Sunday, September 2, 2007

Venting about PC "Native Americans=Good; Whites=Evil"

One of my pet peeves is the notion that American Indians were and are saintly stewards of their environments, and that Europeans were evil racists who cheated and stole from the natives for their selfish gains. And today I found yet another big newspaper spread asserting that settlement of Western Washington state by whites was unfair thievery.

I'm writing a chapter about Native Americans for a book. And as part of the research for that chapter, I took great interest in an article in our local Seattle Times newspaper (Aug. 30, 2007) called "Native Landscape," describing the collision of local cultures with the arrival of the white man by Coll Thrush in his book, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-over Place.

Washington State is Indian country. We live in places that are names of tribes: Snohomish,
Sammamish, and along the Duwamish River. Native American designs and totem poles and Casinos seem to be everywhere. According to an online Casino Guide, there are 26 Indian casinos in the state--perhaps the best advertised being Tulalip and Mukelshoot, all on Indian land. Seattle, after all, was named after a native American chieftan. The Makah tribe every year famously is allowed to violate international anti-whaling treaties by harpooning and then shooting whales with guns. They then bring the carcass to shore, eat a bit of blubber, and let most of the rest go to waste. They do this claiming it is their ancestral tradition, part of their tribal religion. I suspect they do it to assert their presence and gain both publicity and, in overriding governments, power.

This newspaper article, in the most matter-of-fact tones, described the transition of the Seattle region from isolated stone-age tribal outposts to divided parcels owned by white invaders. Reporter Mary Ann Gwinn writes, "Boom-bust cycles from 1880-1920 would drive many Native people from their last refuges within the city limits. It was the 'nadir' of the indigenous Seattle story, Thrush writes. Sometimes the destructive force was development, sometimes outright arson; a couple of Duwamish tribal longhouses was burned by whites in 1893...In 1910, one Indian agent estimated that 1,000 to 3,000 Indians were both landless and homeless. The building of the Lake Washington Ship Canal and the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks wiped out several Indian settlements that until then had managed to survive.

"A sad and shameful story of this period was that of Seetoowathl, a Duwamish Indian who lived in a ramshackle floating house near the mouth of the Duwamish...starved to death in the hard winter of 1920...

"As whites moved Indians to the margins, they appropriated their culture and symbols. A low point of this cultural theft occurred in 1899 when a group of Seattle business leaders cruising the coast of Alaska cut down a totem pole erected in honor of a Tlingit noblewoman, discarded her cremated remains and erected the stolen pole in Pioneer Place Park."

And in much more recent times: "In the 1950's, Indians laid off after the wartime boom were cut adrift, and the ranks of Seattle's Skid Road population swelled."

Was there any time or event when whites acted kindly toward Native peoples? Well, not in this article. The employment of Indians is seen as serving whites' selfish needs for "lumbermen and laundresses, hunters and haulers," and despite the fact that other minorities such as Japanese who had been interned in camps managed to pick up their lives with dignity after the second World War, it seems that whites' "cutting adrift" of Native Americans was what
made them fill "the ranks of Seattle's Skid Road population."

In other words, whites are bad, Native Americans good. Now, I look upon every Native American individual with respect, and I'm aware that indeed, there were cases of wrongdoing by settlers toward native peoples. But one can argue that advanced civilization (ie with written language, the wheel, metal, glass, advanced monetary system) might have something from which a stone-age civilization can benefit. And that portraying Indians as flawless overlooks quite a bit of fact--including their aggressive taking of slaves, their eating native horses to extinction, their running herds of buffalo off cliffs and wasting almost all of the resultant meat, their burning off forests, and their inter tribal warfare.

Nowadays, kids hear the myth that white soldiers gave Indians smallpox-infected blankets out of hatred. Even in an overview of American history at an exhibit on Lincoln in Disneyland, I heard lamentation about white man's cruelty and theft from noble and blameless Native

I realize that what I've just written is inflammatory, but don't you agree that perhaps reality might not be as clear as "white-bad, native American-good" that politically correct writers insist on cramming down our choking throats?


  1. I've always ignored the classic "white guilt" pieces. Are there sometimes valid points, true stories, etc. in them? Sure. But overall, it's a (usually white, extremely liberal) writer who wants to assuage the guilt he feels about his own lifestyle and attitudes...and thinks that by writing pieces like this he's making up for all the problems in his own way of thinking. Argh.

    It's easier to just turn the page, sometimes.

  2. Ezzie, the reason I'm perturbed by the 'white guilt pieces' is because they're not just PC writers working out their own guilt, but are now considered true history, and justify our giving billions of dollars to Indian tribes (out of our taxes) and allowing them to supercede federal laws that pertain to everyone else, of every other nationality or history. Why do they deserve this privilege? The truth is that many thousands of people of Native American heritage have, like the immigrants who came here, successfully integrated into our society. For some reason, we allow Indians--and ONLY Indians--to remain separate in our midst, and what this has meant is that the ones who can't make it in American society can just drop out in their own subsidized homeless camps many miles square.

  3. you guys are both stupid. why? because you don't realize that without the native americans, the settlers would not have survived. meaning america may not be what it is today. Whites were extremely unfair. look at the african americans, and tell me that the white man was fair. and we're not giving billions of dollars to the indian reservations in taxes you idiots. they're making that money because you're gambling at their casinos. theyre also exempt from law because the american government is finally keeping its side of the deal from the several treaties made with the natives. So if you're going to say what about african americans. or maybe even the japanese. think again. no treaty, arrangement or deal was made.

  4. Hi there,

    I thought I'd chime in, since I'm the guy that actually wrote Native Seattle. A couple of clarifications: I didn't write the book out of guilt. I take responsibility for the fact my presence in North America was made possible by the thing we call colonialism, but beyond that, this book was not about my "lifestyle and attitudes." I'm also not interested in political correctness -- and I find that accusations of "political correctness" are often cover for really simplistic (and often racist) arguments.

    I'm fairly certain I never said "Indians = good, whites = evil" anywhere in Native Seattle. That's *your* reading of the history. What I was interested in doing was looking at the ways in which Indians and newcomers alike tried to make sense out of a place that was transformed so quickly and dramatically. At the same time, it would be incorrect to say that racism was not a central part of the story.

    As for "giving billions" to Indians who "we allow to remain separate," the legal status that Native people have today is compensation for territory, not a handout, and they're not just another immigrant group to be "integrated" (whatever that means) -- they have unique historical status because they were here for thousands of years.

    I'd encourage you to get past the "reverse discrimination" idea and really find out more about what actually happened (and continues to happen) in Indian country today. There's WAY more going on.

    I'd love to talk more.

  5. Thank you, I appreciate your thoughts. I am fourteen years old, and we are doing a project in social studies about the westward movement, and, yes, they do actually teach this extremely PC attitude in schools. While I agree that Native Americans were treated poorly in many cases, naturally, Native American life was not perfect before whites. And, yes, why should they receive so much money, only to spend it on casinos, which are illegal in the state of Washington. Another thing that really bothers me is that it seems like every few years they come up with a new name that's PC to call them. I don't see anything wrong with not wanting to be called "Indians", because they aren't Indians, but our class talked to a Native American man, and he said that it was now right to call them "Native American Indians." What is this?! They're not Indians! And I don't want to waste that much breath! And then my godmother told me some new name that they want to be called by! I know this isn't important but, God, it irritates me so much. Sorry for ranting.