Some years ago I was working for a small Indian Center
located in San Luis Obispo County California. Among the projects we were
working on was the development of Title IV Indian Education projects in
the school districts in Central California. We were having a lot of
trouble convincing the school administrators to do the student count and
apply for the funds to develop the programs.
About the same time, I went to an Indian Education conference in
Sacramento and happened to speak with an Indian educator about our
difficulties. She told me a story about a study that had been done a few
years before about Indian students and their performance in public
schools. The study, she said, had shown that Indian students did as well
or better than non-Indian students until they reached the third grade.
After the third grade, the grades and test scores of Native American
students took a nose dive and all of us know the rest of that story; high
drop out rates, low grades, difficulties getting into college, and so on.
The sponsors of the study wondered, why third grade? Turns out, that is
when they began teaching history.
Through the years I have looked for that study and have not been able to
find it, but know from personal experience that it is true.
I went to a small Catholic school in Kansas and vividly recall my initial
lessons in American history. Sister Ancilla was teaching the class and
since the first lessons were about Indians, I was interested.
I remember one of the first stories was about how those "savages" had
attacked and burned the wagons of the "innocent women and children" whose
only intent was to settle on farms and "tame the wilderness." The nun gave
rather graphic details about Indian scalping and slaughter and I went home
with those pictures in my mind.
There at home, in the kitchen as I did my homework, was one of those same
savages and she was wielding a butcher knife, cutting up some chickens for
supper.
Now, I knew I was Indian, my family was Indian, but for some reason it
stuck in my head that my mama was a "real Indian." And she had a knife.
And she was rather skilled with the intricacies of slicing apart some
innocent chickens. I recall wondering if she had the same facility or
desire when it came to defenseless white settlers.
As I tried to focus on my homework, I kept one eye on my dear old mama as
she flipped the chicken this way and that. There was a moment when she
laid one of the legs down and whacked it clean through the joint in one
hard stroke. I jumped. My own scalp tingled at the thought that my mama
and her relatives in the past had done that very same thing to innocent
women and children.
I have long since grown out of that fear and the end of that particular
day of sidelong glances at my mother and her skill with a knife at cutting
up chickens and settlers ended on an emotional note. I told her what
Sister Ancilla had said. She cried.
My mama cried for what she had experienced in hearing those powerful and
hurtful words in her own life. She cried also that her own son would be
made afraid of his mother on the basis of a word, some lies told in
defense of Manifest Destiny, a term she never, ever, understood.
Near where my mother grew up is Tecumseh, Oklahoma and the name of their
high school team, their mascot, is the Savages. When I lived near there, I
would often see Indian people wearing t-shirts and hats which carried the
name of the team.
The local tribes, Shawnee, Kickapoo, Sac and Fox, and my own tribe, the
Potawatomi, do nothing to change the name of that team or the dozens of
others throughout the state. There are Indians across the United States
who think that working to change the names of these mascots is a trivial
issue and not worth our time and effort.
Yes, health care is important, but so is education. And the mascot issue
is not so much about the names of teams. For me, it is about the fear and
ignorance engendered by the use of those names. It is about being eight
years old and hearing the word savage and then going home and finding one,
with a knife, slicing up a chicken to feed her kids.
Those words are lies and Indian people who want to wear lies as a banner
of pride must remember that they just might scare the self- respect right
out of their own children.
I was lucky. My mama and I talked about it and I can still remember her
holding me as she cried about the ignorance of a society that treats us
something less than human. And I still remember her words. "Oh Johnny,"
she said softly, " I am not a savage."
The world gets crazier and crazier everyday, doesn't it? The world that many
of us thought was there, isn't. The bottom has dropped out of everything. The
illusions have been revealed, we have found out who has been pulling the strings
behind the scenes. Millions have lost their jobs, have mortgage
problems, credit card issues, credit repair problems and
foreclosure. What can be
done? Amazingly, we have been mislead. We have been taught that we can control
government by voting. The founder of the Rothschild dynasty, Mayer Amschel
Bauer, told the secret of controlling the government of a nation over 200 years
ago. He said, "Permit
me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its
laws." Get
the picture? Your freedom hinges first on the nation's banks and money system.
It's all about 'commerce'. Freedom is connected with Debt Elimination for
each individual. Not only does this end
personal debt, it places the people first in line
as creditors to the National Debt ahead of the banks. They don't wish for
you to know this. It has to do with recognizing WHO you really are in A
New Beginning: A Practical Course in Miracles, an informational study. Is
your credit rating bad for reasons that seem out of your control? There are
ways of credit repair,
so you can men those broken fences too. Do you want to keep your children protected
from outside forces, there are ways of protecting
your children. Do you want
to keep your sons and daughters free from 'the draft'? Check this out.
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