Guest speaker and poet Kai Coggin led a program on Wednesday at National Park College to commemorate Native American Heritage Month in the second meeting of the 2017-18 "We Belong" guest speaker series.
The series is hosted by the college's Cultural Diversity Awareness Club, which started in 2000. Darla Thurber, special assistant to the president, was a founding member of the club as a student and rejoined the club this year as a co-adviser.
November is observed each year as Native American Heritage Month, which is sometimes referred to as American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month. The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join groups throughout the country each year to honor the ancestry, cultures, history and traditions of Native Americans.
Coggin delved into the "real history" behind the Thanksgiving holiday: While a modern perception of the first Thanksgiving depicts a peaceful partnership between Pilgrims and Native Americans, the original Thanksgiving celebrated the massacre of 700 Pequot Indians.
Massachusetts Colony Gov. John Winthrop announced the Thanksgiving for the colonial volunteers who killed the 700 Pequot men, women and children. Many Native Americans march to Plymouth Rock each year as National Day of Mourning in protest of the Thanksgiving holiday.
"That is the real history of Thanksgiving," Coggin said. "If you want to Google it, you can, but in our country right now, Thanksgiving is a national day of mourning for Native Americans because it not only started as a slaughter, but it was perpetuated with the way we oppressed them as an entire culture throughout history."
Coggin said moves made by various groups and government organizations in recent years are helping to mend relationships with Native Americans.
"Our culture is starting to wake up and recognize how we have wronged them," Coggin said. "In many cities, Columbus Day has turned into Indigenous Peoples Day. So, we are taking steps. We are righting our wrongs, albeit slowly."
Los Angeles' city and county governing boards in California voted earlier this year to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day, as have cities such as Albuquerque, N.M., Denver, and Seattle. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors also designated Oct. 12 as Italian American Heritage Day.
Coggin previously taught English and won the Teacher of the Year award for Houston. She later moved to Hot Springs, where she has pursued poetry, writing and photography.
"One of my main tenets and one of my passions when I was a teacher in Houston was diversity," Coggin said. "I actually started the first gay-straight alliance at my high school where I taught. It was the first one in the district and it is still going today 12 years later."
Coggin is a graduate of Texas A&M University. Her work has been published in various publications and she is the author of two-full length poetry collections, "Periscope Heart" and "Wingspan." She released a spoken word album, "Silhouette," this year.
"I worked so hard to just be myself," Coggin said. "Being a young, questioning lesbian in the corps of cadets at Texas A&M University, which is super duper not-friendly to those types of people, was very hard, but I felt like it really built my character and made me a stronger person to basically be a rainbow where rainbows were not allowed."
Coggin used examples of photographs from the Smithsonian to show how stereotypes wrongly depict Native Americans from the late 1800s and early 1900s. She presented her own work Wednesday in the NPC Library, as well as work from other Native American artists, including Sherman Alexie, Spokane-Coeur d'Alene; Natalie Diaz, Mojave and Pima; Joy Harjo, Muskogee/Creek; and Layli Long Soldier, Oglala Lakota.
The American Indian Heritage Foundation first sponsored American Indian Heritage Month and former President George H.W. Bush declared November 1990 as National American Indian Heritage Month. Similar proclamations have been issued each year since 1994 to celebrate Native American cultures and contributions. The month is also used to raise awareness to the challenges Native peoples faced and continue to face, as well as the ways in which they have overcome them.
Local on 11/17/2017