Indigenous Peoples' Day

   Yesterday, the Monday Holiday that isn't actually October 12th but close enough for practical modern American purposes, I found this popping up on the screen in front of me on a Social Media "news feed," as they call it:

   "For Indigenous People’s Day, I challenge everybody to spend 30 minutes on google (or search engine of your choice) learning about the indigenous people and their land that you’re currently occupying. The education system fails both native and non-native people alike, but with a tool like the internet at our disposal, as we mature into young adults, and eventually adults, that becomes an illegitimate excuse for the responsibility we each have to learn about and honor those indigenous nations who are physically dispossessed from their homelands and culture and lifeways to continue the settler colonial state and non-native occupation of our stolen homelands.
I invite people to leave what they’ve learned below so that we can learn together."

  So far this post has generated

276 Comments and

7,557 Shares at: 

https://www.facebook.com/pg/SavageFeminism/about/?ref=page_internal, "a page that focuses solely on the experience of indigenous women & femmes as we resist the heteropatriarchal settler state," which in turn is linked to: https://www.instagram.com/SavageFeminism/

   I thought about it awhile and this kind of bubbled out, despite the wise guy troll-like comment that I'm embarrassed to say first emerged: "A whole thirty minutes? That's practically half an hour!"

    "In less than 30 seconds, your Internet search results pour in on the screen before you.

     After 30 minutes of Internet research, you may have some sort of understanding about the Tribes in your State, perhaps enough to satisfy your curiosity or perhaps cause you to wonder just where the concept of tribes came from. 

    After 30 hours of Internet research, you might realize that tribe is a European American concept, that a State is as well, and Indigenous Traditional Homelands are at best poorly understood by most people, in particular by the early European colonists interacting with the tiny percent of Indigenous Peoples who managed to survive the series of epidemics that killed more people than any other known Plague in human history. I use the English word Plague because you might have been told that the Black Plague killed the greatest number of people than any other single disease-related event in human history, something that even your well informed Human Biology professor found surprising.  

      After 30 days of Internet research, and using my location in Connecticut as an example, you will begin to wonder why there is so much conflicting information about these tribes - and why the oldest "reservations/reserves" in the country aren't recognized by the United States of America. You might understand something about Indigenous place names and how these names became attached to certain groups of Indigenous People who happened to be living in those places at certain times, making Treaty agreements to share land and resources that magically transformed into Deeds of private ownership, another European concept.

      After 30 weeks, you might be thinking critically about everything you thought you knew about Indigenous People and may actually crack open a book or two. You might start with the former "go to" 1800s book on CT Indians that tells you practically nobody lived in this "desert" of western CT but I'd suggest you follow it with the latest book on CTs Indigenous Peoples by Dr. Lucianne Lavin that I highly recommend.

     After 30 months, you might have a better understanding of Indigenous Peoples - although you might have been distracted by some bad old ideas that persist still, "Lost Tribes" and assorted groups of usually very light complexioned people who were really responsible for the "advanced civilizations" who were later wiped out by these "blood thirsty primitive savages" in the New World.

And I guess that after (almost) 30 years of unfunded independent research, I personally can proudly say that there is so much more that I don't know than I do know. A bright spot in the last ten years is talking with people of Indigenous descent, some very interested in the same sort of Sacred Stones and Ceremonial Stone Landscapes I see remnants of all around me, here by one of two historically known Pootatuck Late Woodland Villages, called the Nonnewaug Wigwams on floodplain field near a stone Fish Weir, in a house whose stone foundation shows signs of Indigenous Iconography, possibly built for the Pomperauge Plantation by ancestors perhaps of some of the people I speak with, not quite as "extinct" as both I and they have been told they were or are.

    Frightening is the dark cloud looming in the last two years as a shadow of ignorance and misinformation, prejudice and bigotry grows larger and darker...

      And after reading this (if you even read this far), your eyes might be tired, so dive into the last question and click on some videos by Buffy Ste. Marie or John Trudell. Listen a while to Winnona LaDuke, watch the training videos for the National Park Service on Ceremonial Stone Landscapes by Doug Harris or the fine work by Rolf Chachat-Schilling."