Tom Benjey, author of
"Keep A-goin': the life of Lone Star Dietz"

As the white husband of a Cree woman ( who has found prostitution to be the most lucrative career option in Canadian society), I've found my self on the firing line between both groups more than once.

The first person was myself, as I had shed a lifetime of liberal assumptions about what kind of society I lived in and what it was like for her.

To put it simply for her, it's a constant fucking struggle. And woe betide you if you have the misfortune to be born outside your nation and have dark skin. You might as well put a gun to your head and be done with it. The much vaunted Canadian tolerance(based largely on the lack of African slavery) stops dead when it comes to Metis, First Nations and people of joint heritage.

It's sad but one the great problems is few lineages milking the mass of the group for their own personal benefit.

It's especially prevalent on the northern Prairies (alberta/saskatchewan/manitoba and adjoining US states), as that a) where the native population is growning and b) where (with few exceptions) immigrant(1800 + onward) population is declining (or not growing as fast).

It's interesting as I've mentioned how the US celebrates the martial spirit of the various nations it conquered while Canada just wishes they would go away. The dissimilarity in symbolism is quite striking.

Oh, and let me tell you about my first year Anth class that devolved into a shouting match between angry racist Caucasian women and an older Aboriginal woman.
The First Nations woman told me later that she had felt "very threatened". This is in a fucking university! And you could see the racist girls swaggering out after class, believing that they had won and that they were right, that they had showed her. So much simmering hate here, but fear that the First Nations will somehow rise up and take it all back is really what drives it. They know their European ancestors really fucked shit up with the Aboriginals – we all learn it in school here – and a lot of the racism stems from this assumption that one day white people are gonna pay. It's an admission of guilt in a really messed-up way.

OK, from the guy who knows very little about lots of things, FIRST, this is by no means a defense of a lack of rape prosecutions or silly mascots. So don't go there.

BUT Abe, when you wander into the issues of Tribal Sovereignty, the Tribal Courts, the Tribal Police, Olymphant and so on, you open up a whole bunch of issues that are not as black and white as you portray them.

For example, if a company is off-reservation, it is totally screwed when it comes to enforcing something as simple as a repo for breach of contract for failure to repay a car loan. You can't get a tow truck onto the reservation, and you'll lose at Tribal Court anyway. There is total Tribal hometowning going on, and who knows who started this chicken and egg and when, but it's bad, and the citizens of the Reservation lose in the end. Few off-reservation will do business with them, let alone open up a company there. So yeah, Tribal Sovereignty is the greater good and everything, but you can't say it had zero to do with the current state of Reservation poverty. And the issues get even more mixed up from there.

Time for more wine.

This whole obliviousness reminds me a lot of what happened in Miller in 2001 when a bunch of white boys chased and shot guns at native girls after a basketball game. The racist slurs and "war crying" aimed at players during the game were just as much a part of the violence as what continued to happen afterward. There was a concerted and deliberate pose struck by the white community to pretend that none of this GROUP PARTICIPATORY activity existed or resulted from the current non-native culture of hate and violence. This American Life did a story a long while back on it; I feel like it's still worth a good listen for those who might not understand the pervasiveness of these attitudes.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=937

We have family friends that live somewhat nearby in Redfield, who while otherwise liberally minded people, excused the whole social/cultural environment that led to the situation by saying, "well, that doesn't happen all the time, obviously." Just some of the time, then, which I guess makes it okay. Sigh.

Notes from undergrad: The Dartmouth "Big Green" used to be the "Indians" and the old guys at homecoming still buy Indians paraphernalia from the Dartmouth Review (crazy neo-con student paper) hobble around campus talking about how much better the place was when there weren't any women allowed (unless they were bused in from the 7 sisters for sexytime on the weekends). It's gross.

The were the only NFL team ever to have a Native American coach. And one result of that, ironically, is a name-change that has insulted many Native Americans ever since.

Being twelve and all, we settled into a comfortable lull of note-passing and spying on some boy we stalked. Until the slide show took a turn in tone. The person giving the presentation began showing all of these slides of suburban sprawl. A deadpan shot of the freeway exit to their reservation. The strip malls encroaching upon their land, driving animals away. He was talking about poverty, and alcoholism. And then the whole presentation was co-opted into a People Not Mascots protest.

My first reaction was glee, of course, because our teachers were soooo uncomfortable. Clearly they went off script. And you CAN'T INTERRUPT AN INDIAN.

But ultimately, it profoundly affected me. He articulated the pain of racism, and I had never been so intimately aware of it before. A friend and I joined them at the peaceful protest which is held in downtown Cleveland before the first home game of every month.

I haven't thought about it since I moved away. But thank you for this post, as it was both informative and allowed me to revisit a past locus.

And now Dan Snyder has wrecked the franchise, so now they are well and truly the Deadskins, which is even worse. Feh.

In fact, one of my prized possessions is a rug adorning the laundry room with those leering injun caricatures. But, it's, well, um, ironic.

I thought I'd be a lot more upset about the "forced retirement" of the Chief than I was. . .part of the benefit of growing older–at least for SOME sports fans–is you figure out that your silly behavior can lapse into ludicrous behavior. But still, this whole "Illini" lore is part of my cultural DNA, and to suggest my "being an Illini" is an affront simply makes no sense, if you aren't an Iowa basketball fan.

I was visiting Dartmouth a few years back–a school with an utterly barren sports program–and these two young men were on the corner behind a card table, selling shirts that read, "The Indian Will Never Die." They'd taken their symbol away, as well, and now were called the Big Green.

I bought one of their shirts. Because, as a Martian, I was appalled.