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Wild Indigenous Cab Ride, KevinAThompson
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The first 3-D movie I ever saw was Avatar. Yes, the first one. And at an IMAX theater to boot. It was truly awesome. Also, I had not seen any give-the-whole-plot-away trailers or spoken to anyone who had seen it. I saw it fresh and virginal. It was a long movie and I did not want it to end. I liked being in that universe I did not want to leave. I as into it, really.
Okay, I was kind of flattered that director James Cameron had chosen Native, Black and Afro-Latino actors to portray the blue people, the Na'vi.
It was accurate that the industrialized world's quest for resources is central to the displacement of the Na've people, not just in history, this kind of thing is going on right now in the Amazon and the Niger Delta. In that sense, Avatar is not about the future but about the present.
But I have my misgivings about this supposedly sympathetic portrayal of indigenous people. Cameron could have made them more like earthlings, instead they are ten feet tall and have tails that can plug into other organisms with which they share the Pandora moon. This makes them superhuman, but also unhuman. Cameron could have made them more like Star Trek's Vulcans, basically human with a small difference, like pointy ears, to show that they were really just a different version of "us." The analogy between human/vulcan and ethnicities is easy to make, because Vulcans are still more like us than different.
Frankly, I was slightly put off by Indigenous people being likened to non-humans. I don't see how Cameron's natives could interbreed with us. We don't breathe the same atmosphere. But we indigenous earthlings of color are human, and we can easily interbreed with well--white humans. White and non-white humans are still part of the same family and have no biological impediments to sharing the same food, air or sexual relations. Its social, religious, and political differences, not biology, that keep earthly humans apart.
We people of color are just that, human, and Cameron seems to say we are something other than ordinary humans. Who are the ordinary humans? Well, I guess modern white people are the true humans, in their own 21st century supposed blandness (unless the whites are cartoonish villains), but still the standard by which other humanoids are judged. We indigenous people are the exotic primitives, still, in the white man's imagination. I know Cameron did not mean it that way. I believe his intentions were good. I don't think he set out to glorify world white supremacy, but I think that is partly what resulted.
MYSTICAL PRIMITIVES
Even today we Indigenous people are occasionally confronted by the curious about our supposed mystical insights. There are criminal rings trafficking in the skeletons of deceased Native American people. The skull of Geronimo may or may not be held by a secretive society at a prestigious university. Geneticists are trying to patent the unique DNA of tribal peoples from isolated regions. Archaeologists rack their brains figuring out how the Egyptians or the Mayans built pyramids without "modern" technology. We still fascinate many.
Modern academia still has not answered how some rural Ugandans today can undergo brain surgery without anasthesia, how frontier-era Native Americans withstood torture without flinching, how ancient Andeans domesticated a toxic root into the edible potato, and so on.
There just are some "abilities" Indigenous humans possess. The still great writer Marijo Moore speculated on-air (on First Voices, Indigenous Radio, WBAI-Pacifica Radio) what may have been the secret to various Native successes. She said that we just be more observant. We are often good at listening, which runs counter to the contemporary impulse to runs one's mouth all the time.
All humans have unique abilities. Certain societies nurture and cultivate particular skills that they value. Indigenous societies often have a different set of priorities than the industrial-consumerist society which is growing so rapidly.
THE LOSS OF HUMAN VARIETY
Global humanity is becoming homogenized. Everyone is plugged in, hearing or listening to the same thing. Who will be left who will listen for profundity in the song of a robin?
One problem is this--seeing the increasingly globalized modern industrial "man" as the only standard for normal. The worldviews we ascribe only to the Indigenous peoples were once the worldviews of all of humanity, including Europeans. Europe destroyed its own pagan culture and like some other monotheistic religions, went about destroying the belief systems of others. In the process, Europeans lost touch with the same "primitve" that had once been their reality as well.
Some of us are annoyed by the "Tribal Odyssey" shows and the naked people shown on TV. Why is the European and EuroAmerican white man so fascinated by the naked people in the forest? In Germany I saw businesswomen sunbathing topless in city parks on their lunchbreaks, jsut afew blocks from their offices. Why are they fascinated by nudity in New Guinea?
Perhaps they know that "primitive" life is what most of human life has been through , and a collapse of industrial economy will plunge all of humanity back into tribal life rather quickly. It is our common history and may also be our future.
MOVIE INDIANS AND REAL INDIANS
In his book Everything You Know About Indians in Wrong, author Paul Chaat Smith notes that the modern concept of what an American Indian is supposed to look like was formulated mostly by Hollywood movies. Smith cites an example of how director Michael Mann did research for Last of the Mohicans (which starred Cherokee actor Wes Studi, who also appears in Avatar) , he learned of rich Mohawk farming towns. But when the movie was completed, we never see Indians as farmers, only as warriors. Hollywood narrative has now become the only template we know.
Somehow, James Cameron, has only been able to deal with Indians as he knows them from the same place most everyone else knows them from--the movies. This is unfortunate. Avatar sequels are supposed to be planned (they better re-use some of those expensive effects gadgets) , I fear the story will be "inevitable" conquest, colonialism and drunk blue people stumbling around lamenting the loss of their world to the Earthlings.
Or perhaps Cameron invisions a transformation of humanity into some kind of human-Na'vi hybrid, taking humanity to new heights of awareness, something the past has not yet given us. One thing I loved about the film was that as a futuristic film the emphasis was on a rich biological, rather than a technolgical, reality. Can Cameron pull off something optimistic and visionary in the sequels. I can only hope.
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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I just finished watching the fourth season of the HBO series Big Love, about a polygamous family in Utah. The fourth season was pretty good, and here are some thoughts:
First the Cons:
1. I grew to like the new opening title sequence. But the original title sequence established the order of the wives and also ended with a vision of the family's life in eternity, a central part of their identity. You can't separate them from their religion.
2. Season 3 corrected a big error from the first two seasons in that we often saw the adults with their large number of collective children. But in Season 4 that changed. In season 4 we hardly saw the four or five children under age seven, and the wives and Bill were always running here and there and it left me wondering, who's watching all those little kids? Even Nicky's teenage daughter attends high school, so without any domestic help, the wives' freewheeling lifestyle does not seem plausible.
3. Likewise, Bill did not seem to spend too much time at his two home-supply mega stores, he was so busy trying to run for office.
4. Juniper Creek is supposed to be a two-hour drive from Salt Lake City, but Bill and Nicky just drive there at the drop of a hat, and no one back home notices them missing for five hours in the middle of the week. (2 hours there, 2 hours back, and some time to do something at Juniper Creek).
5. The whole political campaign storyline was implausible. Bill is a prominient businessman and onetime mainstream Latter-Day Saint. The Mormons are pretty tight-knit, and when he, Barb and their three kids dropped out of their ward I don't believe the other Mormons just forgot about them. Salt Lake City is just not that big. Their kids were still in public school. Home Plus is a major local retailer. So how does he just start running for office and the LDS community forgets he is a polygamist? Most prominent Mormons have attended Brigham Young University, went on missions together, and keep in touch through business and politics. They usually have large families, and that means lots of cousins who also grow up together. ( I'm from a small town with a fair number of Mormons and there are only so many secrets you can keep. )
And Barb was "outed" as a polygamous the first season, and excommunicated in season 3, so how is their polygamous marriage a secret until after he wins the election?
The LDS are not too keen on polygamists. In reality, Bill's campaign would have been killed quietly behind closed doors. He wouldn't even be allowed to openly support another candidate, because of guilt by association.
Clearly someone from NY or LA wrote this season, without any knowledge of how small towns actually work. But then again, even in a big city like New York, there are social networks that would make it impossible to keep a secret.. There are millions of Catholics in New York, but if one priest converted to Islam, word would get around all the parishes pretty quickly. Even a big city contains smaller social networks as tight as any in a small town.
6. The Mexico storyline was pretty good--until the end. The Greens have been established in Mexico for decades, and have the respect of the local political officials. To survive in a world of private narco-militias the Greens must be packing themselves. So how can Lois Hendrickson slice the arm off their leader and live to tell about it?
The Pros--What I liked:
1. Big Love is one of the few TV shows to portray contemporary Native Americans. It was great to see Adam Beach onscreen. If you know anything about the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, you know a possible direction that Season 5 might go. I hope Season 5 goes deeper into the reality of Native Americans, who are a significant social reality in the western US in general and in the Mormon religion in particular.
2. The tragic love story between Albert "Alby" Grant and the trustee was really good. It actually made me like Alby for awhile, seeing his vulnerable side. And I felt sorry for his lover, struggling over his homosexuality. After the lover's suicide, now it seems Albie will go on to be a repressed homosexual and possibly a dangerous homophobe. It happens that way sometimes.
3. I call it the "Racism Episode." There was that scene of the compound relatives watching a 1930s blackface movie scene. Nicky takes a handgun to Washington DC because its so "dangerous" (that is full of black people). Of course, Nicky turns out to be the most dangerous, carrying the gun into a government building and causing a scene. Nothing scarier than a scared white person with loaded firearm.
4. Great seeing Nicky cut off the braid and stepping into a new role, protecting her daughter and "standing by her man."
5. The scene where Bill tries to intimidate the Mexican police chief into helping him locate his son was great piece, especially if you understand Spanish, which I do. Synopsis: Bill is speaking English to an assistant of the police chief, and this subordinate interprets into Spanish for his boss. Bill does not get what he wants and says something negative about Mexico, etc. The chief, who has not spoken a word of English, does understand English, and says something in Spanish (that indicates his comprehension) to his assistant that ends the conversation. Bill never realizes that the chief understood every word he said in English, but the chief as a point of pride, was not going to make life easier for this demanding American. But you have to actually understand Spanish and English to really understand what happened.
6. Sara got married in Season 4 and has left town with her husband. The actress has busy movie career, and her character can always come back. It's good for a family drama to let characters grow.
7. Marjean "extending" the family by marrying Bill's baby's mama's boyfriend to keep him in the country. A sexual threesome (or foursome, or fivesome) seems in the works. Perfectly sordid. I can't wait for Season 5.
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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PBS is one of the few media outlets that even bothers to mention Native Americans, and again the only time this network disappoints me is when Henry Louis Gates gets in the game. Let me start by saying that I enjoy Dr. Gates' programs, his enthusiasm for his subject, and his willingness to take a fresh look at American life. And I was mostly pleased with his recent PBS production, Faces of America, which detailed the documented history of several diverse celebritiies, as he had done before with African American individuals (also mostly celebrities.) I like family stories, and I like the way he presented them. I like the background music and graphics.
Some highlights for me: Stephen Colbert (of the Colbert Report) learned that his great-something grandmother came from Ireland, landing in New York two days before the 1863 Draft and Race Riots in protest of the Civil War. Welcome to America! Colbert remarked, the first thing his ancestors learned was to not fight for the rights of black people. Great insight.
I was mostly happy until the end, when Dr. Gates presented his guests with racial admixture pie-graph charts of their DNA. Mexican-American actress Eva Longoria turned out to be 66% European (presumably Spanish), 31% Asian, and 3% African. Gates says on-camera that the "Asian" DNA includes Native American DNA. To her credit, Longoria herself knew about the African presence in Mexico, and she was not suprprised or bothered by the evidence in her own ancestry.(having a child with her Afro-German-French husband probably helped her to have some openess on the subject) She actually lamented having less indigenous Mexican ancestry than she had believed.
Why is the Native American DNA now being listed as "Asian DNA?" The Gates show lists European and Asian as separate DNA strains, and those two populations actually share the Eurasian landmass, so why is the DNA of the Americas, both North and South, reduced to a subset of the Asian? If Amerindians have been the most separate of continental populations, why is Amerindian DNA now being considered a subcategory of a population from which it has been supposedly separated for fifteen millenia?
Is this the same agenda that promoted the ice-age fossil Kennewick man as a Caucasian and of course the true "discoverer of America?"
I mean, seriously, Dr. Gates, when one travels north across the Sahara, there is no sharp break when the population changes from black African to Arab north African to Mediterranean white. And there is no sharp line between the so-called white races and Asian races when one travels east from Russia to Central Asia. These changes are gradual, but still science separates these DNA strains as separate "African," "European" and "Asian." But somehow the Ameriindian DNA must be subsumed under "Asian."
Is this a conspiracy to deprive the Amerindian of any standing whatsoever?
Which leads me to another celebrity profiled, author Louise Erdrich, who refused to have her DNA tested. Her father is German and she has even written books about it, but she was not subjecting her mother's Ojibway DNA to any TV show racial admixture test. An elder told her that her DNA was essentially private community property and it was not Erdrich's to give away. In one move she protected her privacy and her own people's Sovereignty over their identity. Kudos to her. She was Ojibway and that was that, and no genetic lab was going to get the chance to redefine her. Now that's Sovereignty.
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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So much money used to pour into New York via Wall Street that a whole slew of problems could be drowned in dollars. No more. the lopsided economy of the Emprie State may tip over if changes don't come soon. Some in New York City say that NYC "subsidizes" the rest of the state (and by extension, the rest of the U.S.) because only the financial industry showed any growth in the past fifteen years. But that's looking at it backwards.
When I grew up in upstate NY, there were several thriving local economies based on manufacturing. Rochester had Kodak and Xerox, Binghamton had IBM, Schnectady had General Electric, Buffalo had auto and steel plants. Farming also thrived. Upstate New Yorkers, including my grandmother, parents, and myself, actually made things that could be sold. These places were not suburbs, but cities in their own right. They were too far from NYC for commuting, and that kept real estate prices affordable.
But things changed in the 1970s. The South offered low taxes and a warmer climate to lure business. IBM was the first high-tech firm to establish manufacturing computers in the Research Triangle Park of Raleigh-Durham, seeded by IBM staff from the Binghamton area.
Businesses continued to leave New York State, which refused to lower taxes. Even though the state's higher-tech industries survived the 1980s better than the rust-belt industries of Ohio and Illinois, they too fled south or succumbed to the changing economy.
But the tax structure of NY State continued on as if nothing had changed. So much money poured in from Wall Street that the state legislature and the governor could pretend the gravy train could last forever.
Who's to Blame:
Partly, its the culture of New York City, where people grow accostomed to high rents, high taxes and lots of regulations. NYC has all types of entitlements, like rent-controlled apartments and various kinds of welfare, to make life bearable. Upstate life required less welfare-type payments because an honest-day's work could still pay the rent. Until the factories left. The NYC mentality tackled the problem the way it was accostomed to handling it--providing more welfare, building more prisons to house prisoners (mostly from NYC), and shipping Section 8 (federal rent subsidies) tenants from NYC to the cheaper rents Upstate. So now arrogant NYC'ers blame Upstate for being a welfare case when it was NYC-style taxes that impoverished it in the first place.
I blame the "NYC mentality" because the bulk of the political power in the State comes from the City and the immediate suburbs. Both the Assembly and the State Senate are based on population, so the eight million City people and two or three million more in the immediate suburbs now dominate the remaining eight million in the rest of the state. All of New York's recent governors have been from the City or immediate downstate region. The City and downstaters, both Democrat and Republican, must share the blame because they have been in charge for the past thirty years.
Some Hopeful Signs:
When Senator Hillary Clinton left her seat to become Secretary or State in President Obama's administration, NY governor, David Paterson had to pick a replacement. He chose a female centrist upstate politician for the job and many downstate democrats were furious. How dare he pick this hick from upstate to "appease" the conservative white folks in the sticks! But this was a brilliant political move. The governor knew that several electoral districts of upstate had voted Democratic or Working Families Party in the 2004 election. He was right on the money when he sought to gain some political points with the vast uplands of the state.
About to Lose Again:
Gas drilling and possibly uranium mining is about to come to Upstate New York. Unlike many other states, New York does not even have a tax structure in place to take advantage of the gas profits that may be rolling in soon. It was beneath contempt of the downstate politicians to even consider it. Of course, cash-strapped upstate counties and landowners are working to lure gas drillers to their property. The Marsellus shale gas reserves are the biggest thing to hit the State since the industrial revolution.
And this time the Downstaters should really take notice because the drilling process risks polluting the water supply for the City, which depends on the mountain reservoirs to maintain itself.
You'd thing the governor and legislature in Albany, the alleged capital, would be working overtime to address the drilling issue, but no, they aren't accomplishing anything, as usual. There has not been a state budget passed on time in many years.
Solutions?
The downstate politicians have to wise up and realize they can't bankrupt the state with policies based only on Wall Street revenue. They have to encourage a future economy that is more balanced, with lots of manufacturing , the way it was forty years ago. Just being in New York City does not make you smart. Half of the City's high school students never graduate, and NYC is low on the list of college graduates as a proportion of its adult population. (Seattle and Raleigh, NC are #1 and #2 on that list).
A lot of work needs to be done both in Upstate and Downstate, and NYC has not sought to understand its own problems, and should stop blaming upstate for not understanding them.
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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I can't say this loud enough----identify yourself as Native American on the 2010 Census. Be sure to list your tribal origin. There is nothing illegal about identifying yourself as Indian just because you don't carry a tribal membership card. In fact, the right to identify yourself as Indian is encouraged by federal law.
The Native American Languages Act of 1990 : Congress found that cultures and languages of Native Americans is unique to the United States and that the federal government must act together with Native Americans to ensure the survival of these unique cultures and languages.
There you have it. Since 1990, the feds believe that we are an asset to the strength of the United States, (which historically, wouldn't have come into existence without our help.)
Reverse three centuries of paper genocide and send in those census forms!
For more details click on http://www.manataka.org/page1014.html
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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I have long been fascinated by Louisiana and equally unable to understand it, because it seems to be the most culturally liberated place and also the most socially oppressive at the same time. It's had the most race mixing but remains the most racist state. I have had long talks with fellow soldiers from Louisiana and they were unable to reconcile this contradiction. So I gave up trying.
The Internet has opened more doors, because now real Creole people blog and broadcast themselves on Youtube. They speak to you in their own words, you can see their faces and draw your own conclusions.
Until recently, Native ancestry of African-descended people in Louisiana was simply ignored in mainstream discussions of history and culture in that state. Creoles were written out altogether, or simply labeled as "free blacks" when they couldn't be ignored. This practice was common among both white nationalist and black nationalist historians. Creoles don't fit into any category useful to either white or black nationalist definitions, and there has been a concerted effort to erase Creoles from the public memory. In Indian Country we call this "paper and pencil" genocide.
Some Tough Folks, Creoles of Color
Recently on Youtube, I checked out videos about "Creoles of Color, Plaquemines Parish", and lo and behold, there was a 1981 documentary about the community and the first free election held there that year. Yes, the first free election in the parish, which had been run as a white supremacist dictatorship by Judge Leander Perez, and his two sons, Chalin and Leander Jr. There were clips of Judge Perez articulating his race hatred on William F. Buckley's TV show in the 1960s. (Perez, having a Spanish surname, must have been a white Creole. His family was heavily intermarried with Italians.) (click on http.//www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHrFv4AErm4 )
But the best clip by far is the one featuring some Plaquemine Parish Creoles at a barbecue, with good food and gun-shooting for entertainment. Most of those in attendance are clearly of part-African descent, and most look to have as much Native American ancestry. There was a range of skin colors and hair textures and folks were mixing freely. Like the Cajuns and Houma Indians in the region, the Creoles of color make their living from the wildlife of the bayous. The staunchly Catholic Creoles of Color had been on the bayous long before Leander Perez. Denied access to restaurants and even some grocery stores, the Creoles of Color survived by living off the bounty of the land and the sea.
One older Creole woman is quoted on camera saying about the oppressive Leander Perez, "He would have crushed us if he could." But he couldn't.
This was a revelation to me, because everything else I had read about Leander Perez and Plaquemines was his relationship to "Blacks," when clearly the "black" resilience to Perez was based on their sticking close to their Indian roots, culture and economy. Clearly, something was different in Plaquemines, both good and bad, in the way white oppressed black, as opposed to the rest of the South. Perez had a geographic advantage in his favor: the parish hugs the Mississippi River delta out into the Gulf of Mexico, and this made it easy for Perez to block access from outside civil rights activists. He simply restricted access to the only ferry.
The Creoles of Color, or course, had been there long before Leander Perez. Petroleum is partly what made Plaquemines so valuable to the outside world, and I believe that outside petrodollar interests helped keep Perez in power. It's fitting that Perez would defend segregation as a way to keep little white girls from being raped by "Congolese," when he ran a jurisdiction much like the Belgian Congo, and its successor states, Zaire and the current Democratic Republic of Congo--all oppressive,underdeveloped regimes geared toward the extraction of mineral wealth.
In this way Plaquemines is a microcosm of Louisiana. LIke Africa, Louisiana is mineral-rich but its people are mostly poor. Perez's Plaquemines was more like apartheid South Africa than a typical Dixiecrat region.
Ted Duplessis, Son of Plaquemines:
After reading Ted Duplessis' writings on his blog, Creole Folks, I truly came to understand where he was coming from when I learned that he comes from Plaquemines Parish. Its a tough place to come from. Mr. Duplessis is controversial, to say the least. He does not let either Democrats or Republicans off the hook. He exposes perversion, hypocrisy, racism and corruption from all manner of institutions. He lambasts the Protestants, but he also criticizes the current leadership from the Vatican. He is still a devout Catholic. He is partly African American, but still criticizes the Afro-Protestant leadership when it tries to erase Creole culture. He indentifies as Creole and is part Choctaw. He is a military veteran and staunch defender of the U.S. border and attacks attemtps to use Mexican illegals to oppress black Americans.
He defends Creole culture, Louisiana, Voodoo and Haiti, all grossly misrepresented in the mass media.
Duplessis just won't fit any political category that have been defined for us. Unlike many "educated" elites today, Duplessis has wide experience in college, the military, and public relations. He has lived in different regions of the United States, and has interacted with people of all races and classes. He speaks fluent French.
If you want to read some extraordinary commentary, check out Ted Duplessis on Creole Folks,
http:creoleneworleans.typepad.com/creole_folks/2010/02
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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Colored Aristocracy: the Song
Recently I learned of a traditional song called "The Colored Aristocracy." Most likely it was composed for a popular dance craze called the Cakewalk, a genre whose music is an ancestor of ragtime and jazz. The cakewalk is long gone, but "Colored Aristocracy" lives on as an old tyme and bluegrass song. Just type in "Colored Aristocracy" on Youtube and you will have several examples of contemporary musicians playing the song on guitar, banjo, fiddle and various combinations of instruments. The Carolina Chocolate Drops, a black old tyme music group, even named one of their CD's "Colored Aristocracy." You can also check out the Carolina Chocolate Drops on Youtube, a real sweet treat for the ears.
The name intrigued me. I looked up "Colored Aristocracy" on-line to uncover its history. Of course, no one remembers who first composed the song, or even to which racial/ethnic group(s) that composer(s) belonged. No one is even sure if "Colored Aristocracy" is the original title. At one time, in the version of political correctness of the mid 1900s, it was called "Southern Aristocracy." In the distant past it was also known as "Uppity N***er Aristocracy," which fit the practice of black American cakewalk dances that parodied the pretentions of upper class whites and upper class blacks.
But the title "Colored Aristocracy" persists, not "Negro Aristocracy," or "Black Aristocracy," or "African American Aristocracy." Check out all the white (to all appearance) musicians performing the song on Youtube, who all call it "Colored Aristocracy." No other title really fits, which leads me to believe that the "Colored" title is the real title of the song, based on the social context in which it arose in pre-Civil War America.
Colored Aristocracy: the People
There really were aristocrats of color in colonial America. They were often the descendants of Spanish, French, Portuguese, British or other European conquistadors, adventurers, pirates and their wives of color, white women being in short supply. Many owned plantations and provided the finest European educations for their children. They only married each other or pure Europeans of equal or higher status. These aristocrats of color often looked more white than black or Indian, after several generations of choosing the lightest-skinned spouses.
In Jamaica, these Creole aristocrats represented up to twenty percent of slaveholders. In Haiti, the proportions were similar. When slavery ended in these places, the Creole slaveholding families often fled to Charleston, South Carolina or New Orleans, where they were able to still live as free people, at least for a time.
In uppper Mexico, which later became the U.S. Southwest, Spanish conquerors had also helped create a class of mixed-blood landowners who had European, Native America, and sometimes African ancestry. When white Anglo adventurers from the U.S. South ventured into Mexican Texas or California they elevated themselves by marrying into these Spanish-speaking, landowning families. (At the same time U.S. politicians were justifying takeover of upper Mexico because even the elites of Mexico were "useless half-breeds.") This process continued even after the Civil War, when landless Confederate veterans established themselves through skillful marriages to lanowning Native American women in Indian Territory.
The fur-producing regions of the Great Lakes also created succesful dynasties of color. Rochester and Buffalo, New York, started as fur-trading posts owned by African-descended men and their Native American wives. The Bonga family of Minnesota was started by a French-speaking African, Pierre Bonga, his posssibly black wife and their sons, who married Ojibwe (Native American) wives. DuSable, a Haitian Creole and his Native American wife operated the trading post that became Chicago. (Their daughter married a Frenchman.)There was even a black man from Puerto Rico trading with the Indians on Manhattan before the Dutch arrived.
Often times the first people to speak a European language in a region were people of color. As the earliest of the part-European entrepeneurs, they were the first to get rich and become an aristocracy.
Colored Aristocracy: the legacy
Considering the various aristocracies of color that have existed you would think they would hold a place in the popular imagination, but the exact opposite is true. Only a remnant exists, even among the black-identified population. They seem to have disappeared, even when once being the leading families of several regions at the peak of their influence.
Part of the problem are the narratives with which we look at the past. One narrative portrays the conquest of the Americas as a great white drama with non-whites as mere pawns in the game. Another similar narrative has whites as all-evil and people of color as all-virtuous victims. Another narrative attempts to portray colored slaveowners as all-black but secret soldiers of a pan-African movement, as some kind of "black pride."
Another reason for the disappearance of the aristocracies of color is this: the flood of Anglo settlement and the obsession with racial "purity" meant that elites wisely chose the path of white or Indian identity as a matter of survival. It made no sense to lose one's family's wealth and land over distant non-white ancestry when it was much easier to emphasize the Spanish, French, British, or Indian portion of the family's origins.
But the memory of the Colored Aristocracy (ies) lives on in many families of many color, in the culture of our nation, and in a really cool song. Check it out on Youtube. And check out the Carolina Chocolate Drops, too, also on Youtube.
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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At the risk of offending George Lucas, I never bought his argument that the second trilogy was what he intended as the back story for the original trilogy. What is my evidence? The first three movies, which I practically memorized in dialogue and camera angles, and the novelizations which I also read.
1. In The Phantom Menace, R2D2 is already in existence, while Anakin Skywalker is a child and Obiwan Kenobi is a young man. But all hints in Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), was that the R2 units were the latest design in robotic technology, and hadn't been around all that long. When Luke says to Obi Wan Kenobi that Artoo claims to be owned by Obi Wan, Kenobi's response is "I don't recall owning a droid, certainly nothing as modern as an R2 unit." In the novelization C3PO says "I just don't understand" this new generation of 'droids. This would directly contradict what we saw in the Phantom Menace, where R2D2 is old and 3PO is new!
2. In A New Hope, Obi wan states that when he met Luke's father, Luke's dad was already an experienced fighter pilot, before becoming a Jedi knight. This contradicts the later presentation of the Jedi knights recruiting children and stating that ten-year-old Anakin was already "too old" to begin the training.
3. Lucas also originally conceived of Anakin Skywalker as much older than he was later portrayed. In the final scene of Return of the Jedi (1983) , the spirit of the recently-deceased Darth Vader appears beside the spirits of Obi Wan and Yoda, and he is clearly an old man.(the actor shown was in his 80s) I saw this in the theater (at least three times) and have seen later VHS versions with the original actor. After the second trilogy, Lucas saw fit to replace the old Anakin with a ghost of the young actor who played Anakin in the second trilogy. According to this re-done version, Anakin/Darth was only about forty-three years old at the time of his death.
4. Lucas also envisioned Obi Wan Kenobi as much older than he was portrayed in the second trilogy. In A New Hope , when Darth Vader tells Grand Moff Tarkin that "Obi Wan is here" on the Death Star, Tarkin's response is "surely he must be dead by now." Tarkin meant that just like old Nazi war criminals who were never caught, that eventually old age would get them. That's how old Kenobi was supposed to have been, and Tarkin is pretty old himself when he says that. So Kenobi must have been pretty old even when the emperor started wiping out the Jedi knights, much older than Ewan McGregor portrays him.
5. In The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Yoda is a retired Jedi living on a remote planet, Dagobah, that is not even on the charts. Yoda has been retired so long that Kenobi is able to conceal his existence from young Anakin Skywalker, who has never even heard of Yoda. But in the second trilogy, Yoda is hanging out in the galactic capital, as public a figure as the Speaker of the House.
6. If the Jedi were a force to be reckoned with during the Old Republic, how did Palpatine and Vader wipe them out in one day? If the Jedi were so smart, why were they all just hanging around the capital city, ready to be picked off? Also, that burlap hermit's outfit made sense for Obi Wan to wear in the desert, and for Yoda to wear in a jungle, but it made no sense to wear a hermit's outfit in a mega-city like Corruscant. And if that burlap hermit's outfit was the official Jedi uniform, why would Ben Kenobi wear it while living under an assumed identity?
7. In Return of the Jedi (1983), Princess Leia told Luke that she had some memory of their mother. In the second trilogy, their mother dies in childbirth, clearly omitting any possibility that Leia actually remembered her.
8. All the Jedi were not master manipulators of the force, according to Kenobi in a New Hope. Most Jedi, he says, could not manipulate the force at all. But in later movies, all the Jedi were able to perform superhuman and magical feats on a daily basis.
9. Lucas did not intend the Empire to be as all-powerful as was implied later. In the opening titles for A New Hope (1977), it states that "the rebels have won an increasing number of battles." The senate still had some power and its cooperation was still necessary for the emperor to remain in control. The problem was that some worlds, and their senators, were secretly supporting the rebellion. The Death Star was a last ditch effort by the Empire to maintain control.
10. Despite all the talk of the Jedi and the force and all that, its clear that in A New Hope, the rebels were doing pretty well without the help of Kenobi, but still motivated by "reactionary religious fanaticsm". They even stole the Death Star's plans without the help of retired Jedi. Han Solo saves the day and he openly disbelieves in the force, motivated more by his admiration of Luke than any high ideals.
Which brings me to another point, especially if we are to now watch all six movies in chronological sequence. Put together, the combined story reveals a Jedi knighthood that was woefully deficient, not only because of the ease with which they were destroyed, but due to flaws in their training. The Jedi claimed that the child Anakin was too old to begin the training, and perhaps they were right, seeing how he turned out. But Luke barely even knew what a Jedi knight was until he was twenty, and he is a pretty good pilot and fighter before he even attempts to use the force.
And to top it off, Luke never succumbs to the Dark Side of the force, not even in the face of death. He willingly drops off the precipice in The Empire Strikes Back , rather than submit to Vader, and again he refuses to kill his own father at the emperor's command in Return of the Jedi. Luke never compromises his principles. He is the best Jedi of them all, and he has hardly spent any of his life under their direction, never read their documents (surely destroyed by the empire), and allied with non-Jedi (like Chewbacca and Han Solo, who calls Jedi-dom a "hokey religion.") who save his behind more than once. Even when he disobeys Yoda and Kenobi by flying to Cloud City, he actually does save the group because R2D2, travelling with Luke, re-activates the hyperdrive on the Millenium Falcon before Darth Vader can catch them in the tractor beam of the star destroyer. He still trusts his instincts and his principles and is still victorious.
"I am a Jedi knight, like my father before me," Luke proclaims proudly, throwing down his light saber, fearless! Still brings tears to my eyes.
Note: Check out the 1950s, Kurosawa's Japanese Samurai film The Hidden Fortress, which Lucas used as the structure for Star Wars: A New Hope. R2D2 and C-3PO were clearly inspired by the hapless peasants who open up Kurosawa's film, which is why they remain the heart and soul of Lucas's films as well. Part of the magic of the original trilogy was the intersection of the fiesty politically-motivated princess with the money-motivated Han Solo, the adventure-seeking Luke, and two droids who just aim to survive the whole mess day by day. This mixture of different charcter motivations, all somehow working toward a common goal was all present in the Hidden Fortress.
Note 2: By refusing to kill Darth Vader, his own father, Luke, avoids the unholy act of killing one who gave him life. He also ralizes that to save his father, he must morally surpass his father. He invokes the best that Anakin was "a Jedi, like my father before me," even if his father fell short.
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New York is an empire, but not because of the imperial-like power of the the Wall street Financial district. New York is an empire because it includes small nations within it. These nations are the Six Nations of the Iroquois, who have never surrendered their sovereignty to the entity calling itself the State of New York.
Most of what we know as New York state was NOT part of the colony of New York that rebelled agains the British. No, most of it still belonged to the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy--Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora, as was recognized by the UK. The Six Nations, once an imperial power themselves, had retreated to what became the New York-Pennsylvania border, and welcoming Native peoples fleeing from the south. This emerging population centered on the confluence of the Chenango and Susquehanna Rivers , and included Delaware, Nanticoke (notably dark-skinned by local reports), Saponi, Tutelo, European and African refugees from the 13 colonies. In fact, a racially-mixed population lived relatively in peace on both sides of this border, until the Revolutionalry war ushered in a genocidal campaign by the newly-formed United States.
After the visible Natives were pushed out, mostly into Canada (then still British territory), the whites remained and this became the "Southern Tier of New York." Some Natives remained in hiding, intermarried with white and black residents. The local dialect (which I still speak) still retains some faint influence of the Native tongues that were once spoken in the region.
The Empire Wilderness:
When I drive from Fairfield County, Connecticut into New York State, I can't help but notice how "country" it becomes. The New York side is much less developed. Local residents resist new development with a vengeance. Its rural and wants to stay that way. The greatest number of job-related and deaths in New York is in the lumbering industry.
Upstate New York's sub-regions---the Finger Lakes, Buffalo, Binghamton, etc.--have a remarkable lack of interest in each other, even as they need each other desperately balancing their power against that of New York City. They are like nations in themselves, just like the smaller Indian Nations. I firmly believe that Ithaca, despite being home to Cornell University, has deliberately prevented any modern 4-lane divided highway from connecting it to the Interstate system. By the way, Ithaca has its own local currency.
Surprisingly, when you drive westward to Ohio, the land is far more tamed and developed than New York. In fact, apart from New York City itself, Ohio has more large cities of note. A drive across New York will show you more mountains and forests than skyscrapers. Several counties of New York are part of the Appalachian Regional Commission.
Fragile Empire:
There is long-standing tension between New York City and the Upstate regions. Much of Upstate has the same attitudes towards gun ownership as North Carolina, while NYC's mayor blames crime on illegal guns from Virginia. NYC claims it subsidizes upstate because of all the revenue generated by Wall Street, but it was the City's tax-and-spend politicians who steered the enitre state into high-tax status that drove all the manufacturing out of the upstate towns and cities. Having City-style tax and welfare programs dominate the agenda leaves upstate only one option--get into the game by housing downstate prisoners.
In the past decade, the Onondaga and Seneca nations have flexed their muscle by threatening to shut down the NY thruway on a holiday weekend when the governor threatened to tax cigarette sales on Indian territory-- and the governor backed down. The state has also countered by building local casinos, with no prior publicity, to compete with the Indian casinos. And it seems the far-eastern region of New York, Long Island, is about to have a newly-recognized Indian nation, the Shinnecocks, as President Obama is hinting at full recognition.
Things are about to get more interesting.
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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There is a concensus that China is the emerging superpower, and in the future, may be the only superpower, eclipsing even the United States, my home country. No one seems to talk about what a future will look like for Americans when Mandarin eclipses English as the international language of commerce and politics. The American collective psyche is in for a rude awakening when our dominance is no longer a given. What would an American culture look like that was not an America that was able to dominate other parts of the world? Except for the very few surviving people born in the 1890s, when the U.S. became a world power by winning the Spanish-American war, there is no one on earth who can remember a time the the United States was not a world power.
Borders, Language and Culture:
Pat Buchanan, Michael Savidge and a few others on the right consistently argue that the core values of Anglo-American are under seige and also decaying from within. Buchanan cites the decline in Christianity, along with the dimunition of English as a common tongue as reasons for concern. I believe they are correct about some things, but they also miss some key strengths in the soul of the U.S.
One Secret to American Success:
Of all the formerly British settler colonies, the US is by far the most powerful. The U.S. is also the only one that broke off violently from Mother England, and the one whose speech still sounds the most distinctly un-British. I've even met Jamaicans who believe in their superiority over Americans because they still speak the "King's English."
Compared to Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the US also has the largest non-white population, both as a percentage and in absolute numbers. In the US, the presence of the Negro population, created a need for "white" solidarity, which galvanized the various European immigrants into an "American majority." In fact the Germans are still the largest ancestral pool for current US citizens, but you wouldn't know it because the Germans, too, have helped create the American mainstream.
This tension between the would-be white and would-be black, though often violent, generates power like the positive and negative poles of a battery. Other tensions, between right and left, religious and secular, church and state, all provide energy and creativity to the American people. It is the American genius to keep these tensions bottled up in a single battery that never explodes, much to the amazement of outsiders, who wonder why we can fight each other so fiercely in elections that never degenerates into civil war.
The Most Materialistic Nation and the Most Spiritual Nation:
We've been called the most materialistic nation and the most spiritual nation. This can sometimes occur in the same individual or church, as in the prosperity gospel congregations. The "spiritual" and "material" aspects of man are often contrasted as barely compatible, yet the U.S. confounds that notion. How do we do this? Partly, because we are willing to work at it. We work longer hours than the Europeans, and expect to be rewarded for it. The U.S. has higher rates of home ownership than any nation in Europe.
We will even work harder for spiritual matters. U.S-style protestantism often demands that each beleiver read the scriptures for herself, and even evangelize the masses. The entrepeneural spirit of much Calvinist-descended protestantism has not only
encouraged thrift and business among its followers but has also spawned new entrepeneural religions such as Mormonism and the Baptists, two denominations notably lacking in heirarchical structures but demanding in the personal participation of their followers.
The religous autonomy of the Native Americans opened the colonists's eyes to new possibilities in religous expression.
What Native Americans Taught European Colonists:
By the time Anglo colonists landed in Virginia and Massachusetts, Native Americans had already survived a series of demographic disasters that had already depopulated the cities of Cahokia, the kingdom of Coosa, and numerous other mound-builder population centers. Tightly-packed populations helped epidemics spread quickly. Analysis of skeletons from Cahokia sacrificial mounds reveal bones much less healthy than people living in the countryside. This Native urban life had been stressful, with a less-balanced diet, and the added pressure of serving the priestly class, to the point of killing one's own children in service of their religion.
After the Mound-Builder civilizaion collapsed, the survivors dispersed into smaller groups, each living minimally as farmers and hunters, valuing individual freedom and community autonomy. The Spanish in the 1500s were unable to conquer these dispersed "primitive" Indians on the East coasts of the Carolinas and Virginia, unlike the centralized and highly "cilivlized" empires of the Incas and the Aztecs, which the Spanish defeated in less than a year. Only Canada has a more de-centralized government than us, owing partly to its diverse and tightly-knit Indian communties.
Notice that the English-speakers conquered North America only by skillful adoption of Native farming, fighting, political manueverings and love of freedom that was (and still is) unknown in Europe. The English-speakers also relied on actual Indian soldiers for their most decisive victories. The British needed the Mohawks to seize Quebec and make it part of Canada. George Washington needed the Stockbridge Indians under David Nimham and the Rhode Island Colored (African and Indian) troops to rout the red coats out of New York. Andrew Jackson employed Choctaw and Creole-Native troops to take New Orleans back from the British during the War of 1812, the military used Native-speaking code talkers to transmit wartime secrets in two world wars.
Though the fascination, and even romanticization of Indians waxes and wanes in U.S. life, one fact remains. The United States as we know it would not have been possible without continued Native American participation.
Federal Law Still Values Indian Culture:
U.S. federal law still places a high value on the cultures of Native Americans. The Native American Languages Act of 1990, reads "Congress finds that cultures and languages of Native Americans are unique" further requiring the U.S. and Native Americans to "act together to ensure the survival of these unique cultures and languages." Also, "special status is accorded Native Americans, including to right to continue separate identities." This is not just empty talk as both Republican and Democratic presidents have funded Native language programs though the ANA, or Administration for Native Americans (which can be seen in detail on the Internet.)
I think something else is at work here. Because English has become a world language, and US-bred art forms like Hip Hop and Hollywood movies have become global art forms, and with US-based evangelical faiths winning converts in Africa and Asia, what is left that is unique to the United States? Perhaps one of those few unique qualities is Indian people, who fascinate the world so much that there is still an illegal traffic in Indian skeletal remains. Despite all the denial, Indian people still intrigue, horrify, and haunt the imagination of Western civilization.
What Native American Culture Can Teach the Rest of American Culture:
In the face of increasing Chinese influence, here is a list of strategies for the continued survival of Anglo-American culture.
1. Value family and community over money alone.
2. Value your own culture and history simply because its yours, not because you have the power to impose it on others.
3. Letting others be free frees you from the need to control others.
4. Cultural and spiritual solidarity can weather storms of cultural invasion. Notice how Indian cultures are still here 500 years after Columbus.
5. Don't trade in your local autonomy for the (false) security of a too-centralized system, despite the odds.
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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