Just One More Tribal Tale of Abuse
On long winter nights beside the Knife and Little Big Horn rivers in Montana, tribal elders sit around story fires and tell their grandchildren legends to help them make sense of the world. It's a time-worn custom, as old as silence.
A black man, a white man and an Indian arrived at the Pearly Gates, begins one of their favorite tales. After welcoming them to heaven, St. Peter invites each man to pick the afterlife of his dreams. The black man asks for great music and lots of friends. St. Peter grants his wish and sends him on his way. Up steps the Indian, who asks for beautiful mountain streams, deep forests and plenty of food. "Say no more, chief," says St. Peter, sending him off. Lastly, he turns to the white man and asks, "What do you want heaven to look like?" And the white man says, "Where did that Indian go?"
Ever since Columbus waded ashore, say the elders beside the Knife and the Little Big Horn, white men in funny hats have been asking, "Where did that Indian go?" In this context, the latest scandal -- involving Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, the Republican operatives who allegedly fleeced six casino tribes out of $80 million by promising them, well, a little slice of heaven in Washington -- is an old story come full circle.
Sure, editorial boards at the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others, are right to call for their heads. The practice of mocking tribal leaders as "morons" and "monkeys" while allegedly stealing them blind gives off a foul odor, even in the nation's capital.
Tribes have grown so accustomed to this sort of treatment from Bible-thumping politicians in "the party of values," though, that when the Scanlon/Abramoff story broke, it didn't prompt enough reaction in Shiprock or Lame Deer to bump the girls basketball team off Page 1. Out there in the Big Empty, where silence has always been as bold a statement as any, the Republican Party's stone-faced vigil amid mounting outrage is as clear an indictment as any headline.
Tribal leaders' collective shrug over the scandal is their way of asking: Where was your outrage when Mike Whalen, then assistant attorney general for the state of South Dakota, declared in the '90s: "The Native American culture is a culture of hopelessness, godlessness, joblessness and lawlessness, a mongrelized people living on the outskirts of Western civilization"? Where, they ask, was your outrage in August 2000, when delegates to the Republican Party's convention in Washington state asked the federal government to expel native people from their homelands and declare all Indian treaties null and void?
