Kill and scalp all, nits make lice.

A lot of people who are I think at least a little bit ignorant of history wonder why Native american groups take issue with sports mascots. In the town where I grew up, South Deerfield this was a big issue when I was in seventh grade at Frontier. A Native American group had taken issue with the name and gotten the school to change it and there was a referendum on what the new name should be. I always thought it should be changed to the 'Frontier Rednecks' because of my experience at the school. But there were several choices and the student body ended up choosing 'red hawks' which remains the name to this day. But still alot of people wondered what all the fuss was about. I mean besides reducing a population of millions to a population of 400,000 at the turn of the century. Perhaps its the long history of broken treaties and broken promises, of forced marches and massacres. And the language of this period is unmistakable in terms of the intentions of those who coveted Indian lands. Words like 'extermination' and 'extinction' are used frequently when reading about the history of Native American's in the west. And the abuse continues to this day with Native Americans on reservations typically living below the poverty line. Colonel John Chivington of the U.S. army before the massacre at Sand Creek in which 105 Indians women and children were killed and 28 men 'kill and scalp all, nits make lice.' After the Sand Creek Massacre George and Charlie Bent who were sons of a white trader and a Cheyenne woman, were so disgusted by the events they witnessed there that they chose to take up with the Cheyennes instead and forsake their father. And who could blame them, after seeing the soldiers mutilating the bodies of the Indian's as one Soldier put it 'in going over the battleground the next day I did not see the body of man, woman, or child but was scalped, and in many horrible instances their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner-men, women, and children's privates cut out & I heard one man say that he had cut out a woman's private parts and had them for exhibition on a stick.' Makes your stomach turn reading the kinds of things people are capable of. And I still see people around town waving the 'redskins' banner like they are some kind of patriots. Fucking rednecks.

A good day to fight a good day to die.

She always hated the whiskey trader. He was a heavyset man with a large beard, who seemed to constantly reek of something a strange unpleasant odor she could never quite define. But mostly she hated the dark liquid that he pushed upon her people, that had turned half of her village into wife beaters, and thieves who would sell their firstborn for a taste of that vile liquid. It had turned her father in the space of a few years into a proud warrior and provider, loving father, and husband into something else. A vacant, decaying, husk of a human being. She saw him now passed out in the small room of they're small cabin the bottle half-full on the table beside the bed. She wanted to pour it out, to grab the rifle that hung on the wall and walk out into the village and shoot the whiskey trader dead. She knew this was a sentiment shared by more then a few in the village. She had poured it out before but her father had beaten her mercilessly for it. She had to constantly remind herself that this was not the same man who had reared her. Who had taught her how to live and be a good person in the world, who had comforted her when she was scared, when she felt helpless and in despair. She watched the whiskey trader from outside her window now, he was bargaining with an old man who was attempting to barter a belt or something for a bottle. He would demure at first, but eventually he would give the old man what he wanted. The whiskey trader seemed bound and determined to ensure death and ruin to her people, to sow the seeds of destruction for all of them. A few of the old men of the village had attempted to warn against this vice but their pleas had gone unheeded, unheard, except for a few. It would consume them all, there was no hope.