My daughter is studying the Native Americans in social studies. This week her class started studying the Eastern Woodland Indians, specifically the Cherokee. This amazing people group assimilated into the European colonies and, in many ways, looked exactly like their neighbors.
But they weren’t. They were different.
And that difference allowed people’s greed for gold to forcibly remove the Cherokee and other Native Americans from their land, enduring disease, exposure, and starvation. The Trail of Tears.
When I told my girl the story of the Cherokee, she stared at me, confusion pulling her eyebrows together.
“Why?”
In her wide-eyed innocence, “Why?”
Why, indeed?
You see, my girl is an artist and she understands that in art, in beauty, contrast and difference is celebrated and encouraged. That which makes something different, is core to making it beautiful. Continue reading “Beautifully Diverse”