I'll try not to rattle on too long here, but my heart and mind are so full from reading this, that I have to at least get some of it down in writing before the moment passes.

The rest, I'll save for a diary or several, hopefully sooner than later.  :-)

First, just a bit of name-dropping and a song, to set the mood.

I've mentioned to you in email, va dare, the time a few years ago when my mother came and stayed with us after my wife's hip replacement to help take care of her.  One of the things she brought along with her was a gift, a CD of Patty Loveless' Mountain Soul.  She first cued up "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive," which she first heard in Jack Goin's kitchen with Jack, and Penny Ferguson.  As her eyes filled with tears at the beauty and sorrow of the music, Jack leaned in to her, looked over to Penny, and commented "she's feeling her mountain roots."

I posted a studio-recording version to faithfull's wonderful diary the other day, but here is a live version that'll knock your socks off.  I said there, "this song is what it feels like to have an Appalachian heart."  I think it was also at this time in her Appalachian odyssey that she played some of my singing for her new-found old friends, and it might have been Penny who told her that I had "an Appalachian voice," which is one of the highest compliments I've ever been paid.  Mom'll be reading this, so she'll let me know if I've got that detail wrong.  :-)

I've felt like I've been in the political wilderness for so long that it was an almost unfamiliar feeling to be so galvanized by a political campaign, let alone by a politician, when 2008 and Barack Obama came along.  Jumping into dKos as anything other than a lurker and occasional poster has galvanized me even further.

But this diary galvanizes me in a much deeper and more profound way, because this story, simply put, is the story of America.  The Trail of Tears, the Middle Passage, the Indian Wars, the Scots-Irish diaspora, the great migration of Palatine Germans fleeing the horrors of Europe's wars and religious persecutions, the Revolution, the Civil War, the struggles of labor, the Civil Rights Movement, the great push west towards the Mississippi and beyond, all of these strands of our history and culture pass, at some point, through the bottleneck of Appalachia.

Be careful how you stereotype its people and its many, many descendants, because they are us.  Black, White, Red, and every shade in between, they are us.

I married a lily-white girl who can prove her American ancestry all the way back to 1620 and qualifies for the DAR.  But in her search for her ancestors, she has found that many of the women of her line in 18th century Kentucky have only first names listed, and her lines, like my mother's pass directly through the heart of Melungeon country, only a county apart at most times through Virginia, Kentucky, and on to Illinois.

As my father and I have often discussed, you don't have ancestry that passes through this American cauldron and have it come out all "White."  They are us, because we are us.

So this story is the same story as that of my father's family as well.  I've mentioned a few times here my Abolitionist ancestors from Ohio, who fled to Iowa in 1851 and built a Wesleyan church there that still bears their name.  Their grandson Byron married a coppery-dark-skinned girl named Sadie, who was subject to the treatment you can pretty well imagine a dark-skinned girl in 1890s Iowa might receive.  During my grandfather's childhood, who was nicknamed "Crow" by the other children because of his darker tone, Sadie would take him into the woods and show him how to identify roots and herbs, and explained to him that we were Ioway, the state's inhabitants until most were removed to Nebraska and ultimately Oklahoma in the 1840s.  When he was seven, Byron and Sadie, profoundly alcoholic, got religion and quit the booze, and Byron became a Wesleyan minister.  The Indian teachings stopped.

But during my father's childhood in Minnesota on land that had been the Minnesota Half-Breed Tract, he couldn't help but notice that he and his father looked an awful lot like the Dakotas who still lived in tipis at Tipiota on the Mississippi River when they went there to fish.  As was usual in those times, these things weren't spoken out loud.

But before my father left for the Korean War, grandpa bought a six pack of beer, and took him out into the woods to tell him these stories, and more.  Of how we were Ioway, and of how his almost preternatural skills as a woodsman had come from his mother.  Of how, when he had worked to build the highway that brought FDR to the Mayo Clinic from the nearest major airport in Minneapolis, people had rolled down their windows as they drove by and shouted "nigger" at him.

It was almost by accident that my father's history career led him to South Dakota, that he became an historian of the Northern Plains and of the Sioux.  Almost by accident that we fell in with Dakota/Nakota/Lakota traditionalists who built a sweat lodge on our land.  When my father went on hanbleca, which is poorly rendered into English as "vision quest," to get his name, that name was Ta Chanunpa Ska, "His White Pipe."  When he would ask the old medicineman who was his hunka uncle and mentor what it meant, he "helpfully" would say "ask the spirits."

Gradually, he came to realize that it said that he was meant to be a bridge, a conduit like the chanunpa itself, between the Indian world and the White.

That's his calling.  That's my calling.  I'm pink as they come.  I can "pass."  But I know if I turned my back on knowing what I know, I would lose my soul, lose who I am.

Because they are us.