I Am Native American

I don't like how my tribe tries rewriting our people's history. I guess because much of our tribal traditions are forgotten or because there's just not much to tell so they borrow traditions from other tribes to make our history sound more interesting? For example, every Summer they have this thing called the annual canoe journey which involves members of the tribal community getting together in large ocean canoes and traveling North along the coast. They try to pass this off as a traditional journey our ancestors did but that is simply not true. Our people were river people, we used smaller canoes made for traveling along rivers and in lakes. The bigger ocean canoes were used more by Alaskan Native Americans and if they were used in our area, our tribe certainly did not use them! Another example is they consider the flute a traditional instrument by our tribe but again, that's not true. It's a Southwest Native instrument, our people only used drums! What bothers me even more is that they recently opened up a museum in the area for our tribe's history and culture and of course, they're pushing all of these lies about our tribe claiming that they're our traditions. But most people don't have the guts to call them out for it or they just don't care so our history goes rewritten and people interested in learning about us become misinformed. I hope this isn't something that other Native American tribes do too because then our culture in general just becomes a big fat lie.