"BIA -- Bossing Indians Around"

This is the funniest powwow shirt I've seen so far, including the ones that say "Fighting Terrorism - since 1492," "White Men Can't Dance," and "My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys."

I suspect this shirt is from our Makah friends in Neah Bay (disclaimer: but not an official council t-shirt). There's nothing funnier - and more ghastly - than the Truth. The most gut-tearing comedy is rooted in the most serious trauma.

The shirt flew out the rummage sale door. I think it was a Makah guy took it. We're just lucky these people have a huge sense of humor. Then again, they've needed one. The rest of the world is only finding out what we're really like.

All us late-comers on the American continents had better hope all these people don't start drumming for Holocaust Memorials. Can you imagine one for every single nation that we started systematically wiping out, from the time we got here? Including the ones we succeeded against - that is, the people we drove into extinction AS peoples. That's a lot of tribes to be building expensive mea culpa for. Think of memorials as big as the ones Berlin put up, but to the Huron, Kiowa and the Quilleute. The latter people had a reconciliation feast with Forks, but that doesn't make the past go away. You think they'll let us get away with 40 acres and a mule?

Is anybody out there with the computing chops - and the obsessive gene -- for counting up how many people we and our ancestors drove off their land, killed, infected, neglected, and otherwise persecuted by government policy? And multiplying that by monies owed? In terms of modern currencies? Because nobody's going for wampum, today.

That Manhattan-for-beads sale? Probably just a tribe renting out hunting-rights for the month. Or, considering the tiny price, only a passing hunting party subletting to what they perceived as another one. Subletting may start very early in New York. No way did the Manahattoes consider being driven off their livelihood grounds for a handful of beads, no matter how hard it was to make beads.

If the Israelis can come back and kick other people off their tribal and national lands, then there's no statute of limitations for restitution after national genocide and land theft. No matter who did it. Maybe we're not the Romans who burnt the temple, but we're doing deals in the skyscrapers where other people fed themselves - by mostly sustainable methods -- from buffalo, salmon, deer and corn.

We thought the bailout would be expensive. Pray that all our First Here friends want to do is build a nice, clean, art-supporting casino next door. Since we may be losing the ability to pay them back anyway, they might as well feed us the roulette-table version of whiskey and use it to buy up the land we lied and cheated to get, and send us back where we came from. Homeland security for white people means Sweden. Or thereabouts. Our own Trail of Tears, but in a boat.

Maybe our squaws can get training for running the blackjack tables?