The PlowBoy Interview Rolling Thunder

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Other—although usually less horrid—atrocities were committed all over this country . . . and in many areas they occurred after the Indians had helped the newcomers! You know, when the Europeans started to flee the conditions in their, homelands, there was still room here for everybody . . . and the Indians said, "OK, you can share the land with us." Of course, in many settlements the Europeans were starving at first, so they gladly accepted the natives' help. But then, after they'd survived a first hard winter, they sometimes turned on their benefactors . . . and—in one form or another—the injustice is still going on today.

Our religion says that the land—all of Mother Earth—belongs to the Great Spirit, the Creator . . . and that humans are only its keepers, or "trustees", who are allowed to live on the soil and cultivate it. So we don't think we own the land, and we certainly don't believe that anybody else can own it, either. We say there's room for everyone, if we all share as brothers and sisters. But the white people's government decided that it could "take" the land from us, and that we could then be as signed to certain places to live.

The treaties that sent native Americans to specific reservations were supposed to be in effect for "as long as the grass grows, and the water flows" . . . and the boundaries of the areas were well laid out over a hundred years ago. Most of those reservations, by the way, are on land that's all but unsuitable for agriculture: Much of it is high, dry, and cold. At the time that the treaties were made, the U.S. didn't mind giving away such undesirable land . . . but now that coal and uranium have been discovered in some of those areas, it wants to take away what little territory we have left. The lawyers sent in by the federal government are trying to say the "eternal" agreements are no good anymore, and any Indian who tries to fight them is likely to end up in jail.

There are other ways in which native Americans are still being oppressed, too . . . many of which most white people aren't aware of. You know, there's a barrier to information in the eastern European countries called the Iron Curtain . . . and we've heard the term Bamboo Curtain used to describe the same sort of situation in southeast Asia. Well, out here we have the "Buckskin Curtain". The public just does not know and cannot imagine what goes on at the reservations.

For example, federal law now requires that Indians be hired for all government projects on native American land. Yet even when there's a need for carpenters and builders and local Indians are available— men and women who were taken out of their homes and sent far away to the white people's schools to learn those trades—you won't see our tribal members put to work on such projects. The government builds highways through our reservations and should legally hire our people . . . but it ends up importing expensive labor from other states, seemingly just to avoid using the local native American labor force!

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