From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist
“Before the palefaces
came among us, we enjoyed the happiness of unbounded freedom and were
acquainted with neither riches, wants, nor oppression.”
Tecumseh, Chief of
the Shawnee Nation
While
conducting research for one of my earlier novels in which Native Americans are
prominent, I learned that pumpkins and other types of squash originated with
North America’s Indigenous people as long as 9000 years ago. In farm fields nestled
betwixt and between modern-day large cities and small towns for hundreds of
miles in any direction from my home in sprawling Columbus, Ohio, pumpkins loom
large at this time of year, as do Native Americans, especially in this my
country’s National Native American Heritage Month. History tells us that Ohio was
the stomping grounds of a number of formidable and famous Indigenous persons,
Tecumseh, the warrior chief of the Shawnee Nation, one of the most celebrated among
them, not only in Ohio but across the nation and beyond. As I focused my camera
on the wagonload of pumpkins, that contemporary American enterprise of
something so purely Native American did not hold me fast to present time. On air
saturated with misty currents, my imagination was carried back to the late 18th
and early 19th centuries, the time of Tecumseh and his people’s
struggle against the expansion of the United States into their Ohio land: the
word “ohio” translated as “beautiful river” from the native tongue.
In Tecumseh’s time, the field in
which the wagon now sits would likely not have been an open landscape at all,
but rather, as far as the eye could see primeval woodlands of rotund and
towering deciduous and coniferous trees would have abounded, plots so thick
with vegetation as to be nearly impermeable. It is said that Ohio’s ancient
woodlands were the greatest among all others on the planet, and I can picture
in my mind’s eye Tecumseh and his young braves, like England’s Robin Hood and
his men, making tactical use of the forests in their defense against the white
invaders. In the end, no matter how significant was the camouflage, or how
targeted were the bows and arrows and hatchets of the Shawnee, those weapons were
no match against the muskets and cannons that were the stuff of the arsenal of
the palefaces. At the culmination of a series of the terror-filled decades wrought
by the European colonists on the area’s Indigenous people, they had no other
choice than to give way in Ohio and flea to the safety of neighbor-tribes south
and west of them. Like so many of my Cherokee kin who were removed from the
lush mountains of Tennessee and the Carolinas by the new government and
established in reservations in the wastelands of Oklahoma, the remaining
Shawnee were also distributed to reservations west of Ohio. Try as they might
to get rid of them, the authorities could not have gotten them all, and that
day as I snapped photo after photo, I swear I heard Shawnee whispers afloat on
the air: “We are still here, holed up in the foothills of the Appalachians.
Come to us and we will embrace you, our sister.”
Whether fact or fiction, it is
recorded that a shooting star appeared in the heavens at the moment of
Tecumseh’s birth, and the term became his nickname. I prefer to accept is as
fact for the reason that a shooting star is so very emblematic of the dynamism
of the man. At the time of his death at age 45, that handsome, gallant, wise,
canny, and noble Native American had survived the slaughter of his father and
older brother as well as countless numbers of his contemporaries at the hands
of the colonists. Foreign colonists of several stripes had devastated and then
stolen the native’s hunting grounds, plundered and then burned their villages
and crops, infected them with diseases, cowed them with alcohol, forged unfair
treaties and broke them regularly, and made fatal inroads towards obliterating
their culture and identity. In battle upon battle, Tecumseh as leader of an
alliance of resistance fighters he had amassed from native tribes across the
continent, he and his braves fought the oppressors. Despite the cruelties and
injustices the palefaces had committed against his people, Tecumseh refused to
tolerate inhumane treatment of his militia’s white prisoners of war.
Well into the late 20th century,
Native Americans were labeled as “savages” in American films and other modes of
popular culture. It was the misinformation-diet upon which Americans fed. The
official website of the National Native American Heritage Month reads:
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“During
National Native American Heritage Month, we will explore the heritage,
culture, and experience of Indigenous peoples both historically and in
American life today, while also sharing the various ways the National Park
Service collaborates with Indigenous communities. “America is a vast land of many
cultures dating back thousands of years to the original inhabitants of the
land. Today, programs, partnerships, and parks preserve and share the stories
and heritage of Indigenous people. National Native American Heritage Month is
celebrated each year in November. It is a time to celebrate the traditions,
languages, and stories of Native American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian,
and Island communities and ensure their rich histories and contributions
continue to thrive with each passing generation. It is also a time to
evaluate our pledge to maintain the meaningful partnerships we have with
Tribal Nations and renew our commitment to our nation-to-nation relationships
as we seek to ensure every community has a future they deserve.” I wonder what Tecumseh would
make of this measure of recompense, of amends-seeking on the part of the
United States? Is it enough to whitewash what in my estimation is my
country’s actual “Original Sin.” Perhaps Tecumseh would accept the effort as
enough, at least as a beginning, for after all, a bigger heart than that of most
others pulsated in his chest. As for me, I am forever at loggerheads between
my love of and loyalty to my country and my shame over its sins against its
Indigenous people. William Henry Harrison, Tecumseh’s most persistent and
consistent nemesis, said of him upon his death, “[Tecumseh] was one of those
uncommon geniuses, which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and
overturn the established order of things.” Even so, in the battle that killed
him, Tecumseh’s palefaced victors stripped him and scalped him and peeled
pieces of his skin from his body as souvenirs in a frozen land far north of
his soul’s homeland. While the Indigenous portion of my DNA is Cherokee
rather than Shawnee, still I mourn for Tecumseh, and at the same time I
salute him: “Hail to ‘Shooting Star,’ my fellow Ohioan—my spiritual brother!”
As it turned out, he was my noisy spiritual brother on that day not so long
ago that I photographed the wagonload of pumpkins parked in his front yard.© *** A wrong turn during a weekend road-trip gets ex-pat American,
Nicholas Plato lost in Australia’s forbidding outback, a journey that
terminates at a lonely plot scattered with hundreds of clay pots of every
size and description. A timbered door ajar at the front of a pintsized hut at
the plot’s center seems an open invitation. Driven by a deathly thirst,
Nicholas stops. A strange man materializes
out of nowhere, introduces himself merely as ‘Potter’, and welcomes Nicholas
to his Garden of the Spirits of the Pots. The stupefying indication of his
further words and body language is that Potter has expected Nicholas at his
bizarre habitation. Staggered by such familiarity by a person on whom Nicholas
has never laid eyes, his first instinct is to get in his car and hightail it
back to civilization as fast as wheels can transport him. But something compels him not to leave right away
and keeps him coming back. Although they are as mismatched as two
persons can be, a strange friendship takes hold between them. It is a
relationship that can only be directed by an unseen hand bent on setting
Nicholas on a mystifying voyage of self-discovery and Potter on revelations
of universal certainties. A blend of visionary and inspirational fiction with a touch of
romance, this is a tale of Nicholas’ journey into parts unknown, both within
his adopted home and himself, a quest that in the end leads him to his true
purpose for living. https://www.amazon.com/GARDEN-SPIRITS-POTS-SPIRITUAL-ODYSSEY-ebook/dp/B09JM7YL6F/  #ShootingStar,
#Tecumseh, #ShawneeChief, #ShawneeNation, #NativeAmericans, #IndigenousPeople,
#NationalNativeAmericanHeritageMonth, #pumpkins, #squashes, #Ohio, #OhioRiver,
#BeautifulRiver, #GardenOfTheSpiritsOfThePots, #LindaLeeGreene |
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