's serious. All the talk that we've had in class about the sense of humor of Indians, about how they keep their world together by laughing, isn't in this film as much as I thought it would be. After enjoying the boisterous trickster tales and the incisive humor in Sherman Alexie's book, I miss it. Besides that, though, one thing sticks out in my mind, the scene where Aristotle and Mouse beat up that man on the side of the road. 

There was fear in that white man's eyes when those two Indians got out of the car. He was responding the old stereotype, the one that Hollywood exaggerated and composed the Indians into a great antagonist for the white man to fight and savor victory after victory over. And Aristotle rose to the occasion because when you've been told a lie your whole life, you start believing it too. And there on the screen, Aristotle beat the living shit out of that guy. He took out all of his frustrations out on that man, a representation for all white men. He hit, kicked, punched that man for the years of repression of all Indians, and that man had no idea why he was getting beat.

Do I agree with it? No. But I understand it. A man can only be held to the fire so long before starts fighting his abuser because he's tired of getting burned. 

The New York Fighting Jews

One story in Sherman Alexie's book, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven, stood out for me, and any questions that I might have pertaining to life on a reservation, I go right back to "The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn't Flash Red Anymore." Apparently, the lady who made up some discussion questions at the back of the book felt the same way because she listed at least one question pertaining to it:

                         Question #7. "In 'The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation' Alexie depicts baseball as having extraordinary significance on the reservation. With what meaning(s) is baseball invested? Why?"

Now, I didn't remember baseball being mentioned, so I went back and looked at it again. Nope. No baseball, but of course there was lots of basketball. Someone should slap Carol Rawlings-Miller on the back of her hand.

Basketball is mentioned in several stories, indicating just how important it is to Indians on the reservation. (Shame on you Carol.)  It seems like the game is all they have. It's a ticket to get out and a way to create heroes.

Another sport that is sort of mentioned is football. Now, it wasn't mentioned in the sense that Indians pick up a game in the reservation dirt every now and again, but the team Washington Redskins were brought up with the undertone of  a touchy subject.

Living around Asheville, NC, which is close to the Cherokee reservation, there are (or there used to be) a few high school mascots with Indian names; Students at Erwin High School are called the Warriors, those at Cherokee High School call themselves the Braves, and in Canton, GA, the Warriors still take the court in the winter to shoot some hoops.

When I was playing softball for my high school (a long time ago), I remember playing Erwin High and thinking just how cool their mascot was. I mean the girls' softball team was called the Squaws. Cool right? Apparently not. Shortly after I graduated high school, the Buncombe County Board of Education, in 1998, was pressured into eliminating the term "Squaws" for the girls' teams. According to this, "squaw," in some American Indian languages, can refer to a prostitute or to the female genitalia. Okay, so maybe not such a good idea.

Still the controversy is alive and well throughout the U.S. whether it involves high schools, colleges, or pro sports teams.

What I didn't understand at the time is that using an Indian for a mascot isn't honoring them as great warriors. It doesn't say that our school or our team wants to be fierce and be great victors on the basketball court or the football field. It's depicting an entire people as a cartoon. It's saying that these people aren't people at all they are only a symbol of a feral, savage warrior that got its roots from Hollywood and John Wayne.


One of the points made in my research is that we don't depict other races with mascots. There would be hell to pay if there was a team called New York Fighting Jews, the Chicago Blacks, or the San Antonio Latinos. (Which is a poster in this video on the right that captured these slogans on pennants.) That would be ludicrousness. No other race in this country would accept that. Why do we expect the Indians to?

Yet we do.

My favorite baseball team is the Atlanta Braves. I'd sit in the stands with my dad and we'd do the tomahawk chop and chant with everyone else. The next time I take my kids to a game, I'll be explaining to them why we won't be participating in that ritual any more. I'll miss it, but values are more important. The Braves are still my team...  until they see that it hurts a people and a nation. Maybe one day they'll change it.

And with that I'll leave you this.

Eugenics

As we watched the first part of Smoke Signals yesterday in class, I kept waiting on someone in the movie to mention how Victor's mother was sterilized after his birth in the early 70s, but they never did. (Maybe it comes up later in the film. I don't know.) But it was mentioned in Sherman Alexie's book, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven.

Lately, Eugenics has been in the news here in North Carolina, so it definitely caught my eye when I read about Victor's mother in the book.  Apparently, from 1929 to 1974, North Carolina's government decided to adopt a eugenics sterilization program. About 7,600 men, women, and children were deemed unfit to reproduce and their doctors were ordered to sterilize them by the NC eugenics board. One victim was raped at the age of 13, and when she gave birth to the baby conceived from that rape, she was sterilized for the given reasons that she was considered "feeble-minded" and "promiscuous".

You can listen to a report about Mecklenburg County, NC,  from NPR or read it here. "Only NC gave the power [to select who would be sterilized] to social workers. Most states left the choosing up to doctors."

North Carolina wasn't alone in its attempt to sterilize those the U.S. considered to be of lesser means. Thirty-two states in all adapted similar programs.

So, I set out to try and find something pertaining to the forced sterilization of Indian women, but I wasn't able to find a whole lot short of some scholarly articles on JSTOR and one short video on YouTube.

Forced sterilization is only one part of the genocide that was force upon Indians, and it was under the guise of eugenics.

The most upsetting thing about this, aside from Indian birth rates dropping in the 70s leading to a reduced population, is that these women were lied to. Either they were persuaded under false pretenses to sign a piece of paper, giving their okay for sterilization, or it was done to them without their knowledge.

Some women were told at the birth of a child that if they didn't give their permission to be sterilized, they would lose any and all privileges and assistance from the government for them and any older children that they may have. Other women would go into the hospital for another surgery such as an appendectomy only to find out years later that while the surgeons where operating, they performed an extra procedure, like they were running a buy one get one free special at the Rez.

It's sickening the things that I've come across. How can a civilization that claims in its constitution that "All men are created equal" kill off members of its own society? And that's exactly what they were doing. Fewer Indians born mean that their culture dies that much faster.