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  • From: bobf <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Pima Indians (Arizona)& Barack Obama - The 'new' Great White Father
  • Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:53:11 -0800 (PST)

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








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