Preparing for Veteran’s Day/Remembrance Day

November 11 is Veteran’s Day– Armistice or Remembrance Day in Britain. This began as a day to remember those who served and died in World War I. In the US, it has become a day to remember our living veterans of all our wars, as well as those who died in WWI. This is a holy day as far as I’m concerned. We live in the tatters of a world shaped and defined by what happened from 1914-1918, though in the US at least, there isn’t even a national memorial for that particular war. We didn’t lose as many people, not even as close as Britain and France (though we did send an expeditionary force to Europe under General Pershing over in 1917. My 1stcousin twice removed private S. Wesley Heffner (30 April 1898-June 1918) died in France of injuries sustained in battle. I remember him every November). In Britain, entire villages were emptied of men. It cost the UK an entire generation and devastated Europe. Young men tended to enlist together, and villages were posted in the same battalions together so when those battalions fell in battle, they took the men of entire villages and towns with them.

America doesn’t do anything approaching enough to honor this day. The president may lay a wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier at Arlington Cemetery. Individual towns may have small ceremonies at their local American Legion halls but we no longer have large, city wide parades, or events. We have chosen to forget, and this is shameful. Maybe if we remembered and honored a bit more assiduously, we wouldn’t be so quick to go to war, or so slow to intervene when it is right to do so.

The UK is also having problems this year. In London, numerous Pro-Palestinian groups have decided to hold marches on Remembrance Day. I’m sure we’ll see the same type of garbage here. In this, I don’t care if a march is Pro-Palestinian or Pro-Israeli, or Pro- anything else: it is inappropriate to hold such a thing on a day given to remember our honored dead, especially our WWI dead. Their ghosts still haunt London. You can sense them, feel them in the streets, right along with the ghosts of WWII holding us, their descendants accountable. To do this on Remembrance Day, to hold these pro-Palestinian marches (or any other kind of march that isn’t dedicated to remembrance) is disgusting and gross. Personally, if a group decides to march on Veteran’s Day/Remembrance Day, I’d like to see forcible police action, arrest, and frankly, I’d strip the ingrates of their citizenship and remove them from the country. Or conscript them and send them to the front line of any pertinent war. Teach them a lesson about why we should be grateful to our military dead.

To insult the dead that gave their lives that we might live in freedom is …I don’t have words for how abhorrent that is, especially on Armistice Day. It’s utterly revolting and if the police won’t handle the ingrates, then I hope the people themselves do. That we allow any other type of march to occur on this day shows the utter lack of respect with which we hold our military dead.

I’ll close with a stanza from Binyon’s poignant tribute to the WWI fallen:

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”

It is our privilege and our obligation to remember and with remembrance to carry in our hearts reverence. Always. If we can’t do that, what a pathetic generation of human beings we are.

 

Following up on World Ballet Day: Maria Tallchief

I made a post yesterday about World Ballet Day and Wyrd Dottir was kind enough to note in the comments that America’s first Native American (Osage) ballerina, Maria Tallchief has just been commemorated by the US Mint with a quarter. You know I’ll be buying a couple for my ancestor shrine! 

Readers may learn about Maria Tallchief here. She was very lucky – the article accurately describes her early training, which she had to unlearn when her family moved from OK to CA. Her first “teacher” (and I use that word loosely) put her on pointe at five. That is obscenely and dangerously young. She herself noted how lucky she was not to have sustained permanent injury. 

As a ballet dancer, Tallchief traveled and worked with the ballet Russe and, as the article rightly notes, her partnership with Balanchine revolutionized American ballet. 

Here is a signed photo of her from my personal collection. She is garbed for her famous role as “the Firebird” in the ballet of the same name: 

One thing the article above doesn’t note is that her family was deeply impacted by the events depicted in the historical movie “Killers of the Flower Moon”: Maria’s cousin’s family died in a firebombing perpetrated by ranchers who wanted rights to the land and its oil. 

Read more about that here. 

As an aside, when I was still dancing, I read a story about her and the prejudice she faced while dancing for the Ballet Russe. At that time, to be taken seriously as a ballet dancer, one pretty much had to have a Russian name.  She was pressured to change her name to Tallchieva, to pass for Russian. She was proud of her Osage heritage and refused. That stuck with me, because I changed my last name from a very long Lithuanian last name (Dabravalskas), which always perplexed my directors, to Krasskova. I remain ambivalent about it. 

I haven’t found many clips of her dancing, but here can see a clip of her in Swan Lake. (Her style and technique is that of the 1950s. Today, in part thanks to her and the other dancers of her generation, technique has evolved significantly. Always keep that in mind when watching the great dancers of the past). 

Maria’s sister Marjorie was also a famous dancer in her own right. Both women have statues as part of a display: “The Five Moons” sculpture in Tulsa. The sculpture shows five leading Native American dancers: Maria Tallchief, Marjorie Tallchief, Myra Yvonne Chouteau, Rosella Hightower, and Moscelyne Larkin. In 2022, Marjorie Tallchief’s statue was stolen, and cut up for scrap metal. The statue has happily been replaced. 

There were American ballet dancers before Tallchief, most notably, Augusta Maywood, who, unusual for her time, formed her own ballet company, but none achieved Tallchief’s height of fame and it was partly due to Tallchief and her first husband, choreographer George Balanchine, that a distinctly American school of Ballet exists, one that can hold its own (like it or hate its style) with the great companies of Europe.  

A Sancta’s Feastday

Yesterday was my adopted mom’s feast day — she is honored as a sancta in at least three traditions and I would venerate her anyway because she is my mom. I think of all the things she liked when she was alive, especially those foodstuffs of which she’d rarely allow herself the indulgence and we festoon her shrine with them. It was a good day and I feel like she blessed me with this sense — all day — of cheerfulness. This is not my normal demeanor, let me tell you. I miss her and it’s odd having to navigate different registers (Mutti versus sancta) on such feast days, but I actually wish I could do more for her.

I learned so much from her care, especially in loving the Gods, in being a better human being, and one would think that as a spirit worker, an ancestor worker that death would be an easy thing to accept but one would most definitely be wrong. There were times the first few years after she died where part of me wanted to rage: how dare this world exist without her in it! That does pass though mostly, and I can read the reams of letters we exchanged, tell her stories, cook the recipes we both loved and explored together, and share the pearls of wisdom she poured into my hands with my friends and husband…it was awhile before I could do that without pain.

Who made you? Who transformed your life? Whose stories do you carry as though they were marrow nourishing your bones?

I encourage my readers to honor your dead here: tell me about one of your ancestors that is particularly dear to you (which is not to say that the others weren’t–oh, I hate leaving any of my dead out!). Share a recipe. If you’re named after an ancestor, tell me about that person. Who do you honor first and foremost when you turn to your dead? Let us celebrate them together. 🙂