Shoes make me happy. Bags make Amber happy. This week she has had a wonderful time creating things out of leather with her good friend Henry Duarte the designer. It has helped ease other tensions going on around her, and just seeing her get lost in making things crafty makes me very happy. Marcello has a wolf in the back of the place where Amber runs away to create things. I never can fully relax knowing that the wolf is there, prowling around in the trees behind the house. It has been there since it was a baby but it tore up a mans face once who came into it's space. Marcello's own brother got mawled by the beast. IT really wakes up the tribal instincts within to be around leather and feathers and creativity. It's been said that to look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul, and I think that is true.
Cherokee Prayer
As I walk the trail of life
in the fear of the wind and rain,
grant O Great Spirit
that I may always walk
Amber is Cherokee-- her background is awakened with each step she takes towards it.
People: 'Cherokee' is Creek for 'people with another language'. (It's amazing how white settlers always managed to learn another tribe's name for any group of Indians. They learned the Creek word for the Cherokee tribe, but not the Creek word for themselves.) Anyway, our original name for ourselves was Aniyunwiya, but Cherokee is fine too (though we say it Tsalagi). There are 350,000 Cherokee people today, mostly in Oklahoma and North Carolina.
History: The best-known episode in Cherokee history was also the worst: the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation of the Cherokee Indians from their ancestral home in the southeast to Oklahoma. The Cherokee people were an urban, Christian, agricultural, intermarried society who had supported the United States against other tribes. In the end this was all for nothing. Though prominent Americans like Davy Crockett and Daniel Webster spoke against Removal, and though the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, President Andrew Jackson sent in the army. Fifteen to twenty thousand Cherokee Indians (along with Choctaw, Creek, and other tribes) were rounded up and herded to Oklahoma in the winter of 1838-1839. Driven from their homes without being allowed to collect their possessions first, even their shoes, the Cherokees were no better equipped for an 800-mile forced march than people today would be. Between four and eight thousand Cherokee people died of exposure, starvation, disease, and exhaustion along the Trail of Tears. If you understand this, both the extent to which the Cherokees had adopted American standards of civilization before the Removal and the ultimate futility of it, you will go a long way towards understanding the Cherokee mentality and also the attitudes of other Indian peoples towards us.
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