What Ben Franklin saw back then is more true today. We’ve lost our way.

I tried to find a picture of a real Cherokee for the thumbnail of this article. I couldn’t. I kept getting pictures of the car… the jeep cherokee. Thats exactly what this article’s about. — Michael

I’m white. “Caucasian”, I mean. But, I’ve actually got a small amount of Cherokee in my blood (although you wouldn’t know it if you met me).

I’ve always wondered exactly what percentage Cherokee I am.

Today I asked my Mom about it and her response was disturbing, to put it lightly.

“I don’t know what percentage you are, exactly, but if your great grandfather was half, then you would be something like one sixteenth.”

It was what she said next that was the disturbing part.

“My grandfather, your great-grandfather, didn’t like to talk about it… back then being part Native American was thought of as being… low class, looked down upon.”

She went on to describe the racism that had plagued our family’s past.

How could anyone resent being part Native American? Those proud, ancient people knew this land we call America better than anyone, and were connected to it on a level deeper than any other peoples since. I’m honored to be even a tiny part Cherokee. Who wouldn’t be?

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My whole life I’ve been a romantic, entertaining fantasies of going off to live in some mysterious forest until every one of my senses becomes perfectly in tune with nature.

I can see it in my mind’s eye. It’s a dark forest, the light runs between the trees like a river runs around rocks, it catches the dust and dander of the woods, holding me in its timeless fog.

In dreams I often find myself in those woods, running through a world cast in moonlight, the vitality of the wild burning in my every heartbeat and every breath.

Am I the only one, who dreams such dreams? I wonder.

It was none other than Ben Franklin who answered that question for me, in a letter he wrote in 1753:

“When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

There was something missing in early colonial culture that was found by a few among the native people. Something about early colonial life proved lacking to a few of those early English settlers.

The settlers had left everything to participate in a new life across the Atlantic, and for some, that new life wasn’t to be found among their European brothers in their colony, but among the mysterious culture of the indigenous peoples.

This dilemma still exists today, in our modernity, but more-so.

We have exchanged starlight for the bright screens of our phones, supplemented the cold torrent of a raging river for the gentle flow of a warm shower, traded the free and wild landscapes for roadways to connect our cubicles and corn fields that feed the beef industry. We’ve exchanged a fresh ocean breeze for a polluted, air-conditioned atmosphere. We’ve traded birdsong for car horns and police sirens. We’ve traded firelight for television screens.

We cannot divorce ourselves from our biology. Our role in the natural world is written on our DNA. Our minds and bodies have been sculpted by our past, since way before the native peoples of northeast Asia crossed land bridges into North America thousands of years ago, if not tens of thousands. That can’t just vanish in a few generations.

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There’s the smell of rain in the air, this morning. Not the cold kind — the humid, tropical kind. My head’s spinning. I feel confusion and a sense of urgency. It’s the same urgency that’s haunted me from childhood.

I’ve got to make money. I’ve got to move up in the world. I need to figure out a 5-year plan, but first a 5-day plan. Where can I meet girls? Where can I meet new friends? How do I organize my life? Do I need to go back to school? How can I predict the future, to anticipate economical and social change? Will Russia nuke us?

I’m tired of it. I just hope it rains. I want to hear the thunder, I want to know there’s something bigger than me.

I want a downpour loud enough to drown out the urgency.

I want to stand still for a moment. Just a moment. I guess that’s too much to ask in 2022.