Daily Columnist

The Symposium on the American Indian has been going on this week. Special events were held and there will be a powwow for all to enjoy Saturday at 2 p.m. in the Great Hall in the Union.

I highly recommend you go to the powwow if you do nothing else because powwows are a good time for all; they wouldn’t have them otherwise.

Back home we always had these things. Powwows, markets, festivals. I felt like I was being dragged to them when I was a kid, but like so many other things, I latched onto them whole-heartedly once no one was “making” me go.

American Indian events such as this are always fun. Partly because you rarely meet an Indian who is all pissed off and looks at you like you don’t belong there unless you walk into a bar called The Broken Bow in Sioux Falls, S.D., and then you are just asking for it.

Hard feelings would defeat the purpose of a powwow.

Part of my family is Indian, and when I was growing up, casinos were a far-off dream. I have relatives who have lived with the kind of crippling poverty that most Americans like to think doesn’t exist in this country: barefoot kids running around in junkyards, no real health care, people living without electricity or plumbing, rampant alcoholism and the sort of physical and emotional abuse that comes with it.

They would have killed for a high-paying job dealing blackjack.

Let’s face it, no matter what anybody says, dealing blackjack is infinitely more glamorous than selling car parts out of the junkyard you are living in.

I know the kind of shame people can feel being associated with this kind of poverty.

They take off at a young age, embarrassed even to be Indian because to them it is synonymous with being trash.

It is an invitation to either infuriating jokes or really sensitive consideration from the politically correct. Which one is worse is a matter of personal taste.

You can always kick someone’s ass for a really bad joke intended to offend and humiliate, but you can do nothing to defend yourself when someone says “Indian summer,” “Indian giver” or “Low man on the totem pole” in front of you and then spends the next 20 minutes apologizing for it because he “didn’t mean anything by it.”

Of course he didn’t. And no matter how fervently you try to reassure he that it doesn’t really bother you, he feels guilty, and you feel bad for him because he is beating the hell out of himself for something you honestly couldn’t care less about.

Indians have thick skins. They have to. If they didn’t, they would spend their entire lives angry about things they can’t change.

I have cousins who never bring up being Indian and do their best to pass for white because they never deal with other Indians, and their parents raised them, intentionally or not, to be ashamed of what they are.

So when I see media pundits like Bill Maher drone on about how the nobility of Indians is somehow compromised by casino gambling, it makes me ill.

As if Indians across the United States would somehow be better off living in filth and begging for handouts from the Bureau of Indian Affairs than taking their fate into their own hands, turning the tables and reaping the rewards of the loosest slots in the United States.

I’m not a big fan of state-sanctioned gambling.

I’ve said that before. I think it’s bad for Iowa, and quite frankly, I would much rather see Indians be able to get on without it, too, but I am a pragmatist.

There is nothing noble in high infant-mortality and unemployment rates.

While casinos like Winnevegas and Custer’s Last Chance Saloon and Slots may seem cheesy and demeaning to well-intentioned white folks who let paternalism get the best of them every few years after they’ve seen “Dances with Wolves” or “Smoke Signals,” they are just a good joke to most Indians who have a decent sense of humor and like to eat on a regular basis.

The theme of this year’s symposium is “Dynamic, Electric Conversions and Transformations into ‘Indianness.'”

That is a long, cool way to say we have a facility for taking things outside of our culture and making them our own.

Irma Wilson-White, program assistant for Minority Student Affairs and symposium co-chair said of beads in a Daily story earlier this week, “We turned that very European object into works of art that express spiritual … coded messages and tell stories.

“There have been many things, in our global society, that we have converted and transformed into ‘Indianness.'”

True, dat! Like every other culture in the world, we enjoyed gambling without outside influence, but the casino is a form we have readily converted.

One day, the very word “casino” will be interpreted as “Indian for ‘big house to throw your money away in,'” and I will not have a problem with that, just as I have no problem with people thinking of beads as an Indian thing.

In turn, we have given a great deal back to the dominant culture: corn, kayaks, potatoes, key elements of American government, codetalkers in World War II and bathing on a semi-regular basis.

We are good like that.

So take a few this weekend to try out something new to you and very old to the folks who were here before you.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily.