Rightful and Righteous Speaker
The focus on the spectacle offered by the permanent election campaign was cheap thrills. What a shame we heard so little from Debbie Haaland. But she stands for America's very dark past.
When I was in college studying history, I took a course in “US history from 1865 to 1914".” In the 7th week, the professor hadn’t yet mentioned the bison in the room: What the hell happened to all those Natives during that period?
I had read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee and other histories a few years prior and was always flabbergasted that this pretty obvious genocide perpetrated by the US government with the help of many upstanding Americans seeking riches to steal, was staunchly ignored by my contemporaries. Just a few days ago, the BBC had a story on one aspect: How we starved the Indians off of the land. Consciously, with Puritanical efficiency and self-righteousness, all very much in the Capitalist spirit of things.
Ironically, when I arrived back in the USA after a youth spent in Europe, the Holocaust was the big thing thanks to a miniseries by the same name. Suddenly everyone was an expert on gas chambers and crematoria, but few seemed to know anything beyond that, the horrid images were so riveting, so revolting, why bother slog through the history of anti-Semitism? And being a mini-series, the information just came and went like another Second Avenue bus, and all that remained was a sense of “How horrible the Germans were.” This was replaced by Roots (I think this is the sequence), after which everyone you met would offer a confusing recitation of their ancestral make-up and all the “blood” they had flowing in their arteries, without the exotic languages of course. It was embarrassing, and to a certain extent still is.
Anyway, the inhumane, planned and executed crushing of Native life in this oh-so-Christian country, which is still mostly ignored, was not even a footnote in the prof’s maudlin orations about the Civil War. In fact, we were still grinding away at it about seven weeks into the course, because said professor had devoted his lucubration to that event and had even authored a number of books on the subject. It was one of those lectures with 120 kids, so there was no time or space for any Q&A sessions.
But it was frustrating. So, in a fit of youthful pique, I put in a request to leave the course, which the dean accepted without a word. The price to pay was that at some future date, I’d have to do an extra credit.
So when the Biden administration chose Debbie Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna of New Mexico, for Secretary of the Interior, I was literally moved to tears. Finally a person from the very land once invaded, with the soul of the land, and a very different person from us Europeans, would be taking care of — dammit all — the land that was rightfully hers and that we brutally invaded and still do not respect. Much in the way spoiled kids don’t respect the environment.. In her speeches since, I have found no bitterness, only a deep sense of caring.
Then, for four years, the media spent much of its energy and coin flinging all the cheap, vulgar, unsavory, dishonest, and frankly repulsive verbal and personal crap by some fifth-rate conman into our faces. We even know the shape of his junk and his somewhat selfish attitude towards making whoopee.
Why is it that we have to wait for Michael Kosta, a Daily Show comedian, to interview Debbie Haaland, who will soon be relinquishing her position to a man with strictly no genuine love of land? Doug Burgum’s seems to look at land the way J. Epstein looked at you girls.
Why have we heard nothing really from Haarland? Maybe it’s because she is not spectacular. Because she is not “spectacular.” Trump’s penis was, apparently, far more interesting.
The interview with Debbie Haaland is below. But just a note: When Kosta asks her about her philosophy, she answers gracefully. I would advise anyone with serious interest in history to read The Dawn of Everything by Graeber (who is dead) and Wengrow. Their research suggests that we owe the Native Americans a great deal more than previously thought… Like good Europeans, some philosophers in the 18th century seemed to have omitted referencing some of the sources of their ideas from the New World…