A series of essays….
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NATIVE AMERICANS HAVE LIVED HERE FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS, TRANSFERRING KNOWLEDGE FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION THROUGH STORYTELLING. |
….as seen through my eyes!
By: Jacqueline E Hughes
Some say that with age comes wisdom. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. After all, how many years does our ex-president carry with him, as do many of the Republican members of the House and Senate? It would be far more simple to get my point across here without the added frustration of a retro punch (Hitler, Putin, and the demise of our democracy) of negative politics. Becoming totally oblivious to the events that shape our world is a choice I refuse to make.
My philosophy is if you don’t allow yourself to live with it, you will never be a part of the system that will, eventually, solve it. Therefore, the current situation we face in Washington D. C. will and should always be on our minds even if we’re able to tuck it away long enough to proceed with our daily lives. The more wisdom we seek—the closer we come to achieving the wisdom we require to make this a better world in which to live in.
When I was quite young and watching the wonder of television (test screen and all) while seated on the living room couch with my older brother, our young lives were surrounded by stereotypes of Indigenous People the likes of Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s sidekick. But mostly, we were affronted by the ‘Indians’ who scalped white settlers, kidnapped young white children and raised them within their own culture, and Indians who overindulged in drinking ‘firewater’ (whiskey) and stole firearms to be used against the settlers who purportedly had the right to push them off their own land.
That was our guide in forming the concepts behind Indigenous People; black and white movies depicting European immigrants forcing their way onto native lands, pushing them back in order to spread out into this new land of possibility and opportunity. These immigrants were harbingers of their own religious beliefs and failed to recognize these lands as being a part of a world and its people who had existed here, without them, for centuries.
While playing cowboys and Indians, we were quick to depict the cowboy as the good guy and the Indian as the bad guy. Who defended the rights of the Native Americans for protecting the only lifestyle they’d ever known? Certainly not the adolescent boy or girl of the 1950’s. Hollywood films were the counterpoint to historical reality. Historical reality was not to be found in classroom history books or on the small screen in our own homes. As children, our reality had been twisted with untruths that were embedded into our moral psyche for years to follow.
George Armstrong Custer became one of our unlikely heroes during the American Indian War while attempting to push the Native Indians off their own lands. His death, along with every soldier he led, became romanticized as “Custer’s Last Stand.”
Even George Washington resided on the side of our dark history with regard to Indigenous People and sought their land for his own prosperity. Due to his apparent greed for more land, he would offer the Natives a selling price. When it was not accepted, Washington declared them uncooperative and ordered what we would deem as genocide in order to remove them from their land. He would then claim what he called legal rights to the land for himself.
All powers have two sides: the power to create and the power to destroy. Once again, we are standing on the threshold of having to choose one side or the other. We must learn to create a balance between them. This is exactly the current position of the Ukrainian people with Volodymyr Zelenskyy as their president and political leader. He stands straddling the line between saving his people and land by utilizing his power in an attempt to destroy their aggressor, Vladimir Putin. President Zelenskyy has had to create that balance of power out of necessity for the good of Ukraine itself; fighting for the homeland he loves so much.
In my lifetime, I never believed that the possibility of losing the freedoms offered by our democratic society was even something to have to think about—until recently. Unfortunately, our natural inclination to do right by the world is stifled, breeding despair when it should be inspiring action! Our treatment of Mother Earth is a prime example of not doing enough to change a negative course into a positive one. The intensity of weather patterns is placing the entire planet in jeopardy. This chain of events should be more than enough to inspire action in all of us. If survival is a basic instinct, then the greed and hunger for power within the Republican Party seems to tug even harder on the human soul!
Having recently read the book Braiding Sweetgrass written by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Native American and ecologist who shares her knowledge of all plants intertwined with the rich history of the Indigenous People of her homeland, I profess to being able to better understand the plight of her people. I see a people that received the gifts of the land in the form of food, shelter, and love with open eyes and hearts and gave back to the land by planting the seeds so that all could continue to share the benefits of this living world. Always giving first via blessings in gratitude before taking what would sustain them, these soulful and generous people lived in harmony with Mother Earth.
Their basic belief was, “Never damage Creation and never interfere with the sacred purpose of another being. Sustain the ones that sustain you and the earth will last forever.” What a beautiful philosophy this is. If only it were possible to turn back the hands of time and reproduce this mindset today.
Man’s greed in the belief that more is better, not returning back to the land what we have taken from it, and the power to create being less important than the power to destroy—will be our downfall. As Indigenous People cautiously welcomed the European immigrants onto their shores, their innate kindness and role of being one with Mother Earth blinded them to the possibility of others being cruel, greedy, and detrimental to their own well-being, as well as to the fate of their precious homeland.
History has been bent on suppressing anything from our past that would support or reveal the negative side of humankind. Why else are specific books being banned (as they have been in the past) if not to suppress knowledge, eliminate growth, and promote the dumbing-down of the general population? Isn’t it easier to control a less educated population than one that thrives on free thinking and the power behind learning?
As a child we were taught to believe in the harmful acts of Native Americans inflicted upon the ‘innocent settlers’ who, in actuality, were changing, by force, the entire lifestyle of a nation of people whose love and respect for their homeland extended back thousands of years.
I must forgive my generation for being brainwashed against Indigenous Peoples. But, I cannot forgive those who, by now, have failed to learn the truth and continue to disrespect others by feeling superior towards them.
Around twenty years ago a friend told me that our country was imploding, democracy would be the first thing to be eliminated, and it would happen in the not too distant future. At the time, I scoffed at the improbable idea of this ever happening. I do not make light of his predictions in the world we live in today. Today, I pray that we become students of mindfulness (focusing one’s awareness) and are able to utilize the power of creation over the power of destruction—or, at least, find a comfortable and working balance between the two…
Copyright © 2022 by Jacqueline E Hughes
All rights reserved
