not native fruit

textured light

last night i watched a dvd called 'when the moors ruled europe.'  the info was good, nothing i haven't already read in 'ornament of the world' or other sources, but the IMAGERY was SPECTACULAR!  The film treats you to a visual stream that is simply indescribable, while at the same time you learn more about 'real' islam - for example it's phenomenal emphasis on education - and certain secrets about europe.  as i've been researching this area myself, i've become aware that many of the things i love best about christian culture - libraries, prayer gardens, contemplative poetry, the healing arts - were all done first and best by the andalusians (western/european muslims) and were, in fact, copied and emulated by christian european cultures during the late middle ages and beyond.

anyway, you all know i have written fairly extensively on my ancestors who were called 'moors' at least as late as the early twentieth century and who lived in delaware, south jersey and southeastern pennsylvania.  there is such a lot of controversy over what this term might really have meant, but i know that my line believed it had to do with a connection with morocco, and we had various 'atmospheric' elements around the house i grew up in which cultivated that awareness.  I wish I still had some of those things, which were left behind when we moved the household to california.  but here is synchronicity for you - there are elements about this house where we are living that are atmospherically reminiscent of my childhood home.  Not the same, but  similar enough. 

for example, this house has a wonderful play of light and darkness going on, similar to the effects of screens in islamic decor, and to the effects of blinds, curtains, textured glass and translucent glass which we used in my childhood home.  also, our little house here is loaded with texture, so the play of light and darkness and the various swirling textures combine to intensify this effect.  A friend of mine once said she found the light in our house a little dim - she prefers bright sunshine streaming in as many windows as possible, because of course that's always limited - but that sense of being shaded, as in a forest, as in a garden, is indeed a moorish ideal.  the house should offer a sense of protection and shelter from the brightness of the sun. 

the house is supposed to be 'spanish' in conception.  The style is usually called 'mediterranean bungalow' or 'berkeley bungalow.'  Ours has highly textured plaster walls.  This was a style popular in California in the 1920's and coincidentally enough my father was here at that time doing this kind of plastering, in which some, usually neutral, color was mixed with the plaster and then, while the plaster was being applied and textured, powdered paints of various colors were tossed in patches on the wall and then swirled over by the trowel, creating a wonderfully mottled effect.  I don't think my photos really do the textures of these walls justice, but I present what I have been able to muster.  Inadequate though these photos may be, i offer them to share some idea of the textured interior we live in, which feels so familiar and homey to me.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how easy it is to create 'wonders' when you have a lot of money.  at this time when money is less than it has been, i am reflecting that it is more interesting to me when someone can create something beautiful or interesting using minimal money but more creativity, innovation or originality.  or when something 'just happens' to come together, like our moving into this particular house - (which i initially did not really like!) - keeping the mottled walls, adding lace, getting used to the smaller size of the rooms - and then finding, over the years, that it has been perfect.  as the hindu prayer states, 'everything is perfect, and even when you take away a part of the perfect, perfection remains.' 

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.

daoist wisdom of the ordinary

Here is something I really liked from "Daoist texts with commentary by Thomas Cleary" (with my own comments in [ ] brackets). 

“Ordinary expressions and common sayings accord with the path of sages; you should turn to them for careful research.  If you use everyday activities to search in reverse, everything in the world turns to jewels.” [This reminds me of how I felt about the Book of Proverbs when I was 21-22.]

“The Tao is not far from people;  what people consider the Tao is far from people.  [This was true in Catholicism too.  People thought the mystics were so extraordinary that there was no way on earth we could have any of their experiences.  We grew up with that bias and discouragement.]  The Tao is essence and life is the eternal Tao, the eternal Tao is the Tao of daily life; it’s just that while people use it daily they do not know it.

“If you carefully investigate the principles, you do not need to read a thousand classics and ten thousand texts; there are great revelations of the celestial mechanism right in ordinary expressions and common sayings.  For example, good people are called really genuine, truthful, conscientious, reasonable, respectable, aware of proper proportion, aware of when to go forward and when to withdraw, circumspect, perceptive, having their feet on the ground; bad people are said to be inhuman, lacking conscience, and unreasonable – they hurt others to benefit themselves, are self-deceived, violate nature and reason, take suffering for pleasure, take the false for the real, pick up one thing and forget another, without knowing death and life, without knowing good and bad, only knowing one and not two, only aware of the existence of themselves and not that of others.”  (p. 156, The Taoist Classics, Volume Two, from ‘Understanding Reality.’)

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!

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.

embracing my heritage/ a mere strand of culture

when i attempt to embrace my native/moor heritage, i am embracing a lot of pain.  have i already mentioned this?  it means embracing the poverty we lived in, the second-class status among whites - read Brewton Berry's 1961 book 'Almost White' to gain more insight into those cultures and the kind of prejudice that kept them going - not to mention the constant wrangling among all the various shades of peoples with their unique stories of oppression.  a lot of this has not gone away yet. 

yes, i want to embrace all that was really so so good about my mother's values, but i recognize that there was this 'other side' to the whole experience.  it wasn't all about living peacefully, humbly, adopting people into our family circle, being good listeners and pray-ers and having internal and external visionary experiences (spiritual life), and a vivid relationship with nature and place.  there was also the fighting, the hatreds, and the jealousies that I believe my mother tried to protect me from by crafting a 'white' identity for me.  yes, my father was from denmark (from the lower classes in Denmark), but I knew nothing of 'denmark' other than my father, who saw himself as a part of the world, having lived among people of color since the age of fourteen.  i lived in the quasi-indigenous world of Germantown.  Even the Irish immigrant children there seemed to me not to belong, to be very different, and more 'white' than the rest of us. Then there was that stratum of 'our people' who seemed so comfortable there, sometimes angry, sometimes humorous and as accepting-on-the-surface as possible about the situation, and that was my world.

do i fit in anywhere?  no, not really because i look white but don't think white.  or to be more honest, i've spent most of my adult life trying to learn to 'think white' and I make a fair pass today, but feel alienated from most of that culture.  i don't usually 'fit in' anywhere, not even where I grew up either, except with a few individuals who cared for me.  i accept that (for the most part), and am appreciative and grateful towards those who can see me.  aren't we all?

on someone else's blog (2006)  who was saying how hard it is to be native american adopted by white lesbian parents and to be lesbian-transgender herself, a comment was posted to the effect that many people in america are in the same predicament of having lost their 'original' culture.  italian-americans, philipino-americans, russian-americans, german-americans, african-americans...people who have come here from various and varied backgrounds, even within a 'category' such as 'italians,' 'africans,' etc, and have created a 'sub-culture' here, yet eventually even that sub-culture is left behind for something else, and the 'original' culture feels more and more lost.

I guess, in our case, my husband's and mine, we have yet to find another culture to belong to.  we have not successfully evolved, perhaps, who knows?  we still resonate to a culture we have carried with us from our origins into the present time and place.  people meet us and think we are just the neatest white people, really different and grounded, but they don't realize we represent a particular cultural moment in time as it persists into the present. 

it's nice for me to connect, even if only electronically, with the lenape nation of pennsylvania, because i sense our 'culture' continuing on in them too.  in a way, this business of my learning lenape, and so forth, is a way of holding onto this cultural thread, this mere strand of culture, that still exists and is very real for me, yet on the verge of feeling as if slipping through my fingers.  this makes it real at least for a little while longer, perhaps for my lifetime, perhaps longer, as i know we all wish.  it allows me to become more aware of what I already know, sense and have experienced but without the right language to express it.  so for me it's very important.

I will soon be publishing another website that will deal with these ancestral, genealogical, ethnic and heritage issues exclusively, so maybe this blog can go back to being a sort of personal 'literary blog' which is how it started out.  The new blog will be called something like 'Great-grandmother Carney' or 'my delaware moor heritage.'  Not sure yet, but until then you can view the spud of it here.

Also, I recommend here the book "Native American Postcolonial Psychology" by Eduardo and Bonnie Duran, to learn more about native american people and their issues.

wm penn and lenapehocking

The Philadelphia Inquirer has just run an article on William Penn's 'Holy Experiment' aka 'The Peaceable Kingdom,' Penn's name for his vision of a harmonious European-Native American sharing of the land, which you can read here. 

I think this Pennsylvania dyad - Lenape versus Quaker - with all its karma, must have been a very powerful element in my great-grandparents' union in 1872, and perhaps also fueled the intensity of their impression on succeeding generations.  My great-grandfather, Alfred Whittingham, was a descendent of 'First Proprietor' Quakers who pushed the Indians off their land, albeit in a genteel manner. I have not been able to trace his grandfather William Whittingham past a 1759 birthdate, but I know that British Thomas Livezey, a great-grandfather of William's wife Rebecca, purchased his land directly from William Penn, and that he needed to live in town (Philadelphia) for some time before the Lenape - who must have felt most unfairly treated - had finally cleared off land they knew was theirs, but which William Penn believed had been sold to him, and which he in turn had sold to Thomas Livezey.

My great-grandmother was the descendent of Indians (and probably pirates of a Moorish caste, hence the surname Carney) who were known as Moor Indians, and according to Weslager were a remnant of southern Lenapes.  When my great-grandfather, Alfred, decided to 'do right' by Mary, he was shunned by family members, and I would guess also lost status in the community, which resulted in his no longer getting elected as county clerk.  He had lost a leg in the Civil War, but the local folks voted him in to the job of Clerk.  His wife went on record in the Pension File that he had asked her to keep their relationship under wraps until after he was elected the first time, so it is no secret that his liaison with her was unpopular.  They elected him twice more, perhaps out of pity for the poor cripple, but when he made it clear that he was going to live as husband-and-wife with the outcast, the elections ceased.  They had to survive on his pension and perhaps her needlework, which was artistic and expert, yet in the depositions, most neighbors denied knowing the couple 'well.'  They would only aver that they knew Alfred and Mary had set up housekeeping and were living as husband and wife, raising several children, over the course of more than twenty years.

People often say, well, just look at the wedding license to get genealogical information -but there was no wedding license until 1897, twenty-five years after the supposed marriage, and it was issued in Camden New Jersey, capital of government record-keeping known to be sympathetic to the Moors, and on it she was listed as Mary Whittingham. So, Mary Whittingham married Alfred Whittingham.  She wanted to keep her maiden name out of it.  The whole difficulty with her claiming the pension after his death was based on the fact that she was using an assumed name when she met my great-grandfather. She wanted her Moor Indian identity kept out of the proceedings (and out of her life), but she did mention it once in the hundred plus pages of the civil war pension file's depositions. 

Perhaps this is why I feel so driven to write about my great-grandparents, to re-hash so much of what happened, even in my own life, that relates to her presence in the family - because it was a Big Deal Once Upon A Time, although never acknowledged to me. In a certain way, I feel that Alfred Whittingham tried to bridge that gap between 'Quakers' (European invaders) and 'Indians' (in our case, 'Moors').  This couple tried to do the impossible, and faced a great deal of resistance, especially within the family.  My impression is that they were both very spiritual people, and they had that in common.  Yet he was literate and 'pedigreed' (or almost so - there is some question about the 'purity' of his great-grandmother, Lydia Roberts), while she was 'illiterate' and 'peculiar, almost as if she were foreign.'  They were both very formal, almost rigid about behavior.  If that sounds unlikely, in her case at least, I will mention that I recall Meridel Le Sueur described her Iroquois grandmother the same way.  In order to live down the stereotypes, some of these native women became more 'proper' than the 'properest.'  This part of the native-american story is not often told. 

By the time we get to my grandparents, I don't think the 'Indianness' was so much the issue - there are rumors of native blood on my grandmother's side as well, and she did have a traditional Lenape utility basket, although she could have bought that, but I don't think so - rather, the issue may have been that the elder woman, Mary, was from the southern clan of the Moor Indians, most likely Unalachtigo, rather than Unami or one of the more northern clans which were more likely to be part of Katie's family.  Even my husband's father once said, right before we were to be married, that those Unalachtigos were the ones you wanted to keep away from. (meaning me, I suppose)  So all sorts of clan rivalries may have played a role in my grandmother's sense of superiority towards her mother-in-law. 

My grandfather, Joseph, was a man who held within himself the perfect balance of 'exotic' (moor) and 'proper' (descended from Englishmen).  He was adored by his family, but tubercular, and died leaving his wife and daughter to sort out their color-issues without the benefit of his halo of respectability or the warmth and mischievous humor of his native blood, which my mother remembered so fondly. The appellation of 'Moor' implies an African origin, even though most likely it was pirate rather than slave.  There were many many antipathies among these small splintered remnants of conquered peoples mixed with the blood of the oppressor, and with each other.  I think my mother's frustration with these endless divisions were part of what prompted her to try to opt for the white-identity, especially for me.  Just to get me out of it.  It didn't entirely work, however, since I still lived in a mixed-race environment in which I was elected to play the white role, not a very popular part, and  I'm still not sure how successful my performance was. 

The point is, there still seems to be work to be done on these issues that were a part of my mother's family, and it seems in addition that I am the person who needs to do it.

lenape nation of pennsylvania/writings of Mabel Dodge Luhan

Reading essays from "At Home on the Earth."  Discovered Meridel Le Sueur, whose essay "The Ancient Peoples and the Newly Come" was very moving to me.  I haven't read much about the mid-west.  It's always amazing to me that people often think I'm from the mid-west - and it's true my father was Scandinavian, but not a farmer, rather a seaman from Denmark, and he wanted to keep as close to the sea as possible! - was not a land-lubber at heart by a long-shot.  So he settled along the Delaware River, near its mouth in Delaware Bay.  He liked the semi-indigenous people of that region.  By the way, if you'd like to see a wonderful video produced by the University of Pennsylvania about the Lenape people, called the Prophecy of the Fourth Crow, click here.  It's a YouTube kind of thing and lasts about six minutes.

The people pictured would be the native people of our area.  I cannot become a tribal member because I can't prove my ancestral relationship to the tribe, but that is all right.  There are many of us who can't make the paper trail connections, but we know what our heritage is.  Even if I didn't have ancestors from the local native american mix (Nanticoke, Powhatan, Lenape, Shawnee, Mohawk, Seneca, Susquehannah, etc) I could still be a 'Friend' of the Natives because it was the culture I grew up in.  I could not agree more with the motto of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, "Lenape Culture - The Root of Pennsylvania."  For me, this is true.  For me this is the root of the culture I was brought up in, although we labored to assimilate into what we thought was white culture.  We had a sort of 'dual' culture, but the root culture was Indian.

Yesterday, I remembered a doll that came briefly into my hands.  Let me tell a little story here: in our neighborhood a number of my friends had cloth dolls that were black girls on  one side and white girls on the other.  Or dolls that you could turn upside down to make black or white, each with a different pretty skirt.  My husband says he's never seen a doll like that, but he didn't have sisters.  I'm just assuming these dolls were all over, but maybe not.  Who knows? Did you have a doll like that?  Do you still have it?  Anyway, I told my mother I wanted a doll like that, and she said she thought she might have something like that on hand - not exactly the same, but similar - and she produced a small, poorly made cloth doll that frightened me.  On the back of the doll's head, if you pushed the hair aside, there was a small brown face.  It really scared me!  I didn't like the doll, and after not too long a time, it disappeared from my stash.  Don't know what happened to it, but my mother seemed keen on 'getting rid' of things that related to the other cultures we were part of. 

Anyway, can you imagine my surprise when I read about the first doll pictured at the University of Pennsylvania exhibit on the Lenni Lenape?

Anyway, the realizations, etc, keep coming although at a slower pace.  I've begun studying the Lenape Language - also a feature offered by the Lenape Nation of Penna website.I think I've mentioned before how much my mother loved the various native words that were part of our street names, etc, in Philadelphia, and I have found that the sound of spoken Lenape resonates inside me very deeply.  I'm thrilled to have found a venue to study it more.

I've been thinking of my father, and how he fell in love with the people of our area, and married my mother and produced me, when I just happened to read another essay in "At Home on this Earth," this one by Mabel Dodge Luhan who was a wealthy back-Easterner - she felt great discontentment with her own 'native' culture and went through three marriages before she discovered New Mexico, fell in love with a Pueblo Indian named Tony Luhan, married him and lived with him there for forty years until her death.  I love some of the things she writes about the Pueblo, because this is exactly what I found in so many of the people I grew up around: "The Indians all fell into their own soft speech together, a language that was a blending of outdoor sounds, like running water and the wind in the trees, but that was particularly musical from the kindness in it, often falling into tenderness that was very caressing to the ear.  There always seemed to be this loving kindness in them, not sentimental at all but the expression of the smooth concord of their lives."

Mabel Dodge Luhan struggles in this scene to experience the world 'directly,' not through the mediation of the 'great works of art' that she felt sepated her from her own experience of nature.  She writes, "It had begun to appear to me that there had always been a barrier between oneself and direct experience; the barrier of other people's awarenesses and perceptions translated into words or paint or music, and forever confronting one, never leaving one free to know anything for oneself, or to discover the true essence in anything.

"This landscape made me think of a painting by Constable with its thick, soft, faraway clumps of trees, and then I was impatient because I did not want to connect this new world with the old.  I wanted it to be itself alone and not a part of any past I had ever known.  I did not want to be reminded of old familiar things.

"The grassy banks of the ice-cold pale water were as untouched as though no one had ever been there before; no footprints, no vestige of humankind, marred that empty hermitage.  Tall trees stood with their trunks plunging deep into the grass and white violets and wild strawberries were thick in the cool shade.  Everything in this garden was composed like poetry, and romantic like poetry may be.  'Shakespearian,' I thought, and then quickly dismissed the analogy.  Was one to be forever reminded of something else and never to experience anything in itself at first hand?  My mind seemed to me a waste-basket of the world, full of scraps that I wanted to throw away and couldn't.  I longed for an immersion in some strong solution that would wipe out forever the world I had known so I could savor, as though it were all there was to savor, this life of natural beauty and clarity that has never been strained into Art or Literature.  No - everything in the world outside had been distilled into art, defined by ruthless, restless, wordmongers, or other artists in transformation, and they had used it all up.  I did not want that old world any more.  I knew unless I found a new fare I would admit 'actum est' and give up."

Interesting to me, because I went through this exact same phase when I was younger and discovered the wastes of the California desert east of the Sierra, and of Nevada.  I associated this 'awakening to what is' with a spiritual change in myself, less as an aesthetic change, and also interestingly, I associated this change with my husband, whom we had reason to believe was part-Indian (Lenape, like me), and with the natural environment of California with its empty miles of seacoast, its grassy hills, granite mountains and its high desert terrain.  His consciousness seemed already capable of appreciating an environment that to my mind, distorted as it was, was nothing but empty desert or wilderness.  (My mind was 'distorted' by the stereotypes of the mainstream culture of my time, which had no appreciation for desert-terrain, thought it was okay to blow up atomic bombs in it, even though there were people living nearby, not to mention animals and plant eco-systems.  During this period, I lived a kind of 'double life' - what I really felt inside, and what I felt obliged to express and engage in in the outside world.)  I'm finding that as I embrace my innate Lenape cultural-consciousness - and flesh it out by familiarizing myself with the culture as it has been preserved by those who never forgot their true identity - I feel more 'oneness' within myself. 

Well, I hope you can see how the flow of this post holds together.  Wanishi! :-)