I've always loved the song Come and get your love. Growing up, I thought it was the cream of the crop of hippie era songs about honoring the fact that women have a sexuality too and are not merely sex objects.
Some years ago I saw this video and learned that the song is not a product of the hippie era. Instead, it is a product of an entirely Native American band. I feel like it's unique. In spite of asking around, I've never found a song that I feel quite hits that same note in some important way.
Sort of around the same time in my life, I tripped across the following photo:
The photo looks uncannily like my late father. I saw it not long after my father died and was surprised to learn that Gary Farmer is full-blooded Iroquois.
I grew up thinking of my father as looking and acting more or less like Archie Bunker from All in the Family. I thought he was your stereotypical sexist pig White guy.
The above photo rocked my world. Between the photo of Gary Farmer and the above video of Redbone I felt like I had just been told a shocking revelation about my own life.
According to oral family tradition, my father was part Cherokee. I looked around a bit and the Iroquois are apparently a related tribe.
I never felt close to my father. He was in Vietnam when I was little and I always felt like we missed out on some important bonding experiences and I just never felt close to him like my sister seemed to feel.
While living in Germany and in therapy for the second time for the sexual abuse suffered at the hands of my brother, I uncovered supressed memories that caused me to conclude that my father must have also molested me and did so when I was really little.
Those memories are really fuzzy, so I've never been clear exactly what he did. It would be many more years before I would feel like I more or less understood the gist of what went down.
I think he came back from Vietnam and I was an amazingly adorable blonde little cherub that my mother used to call Shirley Temple due to my combo of outrageous blonde curls and sunny personality. I think Dad just wanted to hold me on his lap and drink that in and forget the war.
And then things got weird.
In the last couple of years or so, due to writing a (mostly redacted, but now back online) blog called Native Influence, I concluded that my dad must have dropped his retirement papers and bought a house in the 'burbs the summer I turned three to protect me from being hurt again. He dropped his retirement papers because the army reneged on its promise to not send him back to Vietnam and I think he decided "Oh, hell no, I am not hurting my child again now that she is old enough she might actually remember it."
I don't think my father was a bad man or a sexual deviant. I think my father paid a terrible price for his military service and so did I. I think the Native influence on him from his Cherokee heritage is why he was able to undo some of the damage to me and protect me from further harm.
I think my story of childhood sexual abuse is not unlike that of Patrick Stewart's story of childhood trauma.
Stewart's father beat his mother when he was a child. Only late in life did Patrick Stewart learn that his father was suffering from PTSD due to military service and this was the root cause of the domestic violence in Stewart's childhood home.
Stewart supports a domestic violence organization in the name of his mother and a combat stress organization in the name of his father. He eloquently explains that in this clip: My brother had a forceps birth. He is older than me but I heard my whole life that you could see the mark of the forceps on his head for three days.
He eventually made amends to me, a story already told elsewhere.
As an adult, I've been acquainted with a few men who helped teach me to respect myself in spite of the misogynistic world around me. I know some of these men are or were Indigenous or part Indigenous and I believe probably all of them were though I can't verify that.
I was friends for some years with a physician. He encouraged me to go back to college, something I desperately wanted for myself but felt unable to pursue due to my oppressive marriage and unsupportive husband. He also helped save my life.
During my divorce, I had a long distance relationship to a full-blooded Chamorro man. He helped me put down a great deal of my baggage.
I also had a long distance relationship to an Iranian man who described the first of his four languages as "a local dialect." That and other factors make me suspect he may have been part indigenous though I can't verify it.
I also once had a Native man give me reason to feel he wanted ME to kiss HIM but he was unwilling to initiate. That relationship never went anywhere but the incident was a surprisingly strong reminder of these other Native influences on my life because it flies in the face of the White American culture with which I am more familiar where men are so often very aggressive initiators to the point where it's a big problem and women are still trying to figure out how to combat the rape culture which grows out of that fact.
My father was a good man who, during a time of extreme duress, messed up. He then did everything he could to make things right to the best of his ability.
My brother is a good man who has suffered from a head injury syndrome his entire life and did terrible things to me while he was still a legal minor -- a child. As an adult, like my father, he tolerated no excuses from himself. He did right by me at some cost to himself, though it was very hard.
It's one of the reasons I don't hate him. It's also why I have no tolerance for bullshit excuses from people who know better but can't be bothered to work at doing the right thing.
Some years ago I saw this video and learned that the song is not a product of the hippie era. Instead, it is a product of an entirely Native American band. I feel like it's unique. In spite of asking around, I've never found a song that I feel quite hits that same note in some important way.
Sort of around the same time in my life, I tripped across the following photo:
The photo looks uncannily like my late father. I saw it not long after my father died and was surprised to learn that Gary Farmer is full-blooded Iroquois.
I grew up thinking of my father as looking and acting more or less like Archie Bunker from All in the Family. I thought he was your stereotypical sexist pig White guy.
The above photo rocked my world. Between the photo of Gary Farmer and the above video of Redbone I felt like I had just been told a shocking revelation about my own life.
According to oral family tradition, my father was part Cherokee. I looked around a bit and the Iroquois are apparently a related tribe.
I never felt close to my father. He was in Vietnam when I was little and I always felt like we missed out on some important bonding experiences and I just never felt close to him like my sister seemed to feel.
While living in Germany and in therapy for the second time for the sexual abuse suffered at the hands of my brother, I uncovered supressed memories that caused me to conclude that my father must have also molested me and did so when I was really little.
Those memories are really fuzzy, so I've never been clear exactly what he did. It would be many more years before I would feel like I more or less understood the gist of what went down.
I think he came back from Vietnam and I was an amazingly adorable blonde little cherub that my mother used to call Shirley Temple due to my combo of outrageous blonde curls and sunny personality. I think Dad just wanted to hold me on his lap and drink that in and forget the war.
And then things got weird.
In the last couple of years or so, due to writing a (mostly redacted, but now back online) blog called Native Influence, I concluded that my dad must have dropped his retirement papers and bought a house in the 'burbs the summer I turned three to protect me from being hurt again. He dropped his retirement papers because the army reneged on its promise to not send him back to Vietnam and I think he decided "Oh, hell no, I am not hurting my child again now that she is old enough she might actually remember it."
I don't think my father was a bad man or a sexual deviant. I think my father paid a terrible price for his military service and so did I. I think the Native influence on him from his Cherokee heritage is why he was able to undo some of the damage to me and protect me from further harm.
I think my story of childhood sexual abuse is not unlike that of Patrick Stewart's story of childhood trauma.
Stewart's father beat his mother when he was a child. Only late in life did Patrick Stewart learn that his father was suffering from PTSD due to military service and this was the root cause of the domestic violence in Stewart's childhood home.
Stewart supports a domestic violence organization in the name of his mother and a combat stress organization in the name of his father. He eloquently explains that in this clip: My brother had a forceps birth. He is older than me but I heard my whole life that you could see the mark of the forceps on his head for three days.
He eventually made amends to me, a story already told elsewhere.
As an adult, I've been acquainted with a few men who helped teach me to respect myself in spite of the misogynistic world around me. I know some of these men are or were Indigenous or part Indigenous and I believe probably all of them were though I can't verify that.
I was friends for some years with a physician. He encouraged me to go back to college, something I desperately wanted for myself but felt unable to pursue due to my oppressive marriage and unsupportive husband. He also helped save my life.
During my divorce, I had a long distance relationship to a full-blooded Chamorro man. He helped me put down a great deal of my baggage.
I also had a long distance relationship to an Iranian man who described the first of his four languages as "a local dialect." That and other factors make me suspect he may have been part indigenous though I can't verify it.
I also once had a Native man give me reason to feel he wanted ME to kiss HIM but he was unwilling to initiate. That relationship never went anywhere but the incident was a surprisingly strong reminder of these other Native influences on my life because it flies in the face of the White American culture with which I am more familiar where men are so often very aggressive initiators to the point where it's a big problem and women are still trying to figure out how to combat the rape culture which grows out of that fact.
My father was a good man who, during a time of extreme duress, messed up. He then did everything he could to make things right to the best of his ability.
My brother is a good man who has suffered from a head injury syndrome his entire life and did terrible things to me while he was still a legal minor -- a child. As an adult, like my father, he tolerated no excuses from himself. He did right by me at some cost to himself, though it was very hard.
It's one of the reasons I don't hate him. It's also why I have no tolerance for bullshit excuses from people who know better but can't be bothered to work at doing the right thing.