Today my niece, grand nephew and I will be visiting the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma, where my nascient writing career began!

 

My mother told me that my first article was titled (spelling compliments of my preschool, or earliest grade school, degree of knowledge) “The Arow in the Muzeum.” Today I am going to see if I can find that arrow (or one like it) and take a picture of it.

 

My visit today — the first in decades —  will be a “homecoming” of sorts for me, to the place where my almost-life-long desire to string words into sentences and truly communicate what’s in my heart was born.

 

I wrote that first piece more than 65 years ago. I don’t remember writing it, or what was in it, but apparently I was sufficiently impressed by seeing a genuine, historic “Indian” arrow up close and personal that I felt driven to write about it…

 

I was, by then, a major Roy Rogers fan, and I knew he was a Choctaw Indian. (A cowboy AND an Indian!)  (For years, my stories were about Roy Rogers, Dale Evans and their real children, which I put into all kinds of peril before allowing Roy to heroically rescue them all.)

 

I also had met, by that time, The Cisco Kid, another heroic horseman, from Mexico. I met him at the B&I Shopping Center, where celebrities often appeared, and where Ivan the gorilla spent 27 of his entire 50-year lifespan between the time he was relinquished as a house pet and sent to the Seattle Woodland Park Zoo and thence to the Atlanta Zoo decades later. (I visited Ivan many times across several decades. We were buddies. He definitely recognized me.)

 

The trans boy in me considered myself a cowboy even before we got horses when I was seven or eight. 

 

I’m the kid on the left on Sugar Babe wearing the robin’s egg blue cowboy outfit

 

Cowboys and Indians were a big part of my fantasy world. So, having history brought alive at the Museum by seeing an arrow and other indigenous/Native American paraphernalia arrayed before me was a huge eye opener, apparently! I have always had  a soft spot in my heart for cowboys, Indians, Mexicans, and black folks, as a result of my early positive exposure to them as a child. My Sunday school teacher was a Black woman and her son Walter was a friend.

 

There is still — always has been — a significant Native American population here in Washington State.

 

I assume that the property Jackie and I  own right now belonged to the Puyallup Tribe back in the day, since most of the Tacoma/Puyallup region did.  Much of the land still belongs to the Puyallups; they lease land to the City of Tacoma.  I suspect the Museum we’ll be visiting today sits on their land, as does the Emerald Queen Casino, which is owned and operated by the tribe.  (I walk more reverently here whenever I consciously remember this fact.)

 

It’s possible that my love of nature and animals was engendered as the result of Native American influences. They regard other animals as equal beings/other nations on sacred paths, and when they hunt, eat, or use them in any other way, they do so with utmost humility and reverence. Many tribes believe that animals consciously surrender/sacrifice their individual lives to human beings with the understanding that all species, in every form, are mutually reliant on all the others for our long-term survival. (And I firmly believe we are!)

 

Anyway, I plan to take photos today while I’m at the “muzeum” and I will share them here when I get back. Especially that “arow” or one like it!  I may cry when I see it again, because it offers mute testimony that I was born and destined to become a writer, and that’s a sacred thought to me!

 

Update: Well, as they say, if history always makes us proud, we aren’t learning genuine history!  

 

The museum visit yesterday was bittersweet. It reminded me of my mother’s family struggles during the Great Depression and of the classmates she lost (Keiko and Reiko Mafune) to concentration/internment camps when citizens of Japanese American ancestry were ordered to surrender themselves to governmental imprisonment during WWII.  There was also very little Native American history in there, which suprised me.

 

We didn’t get there until after 5:30 so we only had two and a half hours to see everything, so I ended up taking 100 photos so I could learn about what we were seeing after the fact. I won’t publish them all here, but I will publish a good chunk of them.

 

The following images are of the railroad’s influence on Tacoma and surrounding areas… built to scale.

It’s an ENORMOUS exhibit!