Welcome to the Tuesday edition of the Coffee Hour at Street Prophets. This is an open thread where we can discuss what’s happening in our lives, what we’ve been working on, and our opinions on current events. To start us off today, I thought I’d bring up the topic of heroes.
Heroes are people who inspire us. They are often people we have never met, people who have may have died long before we were born. They are people whose deeds, actions, and words have helped make us who we are today. Many of our heroes are people we have only met through books, stories, art, and music.
One of my heroes is D’Arcy McNickle. I grew up hearing stories about him and our paths crossed, decades apart, in many places. D’Arcy grew up on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana and is thus often considered a Flathead Indian. His ancestry is actually Cree-Métis. He went to Chemawa Indian Boarding School in Oregon, then attended the University of Montana (then known as Montana State University); went to Oxford, but didn’t enroll; hung out in Paris with other American expatriates; and returned to New York to write a novel. He then wound up working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He was involved in the development of tribal leadership that would be independent from the dictates of the BIA. He worked with parents on the Navajo reservation to show skeptical non-Indians that Indian parents could be involved in the education of their children. Along the way he wrote a number of books, both fiction and non-fiction.
So who are some of your heroes? And if you don’t have any heroes, what’s for dinner?