So professionally speaking, I'm blacker than ever now that I'm out of the closet on my other blog. I talk about black people and black culture and black politics. Happy to do so, too.
Though a part of me feels a little strange about it. In America, mostly you have to choose a race, no matter what your actual genetic makeup might be. People usually go with the one they most look like. Society kinda encourages this. So Tiger Woods very seldom talks about being half-Asian. It's like that part of himself doesn't matter. With Barack Obama, he actually pulls out his whiteness from time to time to remind people when forced to remind folks he doesn't hate white people. (sigh)
When I wake up in the morning and brush my teeth, my Indian blood is the first thing I see in my own slanted eyes. It's not really something that's easily ignored once you know.
With my father's side, being a little bit Indian is about identity. At some point someone or in my case multiple people have the talk with you. The talk that goes a little like: "You know we're part Cherokee, right? You're also Cherokee." My father's mother was half-white and half-Cherokee.
On my mother's side, it's always been less about identity since that was pretty submerged. My grandmother didn't feel safe really being straight about her own heritage until well into her eighties. It was just easier and less complicated to be black than black plus a whole bunch of other stuff. It came out in pieces over time but from what she's told me, she's actually more Indian than black and has plenty of white blood too. Her no-good grandfather's family owned most of the land in and around Catonsville MD at one time. But her father and his brother grew up poor, uneducated and illegitimate born on the other side of the tracks. They took their Indian mother's name as their surname since their father wouldn't claim them publicly. They tried when he died to claim some of their inheritance to no avail.
Her other grandparents were Indian and black each. But I didn't know anything about that as a kid. Instead I grew up with a lot of customs and traditions that I would only understand as an adult to be Indian culture.
I ate a lot of succotash as a kid. I didn't like it much but it was sort of like milk. Succotash was portrayed as a food for growing kids' bones. My mom told us we had to eat it because it would help us grow. Fried fish for breakfast with cornbread, tomatoes and raw onions on many Sundays. Holidays are alcohol-free, always. We were instructed never to drink water that had been left uncovered over night because it soaked up unhealthy spirits and bad energy at night from dreams.
We were taught that dreams were important and coached regularly on how to interpret them and proper action regarding certain types of dreams. So for example, if you had a nightmare, you couldn't tell anyone about it until you'd eaten or drunk something otherwise it might come true in this world. Taking something orally broke the connection between the spirit world and this one.
If you had a dream involving a relative who died, it meant they were trying to communicate a lesson or teaching from the other side. Those dreams were extremely important and taken pretty seriously with much discussion and analysis.
We were taught the difference between dreams and visions. We were told that each person will receive at least one vision in your lifetime meant to guide your life going forward. This is true actually, though many people don't like to talk about their vision because they've received no guidance and don't know what to do with the information. I've had 4 visions in my life so far at critical junctions and they've mostly been comforting visions meant to keep my feet sure on the path when challenges have arisen or are coming. Also, through remote reiki healing, I've had something like a vision when doing healing with my grandmother. That was pretty powerful, though I'm not ready to share that openly yet.
Visions are ok to talk about in my family and can provide a lot of guidance. The difference between a dream or daydream and a vision is that a vision is real. During a vision, you are temporarily forced into another reality for an experience that is not possible in this one in order to accelerate knowledge.On your return to this reality state, you are expanded with new wisdom and guidance for your future decisions.
I've been taught a lot about weather too, like how to smell snow coming or watch to see if you can see the wind blowing up the backs of the leaves to tell if rain's a-coming. It's a hot summer coming if the bumblebees are fat. There's a charge in the air and a heavy feeling when rain is marching toward you about an hour or 2 away on a hot bright summer day. Nothing good will come of an orange sky. The skill of smelling water even when you can't see it near you is a useful one actually. A bit of clay dug from the ground is good for mosquito bites. Cornmeal can be used in a loose paste to wash your face cleaner than any soap.
There are other customs such as my grandmother's insistence on New Year's Day that a man and not a woman must be the first person to cross your threshold or it's bad luck. Kinda sexist, I know. But as I've found out, it's a classic Native American superstition/tradition/whatever. While my grandmother has mostly been indulged on that score, more sacred is the custom that you cannot cut a male child's hair before he is 3 years old. No one's sure what will happen if you do cut a boy's hair but no one's been interested in finding out. In my brother's case, my mother braided his hair in a pigtail and tucked it under his shirt so he'd appear normal. For some of my cousins, there are some pretty cute pics of them with pretty sizable afros.
I've been told I look Piscataway by some Piscataway. They are a small tribe in MD with a tough past. Not many of them remain except us "negro mongrels" as this Catholic site calls us. Like many smaller tribes, when the trouble came, many intermarried, went underground and tried to blend in, becoming the secret Indians passing down their heritage in whispers. My grandmother could never remember the tribe her grandmother on her mother's side was from. She would shape her mouth to try to say the word, her eyes gazing into the middle distance but it got stuck there -- never uttered. So I'll research the Piscataway (pronounced "piss -- KAT - away") to see if they are a match. For the other side, misted even further in darkness, I've only got the customs, some of which I still keep, to go on. Though I ain't eating no succotash.
Recent Comments