growing up native american

by BIG D 21 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  erynw

  I see a couple of things that may be causing the problem.

  take out all of the <td>...</td> tags. Take out the align=baseline comment for the image at the bottom.

  That might fix it.
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  Carmel

  My ancestors were part of the Trail of Tears too! As a 1/4 Seminole I've often wondered whether it would be of any value to research my own heritage. But alas, the 3/4 Irish/Scottish/German pat tells me it wouldn't make any difference at this point. My you live well and prosper. carmel, the mongrel
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  BIG D

  thanks guys, alot of relatives i didnt know i had!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  big d
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  horrible life

  Wheelock Acadamy is the school near Fort Towson, actually in Millerton.
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  BIG D

  i have heard my current relatives speak of that, i believe there a re a boys and a girls dorm, im pretty sure it is for half of full bloods

  big d
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  Forscher

  My paternal great-grandmother was from among a Cherokee family who managed to escape the Cherokee round-up in 1838.

  I even have distant relatives living on the Cherokee reservation in North Carolina. She married a white man from Kentucky and I have several pictures of her from around the time of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. I am told that three of my four great-grandmothers were all native Americans. One Cherokee, one Huron, and the last one Creek.

  My wife counts some Apaches among her ancestors, so my son has an interesting heritage. Neither of us have much in the way of stories about our Indian ancestors, though. I've been working on what I can about my family's ancestry to keep a promise I made to my mother before she passed away.

  Forscher
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  BIG D

  i have many stories to tell of my indian family, 2 of my uncles were indian codetalkers during the world wars, they spoke their choctaw to confuse the codebreakers in the german army.

  we still have tribal allocated to our family, in oklahoma, my mom speaks , choctaw as well as all my aunts, many my family work in the tribal offices, when we were little my mom would take us to tribal pow wows and some would dance, and play drums.

  i still go and take my kids, but only rarely.

  big d
• 

  LoverOfTruth

  I have a special place in my heart for Native American People in the U.S. They were so taken advantage of by the Government.
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  marmot

  I'm Mohawk and while we didn't suffer as badly as other Native groups because we were resourceful and situated next to a major financial center (Montreal), there were still a lot of unpleasant bits in our history.
  
  My Grandmother went to a religious girl's school where the nuns would prohibit the children from speaking their mother tongue and punishment meant having your hand held over the flames of an open woodstove to show you what "hell" felt like, to go outside the village you had to go and ask permission from the local Mounties like some sort of second-class citizen, and the little bit of land we had was unfairly carved up by the government to make way for rail lines, power lines, major highways and the hated St-Lawrence Seaway, which completely cut the people off from the river and permanently changed the culture.
  
  This was all before my generation, though, but things have been turbulent for me as well. I remember Canadian army troop helicopters thumping overhead during the summer of 1990 and seeing tanks and armored personnel carriers stationed all around our village. We had to get milk and bread from the Red Cross because the barricades weren't allowing food deliveries through. We went outside the lines on two occasions to get groceries, once in a speedboat that docked at a sympathetic Canadian government minister's personal marina, and the second time by car over the bridge into Montreal at night. That car ride was one of the eeriest moments of my life, as there were hundreds upon hundreds of people lining the opposite shore and they were all chanting stuff like "Mort aux sauvages!" ("Death to the savages!") and throwing rocks or kicking the vehicles as they drove by.
  
  A few of my uncles and some of my cousins were at the barricades with AK-47s, vietnam-vintage M16s and old hunting rifles staring out at the razor wire and tanks farther down the road. A large number of Mohawk men have served in the U.S. Marines so a lot of them brought tactical knowledge that thankfully was never put to the test.
  
  The Canadian army tried a helicopter invasion of the town by coming in unsuspectingly from across the river and touching down on an island far from the barricades but it was a group of unarmed women who pushed them back. I know an old guy who was fishing near the bridge when this happened who joined the women and wrestled a rifle away from a soldier and threw it into the river. Kids who swim there in the summer have been trying to find it ever since.
  
  Once the crisis had been settled the relationships between whites and non-natives had drastically changed. I got into fights at school because I came from the reserve and I even had a knife pulled on me. At one time I was part of a large group of Mohawk kids who were going to French school, but after the crisis almost all of them transferred out. Now I got it from both sides. Kids at school would be on me because I was Mohawk, and kids on the bus ride home would call me a frenchman.
  
  On top of all that, being a Jehovah's Witness and the fat kid meant I had a trifecta of schoolyard persecution.
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  horrible life

  summer of 1990

  Marmot, why don't you copy this, and start a new thread. and tell why, in 1990, a country in North America, would do this.