Native Americans

The 14th is the feast of Kateri Tekakwitha, the 17th c. Native American saint of the Iroquois tribe. Her story is one of the blending of her Indian heritage with her adopted Christianity. The awareness of her feast this week made me want to tell you of the Netflix series I've been watching lately.The title is Longmire and you might call it a contemporary Western. It has similarities with the Westerns I watched on TV as a child, but it has put down the Hollywood parts, the simulations and stereotyping, and picked up what is the reality, so they say, of life in a small rather cowboy-like town in Wyoming today. Here they blend the use of cell phones with rodeos and ranchers, which leads to the weekly crime adventure as Walt Longmire is the county sheriff. But the reason I like the show is twofold: First, the sheriff is a wounded hero, grieving the murder of his wife while trying to be a good man in a world of crime and flawed humanity; Secondly, a Cheyenne reservation is located right beside the town and every storyline includes interactions between the white world and the world of the Cheyenne people of the area. Lots of Native American philosophy and history are interwoven in the scripts. In this time of "Black Lives Matter" it fits in well.