Thanks for the OT!

It brought back old memories. My friend Ken was from RI. We met in St. Petersburg. He loved to sail. In my childhood I had ties to Lenape, Shinnecock Bay, and other places named after the indigenous peoples, that somehow I was led to believe no longer lived in area. I've told the story before of how my childhood best friend was a native American. Too bad my closest friends from the area have all passed on.

Went out early and touched up the road and the weeps. Later I'll swap out the box scrape for the bush hog. We got 0.7" last night and road moisture was just right for reshaping.

We live on the trail of tears. Most of our native people were forced out in that disaster, but many remained hidden on the mountain. When I was teaching and we had to fill out the federal registry, something like 8% of the kids had some native blood... enough to be classified as native American.

Enjoy your community events...sounds like fun. Thanks for the OT!

To me, Little Compton is the prettiest town to live in RI. While living in West Warwick, about 2005, my aunt in WA State wrote about genealogical research she’d done. She asked if I lived close to Little Compton. I replied that since RI is the smallest state, every place in it was close to me. My aunt’s (and mother’s) maiden name was Hart. She’d traced our ancestors to Harts who lived in Little Compton in the 1600’s and 1700’s. There was an Amy Hart Trail still there, created when Amy Hart walked daily from their farmhouse to the graves of five relatives. I drove down to the town and visited the historical society. A woman there said she’d driven along a road in the northern part of town along which she’d seen a few mailboxes labeled Amy Hart Trail. Following her directions I found it in a very wooded area. Walking along the trail, there were one or two houses. Remnants of stone fences sat among trees. Within a few minutes I noticed a small clearing to the right and investigating, saw five small flat, what looked like headstones, almost buried in the ground. I continued along the trail a mile or so and ended up in a churchyard where dozens of Harts were buried. I wish I’d had a camera or smartphone to record some of this for my aunt. I couldn’t spend much time as I was too busy preparing to move back to Oregon. I did make one more trip down before leaving and found I could access the church by road when driving from a different direction. On one of my trips I stopped at the town library. It had a genealogical section with at least one book labeled “Hart,” in which I read more of our family history. It mentioned one of our female ancestors was left a bed in a will. This may’ve been a generous donation at a time when women didn’t own anything. I have a book “Notes on Little Compton” from records collected by Benjamin Franklin Wilbour. In it is a map of LC, looks like from 1600’s, showing names of owners of each parcel of land. I don’t see any owners named Hart. Perhaps the land they owned at that time was part of MA then.

What a wonderful celebration your town folk are having! The canoe video was awesome.
Native Americans are treated like shit around here. Think of all the smears that dirty Injuns get tagged with: lazy, dirty, drunks, undeserving of government checks, etc... Repairmen, such as appliances and a/c, often will not go onto the reservation to do work.
At least this is not the case in your town.
Thanks for the OT, dear friend!

they are called dugouts. Some are burned out, as per the video, others, chopped, chiseled, hacked and scraped, but not "dug" as we know and use it today. Fun looking little craft, though I am perilous to the success of any venture that involves canoes, having capsized most I've been in.

We're nearing an anniversary out here ourselves, July 7, 1846, the US invasion and conquest of California began in earnest. At least they were openly hostile here, rather than sneaky like they were there.

Off to the county fair today, somewhere in the eighties ut there, but my wife does some volunteer stuff there and I get to eat fair food.

be well and have a good one

My wife and I have decided that, since our cash situation will necessarily be changing in the negative direction quite soon, we need to go do something for ourselves. So we're heading for the airport tomorrow to get out of the US for the 4th of July. It may be a while before we can exercise our passports again, and there will never be a better time than now. I just have a very nagging feeling that I do not want to be present on US soil for the 4th. But don't let that worry you: I've been wrong about pretty much everything else, here lately...

I'm probably going to leave all the electronics home, since the TSA likes to play gratuitous games with people these days, so I'll probably go silent for a week or so. It'll be a no-tech trip, like the no-tech candlelight evenings we used to do. Have a great holiday, everyone, and be safe out there.