Not a Hobby but a way of life. I am very much into geneology but my opinion does not belong under the title "hobbies" as for me geneology is not about a bored housewife sitting around trying to trace her roots back to Mary queen of Scots or the Normans. Now don't get me wrong, I am intensely jealous of the people that can view geneology as a mere trivial hobby, but in reality for most people it simply doesn't matter a bit, especially in the United States where I live where people are obsessive with tracing their roots back to presidents and early colonists. I laugh at these people but envy them. (BTW every white American wants to trace his roots back to the Mayflower, to prove he was descended from a batch of idiots so stupid that they brought not one plow, no seed, no livestock with them and one guy had 39 hats and a complete collection of Plato's work, and if it wasn't for an idiot named Squanto who had been enslaved in England for 9 years and his family killed by smallpox, helping them all those pale bastards would have died)

See the reason of my bemusement is that I am a full blooded Oneida "Indian" (I will use that term for simplicity's sake although "First nations is our prefferred term). For us first nations our heritage and being is well documented and it is imperative to have been listed on a government listing of Indians called the Dawles Rolls. Lots of blatantly Settler Americans always claim Indian blood and want to play Indian by dressing up in buckskins and spending a Saturday at a pow-wow but it is the state sanctioned geneology that limits these fools to mere spectators. They wish to play Indian, I wish they would go live on a reservation in Oklahoma where they can see the pain, poverty, health, and educatioonal opportunities forced on the 1/128 of their blood by the other 127/128s of their blood.

Geneology is very important to us Indians as it seems that when we meet each other we a
lways seem to say, "Hi I am Larry I am Lakota Sioux" or "My names Steve I am Yakima what nation are you?" We all seem to have a general idea of each others tribes. For instance we still all hate the Crow for helping Custer, we all mock the Salmon eaters (Yakima, Spokane, Shisomesh) for the way they make fools of themselves at the intertribal basketball games. Salmon eaters are a proud loud bunch who can't dance or play basketball for all I know. We also remember what tribes are "real Indians" and which ones were "Hang around the Fort Indians". And we are all sick of hearing about the Navajo winning World War Two. While the Navajo windtalkers were being code-talkers for the US Navy. Lots of non sheep eater Indians were kicking Mussolinis ass by fighting like the warriors we are. The only reason those desert pokes got the job being windtalkers is that no German Anthropologists had every studied them because no one can put up with living with them eating sheep in the desert.

So we keep real good track of who we are, we have to. My father was actually half pawnee and my mother was a quarter choctaw. This is Ok, but it complicates who I am. To the pale faces I am still just an Indian, someone they figure should be a highrise steelworker or Marine recondo scout. It really makes a difference within my tribe and the reservation on which I lived that I was not full blooded Oneida. While the US government still deems me as full Indian in their official geneology my tribal elders can not view me a full Oneida. I did not get to learn to fancydance nor would I get to be the keeper of our oral traditional histories. And worse yet the elders were hesitant to teach me the complicated language that would make me a "full" Oneida. See, Amerinds judge each other based on how "Indian" you are, first off did you grow up on a reservation, second, do you speak your language or at least Spanish better than english an
d third do you partake in the other cultural carriers.

There are many resouces that we can use to learn about our ancestors, as first nations. Ironically the Native Americans have both the least reliable geneology prior to the 19th century and then the most accurate histories after that due to the Dawle Rolls. Prior to the US government keeping good records of Native Americans (in order to better repress us and know who to blame for everything) all of our records were long oral traditions that were held by the elders of a tribe. Some plains tribes oral histories extended back 100 generations and the Shawnee of Ohio even recalled in their oral history an exodus from the mezoAmericas where they had been the Mayans. The problem with having oral histories was not finding a person to carry it on as much as the whites, unlike our fellow Indians who we sometimes fought, had a policy of "where there's nits theres lice" and killed our men women and children not just our warriors. So many histories and legacies were lost to the white mans swords and dirtiness (diseases such as smallpox which the settlers created by having unnatural relations with cows. How many years did the Indian live alongside the Buffalo with out making any such disease?) The best sources of the histories is the internet where now anyone can go to learn about their Indian history. I prefer the IHS site, the indian health services. They have an excellent links page with links to various rolls,the famous universal Dawes Roll of 1907, as well as Guion-Miller, Chapman and siler rolls that pertain to specific tribes such as the cherokee. The Cherokee have the best records since they were hang around the fort indians who had begun to draw words even before the white man came. The government sites all always best since in the case of native americans there are some tactile rewards of being a native American as they try to offer us a few scraps of this great land in atonement for stealin
g our lland and way of life.

Now just like the Pale faces we do try to trace our lineage back as far as possible in hopes of finding we are descended from a great warrior or shaman. I must sadly admit that my people (The Oneida) were basically hang around the Fort Indians and I don't like what it has done to our people. I have a niece with Blue Eyes!!!! Can you imagine what that feels look to know that your own bloodline was tainted? I wish I could trace my bloodline back to Techumseh, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, Cochise or someone else famous for killing pale faces but I can't. I do a lot of searching with the Bereau of Indian affairs as well as the Pawnee and Choctaw tribal councils, searching so hard to find that just one of my ancestors at least scalped a white miner or trapper, that at least one of my forefathers was a warrior who burned some white family alive in their wagon as they set off to steal more of our land. You can't imagine how important geneology is when you need a hero, we lay around here watching the freight trains run right through our reservation and have reduced ourselves to running a casino and internet tax free cigarette sites. You just need to know that someone in your past killed off a few whites for what they have done to us. That the ones of us they couldn't kill with smallpox infected blankets they packed away on a reservation, robbed of our traditions, language and land.

NOTE THE ARTISTIC MERIT OF MY NEXT PARAGRAPH WAS CIRCUMSCRIBED BY A DOOYOO EMPLOYEE IN THE INTEREST OF PUBLIC DECENCY I HAVE ALTERED MY ORIGINAL STATEMENTS> I WILL FIGHT NO MORE FOREVER>

My only other path of resistance besides geneology is that I try to sleep with many white women. It is easy to get white women and lots of them hang out around the bars on the prerifery of the reservation because they want a wild and dangerous relationship but can't quite bring themselves to date anyone more offensive. I never use protect
ion and hope that they are not protected because I like the thought of making a settler pregnant, especially if she is married or her father is a bigot. For some reason a lot of white women try to hang out and be Indian groupies. I get mad because Oneida women put up with them women hanging around. I heard Cree women wouldn't stand having settler women chasing their braves. Of course in college I hooked up with some cool people and there weren't any Blackfeet or Hopi at UB, and we disrupted a lot of history classes and stuff with our perspectives but anymore most of the Profs are pretty liberal and find it to be our right to express ourselves so it doesn't really horrify them or annoy them when we try to disrupt a history class. We shied away from protesting the name of school sports teams though. You don't hear the Danes bitching about the Minnesota Vikings neither, do you?

The other activity I partake in is that I am helping indigenous people in Russia raise their tribal voices. Of all people in the world the original peoples of Siberia are most like Indians. They have the same fears and issues and I have been to Russia several times to train future tribal leaders and share our unique but similar cultures with each other.

Please don't think I hate all white people, settlers, I call them. I have only ever really hurt one Honkey, and that was at a carnival. I was playing that game where the gophers (whistle pig, my people call him) pop up out of the hole and you hit them with a hammer. I did very well and won a toy ALF and the punk kid working there said, "Wow chief you must be a plains indian the way you took care of those ground hogs. Do you Arapahoes eat groundhog". So I punched in the face. I wanted to hit him much harder the way I hit those gophers as I thought how much they looked like the Buffalo soldiers that served with the long knives.

But another thing I want to add about geneology is I found ou
t in my research that my neighbor happenes to be descended from the bloke that invented crisps. His name was George Crum and he was Indian and invented crisps as he worked in a hotel in Saratoga Springs New York. Of course he got nothing for it, if he had been a settler you know his people would still get free Doritos and shit, but being he was an Indian he got nothing. But it was neat to find out Lucy was his great great neice, that was my best pleaseant surprise of my hobby so far.