Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

That being said, I think there is also something to what cnoocy says above about the American relationship with Native stories. In romantic American mythology, there aren't real Indians, and they certainly don't exist now. There are historical romantic Indians, all in the past, all mixed together into one giant mishmash of romantic noble savage, culminating in the clusterfuck of Brother Eagle Sister Sky. When Debbie comes in to say "actually, we are real people, we are still here, we are still being hurt by the fact that in the very recent past our parents and grandparents had our hair cut and our families taken away and were beaten for practicing our religion or speaking our own language but we are the primary occupants of pretty much every county on the list of poorest counties in the United States because of this crap, so could you please stop romanticizing us as victims or girl warriors or speakers-to-bears or whatever without doing a little bit of research first", I think a lot of people get very upset. Because somehow we've pushed Chief Seattle into the same box of romantic historical figures we can draw from as Cúchulainn and Lancelot. Whereas the reasons you can't really do that to me are threefold: (1) Chief Seattle was real, and (2) part of very recent and very painful history, to (3) people who are still extremely marginalized in their own country (thus one of the differences between signing yourself Nambe Pueblo or Anglo-Celtic besides the community versus into individualistic stance of the cultures in question).