Well, I know not all my readers are American, and I can’t presume all my American readers celebrate Thanksgiving, but I think we can all be thankful for this cat. Oh cat, you act so outraged, but I’m guessing that at least one time in your life you walked on someone while they were asleep, and possibly sat on their head, so the grand karma wheel of life is even.
@David Futrelle
Thanks for the new blogroll “RESOURCES FOR MEN” . I think the manospher are not agree with these sites and the kind of them.
I find tomcat pee worse than neutered male cat or female cat pee, but stale beer’s worse than either. 😛
I know a bit about my maternal grandfather’s line, because a very distant cousin did a family history back in the 80s. The most interesting part was that a guy I worked with was from a family on the same ship they came out on in the 1840s – in fact my great grandfather’s first wife was from that family. We’re not blood relations, because they had no kids, but it was funny to find that connection. Lots of Ozark jokes doing the rounds after that. 😛
I’ve never been that interested in finding out about my ancestors. No faces, no personal histories, nothing of the sort that appeals to me about history.
There was an odd moment years back when I mentioned my father having been adopted, and an Aboriginal co-worker was all “He might have been Aboriginal!” Um, no, he was Scots English and was sent to an orphanage because his parents weren’t married (at least, his father was, but not to his mother). I wouldn’t have been excited if he had been of Aboriginal descent, because I feel no connection with that culture at all.
Kitteh — the thing with adopted Native Americans, and idk if it applies to Aboriginals, is that a lot of them were forced into orphanages — plenty of NA kids with parents where forcibly removed from perfectly healthy families. And for those kids, when they grew up, and their kids, reconnecting with their origins is a bit of a big deal. Almost a sort of “this is who we are and you failed to take that from us”.
So I can see your coworker getting excited not because Aboriginal = exotic (cuz duh, few people consider themselves exotic) but rather excited at the prospect of reintroducing a descendant of a stolen child to her cultural heritage.
And I can get why — I cannot find ANYTHING on that great-great-grandmother before her marriage certificate. She effectively didn’t exist. Because the boarding schools renamed the kids they stole, and, near as I could find, none of those records were ever digitalized (not surprising considering how hard it is for those kids, when grown up, to get any info on where they came from)
Again, idk about there, but here the last of those boarding schools closed within your lifetime, so plenty of the kids-now-adults are still, currently, trying to pry the gov’n into releasing info on their birth parents (fuck, CPS is pretty much still stealing Native kids here)
In short, “because I feel no connection with that culture at all.”, is the problem // why of the situation — at least here there’s a certain level of “but if that is your heritage, then you should have that connection because it’s wrong that it was stolen from you”
FTR, I’m not trying to armchair psych your coworker, just having a general rant about how badly the US has fucked up Native relations and that we are STILL stealing Native children (You know how most kids who can’t stay with their parents for whatever reason will be placed with another relative if that’s feasible? Well CPS has a habit of deciding that there are neither fit relatives, nor any fit Native parents at all, despite being legally bound to attempt to place Native kids with Native families) — it’s six degrees of fucked up and gets my dander up.
Argenti, you’re exactly right that the same thing happened here; it’s called the Stolen Generations and one of the few memorable things Kevin Rudd did in his first stint as PM, in 2007, was to make the public, official apology to all those people that he’d promised, and that John Howard had refused to do. It’s quite possible that my co-worker went through that herself (this was thirteen years ago, so I don’t remember too well).
Thing is though, even if I was of Aboriginal descent, and had grown up knowing it, I still wouldn’t feel any connection with it. It’s not my culture. I don’t have much of what I’d call a culture – mainstream Australia always strikes me as shallow and it’s only mine because I happen to have been born here. The countries whose history means something to me are England and France (and only a few years in France’s case).
Knowing and being appalled by what was done – and I would bet is still being done here – and the utter shit heaped on native peoples, doesn’t make a sense of connection with their cultures, and it wouldn’t even if I found that it was part of my family history.
The one thing that would be amusing (in a sour way) is that my male parental unit’s a mealy-mouthed racist, and wouldn’t have been at all pleased about it. He’d have kept it very quiet.
To add: I know my mother’s side is mixed German-Sorb on her father’s side, and Irish-English on her mother’s. I don’t feel any connection with those cultures, either, but of all of them, English is the one that means something to me, at least as far as history and landscape go.
I tend to find that a lot of people claim the ‘1/16 Native’ so they can (they think) get away with racism. It’s also used as a trump for settler’s guilt. Blech.
Ewwww. 🙁
Do ya’ll know how I can contact David ? I need to ask him something in private .
His email is listed in the About box near the top right portion of the sidebar.