John Wayne and New Orleans Indians

Why Do They Hate You?

John Wayne and New Orleans Indians

By ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ

"The Cavalry is coming!" announced a reporter on the Fox News Channel when finally National Guardsmen trooped into downtown New Orleans on the fourth day of apocalypse. I said to myself, "There they go again, racist Fox News."

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New Orleans became "Indian Country," the military term for enemy territory. "This place is going to look like Little Somalia," Brigadier General Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard's Joint Task Force told Army Times, for an article published September 2, 2005. "We're going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control." The Army Times report could have been about Baghdad in stating: "While some fight the insurgency in the city, others carry on with rescue and evacuation operations."

For days I have been thinking of Sitting Bull's observation that the United States knows how to make everything, but doesn't know how to distribute it. He was being generous in attributing the lack of equitable distribution of goods to benign ignorance rather than to design. But, he knew better. Once in Chicago while performing with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West, Sitting Bull spoke through his translator to the huge crowd of ragged white men, women, and barefoot children: "I know why your government hates me. I am their enemy. But why do they hate you?" The U.S. Cavalry, the 7th to be exact, Custer's old regiment, massacred Sitting Bull's unarmed, starving people in December 1890 at Wounded Knee, a few days after Sitting Bull himself had been shot and killed by the federal Indian police.

The cavalry sent into the wild west of New Orleans had orders to pen in the starving black population that had been abandoned in order to protect property. It is not a sad or shameful day for the United States; it is a typical day in the United States for the poor, magnified.

http://www.counterpunch.org/dunbar09072005.html