Skip to main content

Going Native


"Hey, you look like those guys from TV!"

"That's right!"

After watching a bit of Baraka the other night (thanks to a fine suggestion from Rimarama), Elizabeth decided to decorate her body a la the tribal peoples. If this was National Geographic, then imagine a photo of the Native Lizzy, naked down to her undies, with green stripes across her legs, geometric shapes on her feet, red dots on her stomach, and lines streaming down from her eyes to look like tears. (Only, she used red marker so it looked like bloody tears. That's my sweetheart.) Of course Samantha wanted to go native, too, and ended up with a nice tribal “smiley face” on her back.

This must be the Modern American Native -- one in which Dora undies replace loin cloths, the war cry is the theme from Barney, and body paint comes care of Crayola instead of natural pigments and guano.

Coincidentally (speaking of tribal peoples), a Native American Indian visited Elizabeth’s school last week. He demonstrated native dance and hunting techniques, and apparently he was funny as well as informative. At one point he took off his hair.

“He took off his hair?”

“Yea. I thought he had long black hair, but then he took it off and he had short black hair.”

That explains Elizabeth’s shortly-cropped depiction of the Indian she drew for us later that evening. (Of course, the question I ask myself is, why wouldn't he have short hair? I mean, come on. 21st century.)

Despite the visitor’s modern representation of the Native American, within minutes of getting into the car the girls were singing “What Makes the Red Man Red?” Which makes me wonder -- what makes the red man red? Well, I suppose singing this song makes him pretty damned red.

I can only blame that politically incorrect moment on Peter Pan which is currently Samantha’s favorite Disney movie. I suppose we could toss Peter Pan into the garbage and forbid the girls to watch it, but then what would they talk about with their friends around the water fountain?

Maybe I should check some of these out before I go to Hell:

Native Americans (web site)

Good Indian Movies That Don’t Suck (Amazon List)

An Expanding View of Indian Country (Amazon List)

I guess Elizabeth was right to draw red tears.<



Previous Comments

 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Just Call Me Ruby

Despite recent evidence to the contrary, it's no secret -- I don't like to exercise. Especially exercise for the sake of exercise... pushups in order to do more and better pushups, etc. To inspire me properly, everything must have purpose . It must be practical. This is why I stopped taking kung fu a few years ago (well, that and it's not easy to execute a perfect roundhouse kick when you're pregnant.) After 2-3 years of working hard to become a great fighter (not that I ever became one), I asked myself, What am I fighting against? I'm not going to join the Army. I don't live in a bad neighborhood. Yet, I'm spending hours and hours of my time learning how to poke some phantom menace in the ojos (that's eyes for those of you who aren't vicariously learning Spanish through your 1st grader). Enough was enough. It just wasn't practical anymore. And thus began the steady process of me falling out of shape. I knew I was in physical decline. T...
5 comments
Read more

Score One for the Bad Guys

Apparently, Lizzy and Samantha have a soft spot in their hearts for the bad guys. After all, in their world the bad guys always get shot, beaten, or killed by super heroes, they always land in jail, and they’re never attractive. So when I heard strange phrases in hushed tones coming from the toy room the other day, phrases like, take off his clothes ... and hand me that bug ... and, put that on his vagina , I had to ask: What is going on in there?! After some debate between the two of them (n o, don’t tell mommy ... it’s OK, just don’t tell daddy ... and so on) they finally fessed up that they were playing a game with Barbies and other creatures wherein the bad guys win. Here’s how it works: In this game, the bad guys torture the good guys by making them take off all their clothes and then placing mind-controlling bugs on their vaginas . The bugs contain a virus that infects their hosts, thus enabling the bad guys to control the actions and behaviors of the good guys. Ergo, the b...
8 comments
Read more

Adult Beginning Gymnastics Revealed

The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself. Well...yes and no . Sometimes what we fear turns out to be OK -- in fact, it turns out to be pretty damned fun. The squadron of peppy cheerleaders turns out to be an extremely quiet guy named Ron and a nice girl named Alison who looks like Hayley Mills (but doesn't know who Hayley Mills is). The gymnastics instructor turns out to be a nice young girl woman who is easy to talk to. And I turn out to be considerably less decrepit than originally feared. Of the three students (!), I'm definitely the oldest by more than a decade. However, I was surprised (and thrilled) to see how evenly matched we were. Where one student is flexible, the other is strong. What I lack in youth, I make up for in pointy toes and perky presentation. While I'm certainly not as fit as the other students, I am not miles behind in skill. (Maybe just a few blocks away.) The first class was primarily an assessment of our current capabilities, so we c...
2 comments
Read more