By WILLIAM LEDFORD
Congratulations to our new Principal Chief Patrick Lambert. Patrick replaces our outgoing PC Michel Hicks who reigned for 12 years. The last that I heard we were $650 million bucks in debt. Patrick, dude, you wanted this, now you got it. An interesting side note to all of this, it seems that incoming Chief Lambert and outgoing Chief Hicks simply traded jobs. Now its ex-Chief Hicks turn to make a quarter million dollars per year.
President Obama officially renamed Mt. McKinley, it is now again Denali, reverting to the name that Native people have been calling their sacred mountain for thousands of years, you know, before there was anyone but Native people here. The Ohio congressional delegation is furious at the action even though McKinley, who hailed from Ohio, never visited the area, ever, and the name was suggested by a random gold seeker. Maybe they should name a peak in Ohio after McKinley. All this uproar kinda reminds me of the Arizona GOP bunch that screamed and wailed when former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano pushed to rename Squaw Peak to Piestewa Peak in honor of Specialist Lori Piestewa, a Hopi Native killed in Iraq. Those pesky Republicans, they love their degrading names for Native people. Sorry, I forgot that they’re honoring Native people with those names.
‘Tis the season again. National election time. Actually that’s next year, but our internet, airwaves and printed media are already being flooded nearly to saturation by pundits and speculators. Mud pies and dirt clods are already being flung at each other, at President Obama (natch), at Megyn Kelly of Fox News, at Univision and at anyone unlucky enough to be standing in the general area. I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings folks, but it’s only gonna get worse.
Recap: Donald Trump once led the conservative pack by a commanding margin, now, not so much. Yes, it is a pack and I’ve now lost count of how many are in the pack even though a few have dropped out. I made a comment previously that the bunch of them reminds me of a circus clown car. You open the door and they start coming out and they never stop. Unsurprisingly, they all look the same, sound the same, even the lone female in the horde…err…pack.
Trump has an early lead, he tallies 22 percent of polled prospective right-wing voters, but that’s miniscule when compared to the numbers polled that would not vote for him. He has shown that there are people out there that like the way he thinks because he’s arrogant, rude, outspoken, condescending towards females, blatantly racist and he has supporters that love him because they think the way he does. They don’t realize that he gets away with his behavior because he’s rich. Some people, his people, believe he has a chance but c’mon…do the math, 78 percent of the GOP voters and 100 percent of Democrats despise him.
Oh, the GOP’d come out in droves to vote for him if he ends up as the Republican choice, but they pray fervently that someone else gets the nomination. Even Ben Carson. Carson, a blackskin, is not the usual choice of a GOP favorite son but seems to be doing very well in GOP straw polls. He speaks contrary to the normal, usual blackskin outlook of America. He’s the anti-Obama. He’s the cookie with the creamy, white center.
It’s slightly different on the Democrat side. Hillary Clinton leads the liberal and moderate side of the Democrat Party. She has a well-oiled political campaign machine, but she scares the Republicans so badly that they’ll do anything to smear her, email non-scandal, dredging up past associations, even holding perpetual Benghazi investigations, six now I believe, all concluding that she did nothing wrong, continuing until they get a favorable outcome. These investigations were conducted by Republican chairmen and they had to admit nothing was out of order. So…why so serious? It doesn’t help that she refuses to kiss butt, she’s arrogant, condescending, outspoken and she does things her way. Funny, if a male did what she does he would be a…more polite Donald Trump…with better hair. People seem to be so afraid of a woman President they’d even consider the other choices…Bernie Sanders and probably Joe Biden, and even possibly Al Gore.
I saw that some sculptor had “visions in stone of Native American faces” and was parading around a statue to commemorate that dark event in our history, the Cherokee Death March. Oh, people mostly still call it the Trail Of Tears, but I’m just so sick of the romantic views people have when using that innocuous term. Call it what it was. A death march. The bare truth is, we lost so many of our old people and most of our children and babies when we were forced from our homeland that it was stated that we had lost our past and our future. People look at the horrible crimes, the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda with revulsion but talk about the Cherokee Death March with such sweet terms as “Transformation through Forgiveness”. Really? Who forgives who? Sorry, as long as Andrew Jackson is still on the $20 bill and our homeland is situated in a North Carolina county named after this sociopath, I ain’t too keen on forgiving.
OK, that’s all I got this time, I’ll leave ya with a Yogi Berra (RIP) quote and I’ll see ya in the funny papers. “Baseball is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical”. The Steelers proved that last Thursday. Go Green Bay!
Ledford is an EBCI tribal member currently living in Albuquerque, NM.
