A history moment
Sitting in the Duwamish Longhouse last night with my 8 year old and watching a film about the first peoples of the Northwest and the white settlers that pushed them out, and then listening today to a talk about the "Tea Party" movement and recent elections, struck me powerfully at the parallels. We saw first how the Denny's and other families arrived in the northwest and barely survived their first years here if they had not had the help of the indigenous peoples who taught them where to live where the weather was mildest, what to grow, how to adapt. Then a few years later as they whites began squeezing them out, a few men with conscience tried to create a reservation for the Duwamish in the Renton area. And then those same men, the Denny's and other families who had been helped so greatly by the native peoples only a few years before, protested mightily against the idea, that "the area could not support it". One of their excuses was that "we already take care of these people ourselves, they work for us....". Oh yes, they took care of them so well, so well that the Duwamish were almost extinct. I heard these words echoed this am by a caller who complained that "Obamacare" would "bankrupt our country" and that "this need can be fulfilled in other ways by local services". Oh yes, if you are white, or if you go their church, perhaps. Once again, history and ignorance just repeats itself.