The NYT quotes Cheryl Little Dog — "a recently elected member of the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council, the reservation’s governing body" — in an article about the decision of the Blackfeet Indians allowing oil drilling on their 1.5-million-acre reservation, which is within view of Glacier National Park. Fracking has made drilling in this area economically practicable, and the tribal leaders — as the NYT puts it — think "oil wealth could be more lucrative and reliable than any casino — a resource whose royalties could transform a reservation scarred by poverty and alcoholism."
Those are the tribal leaders, but:
To find the opposing view, one needs only to drive five miles west from Browning, past the casino, heading straight toward the mountains, and pull off at the red gate on the right. There, on a recent summer afternoon, over mugs of horsemint tea, Pauline Matt and a handful of Blackfeet women were trying to find a way to persuade the tribal leaders to stop the drilling.
“It threatens everything we are as Blackfeet,” she said...
“You see this butterfly, you hear those birds?” asked Crystal LaPlant, as she sat on Ms. Matt’s back porch one evening, the meadows alive with sound. “Once they start drilling, we aren’t going to have those things anymore.”
Ron Crossguns, who works for the Blackfeet tribe’s oil and gas division, has oil leases on his land, a 10-foot cross in his yard, and little patience for that kind of pastoral veneration. He called it “movie Indian” claptrap, divorced from modern realities. Mountains, he said, are just mountains.
“They’re just big rocks, nothing more,” Mr. Crossguns said. “Don’t try to make them into nothing holy. Jesus Christ put them there for animals to feed on, and for people to hunt on.”
You just know Ron Crossguns is not the NYT's idea of an authentic Indian. You know, and he knows, and he's calling
bullshit claptrap.
ADDED: Note how the NYT plays its readers' stereotypes about religion. The women, with their mugs of herbal tea, speak of the spirit of the land. It's a mysterious folk way that conveniently merges with and supplements the religion-free environmentalism of elite East-Coasters. And then there's Crossguns, who's got a 10-foot cross in his yard, so readers know to look down on him. He gives the Times some choice quotes, and we can infer that he was prodded with questions about those steeped-in-spirituality women. Speaking of convenience — he's got
Jesus creating the world and speaks with a double negative ("don't... nothing...."). How the Times must have rejoiced!
पोस्ट्स
