For once First Americans issues made the greatest on the front page

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=439&topic_id=72061&mesg_id=72061

[yellerpup]

1. I was there yesterday but couldn't jump into the

thread because the ignorance of NA issues is absolutely stunning. Not surprising, because of the way history is taught, but disheartening that people who should know better, don't. Here is a short excerpt from my new novel, "Weep" (named for one of my great-grandfathers) a work that is based on the genealogy studies I did into my own family. The setting is Feb., 1839, on the last leg of the trek at the western Arkansas border near the end of the Trail of Tears.


"Rose had come upon a secret lately, that the harder she clung to her anger the easier it was not to cry. To parlay her anger into enough heat to keep her going, all she had to do was look at the paltry remains of their formerly rich lives – her loom, a saw, a plow -- grinding against each other in the wagon bed.

One cooking pot, one blanket, one rifle – commodities of “trade” for rich fields of corn, squash, and beans, for acres of apple groves and peach orchards carefully nurtured over generations. One cooking pot, one blanket, one rifle – a sorry barter for nut groves and berry patches, for clear springs brimming with clean water, for deep, wide rivers with good fishing holes, for foothills and mountains teeming with deer, wild turkey and many such game as was good to eat – all of these riches in return for three bare necessities.

The trees in this new territory were trees any Carolina girl would recognize, but Rose judged these poorer varieties of oak and hickory to be but starveling imitations of the same trees back home. She recognized dogwood, ash, and red bud, but they too seemed a lesser kin, growing jake-leg and stunted in the rocky soil.

Rose’s people had traded with Europeans for centuries and never made such a pitiful deal for themselves as the Removal. “Why can’t the white man just say what the bargain really is?” she wondered, "We are taking all your possessions, period. Now, go away or we’ll kill you all down to the last man, woman, and child.”