Thanksgiving and Native Americans

When I was growing up in Kansas, all the schools were named after Indian tribes.  I attended Cherokee Elementary where a large part of every year was occupied with studying the various tribes, wars, disputes...history.  I thought every child was studying these things but learned as an adult that I am unique in my knowledge about Native American history. It isn't...popular, to be sure.  I also lived in Arizona for four years and not only drove by a few reservations, but stayed with my little family on one for a weekend.  It was a fun, memorable and educational trip I hope some of my children will remember.

I became interested, anew, in the subject of the bigBad white man and the poor Native American man, woman and child after my conversion to Catholicism.  I suddenly needed to change my homeschooling curriculum to include history books which were Not anti-Catholic.  I learned about what Catholic missionaries did for the indigenous people they found here in America.  It was a different story than I had heard years before.  We're not in Kansas anymore.  Now, with Thanksgiving Eve upon us I am thinking of the poverty I saw on the reservations in Arizona.  I am secretly wishing I could just not eat food tomorrow and offer that teeny bit of hunger this small body experiences to God;  to show him the sorrow in my heart for these people.  But  The Family is on my "eating case" as it is - so silent prayers will have to do.

In 1621 the Plymouth folks and the Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts celebrated the first Thanksgiving.  The tribe folks were symbolically excluded from the table.

In 2007, 143 countries finally adopted The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.  The United States was not one of them.

A 1990 study showed that Native Americans are "high" on the "assaultive" side of behavior problems and "lower" on the "depressive/suicidal" side of behavior problems.  It is said that this is because "they have clear, external sources to blame for their misery."  (((sounds like many people I know, actually))).

The National Relief Charities (NRC) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to help improve quality of life for Native Americans living on remote and poverty-stricken reservations in the United States.  One in four live in poverty.  The vast majority are not wealthy by virtue of gaming.  Geography is destiny, many say and I agree.  (((Being adopted I know very well this idea.)))  These citizens live where they were placed...by those who wanted them exterminated as a people.

"To be poor is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships."
- W.E.B. Du Bois


Have a very blessed Thanksgiving and remember the poor.