Cutting up Chickens: The Power of Lies and Disinformation

Some years ago I was working for a small Indian Center located in San Luis Obispo County California. Among the projects we were working on was the development of Title IV Indian Education projects in the school districts in Central California. We were having a lot of trouble convincing the school administrators to do the student count and apply for the funds to develop the programs.

About the same time, I went to an Indian Education conference in Sacramento and happened to speak with an Indian educator about our difficulties. She told me a story about a study that had been done a few years before about Indian students and their performance in public schools. The study, she said, had shown that Indian students did as well or better than non-Indian students until they reached the third grade.

After the third grade, the grades and test scores of Native American students took a nose dive and all of us know the rest of that story; high drop out rates, low grades, difficulties getting into college, and so on.

The sponsors of the study wondered, why third grade? Turns out, that is when they began teaching history.

Through the years I have looked for that study and have not been able to find it, but know from personal experience that it is true.

I went to a small Catholic school in Kansas and vividly recall my initial lessons in American history. Sister Ancilla was teaching the class and since the first lessons were about Indians, I was interested.

I remember one of the first stories was about how those "savages" had attacked and burned the wagons of the "innocent women and children" whose only intent was to settle on farms and "tame the wilderness." The nun gave rather graphic details about Indian scalping and slaughter and I went home with those pictures in my mind.

There at home, in the kitchen as I did my homework, was one of those same savages and she was wielding a butcher knife, cutting up some chickens for supper.

Now, I knew I was Indian, my family was Indian, but for some reason it stuck in my head that my mama was a "real Indian." And she had a knife. And she was rather skilled with the intricacies of slicing apart some innocent chickens. I recall wondering if she had the same facility or desire when it came to defenseless white settlers.

As I tried to focus on my homework, I kept one eye on my dear old mama as she flipped the chicken this way and that. There was a moment when she laid one of the legs down and whacked it clean through the joint in one hard stroke. I jumped. My own scalp tingled at the thought that my mama and her relatives in the past had done that very same thing to innocent women and children.

I have long since grown out of that fear and the end of that particular day of sidelong glances at my mother and her skill with a knife at cutting up chickens and settlers ended on an emotional note. I told her what Sister Ancilla had said. She cried.

My mama cried for what she had experienced in hearing those powerful and hurtful words in her own life. She cried also that her own son would be made afraid of his mother on the basis of a word, some lies told in defense of Manifest Destiny, a term she never, ever, understood.

Near where my mother grew up is Tecumseh, Oklahoma and the name of their high school team, their mascot, is the Savages. When I lived near there, I would often see Indian people wearing t-shirts and hats which carried the name of the team.

The local tribes, Shawnee, Kickapoo, Sac and Fox, and my own tribe, the Potawatomi, do nothing to change the name of that team or the dozens of others throughout the state. There are Indians across the United States who think that working to change the names of these mascots is a trivial issue and not worth our time and effort.

Yes, health care is important, but so is education. And the mascot issue is not so much about the names of teams. For me, it is about the fear and ignorance engendered by the use of those names. It is about being eight years old and hearing the word savage and then going home and finding one, with a knife, slicing up a chicken to feed her kids.

Those words are lies and Indian people who want to wear lies as a banner of pride must remember that they just might scare the self- respect right out of their own children.

I was lucky. My mama and I talked about it and I can still remember her holding me as she cried about the ignorance of a society that treats us something less than human. And I still remember her words. "Oh Johnny," she said softly, " I am not a savage."

This is a crazy world. What can be done? Amazingly, we have been mislead. We have been taught that we can control government by voting. The founder of the Rothschild dynasty, Mayer Amschel Bauer, told the secret of controlling the government of a nation over 200 years ago. He said, "Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its laws." Get the picture? Your freedom hinges first on the nation's banks and money system. Freedom is connected with Debt Elimination for each individual. Not only does this end personal debt, it places the people first in line as creditors to the National Debt ahead of the banks. They don't wish for you to know this. It has to do with recognizing WHO you really are in A New Beginning: A Practical Course in Miracles, an informational study.

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