Dear Digger, hands off my pierogis, Part 2

December 11, 2023

The following is Part 2. For more context, please go and read Part 1 here first.

***

Dear reader,

“Did you hear about the Polack wolf stuck in a trap?”

For reasons that remain a mystery to me, Polacks and blondes were the butts of all jokes in my grade school in Schuylerville, N.Y. I heard violence against women and Poles like this and worse twenty times a day between art class and gym.

The setting was a rusty Hudson River village in the 1980s. The New York Times Magazine in 1990 photographed us in dreary black-and-white, summing us up with the headline “Schuylerville Stands Still.”

It stung, maybe because there was something to it. We hosted closed mills and Superfund sites, our major accomplishment being that in 1777 we had hosted the Battles of Saratoga, leading to first major British surrender in the American Revolution. The blockbuster musical “Hamilton” freshened up the story and helped more people pronounce “Schuylerville” correctly (“Sky,” not “Shoe”), but also didn’t add a lot of shine to Schuylerville. It looms large as the location where Alexander Hamilton doesn’t go with wife Philippa Schuyler one critical summer.

The Polack jokes were a connection, however odd, with another key location for me. Today, I like to swing by Two-Twenty-Three Dale Street in Chicopee, Mass., whenever I can. I’ll point how to my family how the yard used to be twice as big, with apple trees that Grampa would make my favorite apple sauce from. “Like apple pie in a jar,” I would tell him.

Then we’ll drive up to St. Rose. After a bit of looking I’ll locate the grave. A lively chat will ensue. Then—dinner at the local Polish-American joint. Helen Zabawski was a Catholic Pole. The Chicago tenements her parents emigrated to were bulldozed long ago and replaced with a nice fountain by Lake Michigan. How I connect with Gramma now is ordering the Polish plate at the Collegiate Court.

I don’t blame my classmates for the Polack jokes. They were repeating stuff they heard from their parents, and who knows why? Maybe they were descended from General St. Clair.

General who? Let me explain. The only Polish-American culture I remember growing up in Schuylerville was the nameplate on a bridge on the Northway (I-87) for General Tadeusz Kościuszko.

Better known Anglicized as “Thaddeus Kosciusko,” this Pole’s importance to the Revolution started when he gave defensive advice on how to hold the high ground near at Fort Ticonderoga. Garrison commander General Arthur St. Clair didn’t listen, and the British took Ticonderoga without shots fired.

With the British now marching down the Hudson, General Gates saw something in Kościuszko, a trained engineer who wanted to fight for freedom. Gates delegated him to slow the redcoats, and Kościuszko’s guerrilla earthworks were critical to the unexpected British surrender.

No one told me this story growing up. What they told me in school was that a Polack wolf stuck a trap would gnaw off three of its own legs and wonder why it was still stuck.

What did the Polack stereotypes mean for me? “Nothing” is the correct answer, but it took me decades to unbury myself from it and learn to cook my own pierogis. 

Today I celebrate my heritage, while also feeling no concern that a Polish dinner in Vermont, Massachusetts, Chicago, or Warszawa itself will certainly be very different. Nor will I be surprised when I get different versions of indigeneity from different people, as VT Digger ably documents in its recent coverage. Expecting one truth to represent everyone is racist.

Because hate has no home in Vermont, I’m proud that on May 2, 2023, our Legislature read and unanimously voted to adopt H.R. 10, stating, “This legislative body supports the continuing resiliency and strengthening of the Abenaki communities in Vermont.”

How to continue that support? One thing is to expect to find wrinkles in any chronology, Abenaki included. Expecting wars and borders and migrations not to affect heritage would be privileged. Take General Kościuszko, for example. 

May I accurately celebrate common ancestry with Kościuszko? On the one hand, probably not. His family ancestors were Ruthenians, a Slavic tribe who were “Polonized,” or ethnocided, a couple centuries before Kościuszko’s birth. I don’t know where my Poles came from.

Tadeusz Kościuszko. Copy of engraving by H. B. Hall after Joseph Grassi. National Archives

On the other hand, did you know that Kościuszko, as his dying wish, attempted to buy the freedom of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves? (Jefferson thwarted him).

Kościuszko is American A.F.

There is no center to the onion, no single “truth.” Reporting back from Part 1, my friend Julia ordered the DNA kit. Julia acknowledges that the Indian stories “Indeed involve Indian princesses on my mother’s side.” That doesn’t mean she believed it all, just as I knew in my heart that the Polack jokes were bigoted Hatfield-McCoy stuff.

“I always questioned the more fantastical stories and, indeed, there was plenty of family ribbing about them,” Julia told me. “I can’t prove what was taken as fact about my dad’s father’s heritage, but there was no reason not to believe it. Still, I’m uncomfortable claiming heritage without proof.”

Whatever Julia finds in the DNA, she’s told me she’s clear on one thing—“The resurgence of interest in native culture feels ripe with healing for me.”

A few people say we should second-guess the Legislature’s process when it recognized four Abenaki tribes in 2011–2012. They have some good points that I’ll respond to in time.

But I talk to a lot of Vermonters who are struggling. To label and reject tenuous family ties as insufficiently evidenced is a luxury belief.

When I have struggles, Chicopee may be too far to drive, and the Collegiate Court closed last year. One of the things my family does together now is walk out the back door and find our way to an old deer track that takes us to this one stone structure.

There’s archeology to suggest this structure could be 900-plus years old, but there’s also a historical argument that it’s more like 200. What’s the “truth”?

While they’ve been sitting there, these rocks have been blasted by freeze-thaw cycles and by gamma radiation from other stars. They’ve crumbled off dust, much of it invisible. There’s a new method for carbon-dating that dust, in order to date rock structures.

If we could bring the doctoral students and their lab equipment out here to Halifax, what would they tell us? Chances are, some version of “The evidence is mixed.”

We’ll never replace legends with facts, no matter how many more quarters we insert into the academic machine. The myth that we might do so damages our connections to collective ancestral wisdom.

When I’m struggling, I don’t turn to genealogy. I turn to the East and lean my back against that wall of rocks. As I do so I find that I’m looking over Pond Brook to where the sun will rise again the next morning.

And I imagine that who put this wall here could have been ten-thousand Indian ancestors, some of them with bear and snake DNA, who wanted anyone in need to feel their support.

Am I pretendin’? Hell yes! (Sorry Gramma.) It’s bad for public health to tell the kids to stop playing, and that goes for adults, too. Imagination is a human right, and there’s every bit as much science in the methods we use out here.

If you’re in recovery, or just want to play around with connection to the land, get in touch about visiting. Maybe we can even add to the wall.

Editor’s note: I really mean it. If you read this far, send me a quick email, tristan@tristanroberts.org.

Part 1 of this essay is here: https://tristanroberts.org/blog/dear-digger-leave-my-pierogis-alone-13