It seems, for the second time in my life, the words of the President are becoming irrelevant to the national discourse. The first was after the bombing of Cambodia and the Kent State Massacre. Then, Nixon’s words came to mean very little until he was ultimately forced from office. Now President Trump tweets and tweets from the…
This past weekend, I had the rare opportunity to visit the Smokey Mountains in North Carolina with my adult son, Sam. It was idyllic. We walked mountain trails, watched birds, rested on sunny rocks beside tumbling water, and took lots of photographs. Some photos I’ve shared on FaceBook, others I wanted to share more today. However, the murders of…
Corey Ames Heyward and Jon Bernard Marcoux of the College of Charleston, SC have created two informative posters on Colonoware designed for a general audience. The posters were originally used for the February, 2020 International Gullah Geechee and African Diaspora Conference at Coastal Carolina University, Conway, South Carolina. The posters may be viewed at the…
Posted March 1, 2020 Thinking about Culture Change: Frontiersman Daniel Boone once lived in the Yadkin River Valley of North Carolina not far from my boyhood home, and I began reading Boone biographies in middle school. At the time, I was also finding Native American “arrowheads” and “spearheads.” And, I imagined them having been left…
February 7, 2020 In 2016 Rachel Waters published a critical article on the use of DNA tests to establish Native American identity with emphasis on the Lumbee Tribe. Her article, “Bloody Lies: The Dangerous Frontier of Genetic Ancestry in the Battle to Prove Indigenous Identity.” The article was originally published at www.facebook.com, and was written as…
February 3, 2020 Aline gave me a 23&Me test kit for Christmas and here are the results: 95.2% European (mostly Scotland and Ireland); 3.8% Sub-Saharan (West and West Central) Africa; 2% Broadly East Asian and Native American; .1% Broadly Western Asian & North African; .7% Unassigned. To place this in perspective, on average we share 50%…
January 9, 2020. I have told this story of systemic racism many times, to many people. This is the first I’ve written it*: In the summer of 1960 between high school and college, I worked on a construction crew for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco, Co. in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A paternalistic, non-union, company, Reynolds hired students…