From: newt@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Michael Steven Newton)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.celtic
Subject: Scots Gaels and American Indians: genocide of culture
Date: 5 Oct 92 08:26:39 GMT
Organization: Glasgow University Computing Science Dept.

An article from Sunday's Scotland Herald, which I thought was appropriate
in light of recent "discussions" on this group.

The title of the article is "Fears of an early white settlement", by
Lorn Macintyre.

"I felt intense anger as well as sadness when I saw the glengarry bonnet
in the exhibition 'Home of the Brave' in Glasgow, the story of the native
Americans since Columbus.  That bonnet, made by the Iroquis of the north
east and embodying colonial design in its embrodiery, brought home the
similarities of predicament between the American Indians and the Gaelic
speakers of the Highlands and Islands.
  The Glasgow show was the most important exhibition of the Columbus
Quincentennial.  On October 12, 1492, a sailor aboard the Pinta saw a
sandbank of the Bahamas.  The Indians - the Arawaks - bartered parrots
and unknown fruits for bells and woolly hats, the beginning of the
debasement and destruction of Indian culture in which Britain was to
participate.
  Before the Europeans arrived in America, there were more than 300
different groups or tribes, comparable to the clan and sept system in the
Highlands, with their own languages, distinctive dress, ceremonies, songs
and poems expressive of the landscape in which they hunted and fought.
As an Indian said on the current television series 'Before Columbus' on
the fate of the Indians after Columbus, with the coming of the white man:
'He did not discover me.  I did not arrive after him.'
  Highlanders and Indians were brought face to face in the Clearances,
when thousands of clanspeople were shipped across the Atlantic.  Highlanders
had to walk behind the plough with guns to shoot at the Indians whose
territory they were usurping.
  The Hollywood version of the opening up of the American west is of a circle
of wagons, with the white men bravely fighting off Indians intent on their
scalps and those of their loved ones, including babes in arms.  The truth
is that Indians were driven from their ancestral lands to let the Iron
Horse through.
  The Treaty of Laramie which was signed by Red Cloud and his fellow chiefs
in 1868 gave the Sioux and other tribes about half of present-day South
Dakota.  But the pact wasn't kept.  The lure of gold made white miners
violate the sacred Black Hills.  Outraged Indians attacked and there was
war.  In 1871 Congress set aside all the treaties and established the much
reduced Indian reservations that exist today and are still being
desecrated.
  As this process was going on the destruction of Gaelic culture was also
continuing in the cleared lands of the Highlands.
  Indian artefacts are museum pieces now, like the club, a scaled-down
shinty stick with a big ball stuck on the end.  The haunting Indian songs
one heard through the special headphones in the Glasgow exhibition sound
like Gaelic songs, but are disembodied from their own culture now.
  My fear is that soon there will be little left of Gaelic culture if the
rate of colonisation of the Highlands continues.  On bridges in the north
this summer I saw painted slogans: 'White settlers go home'.  I met a
Gaelic speaker at the folk museum at Glencoe recently.  'Thank God for
the recession,' he said.  'It means that houses in Glencoe aren't going
to white settlers'.  I recalled his anger as I walked round the Indian
exhibition, studying faces, old and wise like faces you can still see on
some Hebridean islands.
  Gaelic culture is being destroyed by the cheque books of the white
settlers.  They are being peace, spectacular scenery, and they're not going
to stop.  What's the solution?  Surely a scheme could be worked out,
following the Assynt crofters' initiative, whereby locals could afford to
buy houses and land that become available, using money from a special
British government or EC scheme for the preservation of minority cultures.
If something isn't done soon there will be a museum of Gaelic with
disembodied songs through headphones in the lifetimes of some of us."
Newsgroups: soc.culture.celtic