A Begining Of Sorrows

I want to add that it is probably next to impossible to understand the problems of today without making this journey backwards into the fur trade era and into the plantation system. Then, I would go on through the generations to Plecker and the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Virginia and the eugenics movement in America. I’m not up on the eugenics movement as much as I’d like to be- I suspect learning more about it might help purge my vocabulary of some language viruses that might have filtered through from eugenics into common speak and into my mind– but, I have been told that the early eugenics movement here inspired Hitler. However that may be, understanding the past may help in understanding the unique pressures on “core” groups that managed against the odds to stay intact in their historical homelands and of their continuing struggles to survive as a community and to take care of their people. It may also help in understanding the unique issues of “spin-offs” and out-migrants.

I find Helen Rountree’s books helpful and I am sure others know of more works that would be helpful.

Barbara Mann’s NATIVE AMERICANS, ARCHAEOLOGISTS, AND THE MOUNDS is superb in this manner. Buy it to support native scholarship. Do not think her book is merely a work on the Ohio Valley Mounds and only of regional interest. She tackles with courage, discernment, grace, and humor some of the struggles today, especially for folks in the east, and performs an excellent review of the “academic literature” on the mounds in the social-historical context that gave it birth. She also discusses the issues surrounding Dawes. She also rightfully includes native informants’ information on the mounds and what natives are doing in the present to protect the mounds. For those of you interested in the migrations of the Shawnee, for example, her book is indispensible.

Brenda