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Sharron Bassano's avatar

This is absolutely stunning. I am so glad I found it. I have several people to share this compassionate story with - not only for its specific details, but for its larger application. Thank you!

Sherman, I am working on a piece for 🍁Leaves regarding my two fathers- one that abandoned us and one that was a self-righteous drunkard. Would it be possible to include your poem "How Do We Forgive Our Fathers" in my Substack post, with citation, of course? It exactly represents my own conflict, and is so moving to me. If permission is not possible, I understand. I thank you for considering my request. Sharron

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

Thank you, Sharron. The poem, "How We Do Forgive Our Fathers," is not mine. I adapted it for the film. It's written by Dick Lourie, my poetry editor. You can contact him at Hanging Loose Press. Hangingloosepress.com. The contact info is on the bottom of the home page

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Sharron Bassano's avatar

Thank you, I will do just that.

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Mary Hollowell's avatar

Thanks. fyi - Sebastian Junger, who wrote The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men and the Sea, has begun to share his faith. His book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging opens with Junger describing his personal encounter with someone whom he thought was an angel while backpacking.

his activism stance: pro-health care for veterans

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

I don't think the Indian guy I met was an angel but I can understand why people would believe so.

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Jeffrey Peoples's avatar

I am a bit surprised that the term "Indian" is used to refer to the various pre-european tribes of the Americas -- by people who are ethnically descended from those tribes. Is this common? I figured it would be commonly taken as offensively ignorant.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

Indians call ourselves Indians. It's not offensive to us (though a few Indian activists resist being called Indians). Here's my tribe's website. Look at our official name: spokanetribe.com

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Mary Hollowell's avatar

reading aloud to the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD) in Atlanta https://youtu.be/0anf_H37LLo

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Arjan Tupan's avatar

Powerful story. Great reminder to stay human.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

Thank you.

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Alison Acheson's avatar

This makes me stop. As a young woman, I consciously developed a strong handshake. I worked not to crush or sprain, but I've been told it's a firm shake. Especially when I was young, short and rather tiny, I wanted not to be taken for granted.

Thank you for this. Once again, your words are making me think. To reconsider. I'm old now! I'm hoary of head. Should I still have to feel this way... ?!

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Sharron Bassano's avatar

I have the same question, Alison. We may be old, but never too old to consider new ways of thinking.

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Andrew Paul Koole's avatar

You never stop learning about other people, other tribes. Before this post, I thought a handshake was just a handshake. Thanks for the insight!

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

Thank you, Andrew!

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Jo's avatar

This handshake dominance thing also reminds me of all those clips of Trump using a handshake as an opportunity to pull people off balance. then he met Trudeau who was ready and braced and that was sure satisfying to watch. Back in the 80's I met some Russian visitors and was warned that they grip as hard as they can. No joke, it was painful.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

I don't think people are fully aware that Trump is a big man. 6-2 and at least 300 pounds. He certainly uses his size to intimidate people. But that kind of bluntness is easy to counter.

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Wayne Kigerl's avatar

The first tribe had a problem. With no language, they basically hung out for 2 million years. What they did, no one knows. Finally, a Glee Club was formed, and here we are.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

Keith Richards was their lead guitar.

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Wayne Kigerl's avatar

My wife saw him in Seattle a century or two ago.

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Shemaiah Gonzalez's avatar

It is interesting to me when a word or theme keeps returning in my life. Tenderness has been haunting me all this week. Thank you for adding to that .

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

Thank you. It's a good word. I think it was in my mind because Diane and I re-watched Bull Durham the other night and Tim Robbins was mangling the lyrics to "Try a Little Tenderness."

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Mary Hollowell's avatar

Thanks. LOL. Posted reminder of Vine Deloria, Jr. saying, "most of the people shouting on these marches and things were undercover agents." It's especially important, these days. https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/geoengineering-watch-global-alert-news-may-18-2019-197/#comment-1319422

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

There are certainly documented evidence of undercover agents infiltrating independent political movements of the far left and left, But they also do it to far right and right movements. And there's a very thin line between valid police work and authoritarian sabotage. But I also think that folks sometimes overstate the effects of government infiltration to dodge responsibility for the excesses, failures, and criminality in our political movements.

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Mary Hollowell's avatar

Thank you for sharing. Sherman, please see the photo of an environmental protest staged by Caldecott Medal winner Chris Rashka who is playing an accordion. I am wearing white and holding one of his hand-painted signs that reads "no planes of sorrow." (Your great book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was on our assigned reading list, and it was discussed during this very last Children's Literature New England symposium in VT, Nov. 10-13, 2022.) We are activists in the Anti-Geoengineering Movement. For more information, please go to geoengineeringwatch dot org. https://www.amazon.com/Mary-Hollowell/e/B0039SY8QC

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Sep 14, 2022
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Mary Hollowell's avatar

I would like to share important info that relates to the video clip above. Please scroll down the link to see "related conversation: mature viewers only." Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a former Riverkeeper and environmental lawyer; Naomi Wolf is a nonficiton writer. It has been a privilege to meet both of these activists. https://rootsandshoots.org/projects/roots-shoots-mini-grant-report/

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Annie's avatar

How tragic, that an act of trust and warmth between strangers must often be recalibrated in anticipation of reciprocity turning into a show of dominance. Couldn't we seek a world where a kind of Esperanto of gesture superseded expressions of dominance? I especially like your descriptions of strangers meeting and trusting each other, as in a sketch earlier this summer of meeting a wary man in a late night diner. Vivid and hopeful.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

It's an interesting balancing act. I think we also have to respect the culture of the strong handshake. We just have go be ready for it!

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Dee's avatar

They say that being able to code switch in language is one of the most complex languages there is. I wonder if anyone has studied the physical effects?

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

That's a good question. I'm gonna do some research.

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Dee's avatar
Sherman Alexie's avatar

Yes, there exists a "dominant" culture in the USA but some of us operate as if we've played no part in creating that dominant culture. And dominant is only one way to describe it. What happens if we call it the collective culture? A lot of my white farm town high school schoolmates had to learn how to code-switch when they moved to cities. Here in vert left Seattle, I have moderate and conservative friends who are highly aware of their need to code-switch to avoid conflict.

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Dee's avatar

I had not thought of it in terms of dominant and non-dominant groups. There speaks my white privilege again, but I was aware of code switching in and out of the gay community and from work to home. I was interested in the health consequences.....

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Monica Nicolau's avatar

I recognize this feeling. Many years ago, while in a crowded subway in NY, I overheard a woman ask for directions with an accent I recognized to be from the country of my childhood. We started chatting, two complete strangers, about the situation "back home", in a police state behind (at the time) the Iron Curtain. The touching part of this memory is that after the woman went away, my American boyfriend, who had been by my side all along, watching me chatter away in a foreign language with a complete stranger, smiled and told me that my body language, while talking with this member of my old tribe, had changed completely. We were touching arms, staring directly into each other's eyes, our faces just inches away from each other. It was not so much that we connected because we had grown up in the same place, it was that the foreign language we had used was infinitely more complex than merely the spoken language. It incorporated all the ways our bodies danced in our interaction.

In an interview you once gave, you pointed out something that always stayed with me: when people speak face to face, they interact on countless levels, even smelling one another. So too with our different languages. We each have connections to a myriad different tribes, and when we interact with members of those same tribes, we change a lot more than our spoken language, our bodies speak differently too. Those handshakes you describe... what a wonderful way to connect and speak a range of emotions with our bodies.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

That is a beautiful thing to share. I was just walking in a supermarket and a stranger—a guy with black hair and brown skin—nodded our heads at each other—a common greeting between those who are ethnic-ambiguous.

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Monica Nicolau's avatar

I love this term: "ethnic-ambiguous". I've heard (read?) you use it before. Most classifications tend to amount to superficial oversimplifications anyway, and being ambiguous is a wonderful way to thumb your nose at them.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

I like to joke that living for decades in unsunny grey Seattle as a reclusive writer who doesn't go outside anyway has slowly turned me more pale and Norwegian-adjacent as time has passed. I was a dark kid because nobody knew what SPF meant then!

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Monica Nicolau's avatar

HA! My window was open as I burst out laughing. OK, there's some construction outside, maybe nobody heard me laughing all to myself.

I remember you once described a long train trip somewhere in NY, and as time passed your perceived ethnicity hopped all over the globe.

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Dee's avatar

Thank you for sharing this!

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Karlynn Moller's avatar

Thank you for this story. It is beautiful that even though you're from different tribes, different places, you still shared a common custom that those outside of the Native American world most likely wouldn't recognize. As a woman who has often worked in a male dominated field, it has always been interesting to me to observe how men shake my hand. I was always raised to have a 'firm, confident' handshake to show that I can hold my own in a man's world (no pun intended).

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

Yeah, the gendered differences in greeting are fascinating. That's one of the great things about the Native loose handshake: it's universal.

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Jo's avatar

This beautiful story reminds me of the first time I experienced that soft fingers handshake. It was kind of disconcerting as I was raised to give a firm handshake and took pride in doing it 'right'.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

The smallest gestutes, right?

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