Wallowing in Self-Pity

By Jim Casto, Kanoheda Aniyvweya (Native American News),
Vol. 03, no. 028, 08 July 1995

If we're talking about the French and Indian Wars, they _were_ about land. The British and the French were fighting over the Indian's land. (As well as a few other wars going on in Europe and merely extending into the colonies.) The land is called the Ohio River Valley. That kinda put the Indians between a hard place and a rock. If you're stuck in the middle of a war, it's kind of a human tendency to choose sides particularly when the two opponents are fighting over something that belongs to neither of them, but belongs to you.

Maybe we also need to bring up here that it was the colonists (the American patriots) that were violating the Proclamation Line of 1763 signed by their (at that time still the legal government authority) government and that's why many Indians joined the British in defense of their homelands during the American Revolution.

BTW, contrary to the popular patriotic, nationalist history that has been told in the past, the American Revolution wasn't _just_ about tea and taxes. The Indians and their _land_ were one of the MAJOR disputes brewing during the fifty years or so prior to the Revolution.

If you want a truer picture of history than what you learned in school and the movies, you might locate a series of books by Francis Jennings. The basic titles are:

The Invasion of America, The Empire of Fortune, and The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire. The are basically a set.

The last one was written in 1984. The first one was written in 1975. Francis Jennings was the director of the Newberry Library Center for the History of the American Indian and I believe is still teaching at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA.

As for the crossing the land bridge theory... Some of us don't deny that there was encroachment by invaders over a land bridge. The Native Americans were _already here_, however, and failed to keep the invaders out.

As for disturbing the habitat... Here's an interesting point that was brought up in my Columbia River class last night: The Indians had a commercialized (for barter and trade purposes) fishing industry on the Columbia River for seven _thousand_ years. There was no chance that the salmon would be wiped out. The white man came in and in the one hundred twenty years between 1860 and 1980, the salmon had almost disappeared.

Uh... In this part of the country it's not the Indians that are wallowing in self-pity or whining and moaning... It's the farmer, the cattleman, the miner, and the timberman as they see all their big bucks flowing down the Columbia River.

Only when the last tree has been felled,
The last river poisoned,
The last fish caught,
Will you recognize that you can't eat money.
      -Cree-