Oh sweet pleasure, I have two days off in a row. Chef too has several days off in a row, the most he’s had in years, and has declared that he needs a project. I offered to let him clean and paint my office but he declined. Instead of laying around like a seal, like I very well ought to be, housework is on the mind.
It’s up to me, I suppose, to pick up after myself even if my work will be immediately undone unless I board the cats and leave the house for a week. I have been out of college for almost a year now — eleven months, actually — and I’m just now getting into a real routine around the house. Just this week I’ve discovered the joys of a made bed, realized that I’m now completely anal about clean kitchen countertops, and actually folded and put clean clothes into drawers. It never appears that I practice any sort of cleaning routine, but I swear! I do! For years my housecleaning routine consisted of dishes a few times a week, some laundry here and there, and a thorough cleaning of all bathrooms once a week. Other than keeping Ethan’s room as spotless as possible, no mas.
I attribute my new dedication to housework to my lack of blogging. We are all FRT all the time.
***
Another responsibility I fulfilled this week, this one I feel weird about. Well, if you have children, you do lots of things that don’t jive with your stated beliefs and you thereby deign yourself a hapless philosophical loser and leave books around the house so your kids can correct your mistakes later. A couple of weeks ago a paper was sent home informing parents that the children are to dress as a) pilgrims, or b) indians on the day before Thanksgiving. Now, I did this in my Montessori school in the 1980s and there exists this interesting little picture of five-year-old me with a four-year-old friend, me dressed as generic “indian” with my friend as a little “pilgrim.” I’m a white “indian,” my friend is a black “pilgrim,” and this passed for multiculturalism in the ’80s. So there you go.
It surprised me that E’s public elementary school was going this route, although Thanksgiving is technically a secular holiday and thus completely within legal boundaries. Call me weird, but I feel uneasy celebrating a holiday that lumps all indigenous americans into a murky category, and celebrates their kindnesses to us white immigrants when our thank you letter to them was composed with gunfire, rape, and slaughter. Silly hippie, history’s not for kids.
My mom started the costume for us by cutting a vest out of a paper bag that we were to decorate later. Due to previous responsibilities, Chef and I ended up decorating this vest at 11pm over wine. We looked up various tribal symbols on the internet and drew them over the corporate advertising in magic marker and changed the CVS Pharmacy logo into an unidentifiable weapon, an arrow, and a snake.
“Is that a headband?”
“What should I put on it?”
“‘My Mom Is Ashamed of This Costume’.”
“‘White Pride’.”
“That’s not funny. How about ‘Yellow Pride’?”
“‘Brown Pride’.”
“An Adidas symbol.”
“Nike.”
“Isn’t the drugstore logo enough?”
“I wonder how many kids will show up in Pilgrim costumes? Cracker-ass crackers.”
“Should we make feathers for this thing?” I held up the headband.
“Oh god, this is awful.”
We live just a few miles from the Battle of Tippecanoe site. Heard of “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”? William Henry Harrison, past president and namesake of my high school, ran for President of the United States during the election of 1840 using that slogan to remind people of his heroism during the battle against the Shawnee, the battle that crushed Tecumseh’s dream of a united Indian confederacy that would have united tribal societies in a mutual defense of their land and culture.
[Tecumseh's brother, known as The Prophet, is the originator of the Prophet's curse, which dooms every U.S. president elected in a year that ends in zero to death in office. Reagan is the only president to have survived an assassination attempt that meets this qualification, and G.W. Bush, well, he's still in office. Take one for the team, somebody.]
Every year my town hosts The Feast of the Hunter’s Moon, a reenactment festival at Fourt Ouiatenon, that has slowly become a little less mindful of the native population and way more respresentative of the white folks that eventually settled the area. The last time I attended I remarked that we were really at Honkyfest 2005. When I was a kid there were a ton of people that dressed in full tribal costume and represented tribes from all over the area, not just the Shawnee. Now it seems that the French fur trade and early midwest settler costume is far more popular in this reenactment crowd, for some reason.
I’m a bit cynical of tribal representations in this area, barring whether or not the school discusses the relationships between parties during the first Thanksgiving era. In my opinion we can’t just talk about how everyone was awesome and we all got along and rejoiced together with our cornucopia of intercultural peace, love and happiness, because in a few years the pilgrims’ ancestors would turn nativist and demand that these evil, barbaric tribes would have to go. We don’t get to dismiss the European role, and later the American government’s role, in the depopulation of native Americans by dressing up as quaint bearers of nice gifts. The question is how to discuss this appropriately with children. Dressed as pilgrims and indians.
Photos of the boy??
How do chefs get holidays off?
Shift-trading.
speaking of Thanksgiving and historical revision, you’ll like this.
newspaper people never get long Thanksgiving/Christmas holidays. It’s Harvest time.
RE. Agi’s link: I have “Lies My Teacher Told Me” if you ever want to borrow it. I also have Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and “Voices from…” whatever the title is to that one. The first is quite above E’s reading level (although I know he’s awesome!), but you could always translate it for him, and it would help you to supplement his meager history lessons from school as written and edited by [Harcourt/Holt, Houghton Mifflin, Mc-Graw-Hill, Pearons/Core, etc.] elementary social studies textbook corporations. Remember the shitty half-assed, chock full o’ lies history we received? Yeah, nothing’s changed.
I’m thinking the first step would be to stop having the children with inadequate history knowledge dress up as either/or. Really. What the fuck.
Then, start with learning the local area’s history and which tribes/groups were here before the White Man. Followed by a landmass-wide review of the many, many tribes/groups/cultures. Moving into a lesson on, as you said, the wholesale rape and slaughter (i.e. genocide) of the native peoples and their cultures.
Barolome de Las Casas’ “Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies”, which I also have, is also worth checking out.
And I also have Charles C. Mann’s “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus”, which is more anthropological regarding what this land and its peoples were like (’advanced’, even urbanized) before the White Man came and decided to say it was empty and the peoples ‘primitive’.
E’s teacher should be taking this time to instruct actual history, not glazing it over with a sugar coated fra-la-la dress-up day of ignorance and insensitivity. For shame.
I have both Lies My Teacher Told Me and Zinn’s work — I read lies in high school and Zinn just last year, actually. Several other related books on the shelves I haven’t gotten to yet.
Oh, but we have 4th grade Indiana history! It’s a state standard! Don’t you remember discussing all of that?! /snark
E’s teacher should be taking this time to instruct actual history, not glazing it over with a sugar coated fra-la-la dress-up day of ignorance and insensitivity. For shame.
And in Ethan’s teacher’s defense (I have no complaint with her teaching), it’s school-wide. I can always supplement.
Wrong colony, I know, but slap a scarlet A on his chest and see who gets it.
slap a scarlet A on his chest and see who gets it.
Ha! Next year, for sure.
I was thinking on the South Asian tip, but then it’s mean to make one’s kids an unwitting participant in the parent’s political diatribes.
Well, on the curse front, he wasn’t *elected* to office in 2000, so maybe he’s been dodging it on that technicality.
As for the costume, you’ve got me thinking about these plush toys my SIL got us for Christmas last year - they’re of different diseases, and we got The Plague. I can just imagine getting Smallpox,and sending my wee one into school with it attached to a blanket. Tactile learning!
Augustlet is still young enough for the conversation to go this way:
“Look, dad (pointing at a picture), an Indian!”
“A Native American.”
“Oh.”
“Both terms mean the same thing, but one is more polite than the other.”
“Oh, okay. I’m still going to call them Indians, though.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Oookay.”
I have a suggestion. How about calling around to say, native studies programs at your nearest university or college, reservations band councils (if that’s what you call them there), Native Friendship Centres in cities (what we call urban native community groups here) and asking for a native person, student, elder, woman, to come and talk to: the parent/teacher association (if that’s what you call…), or if you can jump right to it, finding a teacher who would be receptive to having a native person come in, at about grade 6 or 8, where they would respond well to the opportunity. Likely. It doesn’t have to be done for Thanksgiving.
P.S. Children who get their ideas about natives from the movies, tv, or the kinds of programs you describe, are often very surprised to meet native people who look, act, speak and dress just like them (if a little darker).