The Heebie-Jeebies, Jitters And Apoplectic Willies
Adam Fortunate Eagle
Please keep it a secret.
Just between you and us.
If Florida’s governor and the charming Mom’s Against the Freedom to Learn and Think (including the Sarasota politica and her politico husband who were accused of three-soming; he – the one-time Florida Republican chair - was also accused of sexual assault/rape) hear about it, they might develop carpal tune syndrome while pearl-clutching.
We’re almost afraid to recommend…
Sharon McMahon’s The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement.
At mid-November, it was already four weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List (and a fraction of the cost of the self-aggrandizing eponymous “work” of a former and future first lady of the United States).
[We’ll return to Ms. McMahon in a few paragraphs, but first a character she introduces in the book and a dollop of her smile-inducing whimsy.]
Gouverneur Morris, Author of the Preamble of the American Constitution
Adam Nordwall, the son of a Swedish father and an Ojibwe/Chippewa (Native American) mother, was born on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. After his father died, five-year-old Adam and four siblings were sent to the Pipestone Indian School in Minnesota; he later attended the Haskell Institute, a public tribal land-grant university in Kansas. The “Indian schools” allowed him to develop life skills and avoid the Great Depression and the famine and diseases that plagued reservation life.
But the Indian schools were also his first experience of prejudice. With his half-Swedish heritage, he didn’t look “Indian enough” - “I'd look at those beautiful Sioux and Cheyenne boys with their beautiful long narrow noses and then look at my pug nose in the mirror. I became very self-conscious.” And his Chippewa name, which he learned when he was eight-years-old, “Amabese,” meant “handsome” – hardly a name to use in a school where others were known as Running Hawk or Charging Eagle.
(When he was 42 years old a Crow Indian whom he had befriended bestowed on him the name Fortunate Eagle.)
Married to Shoshone (Native American) Bobbie, Adam settled in the San Francisco Bay area in 1951 and, by the late 1960s, owned the First American Termite Company and became the chairman of the United Bay Area Council of American Indian Affairs.
Statue of Clara Brown, “the Angel of the Rockies,” in the Museum of African American History
He came to national attention (prominence?) when he and Lakota Sioux activist Belva Cottier and about 35 others proposed the Native American takeover of Alcatraz Island offshore from San Francisco as a protest of federal policies regarding Indigenous Peoples. (FACT: While Richard Oakes, a Mohawk Native American and local student activist, and other Native American student activists occupied Alcatraz for nineteen months, Nordwall was only on the island for one day – Thanksgiving 1969, when he made an appearance crossing San Francisco Bay standing in full regalia and George Washington-like in the bow of a boat; his primary role in the occupation was as a go-between for the occupiers and the press.]
In 1973, Nordwall, who taught Native American studies at California State University, East Bay (Hayward), was invited to attend the International Conference of World Futures in Rome.
And here begins the good part.
He deplaned in Rome in full tribal regalia – carrying a spear, which, pre-9-11, was somehow permitted - and claimed Italy “by right of discovery.”
As McMahon explains:
“To prove the point that North America didn’t need to be discovered by Columbus because people already lived here, a Native American man named Adam Fortunate Eagle flew to an international event taking place in Italy. In preparation for his trip, he began to research the ‘discovery’ of Italy, much like American students learn of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas. But he found there was no such myth, no tale of a heroic aha moment on the part of an explorer.
“Fortunate Eagle reasoned the same should be true of North America. What right did Columbus have to discover a place that was already occupied?
“At a press conference he said facetiously that he was extremely excited to have discovered this land called Italy, and that he was establishing a government agency to oversee his discovery.”
Pioneering American Educator Virginia Randolph
Okay. A good little story, but the best is yet to come.
Turns out Fortunate Eagle’s question and sense of humor - "What right did Columbus have to discover America when it had already been inhabited for thousands of years? The same right I now have to come to Italy and proclaim the discovery of your country." - made him an instant sensation with the Italian media and earned him an invite to meet with Pope John Paul II.
We’ll let McMahon (and a little of her imagination) finish the story:
“When the pope held up his ring so Fortunate Eagle could kiss it, Fortunate Eagle held out his hand instead, his finger heavy with a ring made from American turquoise. I imagine what was happening in their minds as they held out their hands to each other. ‘You may kiss my ring.’ ‘No, you can kiss MY ring.’ ‘I am not kissing your ring, I am the pope.’ ‘Well, I’m not kissing your ring, I just discovered Italy.’ Eventually, the men smiled and shook hands instead, each side refusing to do any smooching. But the point was made: Adam Fortunate Eagle was featured in the international news with his ‘America did not need to be discovered by Europeans, it was already occupied’ message.”
[While we’ve often referenced author’s, McMahon’s is the first book we’re actually recommending. Whether she or a PR firm developed phrase, the moniker “America’s government teacher” appears regularly in reviews of The Small and the Mighty and her Instagram posts, lectures and book promo tours. By report, she taught high school government and law courses for ten years in St. Paul, California and Washington D.C. before moving to Minnesota, where she eventually entered the world of Instagram, offering American history from a well-researched and centrist position.
Katharine Lee Bates, her poem became the lyrics of “God Bless America.”
In late summer 2020, McMahon’s husband received a kidney transplant after being diagnosed with stage 5 kidney failure. As the family took extra COVID-19 quarantine precautions, she began sharing fact-based and nonpartisan videos about civics and government. “I started seeing so many people on the internet who were just confidently wrong, saying things that are obviously false, but in an authoritative voice. So, I just took many of the skills I had learned from many years in the classroom and started applying them,” she told the (Utah) Deseret News in early November 2024.
Despite the book cover’s female profile – wrapped in an American flag – and the subtitle’s references to “Twelve Unsung Americans” and “the Civil Rights Movement,” The Small and the Mighty is about many more men and women, folks who just kept putting one foot in front of another and doing the right things.
Fifty years ago, a Maryknoll Missionary Sister working in one of the poorest barrios of South America regularly praised the courage and generosity of “the little people.” McMahon offers a tantalizing crowd of folks who passed their entire lives as “little people” (a phrase she would probably never use) and others who eventually rose to the ranks of America’s most wealthy (in their days) and politically powerful.
Amidst those tales is the observation
“Progress is usually born out of struggle. But struggle doesn’t always mean progress, does it? What do we need to add to struggle to create progress? The answer is hope. Hope […] is not a feeling but an orientation of the spirit. Hope is a choice that we make each morning, and we do not have the luxury of hopelessness if we want to see progress…
“Progress doesn’t arrive unbidden, carried on the back of a silvery bird, deposited on our doorsteps during the night. Progress is birthed. It is conceived of and labored for. It is the work of multitudes.
“None of us can do it all. But all of us can do something. And it might as well be the next needed thing….”
Japanese-American and one-time internee because he was Japanese-American, Medal of Honor recipient Daniel K. Inouye
From the founders of Sears & Roebucks to the future U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye and Representative Norm Mineta, who was appointed to the cabinets of Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton, - Japanese-Americans who spent time in the nation’s infamous internment camps before becoming World War II heroes – to Black educational leaders almost no one has ever heard of, McMahon tells the stories of America-changing “little people” – some of whom became big names and important, most of whom remain unknown.
Having highlighted often overlooked Americans – heroes and “little people” like Gouverneur Morris, a signatory to the Articles of Confederation and author of the Preamble to the Constitution, and Japanese-American internees and World War II heroes Inouye and Mineta – McMahon reviews what she would like readers to “know.”
“I’d want you to know that often, the small are truly the mighty. That their stories may be eclipsed by a dominant sun, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t ours to discover, auroras in the predawn hours of morning…
“[Y]ou are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, people who see you and depend on your efforts. Our ancestors made a way in the wilderness for us, descendants they didn’t even know, but whose existence was assured…
“I’d want you to know that the weight of the world does not rest on your shoulders alone. Our unique skills, talents, and abilities are meant to be used in ways that only we can…
“And an educated population is very difficult to oppress.
Japanese-American internee Norman Yoshio Mineta, longest-serving Commerce Secretary in U.S. history
“I […] want you to know that being a great American isn’t dependent on fame or fortune. It doesn’t require your name to be recorded in the annals of history or to appear on a ballot.
“I’d want you to know that the American experiment is full of ill-equipped people, people with the ‘wrong’ faces and the ‘wrong’ life circumstances, who just went for it. They just tried something no one had done before. They were willing to let other people watch them fail. They just did the next right thing. I’d want you to know that you should keep going. That often the biggest breakthroughs happen after the darkest nights…
“America at her best is just. She is peaceful. She is good. And she is free. And it is us, the small and the mighty, who make America great.
“Not again, but always.
“I’d want you to know that there will come a moment in your life, a moment when you will be asked to choose: will I retreat, or will I move forward with courage? ‘You’ll realize […] that every experience you’ve had, every setback and heartbreak, every triumph and joy, will all be used. The character that you’ve been cultivating will be called upon, and when that moment comes, whenever it is, I hope you’ll rise to it.
“I’d want you to know that for some of you, that moment is today.
“I’d want you to know that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
“The small. And the mighty.”
Claudette Colvin. At fifteen-years-old, she was arrested for refusing to give-up her seat to a white woman - nine months before Rosa Parks.
McMahon’s work is brief, easily read, not at all “heavy,” and guaranteed to cause Moms Against the Freedom to Learn and Think and the book-banning governor of Florida and those of their ilk to breakout with the heebie-jeebies, jitters and apoplectic willies.
That alone is a reason to buy it – for yourself and those on your Christmas and Hannukah shopping lists.
And relax. Surgery can correct carpal tunnel syndrome caused by too much pearl-clutching.