Back when we could have a hobby beyond playground-going and the Hokey Pokey, Kenton and I shared one which would have seemed pretty unlikely to me when I was growing up Jewish and bookish in the Eastern suburbs, but turned out to suit me fine: driving around the Great Basin and the Mojave singing cowboy songs.
The Great Basin and the Mojave have many fascinating features including ghost towns, puzzling Cold War communications outposts, and geysers, plus the occasional giant spider welded together out of Volkswagon parts, but mostly they are empty and above all, big. So after a while you run out music.
After we'd started burning out on Sons of The Pioneers and Gene Autry and eventually worked through even the astoundingly extensive catalog of modern practitioners Riders In The Sky, K bought some CDs by a deservedly lesser-known outfit, The Sons of Something Else, who had a few good songs and a load of bad ones and a few so brilliantly awful that we had to keep playing them just to be sure. One contained this couplet: "Where the red man danced/he prayed and pranced..." which about did us in.
I remembered all this recently when I caught Lilah sitting on the floor moving blocks around in a dreamy fashion and chanting a mostly-forgotten stanza of "Home On The Range" to herself, sotto voce:
Oh the Red Man was pressed
From this part of the West
It's unlikely he'll ever return
To the banks of Red River
Where seldom if ever
His flickering campfires will burn
We're sending them to a progressive, not to say hippie-dippy preschool this year, and eventually probably moving to Berkeley, where the official holiday celebrated that Thursday in late November is called Indigenous People's Day. Of course I'm kind of proud of her for knowing such an obscure thing as the second verse of a song everybody knows the first verse of, but I can't wait to see how it goes over when she shares that one with her second-grade class at Multi-Culti Day School in a few years.
Surely even the good folks of the People's Republic over there would agree, though, that if your disposessed people must be pictured as romantically vanished in a nostalgic paean to manifest destiny, it's better to be depicted for posterity as "pressed" than as "prancing."
