This Great White Father seems different

Opinion

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This article was published 18/12/2010 (5388 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When the end of the Earth is coming, all the water will begin to dry up. For a long time there will be no rain. . . . When the new world comes after that, the white people will be Indians and the Indians will be white people.”

—- Apache prophecy

WASHINGTON — In the lobby of the headquarters of the Department of the Interior was a totem pole. At the podium was the president of the United States, and in the audience were the chiefs, commissioners, councilors and chairmen of 565 Indian tribes, some in feathers and beadwork, most in dresses and suits.

They were Quinault and Chippewa, Hopi and Seminole, Uncompaghre and Eskimo. Ninety-year-old Navajo Code Talkers carried the colours; a woman named Fawn welcomed Barack Obama to the hall.

“Still coming to plead with the Great White Father?” I jibed to the leader of the Jamul nation of Southern California, adult population 56, unemployment rate 80 per cent.

“Yeah,” laughed Kenneth Meza. “But he ain’t white no more! What’ll we do?”

We were gathering for the second annual White House Tribal Nations Conference, an outreach by the Obama administration to the scattered, proud, and often benighted remnants of the fabric of Indian Country, as it is called here.

Ken Meza was wearing a Marine Corps lapel pin, his medals from Vietnam, an extravagant moustache, a leather lanyard, and a long, pointed beard. He told me that Barack Obama had been a true friend of the red man, that his promises not to ignore the health, security and education of the people of the vast reservations of the West had been kept.

“Being a minority himself probably has a lot to do with it,” Chairman Meza said. “He was brought up the same as we: poor, ghetto life. He struggled, too.”

But Ken Meza noted that Obama had availed himself of significantly more formal education than the young people of Indian Country, who often don’t go past the sixth grade, let alone Harvard Law.

Meza had graduated from high school, a rare accomplishment for his people, and had joined the Marines as a way to get off the minuscule, six-acre Jamul (HA-mool) Rez on the outskirts of heavenly San Diego.

“What did you do after you got out of the service?” I asked him.

“Actually, I was a drunk,” the Indian replied. “I guess it was my way of rebelling. I didn’t understand anything about the world. I didn’t understand the war, either, but I had a job to do and I did it. That’s what they trained me for, but they don’t train you to be a civilian. It was the same old Indian story: wake up in the morning and ask yourself, ‘What do I do today?'”

Obama began his speech and told us that he had been made an honorary member of the Crow nation of Montana while he was running for the presidency. His tribal name, he said, was One-who-helps-people-throughout-the-land.

“When I told Michelle that,” he noted, “She said, ‘Your name should be One-who-isn’t-picking-up-his-shoes-and-socks.’ “

The president told the tribal leaders that “never again would Indian Country be forgotten or ignored.” They applauded him warmly, a profound change from the days when a Sioux chief could sneer, “Since the Great White Father promised that we should never be removed we have been moved five times…I think you had better put the Indians on wheels and you can run them about wherever you wish.”

Barack Obama finished his speech, shook some hands, and went back to the White House to review his strategy, such as it is, for Afghanistan.

I asked the chairman of the Jamul Indians if he felt any sympathy for the Pashtun tribesmen who were warring to force the soldiers of the Great White Father from their lands.

“I see both sides,” the ex-Marine replied. “When 9/11 happened, it was a bad thing for us, but when I think of the history of the U.S. going into places like Egypt and opening their tombs and digging up their graves, I understand why a people want to fight us, just as we fought them when they dug up our ancestors’ graves.

“We’re proud of our graves,” the big chief said.

Allen Abel is a Brooklyn-born Canadian

journalist based in Washington, D.C.