A National Day of Mourning

"The pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of
Cape Cod for four days before they had robbed
the graves of my ancestors and stolen their
corn and beans."
-------Frank James, known in the Wampanoag Tribe as Wampsutta


Not a day to give thanks, but a National Day of Mourning for the
Native Americans.

In 1970, James was invited to speak at the annual Thanksgiving feast by
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. When festival organizers learned
that James's speech was an angry recounting of the treachery of the
pilgrims, an outcry against the genocide of the Wampanoags, they
refused to let him speak. He left the dinner and went to the statue of
Massasoit, Sachem of the Wampanoags, and gave his speech to 7 or 8
Indians and supporters.

Every year since then on Thanksgiving Day, Native Americans and their
supporters gather at the top of Cole's Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock
to observe the National Day of Mourning.

And every year. in schoolhouses all over the country, children enact
a simplistic, distorted pageant of kindly, virtuous pilgrims and
friendly Indians getting together for a meal which set the tradition
for the first Thanksgiving.

According to Indian sources, the meeting was about the Pilgrims
wanting to acquire land, the Wampanoags had the food for their own
traditional fall feast and brought it along.
See the Native Americans' Bureau of White Affairs.

Two hundred years later, there was no pretense of friendly meetings
when the Cherokees were driven out of Georgia. They were living in
houses, schooling their children, had their own printing press, and
were considered no threat to anyone. But those in power coveted
their land.

In 1931, Nancy Callahan Dollar, better known as Granny Dollar, died
on Lookout Mountain at the age of 105. Her father, William Callahan,
a full-blooded Cherokee, was one of several who escaped the infamous
Trail of Tears by hiding out in caves on the mountain.

There were men on the mountains who would not fight for the Confederacy
and slavery, and before that there were mountain people who would not
turn in the escaped Cherokees, but welcomed them as neighbors. And
there were men who stole their lands, forcing those who survived the
terrible march and those who escaped to start all over again.

Thanksgiving- Feast or Fast?

Thanksgiving is not a day of celebration for Native Americans, as Robert Jensen
points out in the article below. Jensen is a journalism professor at the University
of Texas at Austin. The article was posted by The Alternative Press Review on
November 21, 2005.

Give Thanks No More; It’s Time for a National Day of Atonement

By Robert Jensen

One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the
replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting
with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective
collective fasting.

In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they
have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning
in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock,
Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the
Americas.

Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday
impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most
Americans into apoplectic fits -- which speaks volumes about our historical
hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United
States.

That the world’s great powers achieved “greatness” through criminal brutality
on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies are reluctant
to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable.

But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin -- the
genocide of indigenous people -- is of special importance today. It’s now
routine -- even among conservative commentators -- to describe the United
States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently
benevolent one. Because all our history contradicts that claim, history must be
twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful.

One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving
at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we Americans hear a
story about the hearty Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from
England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians,
they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in
1621 following the Pilgrims' first winter.

Some aspects of the conventional story are true

Read More

Consider the Lilies

Every year I think of all the things I want to do when spring comes, hundreds of
projects I can never accomplish. This year I failed miserably, and therefore
lucked out. If I had started the orchard on the Menlo lot, added another garden
bed and three or four more planters here, my efforts would have been wasted
because of the searing heat and drought this past summer.

I carried bucket after bucket of water to the straggly bachelor buttons I had
started from seed and was rewarded with only a bloom now and then, seldom
more than two flowers at the same time. I would have liked a dense bed of
them, for the flowers were blue and there don't seem to be many truly blue
flowers, most are tinged with enough red to make them more lavender than
blue.

But all through the heat and drought the wildflowers bloomed and bloomed
with no one tending them. Their leaves sometimes wilted a bit when the sun
had blazed down all day, but would recover by the next morning.

Consider the lilies of the field....

No lilies, no fields, but thickets of wild touch-me-not grew on the banks of the
dry creek bed, more than any previous year. Their orange flowers shaped like
little cornucopias drew hummingbirds, delightful to observe. Once I watched
from the bank as two of the tiny birds fought over one patch of blossoms.
One hung in the air against his blur of wings, a tiny guard claiming those blooms
as his own, darting forth to attack the other who hovered near and would not
give up.


The common name of this plant is jewel weed, probably because of the
translucent yellow-green and pinkish stems. The juice from the stalk is
considered an antidote for poison oak. It is called wild touch-me-not
because its sickle-shaped seeds burst open at a touch when dry.
Orange is another minority color among the flowers.

There were also lots of wild sunflowers, the flowers much smaller than the
cultivated kind, but tall and cheerful massed along the creek bank, making
my walks along the dry bed most pleasant. Down near the bridge tall stalks
of bright purple ironweed accented the yellow sunflowers.

Joe pye weed with clusters of small pink or white flowers grew along the
pasture fence and on the ditch bank by the road, the little florets at first
distinct, then becoming ragged as the summer wore on, so that from the
distance they appeared to be a fuzzy mass.


It was a delight to come upon an occasional cardinal flower with its
notched crimson petals, usually only one and usually low on the bank,
but occasionally two, side by side. The same with the lobelias, their
hooded blossoms providing another example of really blue flowers.

My mother used to laugh when she saw a flower described in the Field
Guide to Wildflowers as "escaped". She said she had visions of flowers
running down the road with gardeners in hot pursuit.

The Term "escaped" meant the identified wildflowers had also been
cultivated.I wanted to reverse the process and wished I had saved seeds
from the cardinals and lobelias. I had bought a small pot of lobelias, the
kind with prostrate stems that hung over the sides of the pot. It bloomed
continuously all summer, lovely little blue flowers with the distinctive hoods.
The plastic tag identified it as an annual; the tall wild lobelias survive the
winters and bloom again.

But this past summer it was too hot even after the sun went down to do
much work outside, it was all I could do to keep the grass cut. I couldn't
bear to think of building planters or making more flower beds, and the
"escaped" flowers would have to be confined so that I could mow around
them.

A few years ago, there were only a few stalks of jewel weed here and there.
Now there are thickets, and there are small clumps of them all up and down
the creek.I can hope that the cardinals and lobelias will likewise spread.

And next spring I would... But that is the cry of all gardeners who dream
over seed catalogues throughout the fall and winter. Next spring, next year.....

Red and Blue Splotches on a Solid Pink State

After the recent election, the New York Times showed Georgia as a solid
pink state, meaning it was held by the Republicans, with no gains by either
party. As the Times was only concerned with the major offices, the governors,
senators, and members of congress, this was true from their viewpoint. But as
the people who live in the state find their lives affected by holders of all the
offices, it wasn't exactly true.

Republican Governor Sonny Perdue was re-elected, the voters also elected
the state's first Republican lieutenant governor, and, for the first time, a
Republican received the majority of votes cast in Chattooga County in a
race for state senator, all a cause for rejoicing by the local Republican Party.

There was another race that was very important in this small area of Georgia,
and should be important to the entire country.

About two years ago, just before the last election, the local offices of State
Court Judge and Solicitor General became vacant. The local newspaper
published the names of candidates for the offices, which are non-partisan, but
the two most well-known candidates were both Democrats, and both had a
good chance of winning. Governor Perdue stepped in and, according to a law
which allows him to do so, appointed two Republicans to fill the vacancies,
thereby taking the decision away from the voters.

The Perdue appointees, both decent, competent men, had to run for re-
election this year, and both lost- to two Democrats, including one of those
who had tried to be a candidate two years ago. In the interim he had been
convicted of Driving Under the Influence, and the State Court Judge he
defeated had been instrumental in setting up a drug court, intended to help
first offenders of drug and alcohol abuse get into rehabilitation programs.
Even with this blot on his record, and even though there were more votes
for Republicans than Democrats in most of the other contests, he and the
other Democrat won.

There were constant reminders that elections for these two offices were
non-partisan. But Perdue had made them partisan by appointing Republicans.
Some of the Republicans in the county voted Democrat, and voted in a judge
with a DUI conviction, because that was the only way to show Perdue that it
was wrong to take away the people's right to vote.

The Supreme Court's overturning the Georgia law requiring that voters present
a driver's license in order to vote was also a people's victory. This smacked of
the old poll tax which was intended to keep Blacks from voting, but which also
kept many poor whites away from the polls. Those who make Georgia's laws
did not seem to care that many poor and elderly people do not drive. Now the
some 17 documents that can be presented as proof of a voter's identity include
rent receipts, utility bills, birth certificates. It's a shame that it still takes a fight
through the courts to preserve the right of everyone to vote.

A Fairyland of Lights

It happens every September.
I will walk down by the creek one night and there are hundreds of tiny
bluish-white lights dotting the banks, the sandbars, and even in the grass
near the water.

The first time I saw them it was one of those late evenings when I was
burning brush and waste paper and at the same time cooking what I call
a trash fire supper. Burning the trash- a necessary task- leaves beneficial
ashes for the garden beds and provides me with a delicious meal, usually
potatoes baked in the embers, they bake to mealy goodness best when those
aluminum nails are run through them, and sometimes thin little steaks rubbed
with butter and garlic, and usually a pig's foot or hunk of backbone for Buckie,
who also gets one of the potatoes.

While waiting for the potatoes to finish cooking, I walked over to the creek
bank. Even on fall nights before it turns too cold there is a chance of seeing
one of the elusive water snakes gliding along. No snakes this night, but I saw
something glittering at the water's edge.At first I thought it must be broken
glass reflecting the fire's light, so I started down the bank, planning to pick it
up. And found myself surrounded by a fairyland of lights. I turned off the
flashlight and just stood there breathing.

Finally, after what seemed long time of stillness, I moved cautiously forward,
not wanting to step on the lights. But they would go out when I walked near
them, no matter how carefully I stepped. Sometimes, as I stood watching,
many of the lights further away from me would disappear, but when I swept
the banks with the flashlight then turned it off, they would come back on,
shining steadily, as if in response to my light.

My quest to learn what they are was hampered for a long time because
I assumed they were some type of crustacean. I had forgotten that
sometimes the way to knowledge is to first discard all preconceived
notions and set forth with an open mind. But when I learned there are
many bioluminescent marine creatures, but rarely any in fresh waters, I
was sure these must be some of the rare ones.

Then my youngest son, Andy, came to see the lights, and stood there,
delighted and awed. "I've been around creeks all my life, " he said,
"And I've never seen anything like this." He had to dig one out to see
what made the lights, and exclaimed, "Why, it's just a bug!"

Then I stopped seeing little crustaceans and began comparing them to
illustrations of bugs. I would never have thought of fireflies, for fireflies
have traffic-light yellow lights that blink off and on, and these were a more
pleasing greenish or bluish white that did not blink. But they are indeed
fireflies (Lampyridae), the lightning bugs of childhood, or rather it is the
firefly larva.

They are about an inch long. look flattened, mud or sand colored. Such
homely creatures to make this fairyland of lights. One theory is that they
burrow in damp earth because that is where their prey is, earthworms or
other small worms.

The light show by the creek usually lasts about two weeks. After the first
heavy rain there is only a scattering of lights. I don't know if the rain washes
most away or if they simply burrow deeper to prepare for the cold soon to
come. As the nights become colder, as usually soon happens following the
hard rain, the lights disappear altogether.

It is usually late May or early June when the mature fireflies rise up from the
grass and turn their yellow lights on and off and on throughout the summer nights.

It was in June when Gil and I brought our eight cats from Chicago about
three months after we started moving to North Georgia. Oscar, one of the
younger cats, was irritable from the long drive and wary of the strange
surroundings. He would stop complaining long enough to rise on his back
feet and bat at the low-flying fireflies.

Then I realized we hadn't had fireflies in Chicago. I was well aware that we
had never been able to see the stars. So on that June night we walked about
the yard with the cats beneath a starry sky with fireflies drifting lazily upward
around us.

That was when we were living in the house that burned last January. Gil, the
cats, and the house are all gone now. But the same sky full of visible stars
stretches overhead here, fireflies rise up from the grass on summer nights,
and every fall I can look forward to the fascinating light display their young
provide.