October 1998: Racism & the IndigenousPeople of the World

by Jim Stiles

     The comforting thing about racism is that it's never far away---everywhere you go, there it is. Racism is one of those universal human aspects that never lets me down, no matter where I travel on this confused little planet. It's particularly resistant to intelligent thinking. Or logic. Or compassion. Or understanding. It's heartier than the most resilient bacteria and just as prolific; I can find it down the street, across town, or across the international date line. It's like the internet---it's global.

     The never ending assault on the continents' indigenous cultures, the civilizations that thrived and flourished for thousands of years before European white people came along and told them they were doing it all wrong, is particularly noteworthy.

     Consider these two examples, approximately 10,000 miles apart and nearly identical in content and spirit.

     Last month I took another drive to the Great Plains. I take this trip every summer. I love the prairie, mostly because no one else does---there's not much chance of encountering hordes of tourists in Benkelman, Nebraska. The Plains were once home to one of the most remarkable cultures ever to exist on this planet and we came close more than a century ago to exterminating both the Plains Indians--the Lakota, the Cheyennes, and the others---as well as the animal that their lives and culture depended upon, the buffalo.

     Now the remnants of that culture exist on scattered and broken reservations across the heartland of America, the buffalo are nowhere to be seen. But even a century later, white society puts its own self-serving spin on the near genocide of Native Americans in the 19th Century.

     I stopped again at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, the site where the great Oglala warrior Crazy Horse was murdered by U.S. Army soldiers in September 1877. Fearful of his power and influence among the Lakota, even after his surrender earlier that year, the U.S. Government was eager to dispose of him. The plan was to lure Crazy Horse to the fort with the false promise of giving him his own reservation near the Powder River.

     At Fort Robinson they planned to arrest Crazy Horse and ship him off to a prison in the Gulf of Mexico near the coast of Florida. In that hot and humid dungeon, shackled and stripped of his freedom, the army was confident he could cause no more trouble and would hopefully die a broken and defeated man.

     As they led him to a building at the fort, Crazy Horse saw the bars on the windows, realized he had been set up, and attempted to break the clutches of his captors. "Kill the bastard," one of the officers called out and a private named William Gentles stabbed him twice with his bayonet. Crazy Horse died just a few hours later.

     But at the Fort Robinson museum, owned and administered by the Nebraska State Parks, they have attempted to put a different spin on it. I've written about this before but I think it bears repeating, in a bit more detail. Its interpretive displays give "credit" for the killing to Crazy Horse's best friend Little Big Man, who turned against him at the end, and who claimed to have delivered the fatal knife wound himself. Somehow blaming the death on another Lakota makes the entire affair more palatable---you see, they seem to suggest, those Indians did it to each other.

     In another part of the museum, the interpretive exhibits attempt to discredit another Sioux leader, Red Cloud. It is a well-documented fact that white Indian traders repeatedly swindled and cheated the reservation Indians for the sake of increasing their own profits. They often offered inferior goods, pocketed the difference in money and drove the people to the brink of starvation.

     But at Fort Robinson, the historians attempt to ignore the truth of history and put the blame on Red Cloud himself. One caption by a photograph of Red Cloud says: "One story tells how Red Cloud and his friend Red Dog sifted through the coffee supply and picked out burned or otherwise inferior beans...claiming they were typical of the coffee ration. They may have also mixed fine white clay from the river with the flour ration and convinced O.C. Marsh (a famed fossil hunter and friend of Red Cloud's) that it was issued to them in that condition."

     Those no good Indians, the museum seems to suggest...you just can't trust 'em.

     A few hundred miles to the northwest, at the Custer Battlefield in Montana, National Park Service rangers give carefully worded lectures on the Battle of the Little Bighorn of June 25, 1876. They explain the mechanics and strategy of the conflict, but artfully avoid the ethics or the morality of the battle. Custer's 7th Cavalry was wiped out, but it wasn't a massacre. No one mentions that Custer attacked them. His own Indian scout pleaded with him to reconsider and Custer replied, "The largest gathering of Indians on the North American continent lies straight ahead. And I intend to attack it."

     And so he did, and "in the time it takes a hungry man to eat his dinner," Custer and his regiment were all dead. As Sitting Bull observed years after the battle: "They say I killed Custer. It is a lie. He was a fool and he rode to his own death." The great gathering of tribes at the Little Big Horn was on land given to them by the United States Government, by treaty, in 1868. Now, after discovery of gold in the Black Hills in 1874, white Americans wanted it back.

     But it's difficult to find that kind of information at the battlefield's visitor center. Fat white tourists in $300,000 motorhomes stop to look at the stone monuments and gaze across the open fields to the river and buy post cards, but they really don't want to know what happened. So no one bothers to tell them. After all, acknowledging our racist past might cause painful introspection and re-examination and, eventually, perhaps even change. And that is simply not on the agenda for most of us.

     Now travel 10,000 miles west and south to Australia. When the Englishman James Cook sailed into Botany Bay more than two centuries ago, he encountered its original inhabitants. The 200,000 Aboriginal people living in Australia at the time of its "discovery" by the British had inhabited the continent for more than 40,000 years. At least 600 different tribes, many separated by language and custom, still managed to co-exist and flourish in the Land Down Under.

     But the whites, offended by the Aboriginals' lack of ambition or civilization (as defined by the newcomers) systematically set out to remove them from the continent, or at least from the more fertile and productive parts of the land. By 1860, less than 80 years after the first white settlement, barely 20,000 Aborigines remained---90% of the population was eliminated.

     In the last several years, some of Australia's white citizens and its courts have attempted to address and even make amends for its racist past. But it has brought out the ugly and sordid side of many Australians as well. The newest and fastest growing political movement in the country right now, the One Nation Party, is unabashedly racist in its appeal to whites. Its leader, Pauline Hansen, is the George Wallace of Queensland, Australia. She takes bigotry and intolerance and wraps them in vague populist rhetoric.

     Last year, I was camping along the coast south of Sydney and struck up a conversation with a group of fishermen. They were congenial for the most part, but one of them, Larry by name, was looking for an argument.

     "So what do you think of our Aboriginal situation?" he asked threateningly.

     "I think they've had a pretty rough time of it since you white guys took over," I replied.

     Larry shook his head with disgust. "I figured you to be a bleedin' heart. Let me tell you what the abos are...they're nothing but a bunch of lazy good-for-nothing dole bludgers. They're worthless."

     I felt a certain weary deja vu come over me. Why I thought arguing with Larry might accomplish anything, I'll never know. But instead of just walking away from this moron, I stuck around for a while. We went back and forth. We made little or no progress.

     Finally I proposed this simple analogy. "Ok Larry, think about this. Imagine for a moment that all the Aboriginal people are kangaroos and all white people are horses."

     "What? What're you talking about?" he said confused.

     "Just bear with me for a moment," I answered. "Imagine that all the Aboriginals are kangaroos and they are very good at it. Consider that they were very good at it for years. For centuries. For 60,000 years, in fact. They made excellent kangaroos.

     "Then one day, the British arrived...the horses...and said, 'It's not good for you to be kangaroos anymore. From now on you should act like horses. In fact, you have no choice. You must act like horses, or you will perish.'"

     "So after much resistance, the Aboriginals, the kangaroos, tried to act like horses. But they weren't any good at being horses. They couldn't be what they weren't. Kangaroos make lousy horses."

     I searched Larry's eyes for signs of enlightenment. "Do you see the point I'm trying to make?"

     Larry pulled another beer from the cooler and took a long swig. "If I'm a horse, mate, you're a horse's ass."

     There was no reaching Larry.

     There is no reaching a lot of people. They simply don't get it. And the streets of Moab and Blanding and Sydney and Adelaide are full of Larrys. I suppose they will be around for a long, long time, even if, hopefully, in dwindling numbers.

     Sometimes I hear politicians propose that we should show "tolerance" for other cultures and other ways of life. That's not good enough. How about respect? Or admiration? The Native American culture, to me, has much to respect and to emulate. I don't propose that we all try to become Indians. I'm a white guy and all I can hope to be is a better white guy. But I can learn from other cultures how to be a better human being. And in case anyone forgot, that's what we all are.

OBLIGATORY CLINTON-LEWINSKY COMMENTARY

     So this is the deal. The entire country is being forced to watch a really bad dirty movie. And the question is, are we madder at the players or the people who are making us watch? Of course, no one is really making us do anything. But it is, after all, what American Culture does these days for entertainment.

     So who am I mad at? Who do I blame? I'm mad at everybody.

     I'm mad at Kenneth Starr, that self-righteous, sanctimonious, "kicks-just-keep-getting-harder-to-find" persecutor/prosecutor who is willing to do whatever it takes to bring down this president. It was none of his damn business. And none of ours either.

     I'm mad at the media. None of this could have happened without the press, especially the electronic media. And they're doing it for the money. Thirty years ago, the news divisions of the three major networks would not have touched this story. And thirty years ago, they all lost money. It didn't matter. They weren't supposed  to turn a profit. The news divisions at CBS, NBC and ABC were what gave the three companies integrity and respect and dignity.

     Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley offset the game shows and the situation comedies...the money makers. The news divisions were the class acts of the networks.

     Somewhere along the line, the rules changed. Suddenly the news was supposed to make money, just like the "$10,000 Pyramid." Increased revenues required increased ratings points. And no one was going to tune in for a discussion of international monetary policy. So the topics for discussion became more titillating. More controversial. Today we all pay the price.      

     And I'm mad at Bill Clinton. What a complete idiot. How could he be so stupid? He knew what the political climate was. The Right Wing has been gunning for Clinton since 1992 and Starr's investigation into Clinton's ethics began several months before Monica Lewinsky even arrived at the White House. Instead the President handed Starr his own head on a platter, which is sort of what he did with Monica, now that I think about it.

     I do take exception to the notion that Clinton is a 'sexual addict' as so many politicians and psychologists are proclaiming these days. I keep hearing that the Prez needs therapy because he has an insatiable thirst for sex. The problem with all this is that it leads to speculation in areas where we don't belong. At this stage of the game, however, it's something of a moot point.

     So consider this. We all know that Bill Clinton enjoys sex and that he wandered in his pre-presidential days when the world and Ken Starr weren't watching his every move. Quite a bit according to some. What if part of the problem is that Hillary simply doesn't like sex? What if she finds it downright distasteful (so to speak) and a waste of time? This does happen in a lot of marriages. What if Bill and Hillary are compatible in every way except in this arena?

     Now, we all know that Ken Starr has examined every moment of President Clinton's recent life with an electron microscope. And what he has come up with is...what?...eleven sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky? If a physical relationship between the President and the First Lady no longer exists, then Bill Clinton has had some form of sex (and often without ultimate gratification) a total of eleven times in six years. That's about once every seven months if you spread it out over the length of his time in office. And that makes him a sexual addict? 

     I don't think so.  Frustrated? You betcha. Personally I'd feel better if he were having more sex. A jumpy frustrated president worries me.

     Now if Hillary were really oblivious to all this, then she has the right to attach a meat hook to Bill's testicles and drag him across the south lawn of the White House with an Abrams Tank. But it still should never have been any of our damn business. 

     Ultimately, however, I don't know how Clinton can survive, at least effectively, as President. No one is ever going to take the man seriously again. The Republicans and ratings points simply won't allow it.

     I just wonder what they'll do to Al.