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Pima Indians (Arizona)& Barack Obama -  The 'new' Great White Father

Evidently , President Elect Obama holds honor and hope within many of this 
country's Indians.  I don't really understand it, but it seems apparent.

This article from today's NYT is about one of our local tribes.  The Pimas.  
It isn't that often that major media pays a lot of interest to the thoughts 
of Indians, I thought it was a worthwhile article.........



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

January 14, 2009, 10:00 pm 

Return of the Natives

SALT RIVER INDIAN RESERVATION, Ariz. — Nearly 50 years ago, a Pima native 
took a Greyhound bus from this sun-roasted redoubt of Indian land to the 
winter chill of Washington, D.C.,to witness the first day of a young American 
president.

“When he came home, my father was so excited because John Kennedy stood up 
for him when he walked by him in the parade,” said Diane Enos. “The president 
stood up for an Indian! He couldn’t stop talking about that.”

Next week, Diane Enos will make the same trip, along with hundreds of other 
American Indians who hope that Barack Obama’s inauguration will bring the 
wind of possiblity to Indian Country.

In less than a week’s time, the Great White Father will be black. Amidst the 
euphoria and stirring of fresh ideas, there remains some suspicion.

“He’s still a politician and I’m still an Indian,” said Sherman Alexie, the 
National Book Award-winning writer, a Spokane and Coeur d’Alene native.

“They all look like treaty-makers to me,” said Alexie, paraphrasing the 
native musician, John Trudell. “I guess that’s the puzzling and I suppose 
lovely thing about Indians’ love of Obama. Many have suspended their natural 
suspicion of politicians for him.”

So often, they are invisible, these first Americans, or frozen in iconic 
images of the past. We see them in Curtis prints and Remington poses, or hear 
something attributed to them in New Age spiritual circles. Cool, Indians.

And then a new casino opens off the interstate or a pottery exhibit is 
unveiled, and we realize: ah yes, they’re with us still.

With Obama’s rise, Indians have allowed themselves to dream — some, even to 
fall in love. He was adopted into an Indian family in Montana last May, given 
the name “Barack Black Eagle” by the Crow Nation.

When asked about immigration concerns in New Mexico, Obama pointed to a 
handful of elderly natives in the front row of a high school gym.

“He said, ‘The only real native people in this country are sitting right in 
front of me,’ ” recalled Joe Garcia, who is president of the National 
Congress of American Indians. “You should have heard the applause.”

The epic struggle for natives has been to avoid getting washed away by the 
flood of dominant culture, where Indians make up less than 2 percent of more 
than 300 million Americans.

That, and the physical toll that losing this big land has taken on them. 
Indians die younger than most other Americans, suffer from higher rates of 
suicide, alcoholism, debilitating dietary problems.

The Pimas, who hold to this 52,000-acre homeland amidst the predatory sprawl 
of 4.2 million people here in the Phoenix metro area, have one of the world’s 
highest rates of type 2 diabetes — a consequence of the rough adjustment from 
their world to one handed down by Europeans.

Presidents come and go. They promise to uphold treaty rights and appoint 
somebody to oversee Indian affairs who understands that history did not end 
when Custer fell to his hubris. It’s ho-hum, usually, with a mournful shrug 
on the reservations. 

But on the most recent Election Day, on the Navajo Rez, which spills into 
three states and is the size of West Virginia, high school kids held up Obama 
signs at intersections in the town of Window Rock, and cheered themselves 
hoarse as returns came in.

“I feel very elated,” said Joe Shirley, Jr., president of the Navajo Nation. 
“All of Navajo Country came out strong for Obama.”

Shirley says nearly half of Navajo families heat their homes with wood they 
cut themselves, drink water hauled into their homes in barrels and light 
their rooms with kerosene lamps.

Talk about stimulus: a billion dollars, one-seven-hundredth of what taxpayers 
are giving the financial institutions that caused the Crash of 2008, could 
bring much of Navajo land into the modern age, Shirley said. 

But beyond the desire for urgent, fundamental infrastructure help, Indians 
look to Obama as a powerful narrative. People who were subjugated, with 
near-genocidal brutality, feel a kinship with people who were first brought 
here in chains, even though Obama is an immigrant’s son.

“There’s a bond there,” said Shirley. “Birds of a feather flock together. We 
try to teach that there are no impossibilities to Navajo people. His election 
speaks to the young especially.”

Cynicism is the poison of so many young people. In Indian Country, where 
despair is often woven into the landscape, it takes hold even earlier.

So when Diane Enos, who is president of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian 
Community, arrives in the festive capital next week she will have a teenage 
tribal leader with her.

“Obama’s life has been a journey to find identity,” she said. “That’s the 
Indian stuggle. And it starts with children.”

On Inauguration Day, the capital will host the likes of Ludacris and Chaka 
Khan, corporate titans and political giants, and balls too numerous to count. 

Among the sea of Americans ushering in the president will be a small 
contingent of people who have clung to this continent longer than any other. 
And for once — if only for a January moment — they will feel like they belong.

http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/return-of-the-natives/?hp