For the offended Indians who want to change the Redskins

Has Thomas McDonald have a post for you!   I'm as sensitive to the screwing that the Indians got at the hands of the US government as the next guy.  My great grandmother was full blooded Cherokee.  My wife is descended from no less than three lines of Indian.  Probably there is enough to claim some benefits in a grant or scholarship there.  But I also don't buy into the Dances With Wolves notion that Indians were pure, beautiful, godlike beings of utter perfection.  In fact, like most things, the more actual hard evidence we find, the more a balanced take on the history of the period unfolds.

Perhaps what happened was inevitable.  The Indians lost.  Their culture was such that it was incompatible with living next to the encroaching Europeans.  After all, we've all heard about the White Man and his armies sweeping in and razing an Indian village and killing the women and children.  But we seldom hear of the Indians doing the same.  Perhaps we figure the white men and their families had it coming.  It wouldn't surprise me.  But nonetheless, what little evidence we pick up seems to suggest that, in the end, the Indians were as varied and as complex as the Europeans, and they waged war with one another and against the intruding immigrants from across the ocean.  And they lost.

We can make amends, but not at the expense of ourselves.  At some point, unless we just don't care, we will have to stop disassembling the Civilization that the Church built as a way to make amends since, in the end, I doubt it will do much to assuage the anger anyway.  And furthermore, I will have to believe at some point that such bickering has little to do with making amends, and a lot more to do with putting as many bullets in the dying leviathan that was the West.  A second and final last stand you might say.