Re: 'Caledonia 'sacrificed' over politics; Rally shows who the true antiracists are, and it's not Gary McHale and friends' (Opinion, April 1)
Please tell me this was an April Fool's piece.
Let's leave aside that the writer skirts the entire history of North American "settler-indigenous" conflict to which she alludes for half her article. The struggle against apartheid in South Africa was really a struggle between two different groups of "settlers." The black iron-wielding Bantu-speakers from West Africa crossed the Great Fish River shortly before the arrival of the horse-riding gun-shooting Dutch on the Cape of Good Hope. The stone-age Koi-San indigenous to the region did not choose to live in the desert -- they were forced there.
The natives in Caledonia are settlers too. They were granted their lands by the Crown in compensation for their service against the Americans in the War of 1812. The Caledonia conflict is a conflict between two settler groups and not between settlers and indigenous peoples. If the whites aren't native, neither are the aboriginals.
Further, having worked with natives, and without presuming to speak for them, I cannot imagine how those natives who have made the effort to educate themselves, find work, build businesses, and otherwise rise above the stereotype of the drunken, gas-huffing welfare bum would feel flattered by her assertion that "Native people aren't going anywhere."
If these are the words of a PhD candidate against racism, God help this town.
I don't think David Duke could have been less conducive to helping us see each other as brothers, not two distant races.