Intro
According to oral tradition, my father was 1/16th Cherokee. That wasn't talked about much and it was only after he died that I realized this was likely a larger influence on my life than I had ever known.
The above photo looks uncannily like my father. I saw it not long after my father died and was surprised to learn that Gary Farmer is full-blooded Iroquois. I did a bit of research and found that the Iroquois are related to the Cherokee.
This spurred a series of personal revelations and led to me starting this blog, which has had a few false starts while I tried to figure out how to proceed. The original subtitle of this site was Exploring the largely unrecognized Native influences on my own life and society generally.
During my divorce, I had a long distance relationship to a man named Tom. He was Chamorro, which is the indigenous people of the Mariana Islands, politically divided between the United States territories of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in Micronesia.
In other words, he was Guamanian.
Tom wasn't short for Thomas. It was actually short for Tomas.
He went by Tom because it sounded Anglo and that was useful in pursuing a career. He didn't look at all White-passing but he did de-emphasize his ethnicity to some degree by using the Anglo-sounding short form for his first name.
He died in 2012, which is why I am willing to name him. He is beyond being hurt by the claims of some woman who only knew him long distance, so can't actually prove she knew him at all.
I remember seeing a clip once where a White woman -- a celebrity of some sort -- told her Black boyfriend something like "You erase me." I interpreted his decision to mostly not speak of the relationship as protecting her privacy, but she interpreted it as denying the relationship and invalidating her.
There probably isn't a right or wrong answer per se, but I decided I would err on the side of not erasing this Native man from my life. I decided to give him a little visibility in my online life and state for the record he was important to me.
Here are a few links to pieces about him or which mention him. He told me his middle name was a Chamorro word and he told me it meant "happy." This is perhaps the strongest evidence I have that I actually knew the man.
This Chamorro language site has a searchable dictionary. If you put in the English word "Happy," it provides the following results:
Tom and my father are not the only two Native or part Native men who had a strong influence on my life but they are the only two that I know for sure are dead. I am not willing to name men who remain alive and may be harmed by some woman running her big fat mouth about them on the internet.
I hope to do a better job in the future of writing mostly about Native history and culture here and perhaps how those things influence the bigger picture and writing less about me. But my interest in the topic is very much personal and rooted in a desire to learn more in hopes of better understanding myself and my own life.
So I really don't know where and how to draw that line. Hopefully, I will figure that out without too much more pain because I think this is like the fourth time I have redacted this blog and started it over.
The above photo looks uncannily like my father. I saw it not long after my father died and was surprised to learn that Gary Farmer is full-blooded Iroquois. I did a bit of research and found that the Iroquois are related to the Cherokee.
This spurred a series of personal revelations and led to me starting this blog, which has had a few false starts while I tried to figure out how to proceed. The original subtitle of this site was Exploring the largely unrecognized Native influences on my own life and society generally.
During my divorce, I had a long distance relationship to a man named Tom. He was Chamorro, which is the indigenous people of the Mariana Islands, politically divided between the United States territories of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in Micronesia.
In other words, he was Guamanian.
Tom wasn't short for Thomas. It was actually short for Tomas.
He went by Tom because it sounded Anglo and that was useful in pursuing a career. He didn't look at all White-passing but he did de-emphasize his ethnicity to some degree by using the Anglo-sounding short form for his first name.
He died in 2012, which is why I am willing to name him. He is beyond being hurt by the claims of some woman who only knew him long distance, so can't actually prove she knew him at all.
I remember seeing a clip once where a White woman -- a celebrity of some sort -- told her Black boyfriend something like "You erase me." I interpreted his decision to mostly not speak of the relationship as protecting her privacy, but she interpreted it as denying the relationship and invalidating her.
There probably isn't a right or wrong answer per se, but I decided I would err on the side of not erasing this Native man from my life. I decided to give him a little visibility in my online life and state for the record he was important to me.
Here are a few links to pieces about him or which mention him. He told me his middle name was a Chamorro word and he told me it meant "happy." This is perhaps the strongest evidence I have that I actually knew the man.
This Chamorro language site has a searchable dictionary. If you put in the English word "Happy," it provides the following results:
- magof: happy, glad, delighted. (Adjective)
- manmagof: Happy, glad, delighted. (Adjective)
Tom and my father are not the only two Native or part Native men who had a strong influence on my life but they are the only two that I know for sure are dead. I am not willing to name men who remain alive and may be harmed by some woman running her big fat mouth about them on the internet.
I hope to do a better job in the future of writing mostly about Native history and culture here and perhaps how those things influence the bigger picture and writing less about me. But my interest in the topic is very much personal and rooted in a desire to learn more in hopes of better understanding myself and my own life.
So I really don't know where and how to draw that line. Hopefully, I will figure that out without too much more pain because I think this is like the fourth time I have redacted this blog and started it over.