This being Native American history month, I thought I would take the opportunity to rant about the condition of Native America and put my two cents worth into the debate surrounding the Makah Tribe of Washington and their desire to resume whale-hunting as granted them by treaty.

I have always felt the group that does the least complaining in this country is the same one that has gotten screwed the worst.

American Indians have handled disease, genocide (actual and cultural), colonization (of their land and their minds) and the abduction and re-education of their children in Indian schools.

They have withstood the attempts of government agencies whose only purpose was the destruction of their culture and repossession of the meager lands granted them by treaties which were forced upon them.

They have served proudly in every war this country has gotten itself into and distinguished themselves with bravery and valor when all they had to come home to was poverty.

They have suffered the constant indignity of racist stereotypes which have alternately portrayed them as mild-mannered, primitive hippies, warlike savages standing in the way of white progress or free-loaders living off of the government dole.

They have made great gains slowly over decades, finding the loopholes in treaties that would allow them to sustain themselves financially and culturally as sovereign nations by opening bingo parlors, casinos, liquor stores and cigarette shops, only to have those meager measures thwarted by callous state governments that refused to allow the occasional Indian business to sully otherwise puritanical regions of the country.

The closest Indians ever get to being honored is when they are turned into mascots for various sports franchises, from the smallest high school to the pros, as if they were animals.

You don’t see the Shaman or the Hemani very often either; it’s always the Braves, the Warriors or the Chiefs because the only value Indians seem to have to white culture is in being fierce fighters.

Not good enough to keep the West but good enough to make white people feel better about beating them mercilessly. God knows how guilty white folks would be if they decimated peace-loving people who didn’t bother anyone.

Every other city, state and river in this country bears the name of the tribes that used to live there, and yet if you ask the average American which tribe was indigenous to their area, they couldn’t tell you.

Most Americans couldn’t name more than three tribes total: Cherokee, Sioux and Apache.

But that is probably legitimate when you consider that American Indian restaurants aren’t very common. Most Americans learn more history and culture from restaurant place mats than they do from history books, and unless you can find out about it over a nice hot plate of bear in oolican grease with chokecherries, Americans don’t want to know. If McDonald’s started selling frybread McDunkin’ sticks it might be another story, however.

Forty percent of the staple food items the entire planet sustains itself on were domesticated by Indians in the New World, but everybody still thinks the Irish gave us potatoes and the Italians gave us tomatoes.

The Constitution of the United States is based on the Articles of Confederation of the Iroquois League, but all you ever hear about is how the founding fathers cranked out this entirely new form of government with the sweat of their brows and a fierce devotion to the classics.

If credit is ever given to anyone besides Americans for winning The Revolutionary War, the nod goes to France for helping out. Indians did plenty in that war, and for thanks they got shoved west for the next 200 years if they were lucky (there are plenty of Mohicans living in Oklahoma) and killed straight off if they weren’t.

Pocahontas was not some hot little number that John Smith was madly in love with; she was a fat 13-year-old who saved his worthless life. He begrudgingly married her because he didn’t want to die. She died miserable and alone in Europe of smallpox. No singing raccoons. No Disneyfied songs.

Thanksgiving, in spite the widely-held belief that the pilgrims somehow invented a pagan ritual of plenty while they were starving to death, is the same annual harvest festival that most Indians hold.

Right now, the Makah Indians want to resume hunting whales. If it were anybody else, I would say “keep your hands off the sea mammals.”

But when it comes to the only people who AREN’T responsible for the near-extinction of grey whales, I say screw Green Peace (and I normally like those eco-terrorist/activist types).

I am more than happy to see a big old double standard applied when it FINALLY works to benefit Indians and help them maintain a cultural tradition they will undoubtedly need when technological society blows itself up.

HAPPY TURKEY DAY!

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