Hello everyone!
I'm new on the board, am happy to join this forum, and this conversation especially.
+loshe wawa kanawi nysayka. Great thoughts all.
I just saw that video and it makes me very sad. How can anyone do that to the people with four legs? It is about the most inhumane thing I have ever seen. What I want to know is why they were doing skinning them alive in the first place-- for sick pleasure or because it's more efficient?
PETA is an interesting phenomenen, and I think it largely stems from being pretty far disconnected from the land itself. I'm what you call an urban native (not Indian, but Siberian Nanai), but I am deeply called to the old ways of my own ancestors. As such, I wear buckskin for all my clothing, run a program in aboriginal lifeways, and try to learn, teach and promote the old ways of knowing the land. Guess that's why I'm here in the city.
Sometimes walking down the street in downtown Portland, I wonder if some random PETA person is gonna run up and thrash my coyote parka with paint. They don't know the long story behind those animals, the intensive amount of work gone into braintanning, sewing, resewing. But you can't really do anything about that. Seems like the only real way to change people's minds about hunting etc... is to get them into the land and to have deep experiences there.
The other part of my ancestry is Chinese, and I've struggled for my whole life to understand the strangeness that is the Chinese today. That video sure doesn't help, and really shows me how far apart my grandparents from two sides really are.
The thing is, all that's ancient history now. What I like about this forum here is that everyone here is taking responsibility for what is to come personally, by being proponents of another way of thinking-- ethical hunting, traditional hunting, even today by us as modern Americans. So we're not set in stone by where we come from. That's a relief for everyone I suppose.
