Notice this comment, in particular: comment.

Excellent.

This one about a truth and
reconciliation circle is especially moving. It’d be great to repeat the circle several times over, in many locations.

Hats off to you, Griff, and others who are working this blog.

Oh, I didn’t know that many languages were used in WWII. Hmm. No wonder the secrets were safe!

When we moved here 12 years ago, we looked at the house the other George family was selling at the time. Of seven members in each family, there were five common first names. We decided the post office would never figure that one out, so we purchased a different house.

Back to the Native American theme, your wording is excellent. I always appreciate someone who can express their thoughts well in writing. Actually, there were four main languages used in the wars, Navajo, Cherokee, Choctaw and Comanche. Then, there were the different dialects within each language. What a simple, magnificent way to communicate secrets over the not so secret airways. I think it is an excellent example of how cooperation between people groups can accomplish a common goal. I hope we have not lost sight of that in our current times.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/05/15/midday1/

I hope you have a chance to see the movie.

Do you have two sons? There were Georges running around our house for a few years-- I’m Holly Cybyske Cairns Maybe you aren’t the same George family. Nice kids in that family.

Also, I notice you said “them” and “those people” a lot in your post #31. Ususally I agree with what you write, but this time I am surprised by your usage of “us and them” mentality.

Griff, the Take down the Fort site is powerful. Apparently, this group is religiously motivated, among other things.

By the way, when May is over, how will someone find your Mn Sesqui blog?

US Senator Sam Brownback (R Kansas) has introduced a NATIVE AMERICAN APOLOGY RESOLUTION bill in the Senate, described as: “A joint resolution to acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the United States Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States. ”

There’s a companion bill in the House, too, but both have been languishing since last summer. I’m not sure why.

Many would also want some type of compensation and/or specific actions to be taken, like the group of Dakota people who were the organizers of the protests last weekend. Their web site: Take Down The Fort.

I did a little poking around in the involvement of the Native Americans in the First & Second World Wars. I found a masters thesis by Diane Camurat to be very interesting reading. It seems that somewhere between 11,000 and 17,000 Native Americans served in the first war. There are not, according to the paper, really reliable records from that era. There were about 25,000 that served in the second war. One of the most valuable contributions from these people was their ability to comunicate messages in their own tongue that could not be translated, unless a person happened to know the language. Because of their success in WW I, Hitler even sent some German anthropologists to the US before WW II to study the Indian languages. It was too great a task, so the native tongues were again successfully used in WW II to send secret messages.

All this seems very interesting, seeing that WW I occured about 30 years after the last of the Indian Wars. There didn’t seem to be any animosity with the Native Americans fighting alongside the white men. Perhaps they had an aversion to being forced to learn German. Or, most likely, they saw the nobility in uniting to defend our common land, in spite of how they had been treated. And, the unfortunate thing is that our shabby treatment of them was not changed by their demonstration of loyalty. Greed and idealism always seem to trump common decency. We even did it to the returning Viet Nam vets, no matter what color their skin was. That is a tradgety of our history, and indicative that we, as a society, haven’t really gotten that much better.

I guess we can celebrate this Sesquicentenial with either remorse over our failures or thankfulness for what we have attained. I choose to be thankful, especially for all those who passed before me and gave their lives to allow me the freedom to live in this great state and country.

Do you think most/many Indians want an apology, a change of action, more respect, or what? The atrocity happened long ago. The separation still remains. It would be nice to start by educating…

Now that Jane mentions she’s a Catholic, I can throw in there that I am a Lutheran. Saved by Grace. Less guilt.

On that note: Maybe it’d be better for Pawlenty to ask for forgiveness, instead of apologizing?

Holly, I think we have a problem with community guilt-we are so proud of our individual accomplishments we don’t want to own any mistakes made by others.

I don’t really have a problem admitting guilt since I was raised Catholic (so I am guilty all the time.) I really think that asking for forgiveness heals--and that even those that don’t feel any shame for past actions might gain from a public acknowledgment of the past transgressions.

Yes, the native americans were brutal when they finally attempted to defend their lands--but their actions do not somehow excuse the continuous assault by the people of the United States to exterminate the native americans.

During World War II, Germany visited attrocities on its citizens and those of other countries. Many times people were put in a position of doing something horrible to one group (i.e., Jews) in order to prevent something horrible from happening to themselves or someone they loved. Regardless of their choices during the war, after the war the government worked towards atonement. They built their new country on the rejection of bigotry. Meanwhile, many people had to come to terms with their own guilt. We can never know if someone repents--that is between them and their God. We can only, like Germany, make it easier to acknowledge the communal transgressions and try to make it easier for everyone to move on.

What have we done to attempt repairs for the atrocities of our government and its people on the native americans?

I think that there should be required curriculum in high school to study the painful past of the United States--including treatment of native americans and the Jim Crow south. It would go a long way toward understanding hard feelings passed down through generations, and might enlighten a few “kids of bigots.”

I like the idea of blogging the truth, but I don’t want to see the site run into political problems which hinder discussion.

I don’t really know what to say, here…

In the meantime, see my blog post about the Dakota protests of weekend Sesqui events.

On that note, it’s hard for me to rally behind the current war in Iraq, especially since Al Qadea wasn’t in Iraq at the launch of our war.

William-- a governor apology is a great idea. However, I’ve learned an apology, which is an admission of guilt, isn’t regularly done in our society.

Anyway, I’m excited about nativeamericanminn150.org. I think it’ll be tough to generate engaging content, rather than content that offends, is boring, or is not rooted in fact. It’s a controversial topic and I hope the site captures viewers and gets them to return…

I’m sure that ‘s part of it. But as Holly noted with Abu Ghraib, I think there’s another dynamic we layer on top of that: There’s a part of us that doesn’t like to kill people or remove them from their land. If we’re ordered to do so, there’s a defense mechanism that kicks in. We begin to have contempt for those we persecute; this was observed among Nazi guards. Why do human beings do that?

A friend of mine tells a story to illustrate how we resolve cognative dissonance: His daughter goes to visit her grandparents, who she loves dearly. The young daughter also loves stuffed animals, teddy bears and bunny rabbits. The grandparents live on a farm. After spending some time outside with grandpa, she goes in to help grandma in the kitchen. After a while, she hears a gunshot. She looks out, and grandpa has shot a rabbit (he likes rabbit stew).

How should the girl resolve her cognitive dissonance? Should she hate the grandfather for shooting the cute bunny, who is dead (it would not help the bunny).

Without anything like this kind of explicit reflection, the little girl quickly concludes: “That mean bunny. It must have been a mean bunny.” Now grandpa can be her hero, and there’s no need to deal with the country-kid issues of hunting and animal slaughter.

So yes, if the skin color, physical and cultural features are more “other,” we may be more inclined to fear or distrust a certain individual or group.

But like the little girl demonizing the bunny to save Grandpa, we may tend to demonize (even after the war is over) those former enemies we defeated, and/or whose land we’ve taken. Or to demonize “those black kids with their rap music” — “they’re not like us”; they seem to be trying pretty hard NOT to be like us…). If some part of our minds holds on to the idea that they may be “part savage,” then we don’t have to feel too guilty about the slave ships and all those years of slavery.

Must be a mean bunny.

On NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” the topic today was race, but the LA guests emphasized that we have to deal with racism on a person-to-person basis. There may be some truth in that, but it’s very insular, very go-it-alone, the cowboy-individualist approach (very American).

Maybe, instead, the people we need to welcome into any discussion of race and genocide is a bunch of kind-hearted Hindus who believe in reincarnation: Maybe, in a past life, we worked on a slave ship, or were slave-traders, or slave-owners. Maybe we rounded up Cherokee and led them on their forced march to Oklahoma along the trail of tears, or guarded Dakota at Ft. Snelling, or were in the crowd of spectators yelling hateful slurs at the hanging in Mankato. Maybe in this life, we have the chance to repair some of the damage we did in our past lives.

(I s’pose the Judeo/Christian version is about the sins of the parents being passed down to the 10th generation, or the like… but it’s not as clear who is responsible to fix the curse as in the Hindu faith….)

Holly, the link was from a prominent news story at the top all last week. Now it’s been moved to one of the right sidebar boxes, 4th box down.