Native Americans, hoping to set a new record for not accepting they lost the war, are upset that Trump is going to Mount Rushmore.
I will say it again, especially since I am researching the very war the Indians lost...
You lost the bloody war!
The losers get told how things are going to be, they don't get to make demands of the victors.
Its generally a poor strategy to be a random assortmant of neolithic tribes and bands when trying to deal with Enlightenment era warriors
ReplyDeleteThe Sioux weep big bitter tears about how "sacred" Mt. Rushmore was/is. In the first place, just about everything was "sacred" to them---a very good book on them was called The Mystic Warriors of the Plains. In the second place, they had taken it from either the Cheyenne or Arapaho (I disremember just which tribe) less than a century before we got it from them.
ReplyDeleteIf the damn thing was so precious, how did they fail to purchase the place before the parks service took it over in 1933?
DeleteI am constantly amazed that we give any attention at all to their claims from before the war.
It's a constant repetition of Indians come into conflict with Whites. Start fight. Lose fight. Chafe under terms of loss. Come into conflict with Whites...
While there's lots of guilt to spread around, it does NEED to be spread on every guilty party, not just the victors.
Something telling about their constant state of grievance is people of Amerind descent who've left the reservations and sought a productive life among the rest of America seem to be doing just fine as Americans.
It's something I've been observing among other perpetually aggrieved people. It causes me to ask, "did you even try to join my society?" because success in a civilization is reserved for the members of that civilization. Outsiders are always The Other. The Other never gets far and is smacked down hard if they start to.
If you think that by, "other perpetually aggrieved people," I mean blacks; you are mostly mistaken.
DeleteThere's certainly perpetually aggrieved black people.
I'm more referring to "the south will rise again" and several white nationalist/supremacist groups. They demand to remain in a subculture and they self-other damn hard.