DEAR EDITOR:
I really appreciated the letter from Denise Pieratos criticizing
Robert Mitchell’s unfair and untimely poke at the native peoples of
California in a recent article.
DEAR EDITOR:
I really appreciated the letter from Denise Pieratos criticizing Robert Mitchell’s unfair and untimely poke at the native peoples of California in a recent article. It is rare that anyone has the courage to depart from the anti-Indian attitude popular in today’s politics.
I couldn’t help reflecting that when I first came to this state, these folks Mitchell treats like ROBBER BARONS would have been hard-pressed to chip in and buy a car together, let alone an election. People were nowhere NEAR as concerned when so many of them were starving just a few short years ago. By the way, NO PROBLEM with ARNOLD SCHWARTZENHEIMER buying an election is there? THAT’S different!
In the midst of this resurgence of anti-Indian sentiment one thing is for sure: Euro-Californians like their Indians POOR and invisible. Indeed, before this casino business emerged, MOST Californians insisted that the Natives were extinct! But even so, there is something just infuriating about the very idea of a rich American Indian to some people.
As a commentator it is Mitchell’s DUTY to educate himself on the REAL history of Indian/European relations in California. He should start by reading two books: “The Destruction of California Indians” by Robert F. Heizer and “When the Great Spirit Died” by William B. Secrest.
He may be surprised to learn that California Natives were the virtual and actual slaves of the first the Spanish and then the Americans. He may be SHOCKED to learn that they were regularly hunted like deer by American civilians. He’ll read dozens of accounts where helpless non-violent peoples were murdered and mutilated for sport (honestly, people would pack picnic lunches and go out on scalp-hunting day-trips.)
He’ll learn that between 1850 and 1864 nearly any free Indian could be PURCHASED outright by filing a $50 fee with a court without his or his tribe’s permission. He’ll learn that bounties were paid for people’s scalps. He’ll learn that one of the more lucrative ventures people engaged in was the sale of women and children, girls and boys, often as young as nine to serve as sex slaves to miners.
He’ll learn that people made chair seats, tobacco pouches and household items out of the skin, bones and body parts of native people. Cynthia Walker once casually and cold-heartedly criticized a history book intended to reveal truths similar to these as “revisionist.” She derided its content saying “some people were mean to some Indians.”
But all that aside, casino revenues are changing one of the most unfair and unbalanced economic nightmares ever perpetrated on a people. California Natives support each other as well as other tribal nations throughout the U.S. They are currently the driving force behind a renaissance in Native-American cultural awareness, language, music, art, business and industry. What’s more they are decent, caring and generous people struggling to maintain an identity ripped from them for no just cause.
I ask Robert Mitchell not to plow into this issue mindlessly, as so many others have.
Bill C. Jones, Gilroy
Submitted Thursday, Nov. 6 to ed****@****ic.com
