Native Influence

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

I don't know what to call this post and I don't know how to approach the topic. I've written and redacted pieces on the topic before and I continue to struggle to find ways to say something meaningful and useful and informative without creating undue problems for myself and "putting out the fire with gasoline." THIS post is an OPINION PIECE. As such, I am NOT planning to cite ANY sources. AT ALL. My mother is a German immigrant who was born in the 1930s, so she grew up in Germany during World War II and its aftermath. AKA "Nazi Germany." I love my mother and have IMMENSE respect for her. I cannot overstate how much respect I have for this woman who lived through so much hell and continued to be kind and generous. But she certainly didn't get through it unscathed. Like with ALL parents, her unresolved baggage impacted the lives of her children. My maiden name is Irish in origin. My understanding is my father was ethnically Irish-French

In 1930, Terre Haute, Indiana had a population of about 63,000, down from about 66,000. According to Wikipedia, it currently has about 58,000 people. I thought it was likely smaller in the past. Dad was born in the 1920s and grew up somewhere near Terre Haute, probably not actually IN Terre Haute because he grew up on a farm. I have this idea, perhaps a stupid idea given that the internet doesn't back it up, that Natives have a sense of community more than most White people and that Christianity is this extremely broken attempt to try to tell people to treat other people like human beings in spite of most people no longer living in communities of 150 people or fewer. That's the magic number for how many people you can have in a community and have most human brains follow all the interwoven relationships. My dad was more Christian than most Christians. I like to imagine it's because he was part Cherokee but I don't actually know why. Dad wasn't real shar

In English, So-So-Goi translates to The People Who Traveled On Foot. You might know them better as the Shoshone. This is the story of the last days of the Northwestern Band of Shoshones. They still have living descendants but most of their people were massacred on 29 January 1863. This is both the largest massacre of Native Americans on what would become the Contentinental US and also probably the least well known. It got little press in part because it occurred during the American Civil War. Their territory included parts of modern day Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho and Utah. Shoshone records of the incident call it Boa Ogai . The year 1825 marked the insidious beginning of the end. They ran into White trappers in the area and likely thought not much of it. The trappers seemed to live much like they did and functioned much like they did. The So-So-Goi tolerated them and were happy to trade with them for valuable items, like Western knives. The So-So-Goi wintered in an area they

My American father grew up on a farm in Indiana. My German mother grew up in a large and cosmopolitan European city known as Danzig (a "free city") at the time, currently known as Gdansk, Poland. I grew up between their two worlds, where their worlds met. I grew up on the edge of town where sprawling suburbs ended and trees and undeveloped lands began. When I was a child, behind my childhood home there was a patch of undeveloped woods. After I grew up and moved away, it was turned into more housing. Studies show that Indigenous or Tribespeople who move to cities remain much more aware and knowledgeable about flora and fauna in their environment than average AND they pass this heightened awareness onto their kids. They and their children are much more likely to know the names of the tree species and bird species (etc) around them even while living in the city than other residents. Daddy was like that and it took me a while to attribute it to his Native heritage

I was born in Columbus, Georgia. My parents were stationed at Fort Benning -- a base which may soon get a new name, from what I gather -- but I was not born in Martin Army Community Hospital on the base. It was a busy year for soldiers having babies and my pregnant mother was sent to a civilian ob-gyn for her care. My father was forty years old when I was born, which may not sound that old to the modern ear as someone fathering a child, but it was unusual for that era. He was one year younger than my ex-husband's paternal grandmother. The ex and I graduated high school together and our birthdays are very close together. I have family stories and very hand-wavy timeframes for the first three years of my life. I have only two clear memories from that time. I remember sitting on my mother's lap and riding in the back of a tank at some Army Family Day. My older sister once told me that I must have been about fifteen months old, which fits with my recollection of "Sept