I am a mixed-race Osage, or at least I can say that my Mom is as I'm still working on my enrollment. Both my Mom and I have had a very urban upbringing; we live very close to our Indigenous relatives' capitals, but I don't think that either of us got a very good "cultural education" due to some internal family drama/trauma. I hope to remedy this in the future, as we can relearn our language and reconnect with our communities here in Oklahoma fairly easily.
I would like to say a heartfelt thank you, or in Osage (let me look this up here...);
wéewinâ to all of you who do such helpful research and community activism on behalf of us all! I have been using this site along with the
Native Appropriations and
Beyond Buckskin blogs, as well as reading news on Indianz and Indian Country Today to educate myself as much as I can about what is going on in our little world lately.
I know that people like
Charles A. Laster are not likely to read this here, but if you do I want you to know that you and others like you do in fact harm people like myself! In reading over this forum and others in the last year I have come across stories of some many confused and/or dishonest people who claim Native ancestry that I began to wonder if maybe my mother was fooling herself and our Indian ancestry was just one of those "family myths". You made me doubt my own Mother!
Since we come from a family of mixed-bloods we do look pretty pale, and our "Indian" features could have just been a coincidence, so I carefully asked my Mom if it could be a mistaken idea that we were NDN. Of course she reassured me that we were what she said, and a few weeks later I confirmed it myself: My Mom had lost her Tribal ID and CDIB cards, so we stopped by the enrollment office the last time that we were in Pawhuska. I got the forms for a replacement and brought them to Mom, who was waiting outside inher car, she filled them out and I returned them. Guess what? The office handed my a new copy of Mom's ID to give to her right then and there, and told me that her CDIB would arrive in the mail!
Anyhow, enough about me. I need to apologize to Earth7 if I bothered her. I initially registered on this forum at the beginning of August but didn't hear anything back. I tried to email various addresses provided here (support & admin @ newagefraud.org), but they were bounced back to me by the Mailer System as undeliverable. I tried to contact Al through the contact form on his personal webpage, but he seems busy. Then I found Earth7's intro thread where she gave her full name, looked her up on Facebook and sent her a message detailing this to her. I apologize if this was intrusive or bothersome Earth7.
