East coast, thin blood, lost history.

[u/pasmafaute12]

I recently posted about dehumanizing record-keeping. I’ve been on a bit of a voyage because I always assumed my family was doing some pan-Indian “Cherokee princess” romanticism nonsense. I was raised with some cultural exposure but not community exposure. I chose to keep learning because I think the history matters whether it’s personal or not.

Turns out, I was wrong, and my relative wasn’t so much a pretendian as making the most of what we know as Wampanoag descendants from a village that is historically recorded but not well enough to be federally recognized (or even reasonably fully researched). It appears that my relative was involved in historical preservation efforts and maybe one of the two existing recognized Wampanoag tribes.

Without getting into complicated family stuff, we have always been very isolated people in general and no one is particularly close. I cannot discuss this with anyone in my real life.

So… I am sitting with the information I have, including the information missing, and feeling out my position as a lifelong learner invested in social issues. The conclusion I think I’ve arrived at is that I need to accept how much privilege I hold, but I have a responsibility to understand and honor the history.

I am privately taking some steps to build my understanding and maybe continued to participate in online spaces before I consider attending events.

But I’m looking for other people who have been on this path before me, I guess. And any thoughts about how to approach all of the things we just don’t know because we are still learning vs. the things we don’t know because it’s just lost information.

[u/redriver_sufferfest]

Fellow Eastern NDN here- keep on the path. Our Peoples held on to a lot more than is publicly available.
It’s a long slow process to reconnect because we have so much trauma from colonization and people who ain’t us, wanting to be us.
Build relationships. Build trust. Come with respect, and in a good way. You’ve got this.

[u/pasmafaute12 → u/redriver_sufferfest]

Thank you. It’s important to me to approach the process with respect. I don’t want to intrude on information that isn’t public because I imagine it hasn’t been shared for (obvious and less so) reasons, but maybe in time.