"BIA -- Bossing Indians Around"

First Nations T-shirt Just One in Many

I was in the does-not-exist rummage sale on the West End the other day and found this t-shirt. It says "BIA -- Bossing Indians Around (Since the Invasion." BIA stands for Bureau of Indian Affairs.

This is the funniest powwow shirt I've seen so far, including the ones that say "Fighting Terrorism - since 1492," "White Men Can't Dance," and "My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys."

I suspect this shirt is from our Makah friends in Neah Bay (disclaimer: but not an official council t-shirt). There's nothing funnier — and more ghastly — than the Truth. The most gut-tearing comedy is rooted in the most serious trauma.

The shirt flew out the rummage sale door. I think it was a Makah guy took it. We're just lucky these people have a huge sense of humor. Then again, they've needed one. The rest of the world is only finding out what we're really like.

All us late-comers on the American continents had better hope all these people don't start drumming for Holocaust Memorials. Can you imagine one for every single nation that we started systematically wiping out, from the time we got here? Including the ones we succeeded against - that is, the people we drove into extinction AS peoples. That's a lot of tribes to be building expensive mea culpa for. Think of memorials as big as the ones Berlin put up, but to the Huron, Kiowa and the Quilleute. The latter people had a reconciliation feast with Forks, but that doesn't make the past go away. You think they'll let us get away with 40 acres and a mule?

Is anybody out there with the computing chops - and the obsessive gene -- for counting up how many people we and our ancestors drove off their land, killed, infected, neglected, and otherwise persecuted by government policy? And multiplying that by monies owed? In terms of modern currencies? Because nobody's going for wampum, today.