Yuck! Another questionable woman at that horrible Turner Falls festival.
"Plainfield resident Jennifer Lee, a descendent of the Narragansett and Pequot tribes, spoke at the Great Falls Discovery Center Saturday morning briefly retracing her steps of a 30-year journey searching for her ancestral roots."One of the worst articles I've ever read, she never actually tells how she supposedly found her "native" ancestry". Just the usual "I was attracted to Native American culture" and "I needed to experience Native American culture"...blah, blah, blah. You all know the drill. Oh, and of course the horrible and creepy jet black dyed hair. Here's the article.
http://www.recorder.com/home/21156623-95/searching-for-her-tribe-plainfield-woman-tracks-down-her-native-lineageBy RACHEL RAPKIN
Recorder Staff
Saturday, February 20, 2016
(Published in print: Monday, February 22, 2016)
TURNERS FALLS — How far would you travel to trace your heritage?
Plainfield resident Jennifer Lee, a descendent of the Narragansett and Pequot tribes, spoke at the Great Falls Discovery Center Saturday morning briefly retracing her steps of a 30-year journey searching for her ancestral roots.
“When I look back into my ancestors, I’ve found that they are Polish, Jewish, African-American, Irish, Scottish, English, Dutch, Narragansett and Pequot,” she said to approximately 50 people who came out to hear her story.
With a father from a Jewish background and a mother from an Italian Catholic background, Lee didn’t know how to identify herself as a teenager, and realized years later that it’s acceptable to associate with numerous cultures and communities. Lee, however, wasn’t satisfied just going a few branches up her family tree. She wanted to know where her lineage began, and she set off on a cross-country trek upon her high school graduation to trace her origin.
“All my life I’ve been very, very interested in American Indian culture and history and how native people lived here when it was 20 (degrees) below zero. How did they survive?” she wondered. “Every image that I had about native people was probably not correct. It was given by an egocentric historian who had no personal connection to native culture.”
From California to Ohio and New England, Lee’s exploration led her to experience Native American customs that are still practiced today. Lee didn’t feel she could understand those practices until she re-educated herself about the daily practices of the natives, which led her to track down university professors versed in indigenous history, attend various conferences and read numerous texts so she could piece together tribal history that wasn’t taught in grade school.
“There’s this book called ‘American Indian Stereotypes in the World of Children,’ and they categorize every type of picture or saying that kids have ever seen about Native Americans,” she said. “They are just not right. They are skewed. That’s who I was — an American bombarded with these untruths.”
Throughout her discoveries tracing back 400 years, Lee found that the nation was influenced and shaped by the everyday practices of Native Americans. The roadways that we take for granted and use for our daily commutes like I-91 and Route 2 follow the same footpaths that the natives used many years before the arrival of the Mayflower.
“When the Europeans came here, they wanted to get to a certain place as quickly as possible and once they had the ox carts to take them,” she explained. “They would go up these steep hills and in these horrible place — really hard to travel places — but the native footpaths followed the way that was easy so that families could travel.”
Lee also said the importance of a controlled burn was learned from the Native Americans, adding that the practice became rare when the settlers arrived and killed many of the natives who knew how and when to perform the burn.
“There were controlled burns that burnt off the land twice a year and the native people here knew how to do that. They knew when the conditions were right to burn the undergrowth so that it made more food for the deer and made it easier to travel,” she said, adding that it was a life necessity at that time.
Lee concluded her hour and a half presentation with a few words of advice for those who wish to trace their lineage. She told the audience about the benefits of reviewing historical documents such as census data and through her journey found out the best source of information comes from experiencing the culture and talking to relatives.
“The first thing you should do is get ahold of your relatives — especially your older ones — because they are the ones who are going to remember things like nicknames, places, and time and you get a piece of paper and write everything down that they tell you,” she said. “Anything on paper can be forged or lies, but the family stories are passed on for a reason.”
