A Not Quite Full Blood takes a look at words and some ideas about race.
I have to go along with the Our Red Earth philosophy that if we ( Native American Indians) want to survive as a people we have to save our racial integrity. But the rest of us (half-breeds and committed lesser relations) matter too. If we pull together we will save our families, our tribes and our distinctiveness. So much has been lost in the last 500 years, some of it will never be recovered but it might be reborn if we give our genetic spirit a chance. There are already important ideas that were not current in the golden old days. Inter-tribalness is one and now it is a major key to Ndn survival. In the old days we could get rowdy with each other but we’re truly on-the-line as a people. 100 years ago we were almost completely extinguished but now we have the bodies to reform into an Ndn Renaissance. I know we got it in us. Those of us on the outskirts of Reservation culture have a unique perspective and odd bits of important technical knowledge that can benefit our people and tribes as a whole.
I don’t pretend to be a Traditional. I’ve grown up on the edges of urban areas, ran away to San Francisco when I was very young. My education has been primarily by my own effort and so I have an especial appreciation for access to knowledge. I’m a street kid urban Ndn but I have learned about other Ndn lives and I have lived in some of those places too. I know that the word Reservation is a euphemism for Prisoner of War camp. This is why they are always far from the tribes native ground and placed on waste land (excepting for, like the Mescalero, they are already living on what the U.S. considered waste ground).
In my last entry I took a look at three very current words AfroAmerican, Gang and Thugg. I wrote this as a column on my Onverse blog where it is read by an international group of young people. It surprises me how many Americans are unaware that there are native black people all around the world who are not African. So I bring up the subject by looking at a word and while I was at it pointed out some history on 2 words that, I think, most people believe are no more than 150 years old.
And I fess up to my belief in the African migration theory. It’s not traditional. But then again, it surprises me how many Ndn’s consider themselves Christian. That sure ain’t the Turtle Island theory. But I have my own personal cosmology and spiritual beliefs, and that IS traditional. A bit of our native wisdom, that a true spirituality is based on ones own experience.
And I respect science for what it is, not a faith or spirituality but as an empirical system. The evidence from languages, archeology, medicine and genetics, myth and story has me aligned with the African expansion, beginning about 80,000 years ago. I also believe, from the evidence that people have always been leaking over here from Asia and the Pacific, and for some reason almost not at all from east ( excepting, of course, the last 800 years or so). It is entirely possible that a sea going tribe of Labrador Ndn’s may have sailed to Ireland about 3,500 years ago (National Geographic pictures of found boats around ‘91. You could index it by key words in the previous sentence).
And here is one of my crazier ideas (though based on evidence) that Polynesians landed on the coast of Tuantepec (Mexico) during the Polynesian Diaspora. After a time their culture and especially astronomical knowledge fused with the local and the Olmec civilization came of that fusion. But it you want to stick with the more down to earth, look to the everyday words.
A Micronesioan man of the sea.
