Stuff

Been a busy week:

Up to 12-18 eggs per day. Yay!

The lump of two months is apparently benign. Yay!

Going in Tuesday for a shoulder MRI and x-rays. Boo!

Finally got the house mess sorted out. Yay!

Chainsaw is working again. Yay!

Four "yay" and one "boo." Probably not horrible.

Yeesh. Christmas is here. Or, I should say, shopping season is here. I'm sorry. Going shopping on Thanksgiving is just ... disgusting. Occurred to me that two years ago, I was toodling around the largest shopping mall on the East Coast on the day after Thanksgiving. On this day after Thanksgiving, I took a lunch break to acquire the following:

*** One 50-pound bag layer feed
*** One 50-pound bag grower feed
*** One 50-pound bag whole corn
*** One 50-pound bag rabbit food
*** Two bales of mulch hay
*** One bale aspen shavings

I think I like the Vermont day-after-Thanksgiving concept better.

Also picked up a couple of big winter jackets for kids. They'll need 'em. Single digits tonight.

Have moved the big turkeys into the new chicken barn. They don't seem to appreciate their offspring very much at all. I've let the small chickens out into the chicken yard, but they're not too excited about the big, wide world out there. Plus, the big chickens in the adjacent yard are heckling them, I think.

Woke up mid-week with 10 more baby Angoras. Grand total of 21 in the hutch now. Dogs can't decide whether to run to the rabbit hutch, the chicken coop, or the chicken barn. It's making Stink crazier than usual, I think.

Really need to get back on the training treadmill, but I'm waiting until I hear a bit more about what's going to be involved with the shoulder. It's been a problem for about six, seven years now. I think that means it's time to stop whining about it and get it fixed. Went for my annual physical, and it was just hanging there. Approximate transcript of patient-doctor conversation follows:

Doctor: That arm's been a problem for a long time.

Patient: Quite a while.

Doctor: I'm giving you some painkillers and scheduling an MRI and x-rays.

Patient: Don't need them.

Doctor: They're not for you. They're for me.

Patient: Excuse me?

Doctor: If you take enough of these, you won't be able to whine.

He then proceeded to let me know that my cholesterol was getting high. Gave him three dozen eggs on the theory that if I raise everyone else's levels, maybe mine won't seem so high.

Lastly: I've bitched about this before. But I was glad to see the following in the Washington Post. My tribe has been screwed, screwed, screwed for 400 years. And we're morons! They ask us to help out with the Jamestown celebration, and we do it. How dumb is that?

As Year's End Nears, Disappointment
Va. Tribes Had Hoped Jamestown Events
Would Help Them Gain Sovereign Indian Nation Status
By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 23, 2007; B01

They have donned their fringed buckskin, bone breastplates and finest headdresses made of turkey feather or porcupine hair. They have danced for the Queen of England. They have smiled for President George W. Bush.

At every turn during this Jamestown 400 Commemoration, Virginia's remaining Indian tribes have done everything asked of them.

As the anniversary year draws to a close, however, they do not have the one thing they wanted most: federal recognition as sovereign Indian nations, equal to the Navajo, Arapaho and the Sioux. "First to greet. Last to be recognized," had been their rallying cry. Now, many Virginia Indians find themselves in a familiar, hollow place.

"You're left feeling that this is all kind of superficial, from the Indian point of view. Like we were used one more time," said Chief Ann Richardson of the Rappahannock tribe. "You feel like in 2008, they might just forget about us again."

"Broken promises to Indians," added Chief Ken Adams of the Upper Mattaponi. "The cycle does repeat itself, doesn't it?"

On Wednesday, leaders from some of the eight state-recognized Indian tribes again donned their regalia to offer their annual Thanksgiving tribute of fish and game to the governor, honoring the 1646 treaty with the British Crown that gave them the reservation land that over the centuries only two tribes, the Pamunkey and Mattaponi, have been able to hold on to.

There was such excitement this time last year, tribal members said, as they readied for the world's eyes. "Now, we're afraid that we've lost the moment," said Reginald Tupponce, an Upper Mattaponi leader who recently resigned his position from the Virginia Indian Tribal Alliance for Life, a group that hosts pow wows and yard sales and raffles baked goods to raise funds to lobby for federal recognition.

The road to federal recognition for any tribe is steep and uncertain. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has a Federal Office of Acknowledgement that requires tribes to prove, with reams of exacting documents and genealogies, that they have been in continuous existence from the time of first contact with European settlers. That's 400 years for Virginia Indians.

"The procedures put in place were so stringent, they were designed to limit the groups that could come in," said Mark E. Miller, a historian who has written books about forgotten eastern tribes.

So a process that was designed to take two years for the 300-some tribes that have applied instead generally takes 20, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Some tribes have instead appealed to Congress. But some powerful figures, such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), argue that lawmakers do not have the expertise to make the call. And in the days since the Indian gaming/Jack Abramoff scandal that sent lobbyists to jail for defrauding Indian tribes, the route through Congress has become close to impossible.

Tupponce remembers sitting in the gallery high above the House of Representatives in spring, holding his breath as lawmakers debated whether to pass the legislation that would give sovereign status to six Virginia tribes: the Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy, Nansemond, Upper Mattaponi, Rappahannock and Monacan.

The bill would enable their children to apply for scholarships and would open up federal funds for housing, health care and economic development.

It would mean that they could finally petition the federal government to return the bones of their ancestors from the drawers and boxes of Smithsonian warehouses to be buried with respect, something that only tribes with federal status are allowed to do.

I suppose if there's a bright side, we're no longer considered "colored," which we were in Virginia until the 1960s. Still, you've got to wonder what the hell it takes for the federal government to say, "Oh, yes. Indians lived here once, didn't they?"