November was Indigenous Peoples’ Month, a time to recognize and respect the history, spirituality and culture of those on whose territory we reside.
We not only have recounted the traumatic history of our pre-colonial “first (Sioux and Piscataway) residents’’ but have begun to deepen our awareness and alter our own Pipestone, “Indian” and Pilgrim stories and are finding new ways to seek healing with those we have wronged.
My grandfather Nathan E. Getman was the first optometrist in Iowa. He lived a similar cooperative vision for a personal consciousness for life as family.
His forebears in 1710 were refugee indentured servants to the Crown. Their work camps were for several years along the Hudson River. When their indenture (white enslavement) was paid in the first harsh winter of freedom, lore has it, Mohawks sheltered them on the trail to an Upstate New York homestead.
Also, my grandfather was a teenager in the late 1800s, herded cattle on the traditional summer Plains Indian confederation grounds of the Northwest Iowa near Larchwood and Brandon, South Dakota.
Forty years later Grandpa established on that site Gitchie Manitou (Great Spirit) Park which is now connected to Good Earth National Monument in Sioux Falls.
He also knew the Pipestone/Catlinite native artisans’ 30 miles north, as well as the native summer solstice clock and anthropology midway at Blue Mounds Park.
He would today rejoice at Jim Brandenburg’s Touch the Sky restoration of native land smack in the middle of the three historic sites. I dream that one day it will be a glorious national park.
When we moved to DC I authenticated with the Smithsonian an 1890s peace pipe, by family tradition gifted to Grandpa from a native friend. And to my surprise the antiquities expert informed me that she had a 1960s copy at her desk of the “Plains Anthropologist Journal.”
It contains the first ever survey by “Dr. N.E. Getman” of the ancient Plains Tribes’ confederation summer site for peace-making, marriage arranging and trading.
The 1840s and 50s “Homestead Acts” were times of breaking of early treaties meant to protect the local population who had, it’s estimated, been there from the 1400s.
These Congressional Acts were to accommodate the Western Settler Movement, and most of the Indigenous People were forcibly moved to reservations by way of the rightly called “trails of tears.”
We latecomers to North America have much to learn from our First Nation neighbors on many different levels.
Maybe more than ever this holiday season we seek appropriate reconciliation and reparations (maybe similar to what tribal people did over centuries in their annual “confederation” sites).
Dr. Terence Les from “Becoming Reparative Communities,” suggests that repairing economic injustice “doesn’t come through power or control but through compassionate action. — rebuilding of trust, restoring belonging and standing where systems fail.”
In this holiday season of thanksgiving, worship, and honoring others may each of us find ways to participate as “beloved community” in this urgent project.
Thomas Getman is a Luverne native and a member of the Rock County Hall of Fame and the Luverne Alumni Hall of Fame. His advocacy group in Washington, D.C., specializes in international, UN and nongovernmental organization affairs.
