Best wishes

btice

btice

Joined
Dec 27, 2002
Messages
796
Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. Stay safe and take time to appreciate the little things.

bt
 
Waited 'til the day after Thanksgiving to post this. Just want to remind you all that:

It's all gravy, and everyday can be Christmas ( and Thanksgiving and Easter too ) if you choose to live it that way.
 
eheehee. (the uneasy white guy chuckle..)

Definitely black humor there, Yvsa. Take heart, Man, we're not all descended from that Puritanical strain that England scraped off their boot those many years before.;)

Happy turkey day,
 
I didn't go to work on Columbas day as that's an NDN day of mourning. I didn't even drive through the rez on that day.

Of course I worked on the Walker River Paiute Tribe's rez. That and the Yerington Paiute Tribe's Campbell Ranch rez still argue over who gets to claim Wovoka ( means woodcutter ), the 1889 Ghost Dance Messiah. He lived in Yerington most of his life, but is buried in the WRPT's graveyard. Well, that's what I've been told. He spent time in Fish Lake Valley too, about a hundred miles south. Actually his dad led an earlier version of the dance twenty or more years before. It was the 1889 version that led to Wounded Knee, though.

"I saw all the old people who had died long ago engaged in their oldtime sports and occupations, all happy and forever young; it was a pleasant land and full of game." Jack Wilson ( Wovoka ) Northen Paiute Ghost Dance Prophet.

Whatever: I've seen some things happen on the rez I'm not going to talk about. Did talk once about it with a Mandan, and his and my actual experiences were much the same. What it all meant, now that's where we would have differed, if either of us had understood the experience.
 
Originally posted by Ferrous Wheel
Definitely black humor there, Yvsa. Take heart, Man, we're not all descended from that Puritanical strain that England scraped off their boot those many years before.;)

Happy turkey day,
Click to expand...

Keith I was hoping the wink after my sentence would let everyone know I wasn't real serious, just half so.:)

I only wear the armband if I go out in public.;)

One night some regulars at our Sweatlodge brought a guest. She had never Sweat before nor do I think she had eve been around any ndns.
She asked me, "What do you think of white people?"
Left herself wide open she did.:D
I told her, "Why, some of my best friends are white!!!!":D Everyone had a good laugh but her. I don't think she ever caught on.
I joke around about it, but it's like being -part- ndn. I am a mixed blood so I can't have bad feelings about my non-ndn blood nor the people it came from.

KInd of like this African-American kid, to be PC, out in SoCal. He thought I didn't like him because he was black. I flat out told him I didn't like him because he was a sonofabitch and that if he was ndn and acted the same way I still wouldn't like him.
Like many people he didn't know that there were a lot of ndns captured and put into slavery and when I was talking about that one day he started acting differently towards me.
One day he came up and told me that he finally understood what I was talking about when I told him I didn't like hiom because he was a SOB. He turned out to be a pretty decent kid and started to get along with some of the other guys as well, not all of them, but a few.
Hopefully he improved from there.
I don't judge people on their color as we all bleed red when we're cut.:D
 
In Schurz, the coolies brought in by the railroad brought opium with them and many died stoned lying unconcious in the snow. There's one place near the highway where the old station is now falling down. It gives me shivers when I go by.

In Yerington, the Italian farmers made wine. The indians would work for the farmers, then give them their pay, which they would buy wine to get drunk with.

That's one thing the Mandan taught me. Because NDNs weren't allowed to get alcohol, they'd split a bottle and drink in fast so it'd be in them and couldn't be confiscated. That's a recipe for creating addiction.

Marijuana isn't unknown as an escape from a miserable existence on the rez.

A few years back one of the Ivy League future sociologist/anthropologist grad students offered an old NDN in yerngton a toke of marijuana but was turned down.

He'd learned the hard way to only do one drug at a time. The old NDN happened to be my wife's physical therapist's grandfather. She was torn between letting her kids read about Great Grampaw, and having them remain ignoranant them about him. The grad student got his Ph.D. and then published the dirty little truth on how the ranchers used it to keep a labor pool of NDN labor handy

There were slaves, and then there were slaves to addiction be it booze or opium.

Peyote was different, although it was also an analgesic. IIRC so far as I've heard it was either used for holy purposes or for pain. I'm told it's all over the local area but I've never seen it. If I knew where to find it, I've got a friend who is constantly in lung pain.
He's also a former EMT and friends with tribal members. Legal or not, I'd get it for him!
 
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