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| love one-another |
Recently there has been a wave of media attention on Indian
issues – casinos and blood quantum of course.
Starting with the Cherokee kicking the Freedmen off their roles and more
recently the small gaming tribes in California dis-enrolling members based on
lineage research and even DNA testing.
It has been sickening how biased the media has been due to their obvious
bent against Indian gaming. It seems
like no one has any clue how to even approach these highly complex issues,
mostly due to ignorance and laziness when it comes to understanding Indian
sovereignty and policy, so they just report the most egregious manifestations
of a long history of identity confusion and racism. As with most “newsworthy” issues, what is
debated is mostly irrelevant to the majority of those most affected. What is telling from these discussions is how
little people know about actual Indians, and what they do know is based purely
on stereotypes that persist as others are challenged, and that most people
still see Indians as a race of people – an ethnicity rather than as hundreds of
distinct in-tact identities.
