Native American Treatment; Past & Present
A comparison - then & now
When it comes to Native Americans – more commonly called Indians – unless we grew up within that culture of indigenous people, we might have a somewhat skewed understanding of their history. For me, the experience of learning began as a kid watching westerns in black & white on our television set. One of the more popular series back in the early sixties was Wagon Train.
This was typical entertainment during the life of this series about settlers moving west, from Missouri to their destination on the west coast; usually the Oregon Territory of that day. For those interested in more details about this series, Wikipedia has a good bit of content on it.
Of course, the typical portrayal of the Indians from that era of Hollywood was basically that of the ruthless, but noble savage; ignorant, blood thirsty people who took a knife to their enemies head for a scalp to brag about their victory in battle. Any encounter with them usually ended either in killing them off, or chasing them away for the next set of settlers to deal with another day.
This portrayal was lopsided, of course. The imbalanced view of the settlers fending off the savages did not provide a complete view or understanding of why such violence and bloodshed prevailed between the two cultures. However, over the past several decades that view has changed. It’s fair to say that our imbalanced perspective has been revised, or re-balanced to a more accurate understanding. There are many reasons why this is the case today. I’d like to share my own experience as to why this has occurred.
After serving in the Air Force out of high school for four years, I was a 21-year-old newly married man who was beginning his college education in the mid-1970s. One of my history professors at that institution exposed me to a few of the recent publications of the day; Massacre At Wounded Knee, while another book was Ishi about the last survivor of his Yahi tribe. I would highly recommend watching this video from the In Search of History series, Ishi: The Last of His Kind as a way to better understand what occurred in 1911 in Northern California, not far from where I used to live as a teenager.
What I came away with from that encounter of new information was that the I was supposed to conclude that the white man – the Western Europeans who immigrated and settle this newly established country – was horribly prejudiced against these people for various reason. After the protests of the 60’s, those twenty somethings went into the universities as professors and transformed, or brainwashed, the minds of the youth to begin to hate their country which has all trickled down over the decades to the protests and disruption we have happening today in the antisemitic protests at Columbia, Brown, Harvard, and other colleges. Yet, I also realized that there were other aspects to consider which couldn’t be ignored.
That period of living was a much more intense and brutal demand on those who were less educated and more driven by the ethos of kill, or be killed. With the incredible hope and opportunity of leaving a despotic and unjust circumstance in their home country, many new arrivals in America during the mid to late eighteen hundreds were desperate to do whatever it took to grab their own piece of freedom in a new land. For them, it was an attitude that, whoever tried to prevent them from seizing that opportunity had better get out of their way. There was no time or interest in bothering with trying to understand or respect the Native Americans who had already been living on the land they were interested in because the cultural backgrounds were so vastly different and totally foreign. In the settler’s minds, the land was theirs for the taking; especially when their president was promoting manifest destiny as a nation theme back east.
As I went through my career and raised my children, certain events occurred which exposed me to more information regarding the people in the area. It gave me a clearer understanding and realization that the attitude I’d developed as a child no longer fit the paradigm I held onto. Here’s an example: In becoming a webmaster for a local historical society in our community, I researched the history of the local Native American tribe on whose reservation our home has been on, and still is, to this day.
One event which changed this tribe’s condition of transforming from a poor and mistreated condition in the past, to having its rights as human beings restored today, was when our state governor signed a law which gave the tribes throughout the state the ability to operate casinos. It started out small, but over the decades has grown larger and very prosperous today.
The double-edged sword of this issue is that over that period of growth by the tribe to increase its revenue stream, the reality is that those casinos fostered an addiction to gambling. Any time I’ve entered a local casino, the smoke-filled areas full of one-armed bandits had mostly senior citizens using their pension or Social Security income to pull the lever on the machine they sat at for hours on end. While I don’t really care if they choose to gamble their income away, the one thing which frustrated me is that, being an educator at the time this change occurred, teachers were told that the revenue generated by the casinos and collected by the state would increase funding for better learning and schools. Yea, and I’ve got a bridge on the great plains of the mid-west to sell you too!
Recently, I was pleased to find an article in my local dead fish-wrapper publication about a tribe having accumulated sufficient funds over the decades of running its casino enterprise. The local tribe’s reservation land enables them to use a strip of land along a waterway and across from an existing major west coast port, to begin building the first ever Native American owned port for servicing large container ships from foreign countries. A partnership contract was just signed, to being its construction and is making history in doing so.
While this announcement is unique, it also points out how the tribe has managed to profit from what many would consider a disgusting way by which it acquired its wealth, at others expense, many have become financially destitute from their addiction. Why do you suppose the state’s legislature has only a few years ago funded and started broadcasting local television adverts about getting gambling addiction help?
Over the last month I’ve picked up and read Bill O’Reilly’s book– with Martin Dugard’s help – called Killing Crazy Horse. It is their compilation of archival records on how the several presidential administrations during the 19th century dealt with the Native American tribes across the continent as the settlers moved west like those on the western television series, Wagon Train did. Only this book was more factually accurate and details viciously bloody accounts from the Cherokees of the south, to the Arapaho of the southwest, the Sioux of the northern plains, ending with the massacre of Custer’s last stand against Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.
While the facts of our past can’t be changed, I was raised to always treat every human with respect and dignity, I’m saddened by how our ancestors – one of my mother’s distant relatives came west on the Oregon Trail in 1847 – we have made progress in more recent times regarding those people whose culture was nearly completely destroyed. Yet, our modern treatment has clearly improved in many ways to deal respectfully with them as neighbors who deserve our respect and support. After all, they certainly got the raw deal!
I just wish the level of hate some have for those they used to admire, yet now disagree with today could get over their hate which blinds them to the point of acting with the same visceral attitude that was exercised by our ancestors of a century and a half ago on the Native Americans. The nation certainly could move into a better future of prosperity for all today, but I guess history just repeats itself.