Posted on 06/21/2005 12:32:45 PM PDT by rface
Dear Editor of the Tribune:
The Columbia Board of Adjustment has approved the erection of a 30-foot-tall cross on West Broadway. The argument for its approval was that it would present no health, safety or welfare problems. In other words, it would do no harm.
Do no harm? The giant cross will remind me that my father, a full-blood Choctaw, was abducted from his family at the age of 4 by the state and forced to go to "mission school" so he could be turned into a "good Christian."
Do no harm? It will remind me of every time I have been called "savage" or "soulless heathen" by "good Christians."
Do no harm? It will remind me of the stories my grandmother told me about family members beaten and abused at the hands of "good Christians." I wonder if the city would be as accommodating were I to request the construction of a 30-foot medicine wheel. However, the question is moot. It is not the Indian way to shove our beliefs into the face of others.
Ah, if only Christians were as sensitive.
Debbie Johnson
Columbia, Missouri (address deleted, but available at link)
My wife is over half native American, including 1/8 of the baddest-assed Chiricahua Apache going.
And she loves to decorate with rustic crosses.
It will remind me of the fact that my great-great-great-great-great-great-great . . . grandfather in Connaught was fooled by the monks into giving up nature-worship and losing his chance at copulating with beasts during Samhain, and the fact that my great-great-great-great-great-great-great . . . grandfather in Swabia never got to enjoy being a slaveboy for a lascivious Roman because the local Christians intimidated everyone to adopt their religion.
I drive past corrals all week. Many of them have jackasses standing in them. I don't let it bother me. You just have to remember those immortal words of Rodney King. "Ca...Ca...Can't we all just get along?" LOL
Translation: We were conquered and will now pretend our surrender was a deliberate act to display our phenomenal superiority as an enlightened race.
Nothing like a whiff of intolerance in the morning!
LOL!
Yep. I wouldn't want to be the person who tries to attack her. If they did manage to remove our dog's jaws from around their neck first (Malamute mix that can jump six feet in the air), they'd find themselves fileted with one of many knives I've given her. And don't even ask about her 'hawk...
So reminding someone of something you do not want to be reminded of is 'harm'?
Cry me a river (then give me a break).
"maybe she should get her a greyhound ticket to a place more sympathetic to her views, like Beijing."
Or perhaps somewhere in Iran.
If people always look for the bad in things, they will never see the good.
I don't agree that the Indians got screwed over. They attacked first, attacked repeatedly and eventually lost.
Read the Rogers' Rangers story and their discovery of hundreds of scalps of women, children and male farmers.
Haverhill, Deerfield, etc.
At the beginning it was a pitched war with the French and British involved. However, towards the end, they also had treaty after treaty negated. Until they were pushed onto the most marginal of land.
A chief at the turn of the last century said it well - when asked if he had any advice for the Great White Father in Washington, he said "watch your immigration laws."
Read the Rogers' Rangers story and their discovery of hundreds of scalps of women, children and male farmers. Haverhill, Deerfield, etc.
I had an ancestor at the Deerfield Massacre, so I don't need to be informed of that history.
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