A small victory?
In response to Ian Buruma's anti-NDN slur in the LA Times last week, Wampum commenter Adam Bailey sent off a letter to the editorial board. Today, it was published.
Re "Last of the Tibetans," Opinion, March 26Ian Buruma has many good points about the dangers Tibetan culture faces from Chinese modernization, but his opening sentences that describe American Indians as "doomed" and "reduced to peddling cheap mementos" call into question his ability to make such an assessment. Indeed, American Indians are going through a cultural renaissance wherein more of our youth are learning their languages, practicing their traditions and attaining more educational success than ever before. One need look no further than Harvard University's Honoring Nations awards for proof.
This is not to say that native peoples don't face many challenges, but to declare that we are little more than "tourist attractions" is as false as it is insulting. Is his take on Tibet based on similar romantic notions of a culture that isn't his own?
Comments
Personally I appreciated the fact that someone said a sad truth. Indians in the United States are little more than an anachronistic afterthought of the mainstream colonial paradigm. We are more broken now than we ever were before in our history. Perhaps it will take non-Aboriginals to say what many of us are afraid to say.
Posted by: The Angryindian | March 31, 2008 01:31 PM
Obviously, your mileage may vary.
Posted by: ebw | March 31, 2008 02:03 PM
Nothing personal, AI, but how do you know this? Do we actually know if the decline of Hopewell was an absolute flame-out for a large chunk of Indian culture in the east of the Mississippi sixteen hundred years ago? I mean, when you look at the hundreds of years between the fall of Hopewell and the rise of Mississippian, things looked pretty damn bleak for us. Maybe we were all just sitting around talking to rocks for decades. Maybe we beat the heck out of each other, caused massive famine, or were just downright cultural pariahs during that time.
I honestly get annoyed with the blanket statements regarding "all" Indians, both in any given time, and spanning all time. It's clear that most groups, even covering millions of citizens, were very successful at given times, and at others, they barely scraped by. Right now, some Indians are doing better than they were decades ago, many others are not. Clearly, that can, and will, change. But this blind nostalgia, and worse, looking to the outside, particularly the cause of much of the current blight, for "honest assessment" is hardly helpful, in my humble opinion.
Posted by: MBW | March 31, 2008 03:40 PM
"We are more broken now than we ever were before in our history."
That might be your sad truth, AI, but it's not mine or that of my family or tribe.
Posted by: Adam | March 31, 2008 07:14 PM
Yokoke to Wampum, btw, for posting and for the encouraging words!
Posted by: Adam | March 31, 2008 07:18 PM