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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (14025)	12/4/1997 1:21:00 AM
From: Krowbar	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

JFQ, Perhaps the first descriptions of the Indians were the way they were before the White Man betrayed their trust and drove them from the best lands, where they lived in harmony with Nature, hunting animals instead of grsshoppers, not depending on a handout when the grasshoppers were gone. Maybe their crops didn't grow too well in the Western deserts that we forced a lot of them into, and they were unfamiliar with the territory, thus forcing them to steal or starve, while at the same time stripping them of their dignity. I think that what Mark Twain was describing was the American Indian after we "civilized" him. Dehumanizing the people that you have just robbed of their land is an attempt to justify the theft and murders that you have just collectively commited. I have much less respect for Twain than I once had. Del

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (14025)	12/4/1997 11:51:00 AM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I have to agree with Del about this horrible passage from Twain. What we did to the Indians was absolute butchery and theft on a grand scale, including the U.S. Army slaughtering 15,000,000 buffalo so that they would hopefully all starve to death. I find nothing but horror in the entire period of American dealings with them, including but not limited to sending their children to Indian boarding schools so that they would be deprived not only of the love and nurturing of their families, but even of their native languages and thus be robbed of their culture. We have lied to them, broken countless treaties with them, and shunted them off to the most barren and desolate parts of the country where it is almost impossible to make a living. I am not surprised that you would post such a quote here, Freddy, since you are proudly a Confederate American and thus apparently still support the concept of holding slaves, but I have to say it reveals more about you even than it does of Twain's bigotry, which was at least more understandable in the time he lived than it is now. I would find it so refreshing if you would once in awhile quote something from the late twentieth century!!! Even the public schools are now teaching the true, excruciatingly cruel way Native Americans were treated by white conquerers, and I must say it is about time!!! I am so glad that there is a new generation of Indians in law and business schools, because I hope their activism will begin some balancing of the scales of justice. In the meantime, let's not forget Leonard Peltier, the victim of a well-cocumented FBI frame-up for the deaths of two armed FBI agents who illegally raided Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in June of 1975. He remains a political prisoner after twenty-one years for being a Native American activist and fighter, even though more than 50,000,000 people around the world have petitioned for his release. Did you know that the Communists used to show the Russian people documentaries of how the poor American blacks lived in our urban slums, and the Indians scraped by on the reservations, as propaganda for their cause? Land of opportunity? Not for everyone, and by deliberate government policy.