From: Hal Muskat Date: 04 Dec 91 10:56 PST Subject: Janeen Antoine-"As An Indian Child Message-ID: <1563600094@igc.org> The following is from the Vanguard Foundation Annual Report for 1991. "As an Indian child I felt somehow inadequate and wondered why we Indians couldn't have discovered the New World, considering we were already here. Dirty Indian, Indian giver, dumb Indian, drunk Indian. Only later did I see that indeed Columbus had done much to define who Indian people are, even for ourselves, 500 years later. To educate and assert for ourselves who we are - Lakota, Mewuk, Dine, Tohono O'dham, this is what we must do now. The Columbus myth is a great illusion, the seed of a bad vision founded on mistruths and mistreatment of others. We must respect truth in history -- to observe the Quincentennial without any contrition or recognition of native peoples of this hemisphere would be false and hollow, without honor or justice." Janeen Antoine Director American Indian Contemporary Arts Gallery Activist 1992 Bay Area Regional Indian Alliance - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - From: kr6@ac.dal.ca (KimRilda LeBlanc) Date: Fri, 6 Dec 1991 01:44:00 GMT Subject: Re: Janeen Antoine-"As An Indian Child Message-ID: Original-Sender: kr6@ac.dal.ca (KimRilda LeBlanc) Hal Muskat writes: | The following is from the Vanguard Foundation Annual Report for 1991. | | "As an Indian child I felt somehow inadequate and wondered why we | Indians couldn't have discovered the New World, considering we | were already here... | | The Columbus myth is a great illusion, the seed of a bad vision | founded on mistruths and mistreatment of others... | | Janeen Antoine I agree fully with you. Have recently been reading Mother Earth Spirituality by Ed McGaa, who argues that it is now time for the old Indian ways to be brought to the "raibow tribe" so that they might learn how to heal themselves and this earth. I, for one, would like to be invited to participate in a sweat lodge ceremony, and feel that native spirituality is close to my own. The paradox is: true spirituality is an individual path, between a person and Wakan Tanka -- the worst crime to spirituality is to insist that "your" way is the only way, or the truth. This is what those Christians are still doing. Yet how can we show them how limiting this vision is without, so some extent, borrowing their "conversionary" methods and insisting that the native way is a better "truth"? Just wondering -- KimRilda