And here's what that's about:
November is Native American Heritage Month, or as it is commonly refered to, American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month. The month is a time to celebrate rich and diverse cultures, traditions, and histories and to acknowledge the important contributions of Native people.
I'd add the following:
Native American Heritage Month is also the time for those of Native American ancestry to apologize to the rest of us for their ancestors not developing and spreading life-saving and enriching goods and technologies.
Seems only fair.
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| A picture of the Native American Founding Fathers. Or it would be had they had any means of communication, organization, and knowledge recording. Oh, and it would have helped had they not hated each other. |
A friend on facebook had a post opining about how school students didn't know the name of Pocahontas' tribe. And why was such an ignorance permitted in schools?
ReplyDeleteThe non liberal answer that came to mind was "because they had no written language, their history has largely been lost".
I read a book about the lost colony of Roanoake in the last couple of years. The author was working from a lot of original source material. None of it penned by the natives. All the maps, diaries, and references were written by Europeans. Fancy that.
Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony by Lee Miller; A decent read, but perhaps a trifle long in my opinion. And I found the author's frequent use of direct quotes from 17th century English jarring. I can read and understand writings from that era, but going back and forth from that to modern English multiple times in a paragraph is like having that paragraph written in two different languages.
I remember several years ago sitting through a lecture about how clever the Miwok were. Why, they used the root of some plant as a brush. Yep, very clever. But I could only think of the beautifully brushes carved from ivory, or the wonderfully wrought silver brushes, from the same time period. But taking a root and using it as a brush -- now THAT'S clever!
ReplyDelete"November Is Native American Heritage Month"
ReplyDeleteWhere do I go to get a Paleface to torture (for the fun of it, as one does)? Or do I have to catch my own, like in the old days?