Americans, Indians, Pow-Wows

Like a butterfly as her decorations suggest

Today we enjoyed the annual American-Indian Pow-Wow at Big Sandy Rancheria of Auberry.  It was my second time to go and it was a  lot of fun.  I really enjoy the regalia (their beautiful attire that the American-Indians wear) and the dancing.

It was a beautiful setting, the day was gorgeous with a cool breeze and the Indian Tacos were awesome.

Grass Dance

One dance, we were told, was called the grass dance.  This one was to get the ground ready for planting.  The yellow color of the regalia represents the dry earth that is being readied for planting.

Color guard and flag ceremony

I love their flag ceremony that they always have.  What struck me today was the poem that was read and the explanation that was told of how American-Indians (their word) defend this land to the utmost, this is their homeland and that is why you see so much reverence given to their Veterans and their elders.  Something the rest of us could learn from.

There were flags from several branches of the military, including the Coast Guard and the Marines.



I cannot include all the pictures I took.  There were too many to chose from.  I tried to pick the best to get a glimpse of the beauty in these pow-wows.

The young girls dance

My friend, Erica, the original Indian princess, and her twin daughters

And of course, I had to get a pair of earrings made by local tribe members.  How could I not?

The Musings of a Mother for Mother's Day

1974 My first child

“If you bungle raising children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.”  Jacqueline Kennedy

When I had my first child I suddenly knew that life as I knew it was over.  I wondered why no one had told me this and why I wasn’t prepared.  Nor was I prepared for the immense outpouring of love that I felt for this new life and that it couldn’t compare with any other feelings I had experienced.

Being a mother is not easy, even in the best of households, or the richest.  There is no playbook yet there is an overabundance of directions and/or suggestions from well meaning sources that often contradict each other and add to the mix of confusion.

 When my world was full of little people that I had to protect, provide for and ensure their safety at all costs, my modus operandi was control all situations in every aspect.  When it became clear I could not in all honesty control every situation, my motto became “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”  I felt ill prepared and definitely out of control.  I bemoaned that I was the worst mother in the world.  I would lament little things like:  “How could I buy a pair of shoes too big for my small child to save money only to watch him fall as soon as he got into the parking lot, tripping over those cost saving shoes and getting a nasty bump on his head?”  Certainly that was not the only mistake I made.

There were way too many bumps in the road for my liking, too many pitfalls, too many roller coaster rides. It became clear eventually that the best I could do was make good citizens out of my children, teach them right from wrong and, again, hope for the best.  

For my nuclear family, things were not easy, in fact, we would joke that our family fit the description of dysfunctional when that became a new word in the dictionary.  I could only hope that when I came to the end of this road my children had survived me and were happy and still loved me. 

People would ask me how I did it and my answer was always the same.  “I really don’t know, I just do it.”  But that’s our job, God gave us a task and we must complete that task.  

When I came across this Jacqueline Kennedy quote, it hit home.  As a mother, we have one job, one job to do and that job is to raise our children.  That is our first and foremost responsibility above all other responsibilities.  Most of us just know that.

My children are all on their own now and I am proud of them.  I hope they know how much I love them and that I wouldn’t be without a one of them.  

I think of my own mother and how she treated me.  I was a hopeless wanderer who may or may not have been the black sheep of the family.  I was passionate about the wrong things and I cared for the wrong people.  After 20 years I waltzed back home with all sorts of troubling issues.  My mother had never given up on me and she took me in without question or judgment.  For the next 10 years we talked on the phone daily and were never far from each other.  I now cherish those memories.

I took pages from her playbook and used them for my own.  I wonder sometimes if she knew how much I appreciated her.  I hope so.

Mother's Day Memories

Our family 1955 - my mom on the right

 Soon we will be celebrating Mothers around the world.  I'm pretty sure the event started to give mothers a day off from working in the kitchen, hence, all the restaurants packed out with families giving mom a day off.  Flowers were a peace offering for all those times we made her cry.

Growing up I loved surprising my mom with a few flowers I picked for her or a card I made in school.  I would leave them on the back porch, ring the doorbell and then run out of sight, certain I had fooled her,  and more importantly, made her smile.  I would run around the side of the house huffing and puffing, and then calmly walk in the front door as if I had no clue what little girl had left those flowers on the back porch.

My mom left to go beyond the stars before I was done appreciating her.  I'm sure I could have done more. I'm sure I could have hurt her less.  But one thing I know for sure, she always loved me no matter what.

Here's to you, Mom, and all the moms in the world.

Fresno Remembers - 101 years unrecognized

The theme of the Sermon at First Armenian Presbyterian Church

I spent the last couple of days attending events here with the Armenian Community in Fresno remembering the Armenian Genocide.

 As someone so aptly put - how can 1.5 million people be starved, beaten, robbed, pillaged, burned, raped to death, their villages plundered and their wealth given over to their victors and then they call it an unsolved mystery? 

No, our ancestors knew the truth and they told us and this week we marched, we observed, we prayed, we laid down flowers at memorials and we sang.

 Because, we said, we will not forget.  We will not forget our grandmother's tears, our parents' anguish, our lost and missing relatives, our villages gone and destroyed.  We have been misplaced, we have been scattered, but we are strong and we will not forget.

Near East Relief Display

I cried my grandmother's tears when I listened to the speakers at Fresno State where the Armenian Studies program has placed a monument to the people who perished. 

At the church service, all members of the different clergy came together to perform a service in honor of our ancestors.

The Armenian school brought their students to present the Armenian and American flags and sing the national anthems of both countries.

In spite of hurts and betrayals, we are still fiercely loyal.

Armenian School and Homenetmen Scouts

 














An arm of the memorial that depicts the region my paternal ancestors came from.

Kharpert - Genocide Memorial, CSUF

A small clip of a moving song played beautifully by some of the students.  I love the wood flute, a Shvi

April 24th - the Day a Nation Died

Art by Rosanne Haddad

In commemoration of the Armenian Genocide which is observed on April 24th, I am posting an excellent summary of the genocide by http://silencethelies.com/history/

Summary of the Armenian Genocide of 1915

The Genocide of the Armenians by the Turkish government during World War I represents a major tragedy of the modern age. In this the first Genocide of the 20th century, almost an entire nation was destroyed. The Armenian people were effectively eliminated from the homeland they had occupied for nearly three thousand years. This annihilation was premeditated and planned to be carried out under the cover of war.

During the night of April 23-24, 1915, Armenian political, religious, educational, and intellectual leaders in Istanbul were arrested, deported to the interior, and mercilessly put to death. Next, the Turkish government ordered the deportation of the Armenian people to “relocation centers” – actually to the barren deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. The Armenians were driven out brutally from the length and breadth of the empire. Secrecy, surprise, deception, torture, dehumanization, rape and pillage were all a part of the process. The whole of Asia Minor was put in motion.

The greatest torment was reserved for the women and children, who were driven for months over mountains and deserts [see map], often dehumanized by being stripped naked and repeatedly preyed upon and abused. Intentionally deprived of food and water, they fell by the hundreds of thousands along the routes to the desert.

There were some survivors scattered throughout the Middle East and Transcaucasia. Thousands of them, refugees here and there, were to die of starvation, epidemics, and exposure. Even the memory of the nation was intended for obliteration. The former existence of Armenians in Turkey was denied. Maps and history were rewritten. Churches, schools, and cultural monuments were desecrated and misnamed. Small children, snatched from their parents, were renamed and farmed out to be raised as Turks. The Turks “annexed” ancestors of the area in ancient times to claim falsely, by such deception, that they inhabited this region from ancient days. A small remnant of the Armenian homeland remained devastated by war and populated largely by starving refugees, only to be subsequently overrun by the Bolshevik Red Army and incorporated into the Soviet Union for seven decades, until its breakup in 1990. The word ” genocide” had not yet been coined. Nonetheless, at the time, many governmental spokesmen and statesmen decried the mass murder of the Armenians as crimes against humanity, and murder of a nation.

Reports of the atrocities gradually came out and were eventually disseminated the world over by newspapers, journals, and eyewitness accounts. In the United States a number of prominent leaders and organizations established fundraising drives for the remnants of the “Starving Armenians”. In Europe the Allied Powers gave public notice that they would hold personally responsible all members of the Turkish government and others who had planned or participated in the massacres. Yet, within a few years, these same governments and statesmen turned away from the Armenians in total disregard of their pledges. Soon the Armenian genocide had become the “Forgotten Genocide”.

In effect, the Turkish government had succeeded in its diabolical plan to exterminate the Armenian population from what is now Turkey. The failure of the international community to remember, or to honor their promises to punish the perpetrators, or to cause Turkey to indemnify the survivors helped convince Adolph Hitler some 20 years later to carry out a similar policy of extermination against the Jews and certain other non-Aryan populations of Europe.

http://silencethelies.com/history/

EASTER EGGS AND THE EASTER CHICKEN

With my brother and sister, I'm the one in the middle

 Growing up, I didn’t understand a lot about Easter.  I knew, at least, that it had to do with the death of Christ and his rising from the grave.  What chickens and eggs had to do with it was beyond me.  But I remember hunting for Easter eggs after church.  For us Armenians, Easter eggs were tinted a reddish brown color using onion skins or yellow using turmeric.  For orthodox Armenians, this tied into lent and abstaining from meat products.

As Armenian children, we grew up playing a traditional egg cracking game at Easter. Apparently, the onion skin dye helped fortify the egg for this game.

One person would try and crack the other person’s egg and the last egg standing would win a prize.  We had all sorts of tricks we would come up with believing they would ensure us to be the one to win.  First you had to pick the best egg, if you picked wrong, you were the first to go, we were sure.  Then there was the angle of hitting the other person’s egg.  Everyone was sure they had the best trick to last until the end.  It was always a lot of fun.

On one particular year, we were given baby chicks from our parents.  We enjoyed our baby chicks until they grew to be chickens.  Then one day, my grandfather announced that his American born grandchildren needed to learn about the ways of the Old Country.  Into our house he marched and proceeded to appropriate one of my mother’s kitchen knives.  We were going to learn how to butcher, feather, and eat our pet chickens!

This was quite unusual and even somewhat horrifying, but worse was the reaction of both my grandmother and my mother. I was only about 5 years old, but I will forever remember the two of them carrying on and berating my grandfather.  My mother was absolutely incensed that he was using her kitchen knife which wasn’t very sharp and she was convinced he was going to ruin it.  My grandmother was furious and was scolding him in Turkish.  I have no idea what she said but it sure didn’t sound good and she was definitely angry.  My grandmother was a feisty thing and she could really let my grandfather have it.  No doubt she was trying to stop him and was telling him he was not doing this thing properly.  Yet, as feisty as my grandmother was, my grandfather was equally as stubborn and the procedure of cutting off the chicken’s head began.  Or, I should say, the “sawing” of the chicken’s head began.

My grandfather suffered from an illness that made his hands shake.  The combination of the shaky hands and the dull knife meant for a rather long, arduous and pitiful ending for our poor chicken.  Nevertheless, we dutifully paid as much attention as we could for our lesson about “the old country” in spite of the distraction created by my mother and my grandmother’s tirades.

Later on as we sat down for dinner, I remember eating most everything except this strange chicken wing with a few pieces of feather still stuck to it.  I seemed to have forgotten about the horror show of the morning, so when I told my sister I didn’t want the chicken she reminded me that it was the very chicken that grandpa had crucified earlier.  I told my sister, “I’m so glad I didn’t eat it then!”  I’m not sure that I learned anything about the Old Country from this experience, but I think I may have gained some interesting life experiences from my grandparents.

50s Memories

When I was a little girl growing up in the 50s, my mother, a budding artist, would draw little pictures on my school folders and send me off with my lunch box, my school work and her love.







I found one of her doodles today.  Mickey was one of her favorites, so I'll share it with you.

As time goes on we seem to look more into our past and see things we didn't really see before.  I didn't realize how much I appreciated her drawings until now.