So... one of my friends works at a golf course here in Lawrence and he came over the other day and told us a story. He said that there are a few bald eagles that live around there and he made a comment that his boss wasn't too happy about. He mentioned that he wanted to go around and gather up some eagle feathers and make himself something pretty and his boss told him that it was illegal for anyone other than a Native American to pick up bald eagle's feathers.
What? Maybe some of you are saying duh, but I had no idea about this. It's totally understandable that nobody is allowed to hunt them or anything like that since they were endangered but it's illegal to pick up a feather if you find it on the ground? I looked this information up because I definitely had trouble believing it. When I looked it up on google, there were yahoo question and answers that said there were definitely laws against it. And when I got onto a Paumanauke Pow Wow website http://paumanauke.org/etiquette.htm , It was very apparent that they hold a lot of respect for the eagle feathers.
This last spring/summer two bald eagles lived on my dads farm land and I guess it's just weird to me that if I would have found an eagle feather, on our land, that just happened to fall off of the eagle, that i'm not allowed to pick it up without a Native American card. Hmmm.. Thats weird to me.
What is our world coming to when you can be arrested for picking up a feather off the ground? In trying to be "politcally correct" our society has completely over-corrected itself. Next thing you know, you'll need a permit to rake leaves.
I would have to agree with both Ashley and Sabrina that this is ridiculous. I completely understand that Native Americans have connections and beliefs of the Earth that the rest of us may not understand, however to make it illegal to handle something simply because of its “Native American Value†makes me wonder who is being discriminated against now. Just because we don’t have native blood running through our veins doesn’t mean that we can’t appreciate thing of the land as well.