Yes I know I am a day late. I had been planning on writing something about Thanksgiving. Lucky for me because today I was following the story of Maurice Clemmons, the cop-killer in the Seattle-area. I used to live in that area so I was curious. I noticed on the sidebar of the story that Sarah Palin supposedly misquoted John Wooden. Well Coach Wooden is one of the classiest men to ever live even if his team used to beat up on my alma mater so I had to check out that story.
The story being that Palin's book attributes leftist-Native American's quote to UCLA's John Wooden. Well I could see so much wrong with the story and the subject. Here's a clue about me, I am native American and a First American. I and everyone else who was, or will be, born and raised in America is a native American, however you have to have a certain ancestry to indigenous peoples to be a First American.
Okay so most people think that is only a small, semantic point but if you are one of us it is just another way to make us disappear into the population as a whole. The government policy used to be called "assimilation" which was another word for elimination of our culture and who we are. Assimilation was supposedly to help 'Indians' 'up out of'' their culture, 'up to' American civilization by 'eliminating Indian' practices and language 'from the savage'.
My great-grandfather was shipped off to Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Pennsylvania. At the age of twelve, on his third attempt at running away, finally made it all the way back to Oklahoma by hopping trains and walking at night so he would not be caught and sent back. True he never received a full education and when he was older he would have to have his teenage children drive his automobiles as he and his wife did not know how to drive. He failed in business when he tried to run a store. He wanted his children to speak the languages that he spoke, that he had learned from his father. Unluckily only two of his children wanted to learn their own language instead of English.
To conservatives and to liberals please stop belittling the First Peoples of the Americas. We are not going away and we are who we are. Our population is actually growing. What scares U.S. "Americans" is that the "Americans" from outside of borders imposed by the U.S. will outnumber any other U.S. population group in less than a decade. If population movements continue at similar rates Spanish will be the mother tongue of the majority of the people in the U.S. in forty years. That scares some people so much that they are trying to legislate a new apartheid in this country and stop the flow of people into the country from south of the border.
This does bring us back to Thanksgiving. Did you know that seven years after the first Thanksgiving that the colonists of Plymouth, with an influx of more English settlers every year, decimated the 'Indians' who helped them survive that first year. Just like Adolf Hitler they claimed that they needed more land to live.
Ever since then what we have had has been cut apart and taken away from us. Oh and by the way Sarah Palin, John Wooden Legs' grandparents died for the same land as my great grandparents and great-great grandparents died for but your ancestors were shooting at them and the buffalo that they depended upon.
If you see me and come over and say "How", you can expect me to say "Adios amigo". But if you say "o-e", "hello", "ni hao", "guten tag", "bonjour" or even "hi" we might just have a pleasant conversation. Just like my ancestors I believe we can share the land if you won't be hostile.
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