Daily Archives: October 1, 2007

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Sacagawea is your new best friend

October 1, 2007 10:09 pm , 3 Comments , Wistar

The City of Charlottesville hosts a statue at the intersection of McIntire Road and West Main Street that has some forward-minded people seeing red (pun intended). The controversial statue (Charles Keck, 1919) depicts Lewis and Clark standing heroically over a cringing, subservient Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who guided the explorers to the Pacific Coast and back at the beginning of the 19th Century. The inscription on the statue reads:

MERIWETHER LEWIS/1774-1809/WILLIAM CLARK/1770-1838/BOLD AND FARSEEING PATHFINDERS/WHO CARRIED THE FLAG OF THE/YOUNG REPUBLIC TO THE WESTERN/OCEAN AND REVEALED AN UNKNOWN/EMPIRE TO THE USES OF MANKIND

A TERRITORY OF 385,000 SQUARE MILES WAS ADDED TO THE/COUNTRY BY THE EFFORTS OF THESE MEN; AN AREA LARGER/THAN THE THEN EXISTING SIZE OF THE UNITED STATES

With Columbus Day approaching, Miss Representation USA aka Jennifer is inviting women, friends of women, Native Americans, friends of Native Americans, and seekers of truth-telling rocks to protest the Lewis & Clark statue’s inaccurate depiction of Sacagawea. Here are the upcoming “Operation Sacagawea Never Cowered” events that you are encouraged to attend:

TUESDAY, Oct. 2

Miss Rep & friends at petition table by City Hall from 12-2 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 3

Miss Rep & friends at petition table near West Main Market from 12-2 p.m.

THURSDAY, Oct. 4

Miss Rep & friends at petition table Center Place/fountain at downtown mall from 12-2 p.m.

FRIDAY, Oct. 5

Go see Natsu Saito speak at UVA Art Museum at 5:30 p.m. (FREE) and then see The Canary Effect at Vinegar Hill at 9 p.m. as part of the Columbus: Myth and the American Dream Revisited event.

MONDAY, Oct. 8

Columbus Day Observed. Hide the Statue! Intersection of Ridge-McIntire & West Main & Water from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.

If all goes according to plan in C-Ville, for her next activist feat Jennifer may drape the White House in fabric like Christo, or put a sun visor on planet Earth to protest global warming. There will be no stopping her after her first success. Be smart and get in early. The Jennifer train is leaving the station and the world will be a better place when she is done blowing her horn. And because it’s Jennifer we’re talking about, that train metaphor will remind her of farting.

For more info, contact Jennifer at the hotline: (434) 227-6521

Posted in: Uncategorized , Tagged: advice on how to live your life

Grandmother update

October 1, 2007 7:27 pm , 1 Comment , Wistar

Today Big Wis received a letter from her cat Rascal in Georgia. She has been feeding this stray cat for years on her back porch, and at night it sleeps on her bed. She has been worried that the cat would abandon her during her convalescence in Virginia, because a week-long trip has now become a month-long medical ordeal. Her faithful employee David, who has changed her lightbulbs and watered her flowers and filled her car with gas for decades, has been putting cat food outside her condo twice a day. Like many Southern white folks of her generation, Big Wis has a close, albeit complicated relationship with her black “help,” but David is like family to her. I always assumed that he liked my grandmother, but kept a certain distance because of the de facto social segregation that still exists in the South between black and white, not to mention employee and employer. They were so different, she with her genteel Sweet Briar education and he who learned to read and write only much later in life. And then today she got this letter in the mail, addressed to Wisteria, which made her cry:

Mama,

Thangs have gone to hell hear since you hav gone. David feeds me the same ole cat food. I miss u at nite. I stay wif Ellie & Barney [the condo neighbors] but it was not like u being here. Come home soon.

Rascal