[IPSM] John Wayne and New Orleans Indians

[DBB]

Why Do They Hate You? John Wayne and New Orleans Indians

By ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ

"The Cavalry is coming!" announced a reporter on the Fox News Channel when
finally National Guardsmen trooped into downtown New Orleans on the fourth
day of apocalypse. I said to myself, "There they go again, racist Fox
News."

I switched channels and found reporters and government officials repeating
the same phrase, "The Cavalry has arrived." I should not have been
surprised; during the preceding two days, they had been referring to the
scene in brown water-lodge New Orleans, not as genocide as I saw it,
rather "the wild west."

Racism on top of racism, revealing the scaffolding of United States'
history, its intact structure bared, all the glitter and trappings washed
away.

New Orleans became "Indian Country," the military term for enemy
territory. "This place is going to look like Little Somalia," Brigadier
General Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard's Joint Task
Force told Army Times, for an article published September 2, 2005. "We're
going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation
to get this city under control." The Army Times report could have been
about Baghdad in stating: "While some fight the insurgency in the city,
others carry on with rescue and evacuation operations."

For days I have been thinking of Sitting Bull's observation that the
United States knows how to make everything, but doesn't know how to
distribute it. He was being generous in attributing the lack of equitable
distribution of goods to benign ignorance rather than to design. But, he
knew better. Once in Chicago while performing with Buffalo Bill Cody's
Wild West, Sitting Bull spoke through his translator to the huge crowd of
ragged white men, women, and barefoot children: "I know why your
government hates me. I am their enemy. But why do they hate you?" The U.S.
Cavalry, the 7th to be exact, Custer's old regiment, massacred Sitting
Bull's unarmed, starving people in December 1890 at Wounded Knee, a few
days after Sitting Bull himself had been shot and killed by the federal
Indian police.

The cavalry sent into the wild west of New Orleans had orders to pen in
the starving black population that had been abandoned in order to protect
property. It is not a sad or shameful day for the United States; it is a
typical day in the United States for the poor, magnified.

How ironic that the Superdome became a house of horrors for the
dispossessed for five grueling days. Most of the African Americans who
were herded into the Superdome came from the infamous New Orleans projects
and are descendents of those evicted from their neat little homes in the
working class district that was seized and bulldozed to build, with public
funds, the Superdome. Their cemetery was also destroyed. Construction
began in August 1971 and was completed four years later.

I moved to New Orleans in December 1969 and lived there for more than two
years, leaving unwillingly after being arrested and escorted to Texas,
told never to return. I was then, as now, a social justice activist. (This
story is told in my Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960 1975) In
New Orleans and the surrounding area, the group I was a part of did
unionizing, women's liberation and antiwar organizing, and community work.
The big local issue at the time was opposition to the proposed Superdome
and to the "urban renewal" that would make it possible, removing tens of
thousands of working class residents and transforming them into welfare
recipients, a process taking place during the 1960s in nearly every city
in the United States, as well as in copycat apartheid South Africa, where
Cape Town's mixed working class District 6 was similarly destroyed.

Working with the community against the Superdome in organizing
demonstrations, petitions, and boycotts, I learned about past hurricanes
and floods when gates were opened to flood the poor (black) neighborhoods
in order to spare the wealthy and white uptown. I learned to hate the
fun-seeking tourists in the French Quarter who never bothered to notice
the sixty percent of the poor of the city. And, once it was built, I
harbored an abiding hatred for the Superdome.

I returned to New Orleans in the spring of 1979 to give a paper at the
annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, which was held
at the Hyatt Hotel that is attached to the Superdome, the first time I had
seen it. I reluctantly stayed in the hotel and never went outside while
there, because I was well aware the surrounding area was a no-man's land
where police did not dare to go, a low level insurgency operating from the
day the doors had opened four years earlier.

I kept warning others that they should not go out, even in taxis, because
they would be in danger returning. I tried to explain why, to no avail.
Sure enough, a young historian from Maine was shot and killed by a sniper
in front of the Hyatt after returning from fun in the French Quarter.
After that, the historians stayed inside until ready to go to the airport
in buses.

Now, New Orleans will be rebuilt as one big "urban renewal" project,
destroying the remaining working class homes and apartments, a sort of
Disneyland for tourists and the wealthy. It's been going in that direction
for forty years, as have other cities like Manhattan and San Francisco.
But, it may not be that easy with that insurgency which, hopefully, will
not capitulate.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a longtime activist, university professor, and
writer. In addition to numerous scholarly books and articles she has
published two historical memoirs, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (Verso, 1997),
and Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960 1975 (City Lights,
2002). "Red Christmas" is excerpted from her forthcoming book, Blood on
the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, South End Press, October 2005. She
can be reached at: rdunbaro at pacbell.net