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Native American Heritage Day Nov.27 |
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Written by Jeff Radford
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Saturday, 07 November 2009 |
Native American Heritage Day is Friday, November 27.
When Public Law 111-33 was signed by President Barack Obama this past
June, the first Friday after Thanksgiving each year was designated to
commemorate Native American cultures and contributions.
Corrales was home to Native American families for centuries before
people of European origin settled here. Permanent homes had been
constructed here more than 1,000 years before the Spanish “entrada” in
the 1540s.
Among those were the homes of ancestors of the people now living at Sandia and Santa Ana Pueblos.
The Tamaya people referred to the Corrales area as “Puraika,” meaning
the place of the butterflies. Tiwa speaking people from what is now
Sandia Pueblo built small villages here. The ruins of two such
communities have been identified by archeologists. They essentially
abandoned Corrales after the arrival of the Spanish in the mid-1500s.
Writing in the November-December issue of Native Peoples, Ernest L.
Stevens, Jr. noted that “Thanksgiving has historically been a harvest
celebration, focusing on the hospitality and neighborliness that the
Wampanoag people extended to the Pilgrims in the early 1620s.
“At that first Thanksgiving, Native Americans helped the new settlers
survive in a time of shortage and hunger as they adapted to the
American landscape. Yet our modern American celebration of Thanksgiving
largely ignores the history of Native Americans and our status as
Native people today.”
He stressed contributions of world-wide importance that have received
little recognition. “The profound impact of these original American
achievements is reflected by the fact that today 60 percent of the
crops grown worldwide originated with Native American farmers,
including beans, corn, chocolate, cranberries, peppers, potatoes,
squash and tomatoes.
“Our people were growing sweet potatoes 1,000 years before the people
of Mesopotamia, the cradle of Western civilization, began farming.
“Many of today’s medicines —from aspirin, echinacea and vitamins B and
C to quinine, coca, curare and modern treatments for cancer, originate
with Native Americans,” Stevens wrote.
President Abraham Lincoln established the third Thursday of November as the national Thanksgiving holiday in 1863. |
