Red Lake, public memory, and our scripted lives

Indian Country Today (Thanks to Cold in Laramie for the link) is talking about the media coverage of the Red Lake tragedy. As we have discussed here, America has responded in different ways to this particular school shooting. Columbine was a "massacre" but Red Lake is a "shooting." Why?

Some say that we are inured to the tragedy because it is certainly not the first school shooting. But clearly had this happened in suburban Dallas, the coverage would have been different. Some speculate that the closed reservation and lack of 24 hour news mindless looping of events led to that. I can certainly understand that, but the initial reaction was even different and muted. Our great compassionate conservative Christian President couldn't be bothered to tear himself away from Terry Shiavo to even comment on the tragedy. I think race has something to do with the reaction.

I have been thinking about how I react to certain things. I fear that at times I still look for cues as to how to respond--what does a good liberal say in times like this? I don't like that response, but suspect that I am not alone there.

I was thinking about that and thought that we all probably (to greater and lesser degrees depending on the person) have a script--a world view that explains how we see that experience outside our lives. When an event happens--Terry Shiavo, the Pope, Iraq, Tom Delay--we read the event through that script. It plugs in pretty naturally in a way that most of us don't even consider.

I think for white America, Red Lake was outside the script. Native Americans have existed on the fringes of our experience. They exist as images and icons--mascots and movie screens. White America looks at the Native American mascot controversy and thinks, "how trivial is that?" Many NA's look at that same controversy and think, "here we are again--existing only as plastic beads and feathers, not real people." Indians remember that in California, for example, the native population dropped from 150,000 to 30,000 in 12 years! In a little over a decade, 120,000 California Indians were either mass murdered, died of disease or abuse--hunted down, starved. California miners hunted Indians for fucking bounty! The miners had to return with body parts to redeem for their pay. Small children were either enslaved or murdered.

Those stories are often not part of our script for American history. How do we fit that into our great progressive or divine history? How do we plug that into an upward movement for freedom and equality? How do we put that into the great past where Americans prayed and worshiped God en masse?

We don't. We just look past them. Leave them out of the script so we don't have to reconcile them with our broader ideological beliefs. So, all across Indian country, people are thinking that Red Lake is no difference. For White America, it doesn't compute. 10 dead on a reservation just doesn't fit in the script. It doesn't fit well into a anti-gun control or pro-gun control rant; nor (though some have tried) into a vapid "taking prayer out of schools has caused all our problems" script. It is as if our sense of Indians as "West of Everything" is still very much a part of our understanding.

Maybe it would behoove all of us to get off the script a little more and see the world through fresh eyes--understanding that our simplistic framing doesn't always work.