Tex the Pontificator

In a more detailed discussion than my post below on American atrocities, Victor Davis Hanson calls for balance in viewing what American Indians were and are. He attacks several popular myths and then notes:

Moreover, reducing the European contact with American Indians to a therapeutic melodrama of good and evil ultimately dehumanizes both sides. Loading the Indian with our mythic obsessions does nothing, of course, to change the past, and actively distracts us from solving the very real problems that too many American Indians face today, none of whom are served by our Golden-Age daydreams. No Indian benefits from Ward Churchill’s fake Indian identity, one that worked because it traded on the myths that have been enshrined in university Indian studies programs. No Indian benefits from the NCAA’s attempt to punish schools with Indian mascots — an act of monumental hypocrisy, by the way, given that the NCAA is an organization making billions from black athletes admitted to universities they are unqualified for and can’t graduate from. No Indian benefits when business projects that could bring economic benefits to a region are stalled because they might offend some Indian religious belief that in many cases is very likely a modern invention.

Read the whole thing.

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