Grandma,Genocide, And The Guacamole Act Of 1917. A Herstory.

When I was little my parents used to dump me off at my grandma's house for babysitting. She lived in Mission South Dakota on the Rosebud Reservation. I didn't know much about my grandma except she spoke broken english because she was an immigrant from Lebanon. Misogyny plays a big role in Lebanese families. As I got older I learned more about my grandmother and realized she needs a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. My grandparents wanted to flee Lebanon at the turn of the last century because of the threat imposed by The Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were busy eradicating Christianity by starvation and sometimes just going into villages and slaughtering every man woman and child. The same director as The Armenian Genocide.

So I heard stories about how brave and courageous my grandfather was by leaving Lebanon alone to come to America. He came here to America and peddled pots and pans off of his back to the sparsely populated South Dakota prairie. Religion sucks and to prove how much religion sucks, this same drama is playing out right now in Israel.

I never heard stories about my 4.6 foot tall grandma. As it turns out my grandma was a force to be reckoned with. Sure she looked like the grandma from "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," and when she mixed in with Native American women in the small reservation town, I would lose her. They all wore black dresses and head scarves and sunglasses. My grandma invented "Where' Waldo." So my grandma was born about 75 feet from the above picture in my family's ancestral home of Kfeir Lebanon. I asked some of the older Lebanese Ladies about her and of course flowery stories emerged depicting a beautiful young Lebanese woman desired by every man in the village. Then they pointed at a manger where the farm animals slept. "So my grandma was born in a manger?" Female Jesus?

The Sheroic part of this boring story is the fact that my grandma lived alone in a war torn Southern Lebanon for ten years. She did this while my aunt and uncle were children. She saw Lawrence Of Arabia in Damascus, she attended a Russian Orthodox school and could speak Russian. The story goes that my grandfather finally scraped enough money together to bring her and the children over to America. Then when she got here I guess my grandfather arranged for the Native Americans to welcome her dressed in all the traditional traps they wore for thousands of years. Already suffering from PTSD from being in a war zone, grandma ran into the house and barred the door.

So my grandma was pretty cool. My memories of her are fond. When she wasn't beating me with a slipper for being outside reenacting Custer's Last Stand with the Native American kids using BB guns, or force feeding me lamb. I often wonder if that is why my family is so liberal. The struggle to reach America was everything because the alternative was death. This is of course a small drop in the ocean of immigration stories. As it turned out my grandparents had a store on the reservation and my grandfather would deliver food for free to Native Americans in need. My dad ended up helping to settle the Wounded Knee Standoff in the early 70's as well as passing laws to ensure that Native American children had to be placed with Native Families because Native American children were being adopted out to white families at an appalling rate. My father and brother fought the U.S. government to keep a hospital open for Native Americans in South Dakota. My two uncles fought in WW2 , my dad in the Korean War.

Thanks Grandma.