Interviews From Pima Country

The linked video has some interesting interviews.  But it's titled "Inside the Indian Reservation Where People Go Missing."  Then it doesn't address anything about the how or why of people going missing.   Instead he takes an ill-informed stab at the history of boarding schools.  This guy means well.  He tried.

It's upsetting to see how the shittiness of America has fully pervaded Native America.  I knew that it had, because I've been all through the West for the last ten years.   But I don't have any personal experience with Natives who have access to casino money. It's depressing to see how clearly money doesn't fix it.  Even when people do have access to drug rehab facilities, they need more than that. 

America is doomed.  Even people who are literal members of a tribe, enrolled members of a family with an ancient name that they know, can't withstand end-stage capitalism without alcohol and crystal meth.  The village can no longer raise the child.

What really struck me was when he said his mom couldn't even talk about the boarding school.  She'd fall silent.  That's my experience, too.  People just choke up about it, they can't even go there.  Those schools were the most shameful torture camps for children.  My mind was completely blown when I read Luther Standing Bear's book, his shilling for that horrible place, his rationalizations of the horrors he described. 

I can understand why Standing Bear said what he did, in his own personal context  But as an Italian-American, and a Catholic, especially as a survivor, I can never feel anything but shame, grief, and remorse for any of that.  I'm so horrified.

It's important to point out, however, that the young man in the video got one important thing very wrong:  Catholics and Anglo-Saxon Protestants are two very different communities.  Never the twain shall meet.  Catholics did many bad things and also ran horrible boarding schools.  But the "Kill the Indian, save the man" situation of Captain Pratt, and the ethnic cleansing pogroms of America overall, were an Anglo-Saxon Protestant joint.  Andrew Jackson was a Protestant.  The Trail of Tears was a Protestant situation.  Custer was a Protestant.

Let's not get it twisted:  in our modern era, from the Mayflower forward, America's punishment fetish has been a Protestant thing.  Specifically hanging and lynching, lots of which was done against Native Americans (and my people, who called both the act and the people it was done to linciati) are strictly a Protestant jam.  Catholicism doesn't allow for capital punishment.  Abraham Lincoln had the option of pardoning a number of Natives who were to be hanged.  He pardoned most, but not all of them. 

The Catholic Church was responsible for destroying the Mayan codices, for the horrific child trafficking mass murderer Christopher Columbus, and for having the most questionable moral high ground, for sure.  But they're entirely distinct from the boss-man of America. Catholics have never been in charge in America.  Plenty of horrible murderers were Catholics.  But our rank-and-file don't stand in lynch mobs as a rule.

And I, as a second-generation American of Napolitan stock, need to draw that distinction.  Because my people aren't actually in the same ethnic community as Columbus, either.  His people don't so much recognize us and vice versa.  So this young man is making a bit of a whiteberg.

I'm not saying the Catholics are overall any less racist or imperialist, or better.  The pope's moral high ground is the janitor's bathroom at Deutschebank.  I'd just like there to be a clean line when laying blame.  Catholics go all around the world protecting their horrible priests, like the old Frenchman who was accused of assaulting Inuit children.  We're famous for it.  But they do then incorporate all of the Indonesian, and Inuit, and African, and other people who converted into one big coat of every color that is our (molested) Catholic family. 

Protestants still run America to this day, and do all the same things, and are invisible and oblivious to that fact, pointing at Catholics, because we're all white.  Catholics shouldn't be equally blamed for Protestant crimes, is what I'm saying.  "Kill the Indian to save the man" was by, for, and about Protestants.

I remember how horrible Catholic schools were for me as a white, Catholic child who spoke English in the 1970s.  And our nuns were racist, while believing they weren't, and teaching us not to be, as best they could.  Some of them tried their best, they really did.  They just weren't good at being nice to kids.  They were unhappy people in a dishonest religion.