Tribalism, Your Kidding Right?

I was watching TV some time back and the most unusual commercial came on, it was directed at Native American youth. The comercial had one young Native American after another talking about how great things will be "If I stay on the res" (reservation). I thought about this. I am partly of Native American descent my self. I remember how my father talked endlessly about his Native heritage and how his father was a "full blood" (I guess that means that the rest of his physiology was Native American to.) My father and mother married in there 40's, I'm gen x so my parents should have been boomers but they were a couple from the "Greatest Generation" making a new start in there forty's.

My paternal grand father raised my father the way he was raised on the reservations of Missouri and Oklahoma apparently, that aria was a kind of Auschwitz for Native Americans back in the 1800's a bunch of them were dumped there to get them out of the way, or kill them I suppose, if things worked out for the European Americans doing the dumping. I was raised in a series of old travel trailers parked along the road and in abandon gravel pits while my father worked on road construction or drew unemployment. There was no water, no electricity, no air-conditioning, some times we had heat from propane and usually a propane refrigerator

I'm not sure if they still live that way on the reservations but I have little doubt that some do. So what's the advantage to staying on a reservation? It's isolated from the rest of the world outside, often in an isolated rural aria. Of course employment opportunities are slim in rural arias as well as opportunities for education. Tribal societies are rife with superstition and backward ideology about gender roles. Women are hardly equal, oh people can make arguments about women being highly esteemed in there positions as bean cookers or head fry bread makers etc. but at the end of the day they are being segregated out and forced into a role for no better reason than some religious tradition.

The real reason these commercials are on the air, is not for the benefit of young Native Americans, it's to keep them on the reservation so they can keep up the dieing culture of their ancestors. If Europeans had never came to America these young people would have no decent medical care, no education, and a good chance of dieing in their 30's. Native American culture, like all tribal culture, is absolutely stone age in it's development. Native people had slavery, constant fighting with other tribes and methods of torture that are nothing less than legendary. And this crap is what people want to preserve?

If young Native Americans are leaving the reservation, it's because there are no opportunities there, they are trying to get out and decide for them selves what they want in life, who they are, and how they think, not by some story handed down from some one who couldn't read or write and thought the world rested on the back of a tortuous. If I want to study tribal beliefs, the place to do that is in a book or in a museum. What these young people have realized is that there is a world out there to be explored, they want internet access, they want modern medical care, they want to trade stocks, they want to see Paris and Tokyo, maybe discover some new technology , or write a famous screen play, the possibilities are endless. But that's out here, in the real world, not cooped up on some reservation, playing Indian so a bunch of European's don't have to live with there ancestors depressing , embarrassing , and very painful legacy of attempted genocide.

No one blames Native peoples for what there ancestors did because they were ignorant of modern sociology, philosophy, and technical knowledge. What you have to take into consideration, is that the Europeans of a hundred years ago were pretty ignorant them selves. They had slavery, women couldn't vote, there were any number of repulsive, and savage laws on the books back than. What was done to Native Americans was unspeakable in it's brutality, but the European Americans of a hundred years ago were little more than half starved savages them selves.

It's time to let the past rest and let every one partake of what the modern world has to offer. Together we can discover a whole new culture, a whole new way of life. We can wallow in the miseries of the past, or we can build a future, discover the secrets of biology, chemistry, and physics. We can build and design a better world with an improved and enlightened culture. We can stop disease, age, natural disasters, and make our homes in the very stars.