not native fruit

many stories

as i continue to read and do research in the area of my family history, i realize more and more just how many and varied the stories are, yet to each of us it seems as if our own story is 'the' story.  Whether it's the stories of former slaves, of the various native american tribes, of the 'mulattos,' and probably even of the oppressors, there are unique experiences in every region.  back east, there must be unique experiences about every twenty square miles.  i am finding it fascinating to read all these different accounts, often finding something i can relate to, or that applies to my family.  of course, i am mostly reading about the east coast where my mother's people are from.

i now realize that my mother's father's people, in particular, come closest to what used to be called 'free people of color,' or sometimes 'the intermediate class.'  dr. pauli murray, a harvard graduate, writes a great deal about free people of color and also about slave-mulattos (the progeny of white slave-owners and their slaves) in her book 'proud shoes.'  one of the most poignant, for me, stories in the book relates to how much the offspring of the family that endowed or founded the university of north carolina longed to partake of its education, but could not, because of their color-status.  even dr. murray was turned down by the institution when she applied, and she had to take her undergraduate degree elsewhere.  she chose a good school, but still the pain of applying to a school created by your own direct ancestor and being rejected despite her excellent qualifications - i'm sorry, but that is just totally dysfunctional to say the least.  later she graduated from harvard law school, no mean feat.  

i'd like to share with you a site dedicated to a people i feel are very familiar to me.  it's called 'the minqua people of the welsh mountains of southeastern pennsylvania' and here is the link.  these are some lovely, gracious people, people i know both of my parents respected to the nines because of their excellent values and manner of living, and my mother felt herself and her family to be a part of.  i hope you'll enjoy the site as it gets rolling.

native american language idioms

i've been studying lenape, the indigenous language of my area of origin, the Delaware River Valley, as it has been preserved in various sources.  i've been studying on the lenape nation of pennsylvania's site www.lenapenation.org where there are lessons designed by Chief Shelley de Paul. 

anyway, two of the 'idioms' i've noticed and found interesting in lenape are that 1) one can say 'this squirrel' (na hanikw), or, in order to be more specific as to the exact squirrel one is referring to, 'this here squirrel' (wa she hanikw).  now doesn't this sound familiar?  isn't that the way the so-called 'mountain people' used to talk?  ("This here road, this here knife' etc -) it was considered substandard English.  i always thought people who talked like that were supposed to be 'white people,' but it turns out, according to my research into their history, that i was mistaken.  maybe that was why it was okay for them to be the object of humor by the dominant culture for so many years.  just something to consider.  

and 2) that the lenape had a way of saying 'you all' and also 'you' (but including me too).  For example, let's say a group had set out on a journey but decided the weather was so bad the group had to turn back and go home.  Someone might wish to say 'you all are going home now (but not me, i'm not going home, i'm going forward)' - this is the 'exclusive' form of 'you.'  On the other hand someone might want to say in a rhetorical way for the sake of argument, 'you are going home now, and in the subtext, i am going home now too, but for the sake of argument let's just say that 'you' are going home now.'   in other words, i'm not arguing with you here, but i want to make a point about this plan to go home.  of course, if you go, i will go with you, but first let me present my ideas about going forward instead of going back.  This is the inclusive 'you' which is more of a 'we.'  I really 'get' the difference here, and when I first discovered this grammatical form, I got really excited about it.  so here is how it looks in lenape: we are going home, nemachihena; you (excl) are going home, kemachihemo; you (incl) are going home, kemachihena.

there is nothing like studying another language to clue you in to completely other ways of thinking about things, about life. A whole other approach to life.  it is really sad that the early explorers, friars and so forth did not have a better grasp on the cultural dimensions of the new languages they were struggling to learn and to teach.  i wonder how that might have influenced the outcome of things.

mayan culture, powwows and me

I took a wonderful class at Gathering Tribes on Thursday, September 17th with Jean Molesky-Poz on 'Contemporary Mayan Spirituality' - also the title of her book.  Jean teaches Mayan spirituality at Santa Clara University here in the Bay Area.

I ought to have known that by studying the Lenape language and culture, I would eventually have to familiarize myself with the Mayans, but I really thought it was going to take me a lot longer to work my way around to it.  I will share more later.

By the way, the Lenape Nation had their annual pow-wow last weekend, September 19-20, at Wind Gap, PA.  Sure wish I could have been there for that.  Amazingly, my right knee is still bothering me since my train trip.  It will probably take a while for that to recover completely.  It's a shame, because my joints have been so good for a few years now, after decades of being not so good.  It's hard to take this, so to speak, step backward.  But that's not the reason I didn't go to Penna.  Just felt too far to travel for me at this time, and now I'm kind of glad I didn't, given how my knee is.

I also wanted to mention that I attended the All-Nations Pow-Wow at the International Tribal House in Oakland the weekend before last.  There was great drumming, singing and dancing, good vendors and food, and I would say it looked to me like a good time was had by all.  The energy of the group felt very familiar to me, but it was only the good stuff, as the atmosphere was un-tinctured by drugs or alcohol - rather it was just it's own peaceful, grounded feeling, that I often knew as a child in my early part-native-american environment.  I enjoyed it very much, and in many ways it made up for not being able to attend the lenape powwow. 

One of the things I've been coming into greater awareness of, is that I live in another native environment here, ohlone and other western tribes are amply represented here, and I want to be here spiritually as well as materially.  I'm feeling a greater resonance to this area than ever.  I think finding healing for my repressed lenape identification has helped me tremendously.

liquor laws/blue laws

anyone remember the blue laws? 

i've been reading in C.A. Weslager's book on the Delaware Indians that liquor laws were introduced very early in the delaware river valley to try to prevent sales of liquor to native americans who couldn't deal with alcohol.  of course, now science has shown that native americans completely lack the enzyme necessary to metabolize alcohol, which explains a lot.  but i just have to say that i had no idea that pennsylvania's liquor laws, blue laws as we used to call them, were in place mostly because of the native american population. 

later, others came to the area who may also have been perceived as needing these laws too, but by and large, most people were christians - even most of the native americans were eventually - so not working on sundays and other aspects of the blue laws were probably just fine and dandy with most folks.  my recollection, however, is that as a child i heard a LOT of complaining about the blue laws.  now of course they've been revoked.

today, it seems to me, intoxicant abuse can only be prevalent among people who are not happy with their lives.  doesn't that make sense?  poverty is usually a direct result of oppression and racism everywhere in the world, and i would say only secondarily a result of material lack - famines, lack of trade goods, and so on.  extreme poverty is more than likely a fairly strong condition for creating unhappiness, i would think. 

and also, of course, another strong predisposer towards alcoholism is genetic as well.  Even rich people, oppressors and the like, can become strung out on alcohol.  how can something so good also be something so bad?

tracks by louise erdrich

so far, this novel has been the most difficult of them all for me to read and enjoy.  partly because it is much more about the native community living out 'in the wilds' (on their allotment lands) in their traditional manner.  it's interesting, of course, but isn't something i relate to as much, personally, except in terms of the backpacking i've done.  also, i never enjoy reading about witchcraft - probably because it makes me feel anxious - and there is some of that in this book. there is an amazing moose-hunting scene, and i have to say louise erdrich makes another time and place come alive most convincingly.  history and anthropology never read better.   but i found it extremely difficult to see this family lose its land.  i knew all along that it was coming, and it was just wrenching and agonizing when it came.  still, i think that if i'm going to immerse myself in learning about this part of our history (and i find i can use the word 'our' in a very inclusive sense after all), there is nothing for it but to endure the pain.  the more i learn about our indigenous forms of spirituality - and i am grateful to my ancestors for guiding me back to them and showing me how to make the connections - the more i can see how they could - possibly - survive all that pain.  not that everyone has done so, by a long shot.  but i can see the way.  it is really quite amazing. 

now i am reading 'the crown of columbus,' a book Erdrich wrote with her former husband who is now deceased.  this book is interesting in a whole other way, and i'll write more about it when i've completed it.

history of bucks county/early spanish presence middle atlantic states

i'm finally reading 'the history of bucks county,' one of the resources i downloaded in the past two and a half years since i've begun researching my mother's family's background.  my great-great-great grandfather, william whittingham, is listed on the 1790 census as residing in bucks county.  his wife, rebecca livezey, is a descendent of the original Quaker Thomas Livezey, through his son Jonathan, who were 'First Proprietors' in Pennsylvania, so the history of bucks county is partially my family's history as well.  i'm interested in their history, and especially in the intersection with the local native american people which occurred, at the very least, when my great-grandfather, Alfred, married Mary Carney, a 'Moor' in 1872.  his parents were both deceased at that time, but alfred's brother refused to visit the home of alfred and mary, according to the civil war pension deposition filed on her behalf.

the so-called moor indians are usually given very little credence even for having existed in the past, so i've found it interesting to look into it a little.  i've found evidence for their existence in brewton berry's 1961 classic 'Almost White,' and also in 'Delaware's Forgotten Folk' by C.A. Weslager.  Weslager also wrote a book called 'The Delaware Indians' and in that book he states that the southernmost clans and bands, who spoke a Lenape (Algonquian) dialect similar to Unami, disappeared early by being absorbed into 'many peoples.'  In 'Delaware's Forgotten Folk,' Weslager makes the educated guess that the Moors were actually a remnant of the Lenape (Delaware) Indians, and I would assume he means the southern people, the Unalachtigo.  So, why was this remnant population known as 'the Moors'?

keeping all this in mind, it's interesting to read in different sources that there was a fairly strong Spanish presence all along the eastern coast of North America, at least as far north as the Hudson River as early as 1513 and throughout the 1500's.  In most of the American historical tradition and literature, a claim is made for the pre-eminent presence of the Dutch and English in these areas, but as we say, history is written by the victors, and I guess that's how the English wanted it to look.  An anti-Spanish, pro-Anglo bias has dominated American culture up until very recently, so I think it's important to keep that bias in mind.  Apparently, the Spanish - and their 'Moors' - were more present in the middle-Atlantic states than has been acknowledged up til now.

Paula Gunn Allen writes that Jamestown was situated 40 miles up-river in order to avoid Spanish ships as late as 1609.  According to the 'History of Bucks County,' the mouth of the Hudson River was first glimpsed by Verrazana in 1513, also a few years later by Stephanus Gomez who called it 'Rio de Gomez.'  "Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the service of the Dutch East-India company, discovered [for the English] Delaware bay August 28, 1609, but he made no attempt to ascend the river.  Captain Cornelius Jacobson May ascended the river some distance in 1614, and two years afterwards Captain Hendrickson discovered the Schuylkill.  In 1616 three Dutch traders struck across to the headwaters of the Delaware, down which they traveled to the Schuylkill.  Here they were captured by the Minquas (Susquehannas) but were rescued by Captain Hendrickson at the mouth of that river."  All of this takes place a full hundred years after the Spanish first began exploring the region.  The Spanish also had two aborted colonies in the Chesapeake Bay region in the 1500's.

Historical record shows that many people came to the area and it is likely that there were more whose recorded names have been lost to the corrosive effects of time or who were never noted down in records to begin with.  The people we have records of are mostly those who were associated with one of the big trading companies who were all excellent record-keepers.  "About 1624-25 the West India company established a trading house on a small island (in the Delaware River) just below Trenton Falls, and located upon it three or four families of French Walloons.  The post was broken up about 1627, and the Walloons returned to New York.  In March 1685 Peter Lawrensen stated in a deposition that he came into that provice a servant of the West India company in 1628 (and) that in 1631, he, with seven others, was sent into the Delaware, where the company had a traditing house, with ten or twelve servants attached to it; that he saw them settled there.  A considerable body of Waldenses and Huguenots were sent to the Delaware in 1656-1663, but it is not known what became of them."  These are just people we can keep some kind of track of, thanks to the written record of these trading companies, but how likely is it that there were more who did not come under the auspices of an official institution?

For example, between 1623 and 1634 there was a group known as "The Albion Knights" who settled along the Delaware.  "Colonists were actually introduced and made their homes on the Delaware, but neither the number nor exact location can be told." (p.9)  This group is sometimes referred to as 'Plowden's Colony.'  William Rawle, who has studied the colony, "believed that some of those who welcomed Penn to the shores of the Delaware, were the survivors of the Albion Knights." (p.10)

It's no secret that these early Europeans started mixing their stock in with the Indians.  "During the early period, the river of the Sickoneysincks at Lewes, Delaware, received a new and vulgar name - Hoeren Kill (Whore's Creek), "From the liberality of the Indians in generously volunteering their wives or daughters to our Netherlanders at that place." (p. 294, Weslager, Dutch Explorers) "Evidence of miscegenation was soon to be seen in some of the Delaware villages when dusky-skinned females gave birth to lighter-complexioned, blue-eyed infants.  The process of Europeanizing the Indians had a subtle beginning, and unplanned cross-breeding preceded the technological changes." (p.109 Weslager, The Delaware Indians)  This sharing of the bed was part of Indian hospitality.  The Europeans were, by and large, Christian men (with the exception of the early Moors in America) and due to Christianity's emphasis on the sacredness of virginity, and their patriarchal slant on monogamy, there was very little understanding of a society where sexuality could be more liberally shared. Certainly such an offer implied a very close tie, a real acceptance of the Dutch or the Moors into the tribal network, and not just 'casual sex' which was more likely to have been the assumption made by many of the sailors or their captains. The name the Dutch gave to Lewes reflects their distorted view of what was going on.  But the subject of sexual distortions in Christian society could be a lengthy discussion, as we all know by now.

If people-making was happening among the Dutch, why not also with the Moors? 

poetry of ancient/indigenous language

shelly de paul, a teacher of the lenape language in pennsylvania and online, has said that she finds the ancient languages powerful.  Words have power.  And that she began her study of lenape in order to write poetry. 

this is a sentiment I can definitely get behind.  i've also been wanting to find my poetic music in lenape.  i'm sure it will come.  in fact, it's already happening.

also, i've had a breakthrough in terms of communicating my feelings about my connection with the lenape.  i've been a bit sensitive to intimations on the part of 'others' that i may be a lenape wannabe, etcetera. 

what i've realized is that i've realized how much more our native heritage meant to my mother and my grandparents, and their parents.  it meant a lot to them, enough to keep it a secret from me, but to enjoy the secret secretly among themselves.  i've realized how much more it meant to me than i ever recognized or acknowledged, surrounded as i was by the land and the community of the lenape remnant in the philadelphia area. 

i can't not acknowledge that. 

not only have these realizations, recognitions and awakenings filled in many of the blanks in my story, but they have reduced my anxiety and my need to please others.  there's some way in which this experience has made me more whole, so it must be good.  therefore i will continue on this path.

that's simple, that's clear.  this clarity helps me.

'weli kishku' ~ have a nice day!

the beet queen by louise erdrich

this book is the sequel to Love Medicine and chronicles the tale of three children abandoned by their mother in a rather comical fashion, of how they separate and eventually come back together again over the course of forty years.  it also the story of three women and a child - two cousins, an in-law and her daughter - living in a farming village in north dakota.  the native americans in this story are more or less peripheral, yet powerfully portrayed, and there is one main character, the part-native gal, Celestine, who becomes an in-law to the two cousins.  while i didn't enjoy this novel as much as love medicine, i will say that l.e. writes at times some of the most outrageously funny material i've ever read, including the scene where Aunt Mary teaches her niece's first grade teacher a lesson, and another scene that must be the funniest death scene ever written (probably) - and not disrespectfully so - I would imagine the deceased would never have wanted it any other way.

love medicine by louise erdrich

i've just finished reading Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich.  this was her first novel, i believe, and as such, it is rather raw yet extremely beautiful and powerful at the same time.  this book has got to be a classic.

part of the reason i feel it has been so important for me to read, is because it's given me a chance to process a lot of my feelings about the native american element in my own life: my feelings of loss, because my life took me away from 'native america' for so many years and yet has brought me around full circle back to it.  so there is wonder, grief, regret, joy and appreciation in the experience for me.

also, this book allows me to vicariously live the life i might've lived - or something close to it, since our tribe does not have any reservations anymore - if my coloring had been a little different so that i was more obviously a part of our group, or if my mother had given me more instruction in the correct etiquette to observe.  i really do understand why she may have hesitated to tell me the truth in the first place.  you had to be there, perhaps, to know what i mean.  but the book allowed me to imagine what may have happened in the lives of Angie, Philip, the Hammonds, Andersons, Strausses and Moores.  It allowed me to remember Ronny R, Christine K, the Scul---ys, and others.  not that i would have wanted to have their lives, because, in fact, they were very difficult.  i've had my problems too, but i've also had the way out.

in the book, there is a character who doesn't know his parentage.  he's been adopted and raised by the woman who is really his great-aunt, a woman known for taking in strays.  the reader is clued in from the beginning as to who his mother is, so the reader knows he really is a part of the family, but the character doesn't learn the identities of his mother and father until the end of the book. his process, while somewhat different from mine, is also somewhat similar, and i found it helpful to walk through that process with him. 

one of the important lessons for me in his story is to recognize, along with him, that the child (of his mother) who was acknowledged has had a very tough road to tread, while he, who was her secret child, slipped under the radar and was allowed to live his own life, be his own self, and find his own way back to his parents and ultimately to himself.

i found the whole book really healing for me to read.  not always easy, by any means.  but extremely rewarding.  i highly recommend it to anyone interested in native american lives, or just in human life, or simply in the most masterful level of writing.

blended culture and sequelae

interesting conversation with a friend yesterday. Her family is from Kentucky and Ohio and has no memory of any native american ancestry, but as i shared with her my idea that because our white ancestors shared a history with the native peoples, some intermarriage and also a shared lifestyle, we have a different cultural development from what is euphemistically called the 'dominant white culture.' 

reading about native americans enlightens me as to the values and world-view of my own ancestors who were not primarily european-based in their orientation, neither were they 'indian-haters' or any other kind of 'white-supremacists.'  I still feel the person who has come closest to articulating who my ancestors were is Brewton Berry who wrote, "Almost White."  i see my ancestors as a blend of european-american and native american.  For example, we did not value autonomy as some kind of measure of maturity or character-development, but valued our kinship-based community first.  we adopted people into our families.  I remember a european-immigrant friend becoming absolutely livid that my cousins, aunts and uncles couldn't possibly be my cousins, aunts and uncles because they were not blood relatives.  Hey, we were short of blood relatives, so this seemed good to me, and i just accepted it as the way things were.  Yet something about it really offended my friend.  In her eyes, it was some sort of act of dishonesty.  As for my friend, I think maybe she and her family were confronting their own issues as immigrants, fears of no longer being 'a people.'  Nowadays they make annual trips back to the old country. 

actually, i find that the people most sympathetic with my point of view tend to be african-americans who seem to have no problem 'getting' that i have varied racial tributaries in my background, that I may look white but am not exactly.  even when i was a kid the african american kids would say things like, 'you don't seem white to me,' or 'you look white, but you don't act white.'  anyway, if i deny my native american ancestors it seems disrespectful to them.

i think part of the reason this is particularly a problem for me now is that i live in a different world from the one in which i grew up - and the older i grow, the more i realize i will be living in this world for the duration - a world in which there are a lot of upper middle-class whites, and a large number of asian-americans, hispanic-americans, african-americans, and both immigrants and foreign students (UC Berkeley) in that order.  by default it would seem that i ought to belong with the upper class whites, yet these are people whom i feel i do not understand.  so this is my problem. i'm supposed to belong to a group with whom i have nothing in common - my appearance places me there, and probably also my address.  my original family, both blood-ties and adopted, are for the most part deceased or live far away, so i am struggling to understand myself in this environment.  i feel so fortunate to have my partner who is from a similar background to mine and also from the same regional world.  we've carried our origins with us through being able to share our values, place- and people- memories, and so on.

right now i'm reading 'native american postcolonial psychology' by eduardo and bonnie duran.  they outline the importance of taking culture into consideration when working with native americans, and i find that what they write would apply to our people too.  this book is really helping me understand why i don't connect with so much in terms of the dominant expectations of behavior and thought in our world, even though I am perceived by most people to be white. 

My mother's mother's people were from the mountains of Pennsylvania, a former stronghold of native americans in our region.  I was brought up to believe they were Irish, but there is one of those 'Cherokee great-grandmother' myths floating on that side of the family that there is native blood.  However, I have only the most circumstantial evidence supporting that claim.  there is something to it, but just what, i don't know.

On the other hand, my mother's father's mother was definitely descended from the remnant of the Unalatchtigo Lenape people whose identity was watered down (and disguised) as 'Moor.'  'Moor Indians.'  Apparently the Unalatchtigo dialect was very similar to the Unami Lenape dialect that is currently being taught online out of both Oklahoma (land to which the Lenape were removed) and Pennsylvania (where a remant remained, marrying in with each other and European-Americans, accounting for why these Lenape look less Indian than the ones in Oklahoma who primarily married other native americans of varied tribes).
 
In any case, I am enjoying learning Lenape because it helps me to feel my connection to that land back there where I'm from.  I feel some kind of very deep connection to it, it's sort of like a language in itself to me, and the Lenape language feels to me like the original speech of the world - but maybe it's only like that for me and a smattering of other people, not for the whole world.  hard to believe, but possible.  *smile*

I'm also reading another excellent book called 'Yesterday's Self' about nostalgia, and how it can either hinder or help a person's adjustment to a new environment, as in the case of refugees, immigrants, exiles or people who, for whatever reason, have left an environment and culture that was very meaningful to them, for another new world that offers multiple difficulties in terms of identification and assimilation.  It's just really helpful to me to read a book that addresses issues of identity, since this is so up for me in this lifetime.