“HAIL TO ‘SHOOTING STAR,’ MY SPIRITUAL BROTHER!”

 

 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 18^th and early 19^th 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 20^th 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:

 

“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