Indian

 Herself speaks.

Back in the early 1970s when I was a youngster, we were taught about "Indians" in the most vague and benign of terms. We learned very little: snippets of how their villages were ostensibly constructed, what their clothing and jewelry looked like, what they ate. Virtually nothing about where or how they lived, their culture, their myths or creation stories or history, development of medicine or knowledge about nature or the world around us. 

I had an Indian "costume" lovingly sewn by my grandmother, depicting what we, as very white people, saw in the media; I had jewelry obtained during some travels somewhere at a roadside stand. I loved that outfit. I refused to wear tights with it, even though it was chilly, because in my mind, "real Indians wouldn't wear tights".  I had a poster of a cartoon map of an Indian village, and I spent hours wondering and imagining how people might live there, and whether they would accept me living there as well, even though I was clearly Not An Indian.

-----

Those were days when when we were not taught about the multiple, varied peoples native to this continent before settlers arrived; when we did not learn about the cultures destroyed, slowly or all at once; about the ways of life forever changed, the peoples slaughtered, the land stolen. The Trail of Tears. The schools where children were sent to be stripped of their culture, where many died. Unimaginable, yet true. It is hard to process the level of horror that exists in this part of our nation's history.

And yet, we have people griping about changing the name of a sports team from the Cleveland Indians to the Cleveland Guardians. Really, people? Really? Let's watch a few minutes of footage of tiny coffins being returned to survivors of decimated tribes, and then let's re-think our priorities. All of them. Take your time. Think long and hard. What is important here? 

Young me, so happy in my Indian costume, would have been stuck on the Magnitude of Terrible, if she had encountered a molecule of knowledge of this history. How could it have happened?

It did. 

Let us acknowledge the harm. Heal what we can. And resolve to do better. 

Before I knew better.