A few sentiments and questions that have been shared with the author include the following, "What makes you qualified?", "Why should I believe you?", "This is all BS!", "You're making things up!", "You're taking other peoples' culture", so on and so on. My question is, what makes a person "credible"? The answer to this question is simple, the information provided by the person is what should be deemed credible or not.
The image below is from Scholastic News published in the year 2015. The intent of Scholastic News was to provide nonfiction current events and historical moments for elementary grade level students. The publication shows us what the Wampanoag Indians would have looked like in the 1620s with the pilgrims arrived along the eastern shores of North America. Today, this young lady would be referred to as "Black", "African American" or "of African descent".
The video below is from the Library of Congress (LOC), and titled: Native Women Washing Negro Baby in Nassau, B.I. The LOC did not refer to either of these original people as "African" or "Black". They are the original people of the Bahamas. While you have been conditioned to believe their ancestors are "African", the LOC explicitly tells you that the woman washing the baby is NATIVE to Bahamas.
The video below is also from the LOC. The video was featured in Serving: Our Voices and is titled: PERSONAL NARRATIVE Donald E. Fisher Collection. The link to the full video is at the bottom of the page. The video directly below is a snippet where Donald Fisher shares that his grandmother is Wampanoag and his grandfather is Cherokee. In the video, he talks about how his grandparents met, as well as a variety of his accomplishments as (and in relation to) THEE American Indian.
As asked in the title of this blog, what if it was someone more "credible" telling you?
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