Native culture thrives in its diversity. There are differences of custom, language, practice, costume, religion. There’s upheaval at the core. It’s a culture that landed in a new world it did not want to land in, yet is anchored there nonetheless. It’s as if the native peoples were in the ships that came, instead of the ones that met the ships. The natives have traveled to a far land, which was placed upon their own land. It’s a conglomerate culture with contradiction and complication— a culture lost as well as preserved. Devastated, yet resilient. Wronged by others, yet wronged also by its own lapses in judgments and abuse. It’s a culture often improvised. Yet it was, and is, and shall be.
Diane Glancy