10/11: Reflections after a Veterans' Day Pow-Wow
Category: American Culture
Posted by: an okie gardener
If you close your eyes at an Indian pow-wow, you can imagine yourself anywhere, or anywhen. The men beating the drum in the center of the circle keep up a complex rhythm that sounds on the surface deceptively simple, boom boom boom. The men singers and lady singers do songs in which rhythm and pitch seem to matter as much as the words. While the drummers around here mostly use Southern Style, if you close your eyes, you could be in Oklahoma, or New Mexico, or Texas. With a little imagination you could be anywhere in the world people gather round the drum to sing and dance. Or, you could be anywhen, now or the last century or 3000 years ago. The drum, the singing, the dancing.
Tonight at the Veterans' Day pow-wow put on by the Comanche Indian Veterans Association veterans were honored individually, called into the place of honor during the dance, one at a time. Between dances they were called to the east side of the circle, in small groups, and given gifts. Warriors honored for their service. It does not take much imagination to see other places, other times--the drums and dancing and honor given to warriors: red skin or white skin or black skin or yellow skin or brown skin.
War has been a constant of human history. Before there were nations to defend, there were tribes, clans, families. Apaches in the old days lived in temporary brush shelters, resembling brown igloos with a long entrance passageway. The man slept in the entrance passage, the woman and children in the main body of the shelter. Anyone entering had to get past the man, the warrior.
Tribes and peoples of any and all times and places honored their warriors, for the survival of The People depended upon the courage and tenacity of the men.
We modern Americans tend to think peace is the normal state of humanity, interupted by occasional war. Many Americans even think that wars somehow will not involve us if we give no provocation. Perhaps, we dream, with enough food and education and the spread of democracy or construction of international organizations wars will cease. So we dreamed in 1918, when at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month The Armistice took effect. But, we learned differently on December 7, 1941. And Armistice Day became Veteran's Day to include those who fought in another war after The War to End All Wars.
So it continues. Our nation will remain free only so long as we have courageous and tenacious warriors, men who will put themselves between those who sleep and danger. Men who think that home and family and country are worth dying for. In the case of the United States, that liberty is worth dying for. G.K. Chesterton, criticizing the descent of England into merely commercial enterprise, wrote: Men must in the last resort love it; for the simple reason that men must in the last resort die for it. No community or constitution can survive and retain its identity at all, that has not in the minds of its subjects enough of an ideal identity, to appear to them in certain extremes of peril as the vision of something to be saved. It is on that ideal, inhering in the reality, that every state will depend when there is a struggle of life and death. And we will have such warriors only so long as warriors are honored, and remembered.
Tonight at the Veterans' Day pow-wow put on by the Comanche Indian Veterans Association veterans were honored individually, called into the place of honor during the dance, one at a time. Between dances they were called to the east side of the circle, in small groups, and given gifts. Warriors honored for their service. It does not take much imagination to see other places, other times--the drums and dancing and honor given to warriors: red skin or white skin or black skin or yellow skin or brown skin.
War has been a constant of human history. Before there were nations to defend, there were tribes, clans, families. Apaches in the old days lived in temporary brush shelters, resembling brown igloos with a long entrance passageway. The man slept in the entrance passage, the woman and children in the main body of the shelter. Anyone entering had to get past the man, the warrior.
Tribes and peoples of any and all times and places honored their warriors, for the survival of The People depended upon the courage and tenacity of the men.
We modern Americans tend to think peace is the normal state of humanity, interupted by occasional war. Many Americans even think that wars somehow will not involve us if we give no provocation. Perhaps, we dream, with enough food and education and the spread of democracy or construction of international organizations wars will cease. So we dreamed in 1918, when at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month The Armistice took effect. But, we learned differently on December 7, 1941. And Armistice Day became Veteran's Day to include those who fought in another war after The War to End All Wars.
So it continues. Our nation will remain free only so long as we have courageous and tenacious warriors, men who will put themselves between those who sleep and danger. Men who think that home and family and country are worth dying for. In the case of the United States, that liberty is worth dying for. G.K. Chesterton, criticizing the descent of England into merely commercial enterprise, wrote: Men must in the last resort love it; for the simple reason that men must in the last resort die for it. No community or constitution can survive and retain its identity at all, that has not in the minds of its subjects enough of an ideal identity, to appear to them in certain extremes of peril as the vision of something to be saved. It is on that ideal, inhering in the reality, that every state will depend when there is a struggle of life and death. And we will have such warriors only so long as warriors are honored, and remembered.
