Americans are not interested in truth, nor are they engaged in the practice of fully digesting past horrors, and atrocities, or learning from them and moving on to help those left in the wake of their conquest. Americans are in Iraq doing the same thing to the Iraqis they did to the nations here on Turtle Island, and at the same time denying that there is a continuation of the American Indian policy into the 21st century. Those paradigms have not changed, and setting any time to honor us, Indians, would change little, and few would be open to that exchange. Americans will not or cannot delve into the depth and the fundamentals of the national belief-practices.
Americans like to float on the surface renaming things to change the impact of their actions. Today a war tactic has become a noun. Freedom fighters have become insurgents. Americans are oblivious to the fact that Iraq is sacred to their religion, and Americans seem incapable of asking the right questions of themselves about the willingness of Arab women willing to strap bombs on themselves to kill the soldiers who invade their lands. The American mind doesn’t like to stretch itself into those realms. In that realm the ghosts of the American Indian conquest will bubble to the surface and the voices shut out for centuries will deafen the sound of their own racing heart beats, and they won’t hear what we have to teach them. - Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories
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