the peaceful peacock

I wonder what Ernie would have to say about Indian Day

Posted on 27 November 2009

I know what his opin­ions were on Thanks­giv­ing but I decided a long time ago not to use those words in my blog.

But Indian Day–ok, Native Amer­i­can Her­itage Day but I know Ernie would totally call it Indian Day–that’s some­thing different.

Now before I dig into this topic, I should let you know Ernie rarely said any­thing that wasn’t funny.  Sen­si­tive issues were pep­pered with jokes in order to ease the blow, he had an arse­nal of one lin­ers at the ready at all times.  A sea­soned vet­eran of two tours in Viet­nam is just kind of like that. If he was still here, I’m sure his words would sound much less harsh than mine, but I’ll give it a shot.

I’m sure he would be quick to point out the Black Fri­day ref­er­ence.  In fact, I take that back about him call­ing it Indian Day…he would call it Black Fri­day for sure.  He would def­i­nitely laugh about the day being a sec­ond thought to Thanks­giv­ing, when every­one was stuffed on turkey and didn’t feel like mak­ing another feast to honor the Indige­nous Peo­ple.  He would talk about it being too lit­tle too late, a polit­i­cal scheme of some kind in order to make white peo­ple feel bet­ter about the deeply ingrained guilt car­ried with the geno­cide of an entire race of peo­ples.  And he would be sure to note the part about Black Fri­day being the day that is best known for shop­ping and cel­e­brat­ing mass consumption.

While he was quick-witted and light with his words, he never missed the point.

On this day, I think Ernie would tell me to teach my chil­dren about their roots and show them how to keep a promise.  And make sure they under­stand the impor­tance of tread­ing lightly on the Earth Mother.  He would say we should tell them the truth about Cow­boys and Indi­ans.  He would say that the con­cept of Black Fri­day belongs to us and we are respon­si­ble for mak­ing it into some­thing good, some­thing mean­ing­ful to our lit­tle tribe.

And he would say, “It’s a start.”

I know he would.

And I’m sure we would be lis­ten­ing to this song–at least twice. But more like four times because that’s how many times my screen froze up when I was try­ing to retrieve the code to embed this video. That’s just Ernie’s lit­tle way of say­ing hello.