dual personalities

This November, we celebrate Native American Heritage Month, a time to honor the history, culture, and traditions of Native Americans past and present.

On September 28, 1915, President Calvin Coolidge issued a proclamation that resulted in the first Native American heritage celebration in the United States; he declared the second Saturday of each May as American Indian Day. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush approved a joint resolution designating November as National American Indian Heritage Month.

We will try to be more respectful in our celebrations this month than might be suggested from our entertaining, but culturally appropriative, singing of “Ugga Wugga Wigwam” to the wee babes the other night.

Perhaps we will watch the final season of Longmire, which premiers next Friday.

But I doubt it. Since reading all the books last summer, I am loathe to watch the show, because in my opinion, the video version and its ridiculous story lines do not compare positively to the books. I mean, there is no torture of people (Indian or white) in the books (see trailer)! There is no evil Indian bad guy in the books! And I’m sorry, Walt is a lot smarter in the books! Furthermore, Walt has a good relationship with the Cheyenne in the books, not the relationship fraught with drama portrayed on the tv series. All the racial unrest on the show is inserted to heighten the drama and that drives me crazy. Ugh.

We’ll have to think of something to do to celebrate Native American Heritage Month, such as visit one of the various American Indian sites throughout our state. There are several–for instance, I did not know there is a restored and authentically finished 1790-1815 French and Indian trading post and village, at Fort Charrette Village and Museum, 10 minutes east of Washington, Missouri. The fort includes five log houses, one of which is believed to be the oldest log house west of the Mississippi River. All are furnished with 1700s American antiques. There is even a winery nearby!

In the meantime, here is something beautiful and perceptive from Willa Cather:

“It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it. The Hopi villages that were set upon rock mesas were made to look like the rock on which they sat, were imperceptible at a distance. …

In the working of silver or drilling of turquoise the Indians had exhaustless patience; upon their blankets and belts and ceremonial robes they lavished their skill and pains. But their conception of decoration did not extend to the landscape. They seemed to have none of the European’s desire to “master” nature, to arrange and re-create. They spent their ingenuity in the other direction; in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves. This was not so much from indolence, the Bishop thought, as from an inherited caution and respect. It was as if the great country were asleep, and they wished to carry on their lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse. When they hunted, it was with the same discretion; an Indian hunt was never a slaughter. They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.”

—Death Comes for the Archbishop

Ruins of Hopi Trading Post by James Swinnerton (1875–1974)

Thomas Moran (1837–1926)

Thomas Moran (American, 1837 – 1926) -“Hopi Museum, Arizona”, 1916

*Pony That Walks in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)