Native Influence

My father was career Army. He retired when I was three. I grew up in Columbus, Georgia and Ft. Benning was a large part of my life. I had a lot of friends who were in the military, were former military or had a father who was retired Army and so forth. I got married at age 19 to another 19 year old with whom I had graduated high school. His father had been career Army and his only dream was to be a soldier. Like his father (and mine), he also made a career of the Army. So I was a military wife for a lot of years. And then we began a long, slow divorce that was drawn out because of my health issues and the fact that we have two special-needs kids. When I was getting divorced, my first boyfriend was a man who had retired from the Army. We met through a mutual friend and this friend was, like me, a military wife and homeschooling mom. The military has its own culture. I tend to get along better with people who have spent some time in the military or who have been military depend...

I started to reply  to some post on Reddit  then thought better of it because I'm White and I have been told I shouldn't mention that I'm part Native according to oral family tradition and etc. This is what I wrote: It's the internet, not a face-to-face conversation. Downvote and do not reply, consider reporting if it breaks some rule.  I feel that Native people are "too conversational" and respectful. These people aren't respecting you and your space and your time and energy. A lot of white people are really awful about feeling entitled and your cultural practices of trying to take them seriously etc gets interpreted as kowtowing to them. Trolls crave attention and don't care if it's negative attention. Giving them any attention fuels their bad behavior.  I am all for referring people to r/askanative whether anyone actually starts such a sub or not. "This is not the purpose of this sub. Try someplace else." And don't apologize. 

There is a book called "My Mother, Myself." From what I gather, it is about a woman coming to terms with who she is by trying to separate out her psychological identity from her mother. That's apparently a common phenomenon, thus the book, but I never went through that. I had to separate my identity from my older sister. At the age of 59, I have finally concluded that most likely my mother didn't want me to be "like mother, like daughter" and intentionally set out to make sure I would not be "my mother's daughter." My mother is an excellent cook and my sister took over all the holiday baking when she was twelve. I know a lot about cooking because I played assistant to my sister, but my mother declined to teach me to cook or clean. She always had some excuse. "It's faster if I do it myself." or "Your sister knows how. I don't have time to show you." My mother is an excellent seamstress, knits and crochets. I had an au...

In recent weeks, my adult sons have been regaling me with tales from our lives ten or twenty years ago. I frequently have no recollection of the stories they tell or maybe only a small part of it sounds familiar.  So my memory is not what it used to be. I've lived a very private life. I was a homemaker and full-time mom for a lot of years and then I got divorced. Trying to learn to interact with "the public" post divorce was a very painful process. I'm less naive than I once was but lack of naivety doesn't magically make certain problems go away. I trend towards expecting people to believe me because I'm telling the truth, but I lack a public reputation and a lot of things about my life fall outside some socially acceptable Overton Window and people on the internet trend towards thinking you're a liar rather than thinking fact is stranger than fiction and maybe you're a statistical edge case or something.  I'm 59 and starting to feel like time is r...

I am "subscribed" to probably a few Native reddits. I generally only read and don't comment and don't do much of that either, if only to reduce the odds I will comment. I did leave a comment a few hours ago on one of them. No doubt due to lack of oxygen going to my brain since I was bitten by a poisonous spider something like 2.5 weeks ago and have been suffering the effects of hemotoxin and neurotoxin both. Most spiders only have hemotoxin. This was probably a black widow, which uncharacteristically has both. I was in the ER a few days ago and they didn't take it seriously that the poisonous spider bite was relevant to my acute health crisis. They chalked it up to heat exhaustion and dehydration and didn't even adequately address that issue.  I spent two weeks eating very little and throwing up most of what I did eat, but that could not possibly be relevant to my dehydrated, stressed state, no. Medical professionals say so and my opinion about my own body be...

I've just reread my last two posts on this site which were posted a few months back: MMIW Why, YES, I am always this paranoid And I came up with an analogy for why SOME White men are so screwed up. I think it's kind of like how seeing-eye dogs get trained. There was a blind woman who appeared on Sixty Minutes a lot of years ago and talked about her life and her seeing-eye dog. In the course of the interview, they gave the dog's name. In a follow-up interview, she had a NEW dog and declined to give the dog's name because with having appeared on the show, she was "famous" and everyone knew the dog's name and etc, so they would call out to her and call out to the dog and want to pet the dog. All this affectionate attention made the dog useless as a seeing-eye dog because it was being treated like a pet. Seeing-eye dogs ONLY get petted and such for DOING THEIR JOB. If you give them affection like a PET dog, they stop being useful as working anim...

I think I was probably 37 when I met Tom Fejeran. I had gone to GIS school. I was trying to pursue education pertinent to plans to have a career in Urban Planning. I was a homeschooling mom -- aka the teacher for a two-student private school under California law -- and military wife and facing a divorce that I knew would happen though the paperwork would not be filed for some time. Tom had been an urban planner in Guam for some years until shortly before he met me. He was retired military and he had recently left his planning career to begin working as a school teacher. I think I was involved with him for over a year. Sometime during that relationship his youngest child was eight years old. I remember because we were talking about our kids and he was listing their ages, maybe in parentheses, and it created a musical note on screen and we both laughed about it. He was legally separated and had been since that child was something like three years old. So his divorce and mine w...