Other Trails

I'm reading a lot about Indians lately. I have a book in mind I want to write and spend some time letting go of it to clear my head, then researching everything I can get my hands on to see what might fit somehow. Read a hundred pages and get a paragraph out of it I want to use.

But these are all books I already own. I love reading. I have many things in my life and so do many different things, but the reading part of it sometimes seems insatiable. Just not enough time and energy to do what I seem to hunger for.

If you try to look at things objectively, Indians did their share of 'human' things. Meaning faults. But people that wanted their land, us, and also culture clash misunderstandings, we just blindly found fault with them and determined they didn't deserve their land as much as we did.

Again, I've seen this in other cultures. I appreciate tons of my own, I don't need to hate us. And when it really sunk in, I guess, is when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines, during the revolution that overthrew Marcos. It also was an unstable time about the U.S. Military bases there, and even the world price of sugarcane.

One of the things America did to keep the bases was to artificially inflate the price we gave for Philippine sugar. When suddenly the bases were gone and also our need to prop this price up, prices there tumbled dramatically. Filthy rich sugarcane plantations were on the verge of bankruptcy overnight. At the same time, the new administration of Cory Aquino instituted some land reforms. This divided up some of this plantation land to thousands of suddenly jobless sugarcane workers. But even that wasn't enough.

Mindanao had already been a 'newly' settled land, like the Old American West, with the Moslem inhabitants being the Indians, and the misplaced Christians from other islands being the cowboys. Some of the tugs and near civil wars were going on while I was in Mindanao. But when I was transferred to these plush sugarcane islands and the latest upheavals occured, I saw first hand some of the results.

These misplaced workers, even as Plantation workers lived a miserable life while the Plantation owners would fly to Manila for a party in their privately owned helicopters. But with the sudden depression, as hard as the Plantation owners had it, the workers, who at least had three hots and a cot before, basic securities, now were landless, jobless, and unskilled. And no Mindanao to take from the Indians.

Some of them went to another island that was rather unsettled. And they drove from the land, the local natives and were ruthless as they did so. Where they had been the 'victims' before, they were bloodthirsty bloodsuckers now.

There is just a trend here, in the world, in the universe. I don't need to hate my ancestors, I need to understand, to grow, to find a way.

I have encounters with people all the time, big things, little things. I react to them. I have my own version of moral codes and rights and wrongs to judge with. What I want to do is understand. Not just intellectually, though that can be an aid. How to limit the judging of others. It's there and probably should be, but the more you grow up, the more you understand, and the more you are judicious instead of just judging others.

'Judge not lest ye be judged'. Sometimes I almost think I know what that means. Not so much the revenge thing, but the mindset thing. If you live in that world, you are subject to its whims.

As I read about the American Indians, and my ancestries' encounters with them, I want to understand now. Human nature. God. That's what the book I hope to write is going to be about anyway. But boy, we did do the Indian a number. From the very beginning, right there with Mamoset meeting the Pilgrims, they had no idea that we were going to take over their whole world and the whole Continent, but they befriended us, traded with us, mutually beneficial. And we took took took and just considered them barbarians so why not.

We can come to grips with this. I don't need to see us as evil and them as purely victims. I want to understand. I want to see what God sees, as Albert Einstein once said. But in the meantime, my mortal eyes do often get in the way.

The Trail Of Tears

I had heard of the trail of tears before, of course, and the controversial removal of the so called five civilized tribes from their land by the administration of Andrew Jackson in the early nineteenth century.

My generation got their first glimpse of this sad history from Walt Disney when he introduced to us our first hero, Davy Crockett. I was one of those taken. John Lennon once said, before Elvis there was nothing. That's not quite true. In America, at least, for my generation, before Elvis, there was Davy Crockett, thanks to Walt Disney's six episode series of him in 1955.

According to Walt, Davy was railroaded out of Congress by his one time mentor and hero, Andrew Jackson. There is a certain link in that actually, though more to the story. There was also more to the story when Walt showed us Davy down in Florida fighting the Seminole (who wore buffalo skins, ha, in the tv series). You heard Davy explain to them that the great white father in Washington would take care of them and honor the treaties, violence was not the course of action to take.

Certain truths to all of that too. But when the great white father ended up being the very man that defeated them as a general, they ended up getting moved to Oklahoma. Every treaty in the book broken in the most in your face methods available, and few lost sleep over it. It was one of the most tragic episodes of a tragic history. My generation later remembered some of what Walt Disney taught us when we were school kids, and linked this with Vietnam and racism, etc. I could well understand much of the sentiment, though I wasn't one of them to hate my country for it.

The more I find out about the trail of tears the worse it comes out. This was greed at it's extreme worst. Maybe Hitler was worse. Maybe. Probably even.

Probably the most 'civilized' of the civilized tribes were the Cherokee. I'm part Cherokee as are a lot I know. My great Uncle Sam on my mother's side was even a half breed.

Before the pale faces arrived they were already pretty civilized. They farmed. They were fierce warriors, but they pretty much were settled down and domesticated. When they found themselves faced with the European settlers, they even used European methods to educate themselves, even forming a vernacular alphabet for their language. They taught themselves to read and write.

Not only Crockett lived and liked the Indians, especially the Cherokee, but Sam Houston lived with them several times in his life and loved them. He even lived with them some as a refuge when he was an adult, even after becoming governor of Tennessee, before moving on to Texas. Same with Crockett. They loved them and had consciences and confronted their mentor Jackson, which was a major reason they moved on to Texas, over this very thing.

The Cherokee didn't budge when the edict was ordered about moving to Oklahoma. They were refined, educated, domesticated and peaceful. They had made and honored their treaties with the United States government. But hard times and expansionists sentiments made white settlers want their plush lands.

The leader of the Cherokees was a lawyer named John Ross. He took these treaties to court. It went all the way to John Marshall's supreme court with Marshall and his cohorts siding with the Cherokee. Andrew Jackson remarked, Marshall can take any side of an issue he wants, I'd like to see him enforce it. Then President Jackson forced them out as well. One fourth of the Cherokee died on this trail of tears.

I still love America and even Andrew Jackson. I'm not naive or wrong for doing so. I did so even as I read all of this history again as I helped my youngest son study his social studies. I was glad it was in his book. I would resent it if it was just some method to get us all to hate ourselves and our past. But it is something to come to grips with.

Many of the same peoples that such as the trail of tears happened to, such as the Mormons among the white settlers in this country, and landless people I saw when I was in the Peace Corps in the Philippines, later did this very thing themselves to others. They were victims, and then created other victims. Even the Cherokee and other Indian tribes when they got to Oklahoma, took on black slaves and many even fought for the Confederacy as slaveholders. One of the biggest reasons for the Jim Crow laws actually in the southern states, wasn't just for cheap labor needed to abet the economy, the Jim Crow laws stymied the economy, as did slavery. The biggest reason for them was needing a dog to kick. Greed can be a reason, but usually it is needing scapegoats and pecking orders. It happens in a lot of places and events.

So, as history, for learning and for knowing what to do with it, I was very glad to read about the trail of tears in my son's text books. It was not an attempt to get him to hate his heritage, but to grow and learn and improve things.