u/pasmafaute12

Hey— trying to find a song for a friend. He’s about 70, and most of the songs he’s mentioned so far have been from about 1972-1985.

He remembers the lyrics as:

“i am just stopping by to say goodbye/ cant really stay/ hate to see you cry/ my heart is overwhelmed/ it hurts with the pain/ my mind makes me visit you leaving again”

But for my life, I can’t seem to find anything close enough to be correct but misremembered.

Any ideas?

Edit: he says he thinks the title is “This is My Last Night with You” and added possible lyrics “As I leave you behind, a feeling of emptiness enters my mind / once again, yes, this is my last time with you. “

Hey— trying to find a song for a friend. He’s about 70, and most of the songs he’s mentioned so far have been from about 1972-1985.

He remembers the lyrics as:

“i am just stopping by to say goodbye/ cant really stay/ hate to see you cry/ my heart is overwhelmed/ it hurts with the pain/ my mind makes me visit you leaving again”

But for my life, I can’t seem to find anything close enough to be correct but misremembered.

Any ideas?

Edit: he says he thinks the title is “This is My Last Night with You” and added possible lyrics “As I leave you behind, a feeling of emptiness enters my mind / once again, yes, this is my last time with you. “

Hey— trying to find a song for a friend. He’s about 70, and most of the songs he’s mentioned so far have been from about 1972-1985.

He remembers the lyrics as:

“i am just stopping by to say goodbye/ cant really stay/ hate to see you cry/ my heart is overwhelmed/ it hurts with the pain/ my mind makes me visit you leaving again”

But for my life, I can’t seem to find anything close enough to be correct but misremembered.

Any ideas?

I’ve been kind of plunging the depths of the available information about the Eastern Woodlands, and I am really struggling to keep straight certain names/words because there are so many different spellings. There have been a few times that I realized after a while that two extremely different spellings indicated the same thing.

As far as pronunciation, I’ve been comparing alternate spellings and trying to arrive at the most likely intended pronunciation.

I am considering my options and think maybe the next best choice is to reach out to language reclamation projects and hope that they have the time to offer a sense of what pronunciation resources are available and what they may be comfortable sharing. I don’t want to overburden any resources better directed to someone else but I also don’t want to approach something so sensitive irresponsibly or arrogantly and learn it completely wrong.

What has your experience been with learning language and names that feel unfamiliar and may be poorly recorded/ not publicly available/ otherwise somewhat challenging? What was helpful to you?

I recently posted about dehumanizing record-keeping. I’ve been on a bit of a voyage because I always assumed my family was doing some pan-Indian “Cherokee princess” romanticism nonsense. I was raised with some cultural exposure but not community exposure. I chose to keep learning because I think the history matters whether it’s personal or not.

Turns out, I was wrong, and my relative wasn’t so much a pretendian as making the most of what we know as Wampanoag descendants from a village that is historically recorded but not well enough to be federally recognized (or even reasonably fully researched). It appears that my relative was involved in historical preservation efforts and maybe one of the two existing recognized Wampanoag tribes.

Without getting into complicated family stuff, we have always been very isolated people in general and no one is particularly close. I cannot discuss this with anyone in my real life.

So… I am sitting with the information I have, including the information missing, and feeling out my position as a lifelong learner invested in social issues. The conclusion I think I’ve arrived at is that I need to accept how much privilege I hold, but I have a responsibility to understand and honor the history.

I am privately taking some steps to build my understanding and maybe continued to participate in online spaces before I consider attending events.

But I’m looking for other people who have been on this path before me, I guess. And any thoughts about how to approach all of the things we just don’t know because we are still learning vs. the things we don’t know because it’s just lost information.

I’m struggling to even phrase this post, but it feels particularly evil to see how individual ancestors were recorded. I logically knew that many people were recorded as “(tribe name) Indian woman.”

Even when I did find some names, it felt like reading descriptor-based “Jane Doe.” The name pattern seemed to be (common English first name) (first syllable of tribal group). Not the tribe, but imagine “Narragansett woman” were only slightly personalized to “Mary Narr.” The pattern continues until everyone had very solidly English names.

And… my heart hurts.

I’m not sure what I’m seeking by posting.

It seems the primary means of avoiding residential schools were hiding children while remaining in the area, but I wondered how commonly families might have relocated to more effectively hide their children or obscure their cultural backgrounds. It seems plausible that, especially in cases where families may have been white passing, some families may have assimilated on their own terms (as much as it could be their terms) and tried to self-erase for safety.

I am struggling to find resource that speak to this possibility.