November 25, 2022 * Parshat Toldot

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Native American Heritage Month

I don’t know much about St. Louis. It just wasn’t a city that I’ve had much interaction with. So when I visited as part of the Rabbinical Assembly Convention at the beginning of November with the opportunity to choose from several “St. Louis experiences”, I had no idea which pick. I knew breweries and baseball fields weren’t my thing, so I chose the Arch which I also knew nothing about except that it was considered the “gateway to the west”. I remembered learning in elementary school about how the “West was Won”, but again, I felt like my education here was lacking.

When we arrived, I found out that we got to not only go up in the Arch (how exciting!) but also explore the newly opened museum attached to it. The museum explores St. Louis during the span from 1764 to 1965 with topics covering Colonial St. Louis, Jefferson’s Vision, Manifest Destiny, The Riverfront Era, New Frontiers, and Building the Gateway Arch. What caught my attenditon, however, was a large 3 part sign that read “The West was Won”, “El Norte nos fue Robado”, and “The West was Stolen”. These signs reminded me once again that there are many different perspectives to one story. The museum included these other perspectives that I certainly don’t remember learning in school and that I may not have considered otherwise. For those already living in the region before America’s move West, their lives were completely changed and the museum acknowledged how American expansion affected those communities.

One exhibit I was drawn to was called “We’re still here” and featured interviews with Native Americans who are descended from local tribes which are still active. The way they spoke about their heritage and the way they pass on their traditions, it reminded me of our own Jewish culture. Their family stories of displacement, of connection to history, to storytelling, and rituals seemed so familiar even if the words that explained them were different.

As a way to observe Native American Heritage Day and as National Native American Heritage month ends, I thought I would do some learning and came across a talk called “Intersections of Identity: The Jewish Indigenous Experience". This program, presented by the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, features a conversation between Sarah Podemski, star of FX’s Reservation Dogs, and Emily Bowen Cohen, artist and comic writer. The program is moderated by Cindy Benitez, Program Manager at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. They talk about how their worlds live independently, how they form different parts of their identity and what happens when they collide. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Blatt

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