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August 16, 2006
clearcut stereotypes
It just dawned on me that I've never pissed off Native Americans or Australian Aborigines in this space. Next!
My favorite means of travel is the road trip. One of the road trips I'm considering undertaking is enormous: circumnavigating Australia. If not circumnavigating, then at least criss-crossing the continent. Toward that end, I'm reading a book called Driving Tours: Australia. I read this passage yesterday:
Land to Aboriginal people is not something to be owned, but an integral part of life which is to be deeply respected and cared for. Europeans understood nothing of this.It struck me that this is how every native people are characterized, regardless of continent. Not that colonial Europeans weren't rapists, and not that it's even untrue, but what are the odds that the natives in every continent but Europe uniformly walked barefoot in the grass, chewing granola and holding hands with Mother Nature? Weren't any indigenous peoples complete fuckers?
The book's saintly description could easily have been written about Native Americans, of course. That's what first struck me. And then I set down my book and drove into town, past the Indian casino. (A note for international readers: Native Americans still call themselves "Indians" when they're marketing themselves.) And I saw that in a single day, they'd clear-cut hundreds of beautifully forested acres abutting Metamuville Road. It looks like photos of Nagasaki circa August 1945.
Nauseous, I stopped at the reservation to ask what the devastation was about. "That's our new trailer park," a Casino-Owning American replied.
"Would it have killed you to have left, like, a tree?"
The Clearcutting American shrugged. "That's progress."
Maybe Native Americans walked with nature before Europeans got here. Maybe they learned about "progress" from Europeans. Maybe the white man forced them into an economic corner where they had to open casinos and devastate the environment. I'll grant all that. But the saintly, popular stereotype? Forfeited. To me, it's as dead as old growth timber.
posted by john at 7:53 AM • permalink