> As a Anglo person, it made me quite angry and still does about
> how the U.S. cavalry viewed and treated the native cultures in
> this country. It makes me ashamed to be a white person!!!!
> Hopefully there were some Anglos that treated and viewed
> the native peoples as humans.
Beware the past tense. The cavalry has not gone and regroups at
every opportunity. The story you watched is ongoing. The pain as
real today. Remember, Wounded Knee was revisited not long ago and
Leonard Peltier sits in prison. Eddie Hatcher, while released, has
been "banished". There are many even more recent events that cross
this list monthly. In too many ways very little has changed. Indian
religious practices are still under assault. There is still a strong
treaty abrogation movement, resource and land use rights are
challenged daily. The fishing rights issues flared in irrational
ugliness here in Minnesota not long ago and continues to be fought
in the courts. Fishing rights issues were bitterly fought in
Washington State and continue to this moment. As the Lakota woman
stated, the faces on Rushmore serve as a constant reminder.
In many ways, it was again a show of the "myth making" type - the
indomitable, irrepressible American spirit. While much better than
many attempts to provide a picture of the conquest of the West, it
is still far from what is needed. Did you notice how the commentary
invariably wavered between battle and massacre in the Custer segment.
Little things like that, sending needed, comforting, signals to the
viewers. There was little REAL soul searching or outright statements
of the moral wrongness of what white Americans did. Did you notice the
many times they mentioned, "Well, right or wrong..." rarely that it
was simply immoral, a tragic immoral time in the making of a nation.
Instead, it is portrayed as the taming of the wild west, the forge of
the American character, a time when the individual against all the
odds was able to make the barren land fruitful (from the holes in
the ground, where the immigrants stoically held out against nature
and the odds). It was a time when toil and industry grounded the mythic
heroic individual. A time when the horizon of infinite space itself was
made to yield to the constructions of human effort (a play on images from
the show). What happened to the Indians was inevitable the show suggests
(as if people were not making choices). An unfortunate consequence of
a clash of two irreconcilable cultures.
It was not simply two points of view that were at odds. It was in
fact the concrete choices, many conscious choices and acts, of a people
and a society that saw, and largely continue to see, the only answer
to gaining total domination over the whole of the continent in the
extinction of a race of people. It was often and continues to be,
unambiguously, the call for the complete and utter extinction of Native
Americans: heart, mind and soul. Americans need to admit to and OWN the
terrible wrongs they inflict/ed on indigenous peoples and stop
perpetuating them. Turn your shame into a resolve to fight the same
attitudes in the present.
My sentiments. Maybe sharper than they needed to be, but hopefully
to the point.
Respectfully-
Karl Lorenz
[ I suggest that further articles on this subject be sent to the NATCHAT
mailing list. --Gary (gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us) ]