excellent op-ed from Melvin Martin
runningwolf
Melvin Martin: Tiger's philandering and Indian Country
Monday, December 21, 2009
Filed Under: Opinion
Last week several of the people who regularly respond to my op-eds
here at Indianz.com brought this disturbing tirade by one of Tiger
Woods "alleged" mistresses, Jaimee Grubbs, to my attention (as of this
writing Woods' "mistress count" is up to 14). I would confidently
venture to say that any Indian person who is proud of who they are and
proud of their people would be extremely outraged as was I:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid16157557001/bctid55060348001
or search for it on Radar.
Since March of 2009, I have had the exceptionally good fortune to be a
featured op-ed columnist here at Indianz.com, and since then I have
taken on anti-Indian racism at its worst, in its worst locales. My
basic interest in illuminating the scourge of anti-Indian sentiment
stems from my life as an American Indian person who has encountered
this particular form of hatred all over the country since the 1950s.
I would like to take this opportunity to selectively highlight the
more anti-Indian, stereotypical content of Ms. Grubbs' vicious
diatribe on a point-by-point basis to once again illustrate how our
own people (to include those dubiously claiming American Indian
ancestry) are often our worst enemies.
Ms. Grubbs, who recently went public with her almost two-year affair
with Tiger Woods, claims to have been raised on the Colville Indian
Reservation in Washington state. Whether she actually lived there long
enough to be considered "from there" is a matter of contention per her
statement on the video that [Indians]: "They get their free money,
they drink and that´s all that matters." To all of us who are actually
Indian this is perhaps the most commonly used stereotyped arrangement
of beliefs held by 100% of Indian haters everywhere.
"They get their free money,..." has been around in various
permutations since I was a kid growing up in Rapid City, South Dakota
in the early '50s. This is by far the most mythic assumption by the
majority of non-Indian America, that Indian people throughout the
country receive a "monthly check" for simply "being Indian." If this
were true, well then, where's my money? I'll be 57-years old in
February of 2010 and not once in all that time was I ever given one
red (no pun intended) cent by the federal government solely for
possessing Indian heritage. This particular falsehood is the most
damaging to Indians as it implies that we are indeed bred and born
with a strong aversion to work for a living - why should we want to
work at all when we get free money?
"they drink and that's all that matters..." is to be found in the
KKK's member guide to hating the American Indian. Yes, Indian people
do suffer from alcoholism at rates far greater than other ethnic
groups and a lot of Indian people drink. But, we are most definitely
not defined by what essentially constitutes a disease that was foisted
upon us, a people who had never had a few thousand years to
biologically acclimate to alcohol. Factor in generations of Indians
who have been horribly victimized by all sorts of abuse by the
dominant culture and is it any wonder why so many of us seek escape by
way of alcohol? I'd like to point out here that in 1968 when the
Soviet Union invaded what was then the nation of Czechoslovakia, that
within a mere 24-hour time period, every bottle of alcoholic beverages
in that whole country had been either purchased, traded for or stolen
- by a citizenry under siege by an oppressive, murderous super-power.
Continuing with other gems from Ms. Grubbs' inarticulate rant, she
also said that she would never date "a Native American man." as "they
fought, they drank. They are very aggressive." Indian haters since
before the reign of Andrew Jackson have put forth this observation
about the behavior of Indian males to the extent that it was often
used as justification for our near extermination 'a la "the only good
Indian is a dead Indian." I am a "Native American man" who has not had
a genuine fight in close to twenty years and even then the fight
involved a group of heavily intoxicated white cowboys in a Northern
Plains hick town. I am a "Native American man" who chooses not to
drink as a matter of lifestyle, but more specifically because I simply
no longer desire to partake of what I feel is a form of culturally
lethal poison for all of us as Indian people. I am a "Native American
man" who channels my basic human aggression and aggressive impulses
towards combating the racism that has always initiated the aggression
in the first place.
Further along on the video, Ms. Grubbs also indicates that: "I like
white boys, well tan white boys," and then goes on to add, "I hate
long hair, Indians have long hair." Alright, Ms. Grubbs' physical
preferences in men are really of no major consequence to anyone but
herself, I mean who cares? But, I must take exception to her ignoramus-
founded assertion that "Indians have long hair." What she's actually
saying is that she hates Indians. Period. And I must note that these
days the vast majority of Indian guys across the age spectrum do not
have long hair as we tend to follow nationally directed social trends
(read fashion and style) in very much the same manner as do "white
boys."
As far as this Indian is concerned, Ms. Grubbs has had way more than
her fifteen minutes of fame and it is now time for her to retreat to
the hole from whence she came. The anti-Indian animosity that Ms.
Grubbs took to the world stage is, of course, of extreme offense to
those of us who have lived our entire lives as Indians in a society
that has not always treated us as first-class citizens. Many of us
have been indoctrinated to hate ourselves by a country that had to
demonize us to justify all that was done to us since 1492. The
question that I'd like to ask Ms. Grubbs, from the Colville Indian
Reservation, is this: Why must you ally and align yourself with the
very same forces that would like to bury you if they had but half a
chance?
Melvin Martin is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe of South
Dakota. He can be reached at pbr...@live.com.