Tag: Native Americans

It’s the Fourth of July, and I’m wearing orange

Why I’m wearing orange

My mother told me when I was very young, “You can’t take a culture away from someone, because you don’t have anything of value to give in return.”

Photo by James Wheeler on Pexels.com

My grandfather (paternal, mostly white) attended an Indian school, because it was the closest one to where his family lived. He said he watched the Native children get beaten for speaking their own language. This was my first contact with what has been in the news lately, the Native American and First Nations children who were murdered in the residential schools, and the shell-shocked survivors.

Now they’re in the news, with already hundreds of children’s bodies found buried. In solidarity with the Native Nations, I wear orange.

 American Thanksgiving is fraught with a misleading mythology. In the great American myth, the first Thanksgiving was a dinner held jointly between Native Americans and the white settlers, bringing them together.

There are several problems with this scenario:

  • It assumes the Native Americans had no thankfulness rituals, when indeed they did.
  • It assumes that the white settlers and Native Americans lived happily ever after, when in actuality the Indians were systematically killed and driven into successively smaller parcels of land, all in the name of Western expansion. 
Americans are indoctrinated into the myth at an early age in our schools. We cut out Pilgrims and Indians and learn about the myth  of the First Thanksgiving. Although that dinner actually happened, we are kept away from its aftermath. We are told (or at least we were in my time) that the Indians don’t really exist, but we are not told why.

The myth and its originals are personal for me. I am a child of the white settlers and of the Native Americans. I count Michel Cadotte and  Ikwesewe of the Lake Superior (now Lac du Flambeau) Ojibwe as ancestors. Mostly white but for the stories of my family, where we remember ancestors with long black hair and almond-shaped eyes. 

For me to celebrate Thanksgiving, I have to separate the thanks-giving from the mythology, and at the same time remember the thanks that my ancestors gave to their Maker.