Native Influence

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...