I celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day two days early this year. Had a good time with my Indigenous People group on Saturday.
If you put in “Bride, TN” or “Bride Road, TN” on your map app and zoom in you can see where my Indigenous People call home. Our “land” goes to the north to the Hatchie River and east to Covington. Goes south of Bride Road for a couple of miles and west part way to the Mississippi.
And, if you look up Indigenous People, you’ll see there’s no settled definition. Generally, though, it means the people who lived somewhere before colonizers came. Of course, colonizers isn’t defined either, but all Cultural Marxists presume its European colonists. It’s never AmerIndian, African, Arab Muslim, Mongols, or the people groups who for a thousand years did their Völkerwanderung invading and occupying Europe.
After two hundred years in West Tennessee and over a hundred before that in Virginia, we are the natives of this land. Since we’re being replaced by the invading Illegal Alien colonizers, we are truly the Indigenous People here.
We’ve used the term “my people” for generations. We see ourselves as a People. Actually, as kin in a Scot-Irish clan. There are about 500 of us. About 40 of us gathered at the more than century-old country school turned community center named for late cousin David Bowden. We own it outright. And, it sits out on the edge of a church and graveyard which holds some of our kin and is surrounded by fields. Cotton and soybeans for the most part.
We are all descended from Jimmy C. Bowden and the formidable Florence Ellen Maley. She was born in 1855 in Tipton County. Died in 1944. We are her People. She said, “We’re Arash.” That’s West Tennessee for Irish. More accurately, Scot-Irish.
I’ve had three DNA ancestry tests. They all report the same ethnicities. The mix from my mother and father makes me almost one quarter Welsh. But, I can’t discern anything Welsh in my Indigenous People group. I see a lot of Scot-Irish. Family-family-family, freedom, and faith.
My cousin Carolyn captured what we are in her prayer at the meal. She thanked the Lord Jesus Christ for “this land, the blood ties that bind us, and our Christian faith.” We are a People with a place, people – kin, and faith. We live different lives but what we keep in common is important to those of us who gather every year. We care about our cousins.
There are only two ladies who are part of the “grandchildren’s” generation of 34 first cousins and their spouses still living. The hundred or so of us 3rd cousins (or are we second cousins once removed?) probably feel the family ties more than the two generations younger than us.
These family gatherings started as celebrations of the Bowden-Maley Matriarch’s birthday. They were intermittent after that until my Daddy, James Albert, and cousin David got it going again in 1970 as a pig-picking every year.
Usually, I mock Indigenous Peoples Day. I ridicule the Cultural Marxists’ cartoonish history. I joke about their absurd Presentism. I argue against their deliberate attacks on Christianity and Western Civilization. Yet, I understand the rightful pride of any American with Indian blood.
But, their heritage doesn’t equal a claim to perpetual victimhood and permanent privileges based on birth. If my late wife had been one-eighth Cherokee instead of one-sixteenth, she could have claimed ridiculous “rights” as the descendant of Indians and people who had family murdered by Indians in 1760.
Furthermore, I understand AmerIndians’ sensitive pride when Indigenous Peoples Day is mocked. No matter how appropriately the Cultural Marxism needs to be slammed, it could feel personal. I apologize for whatever is taken as personal criticism, because it isn’t so.
On the other hand, my very Bowden response to those who disparage my Confederate ancestors is disregard, disgust, and defiance. Their ignorance, biased information, or bigotry doesn’t define my heritage. It can’t stand up to scholarly, truthful, and accurate history.
The Matriarch of my Indigenous People group was 8 years old when the invading Yankees tried to scare her into telling where her Tennessee Partisan Ranger brother was hiding. They shot a percussion cap pistol off by her ear. She was deaf in that ear for the rest of her life. She didn’t tell them anything. The Yankees killed the farm animals, pets, and burned the barn. Losing that war with the destruction and having all money to zero caused three generations of poverty. Re-building and family farming builds wealth very, very slowly.
My People survived. Thrived. They had their land, their relatives, and their Bible-believing Christian faith. We will survive the same way in the future.
We say and believe, “God is good. All the time. No matter what. No matter what.”
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Outstanding diatribe!
I am also so sick of the PC Leftards inserting their BS narrative into our lives.
Screw them, and their sick world views, Their constant collective expression of MENTAL ILLNESS is very tedious (to paraphrase the late-Great I Man).👺
Diatribe? I thought it was profound prose. LOL. Thanks for reading and commenting.
The Left has to destroy our history to create their imaginary perfect future.
My first American ancestor, Richard Warren, arrived on these shores in 1620; after 404 years, how much more of a native American could I be?
Consider this fun fact: “American” is in what language? Who named this place on earth “America”? I believe the natives did. Yes, the English-speaking people who became American, not the neolithic tribes of hundreds of tongues and no written language.
The descendants of those tribes are Americans now. But, they aren’t more or less American. They are fully assimilated members of our American branch of the English-Speaking People.
Fully assimilated? We are becoming a less and less assimilated nation every day!