remember

I was trying to come up with some form of memorialization that deals with memory construction, that is, how history is created/continued over time.  9/11 comes to mind as well as pretty much any monument you find in Washington, DC...but I wanted to come up with something that was not physically in space, so I started thinking about this question on a personal level...what is something that has meaning to me that deals with the construction of memory? The first thing I thought of was my tribe, where everything that we do ultimately has ties to historical recognition or ancestor memorialization.




An event in particular is the cultural walk that we do during late October, in which we hike and camp for a small portion of the journey that our people made from the Ohio Valley to the reservation that today lies in northern Oklahoma. We do this as a tribute to our ancestors that experienced hardship during the 19th century, and during the trek our story-tellers orally speak the tale and talk about the deeds of former chiefs and warriors. We also play traditional games and eat customary food...the idea is to re-live and get a perspective, albeit through modern eyes, of what we come from.


The story and experience has undoubtedly changed from what we do today, but it is through our actions, words, and emotions that we remember our tribe's history, and that is unique to the memorialization aspect. There is nothing necessarily tangible in this memorial, we think we know that the ceremonies are historically accuate simply because it has been physically passed on. We can only guess that the customs we bear are identical to those who lived centuries before in modern day Kentucky and Missouri, but even if they are not, it has been constructed in history over time to be who we are now.