The Natives are PISSED.

It seems appropriate to start out any exploration on the American dream with the natives of said country, so since I'm a literalist, we're going to start with my friend Roger, who is a Native American.

I lied about two and a half things in that sentence. 1) The Roger in question is not actually my friend. We've met on enough social occasions to be called thus, but to tell you the truth, we're not all that fond of each other; 2) His name isn't Roger either, but we covered that in my welcome post; and the other 1/2 has to do with the fact that the professor of my aforementioned course on the American dream came up with the idea of covering Native Americans first, not me.

Now that we've gotten that disclaimer out of the way, here are the things you need to know about Roger:

1) He prefers to be called an Indian, not a Native American;
2) He was one of the foremost members of the American Indian Movement in the seventies;
3) He thinks the American dream is bullshit.

The easiest of these to explain is the first one. As Roger explains it, Columbus wrote in his journals of Indio, not Indians. According to Roger, the name for the native tribes Columbus and his men stumbled upon came not from his mistaken theory that they had somehow landed in the West Indies, but from the Spanish term Indio - or, "of God," the idea being that Columbus was so impressed by these tribes that he deified them in his writing. I, of course, have no way of verifying this assertion, and nor does Roger. But that's not the point. The point is that, in Roger's mind, he would rather change history to suit his purposes than accept a politically correct term that he views as a condescension from a race he despises. And he does indeed despise them, the "them" in question being white Americans. He will tell you this openly, being the most refreshingly open racist I have ever had the curiosity to meet.

The thing is though, you can't really blame him. The wounds inflicted on Roger and his people from a surprisingly large swath of the aforementioned race are probably more fresh than the wounds on any other race in recent history. In his case, the wounds have become infected and gangrenous, to the point they have embittered him towards anything remotely related to what inflicted this wound on him in the first place: the white man.

Which brings us to number two. Roger was involved in many standoffs between the Indian movement and the American government in the seventies. It was a time, to hear those that were there tell it, of a sort of chaotic hope for revolution; the organized civil rights movements of the sixties had given way with the assassination of Reverend King to rowdy, violent demands for change. It was the time of the Black Panthers, and the time of AIM - the American Indian Movement. Roger was there when they took Alcatraz, and he was there when they raided the headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, taking what documents they could use and burning those they could not. He was also there for the standoff at Wounded Knee.

They were coming off a long series of purported victories, and hope was running heedless and high. Things in the Oglala Lakota town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota were dismally bad, due to the goons elected by the BIA to keep the peace, who instead took advantage of its people. The Tribal Council met with and heard from both OSCRO (Oglala Sioux Civil Right Organization) and selected members from AIM (including Roger, among others) as to what to do about the problem at Pine Ridge. To hear Roger tell it, the men were all but bullied by the women of the Oglala tribe into taking a stand.

Take a stand they did. They took over Wounded Knee, and the next seventy-one days were spent in a stand-off with the BIA. Unfortunately, it devolved into violence as two Indian men were killed as well as a BIA officer. At the end of the stand-off, they surrendered willingly, believing they would be protected from any reprisals and that the issues raised would be investigated as promised by the government. This never happened, and on May 5th some sixty people were arrested, though none were ever convicted. Roger was one of them.

Since then, not much has changed for Roger's people except for reparations in the form of Indian casinos. For him, this is not nearly enough. He lives by the treaty of the first Wounded Knee Massacre, when his people were promised sovereignty over their land (South Dakota), and it was never delivered, and he is still waiting for that its delivery.

It should be obvious by now why Roger believes the American dream is bullshit. In fact, he blames it for the bad things that have happened to his people. The American dream, to him, is opportunism, and it is this opportunism that took advantage of his people. Roger would say that the American dream belongs to the white man. His dream is a dream of the past.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out if the problem here is Roger not adapting to the American dream, or the American dream not adapting to Roger. Many Native Americans have managed to live out their own "American dreams" perfectly happily - moving off the reservation, getting jobs, buying houses, starting families. But others (most certainly Roger) would argue that by doing so, they are abandoning a majour tenent of their culture, which is the communal aspect of reservation (formerly tribal) living.

Roger is not suffering, per se. There are people who are much worse off than he, who has three houses in Arizona, California, and South Dakota. He gets on well, but it's likely you will still see him around wearing long hair and a t-shirt that says "Fuck Nixon." To him, Nixon represents his image of the white man: manipulative, condescending, or to put it more simply, "full of shit." His grudge against Nixon extends to the entire American dream, and I can't imagine he is the only one to have ever held a grudge against such a sacred entity. For everyone who has accomplished their own American dream, it seems there is another who has been screwed over by it, and no matter where you look it seems there is always dissatisfaction. At least that's how it looks from the rez, and how it looks to Roger.