accept most of the compromises with good hearts. We start our cedar burning with cigarette lighters, and we drive to Sun Dance. But our old hunting life is gone. Our old religion is in tatters (your government consciously worked to destroy it). The ways that made us a people, that gave us a good life—they’re gone. You made the world we live in, we didn’t. In this world money and material things, that’s what counts. In our world nature counted for more, spiritual things counted for more. Your poet Housman wrote, “A stranger and afraid in a world I never made.” Thoughwe’re past being afraid, we feel like strangers in your world.
We’re poor, very poor. Meanwhile, you’re prospering on the lands you took from us with smooth words and bullets. How about a good example that happened to my people? The Homestake is the richest gold mine in world history. It sits in the middle of the Black Hills, which you signed over to us for as long as the grass grows and water runs downhill. When you found out there was gold in the Hills, you land-grabbed them. Your own Supreme Court says that’s in violation of the treaty.
And how is that today? The mine is still producing gold. Every day now, every year for a century, it has minted money that made you rich and us poor. When my nieces have to hitchhike, the thought of the Homestake makes me mad.
More. You’re doing the Great White Father crap. You control tribal governments through your Bureau of Indian Affairs. You give us the housing you think we need, the job training programs you think we need. You try to tell us how to use the minerals on our lands—our own sovereign lands—or not use them.
[I wrote this paper in 1974. Today I’d add that you want to tell us whether we can have gambling on our lands.]
I am warming to the subject. You assume we are lazy, dumb, shiftless, drunken, etc. (The black folks have told you about that.) Whether you want to help us because of it, or look down on us because of it, the assumption is in your faces—lazy, etc.
Which reminds me. You treat us like a conquered people. Some of you are proud of that, some ashamed of it. Either way, equally, you regard us as a conquered people. And you teach us to think of ourselves that way.
Think about that. What does it do to people, thinkingof themselves as conquered, subjugated, defeated?
Last thing. Some of you believe we are noble savages, some believe we are dirty savages. Notice what those labels have in common—the word savage . Some of you idealize us, most of you despise us. Either way, we’re not people to you, regular folks to hang out with. You don’t see us. You see Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull way clearer than you see me and my relatives today. Five hundred years after you got here, we are ever more the invisible people. And that pisses me off.
What did Mrs. Standish say about my paper? Well, she made notes about spelling, comma splices, and vulgar language. She commended me for quoting Housman. About the content of the paper she said not one word. She gave me a B.
Afterward, I looked up comma splice. It means running sentences together without a period. Ever since, I have written all of those I want.
Generally, I made good grades. Thought I’d major in Indian Studies, which was hot in those days. My first teacher was a Chicago Jew named Ron Sternberg. He was the one professor I hit it off with, the person who changed my life. He was the sort of teacher common in the seventies who’s probably on the outs now, was a hippie, a child of the sixties, with a Jewish Afro, jean jackets, and Birkenstocks. He was wild about his subject, anthropology, and completely devoted to his students. He hung out in the student union with us, drank beer with us (he wouldn’t smoke dope because it would get him fired), drank endless cups of coffee with us, and talked about books, movies, philosophy, anthropology, and life. To spend an evening with Bradley and Ron was to go roaming through the
We’re poor, very poor. Meanwhile, you’re prospering on the lands you took from us with smooth words and bullets. How about a good example that happened to my people? The Homestake is the richest gold mine in world history. It sits in the middle of the Black Hills, which you signed over to us for as long as the grass grows and water runs downhill. When you found out there was gold in the Hills, you land-grabbed them. Your own Supreme Court says that’s in violation of the treaty.
And how is that today? The mine is still producing gold. Every day now, every year for a century, it has minted money that made you rich and us poor. When my nieces have to hitchhike, the thought of the Homestake makes me mad.
More. You’re doing the Great White Father crap. You control tribal governments through your Bureau of Indian Affairs. You give us the housing you think we need, the job training programs you think we need. You try to tell us how to use the minerals on our lands—our own sovereign lands—or not use them.
[I wrote this paper in 1974. Today I’d add that you want to tell us whether we can have gambling on our lands.]
I am warming to the subject. You assume we are lazy, dumb, shiftless, drunken, etc. (The black folks have told you about that.) Whether you want to help us because of it, or look down on us because of it, the assumption is in your faces—lazy, etc.
Which reminds me. You treat us like a conquered people. Some of you are proud of that, some ashamed of it. Either way, equally, you regard us as a conquered people. And you teach us to think of ourselves that way.
Think about that. What does it do to people, thinkingof themselves as conquered, subjugated, defeated?
Last thing. Some of you believe we are noble savages, some believe we are dirty savages. Notice what those labels have in common—the word savage . Some of you idealize us, most of you despise us. Either way, we’re not people to you, regular folks to hang out with. You don’t see us. You see Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull way clearer than you see me and my relatives today. Five hundred years after you got here, we are ever more the invisible people. And that pisses me off.
What did Mrs. Standish say about my paper? Well, she made notes about spelling, comma splices, and vulgar language. She commended me for quoting Housman. About the content of the paper she said not one word. She gave me a B.
Afterward, I looked up comma splice. It means running sentences together without a period. Ever since, I have written all of those I want.
Generally, I made good grades. Thought I’d major in Indian Studies, which was hot in those days. My first teacher was a Chicago Jew named Ron Sternberg. He was the one professor I hit it off with, the person who changed my life. He was the sort of teacher common in the seventies who’s probably on the outs now, was a hippie, a child of the sixties, with a Jewish Afro, jean jackets, and Birkenstocks. He was wild about his subject, anthropology, and completely devoted to his students. He hung out in the student union with us, drank beer with us (he wouldn’t smoke dope because it would get him fired), drank endless cups of coffee with us, and talked about books, movies, philosophy, anthropology, and life. To spend an evening with Bradley and Ron was to go roaming through the
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