Dakota Beacon

Here is a break from stories about coronavirus and the evil Chinese communist government, just to show that life shuffles sadly along in the background just as before.

Land O’ Lakes is going to throw over its iconic Indian girl as their logo for their top quality butter.  This is sad for many. The Indian girl recalled an earlier time, a time when nature seemed unsullied by smog or pavement, the clear blue lakes of the upper Midwest.  Not to Ruth Buffalo, however. Buffalo is a North Dakota state representative. Where most of us see a lovely image of a beautiful, natural-looking Indian girl with the backdrop of a lush, natural setting of lakes and verdant trees, Buffalo sees this:  “human and sex trafficking of our women and girls ... by depicting Native women as sex objects.”

Excuse me, but maybe you are seeing only what you want to see.  I see no drug paraphernalia, there is no pimp or john in the picture, no red-light district.  What I see is what is actually there - a very pretty Indian girl, idealized, perhaps. (I once had an Indian sister-in-law who looked nothing like that, but maybe she’d be someone to whom Buffalo might better relate.)  The girl in the picture is innocent-looking, pleasant, has no look of flirtatiousness. She certainly is not suggestive - at leat to innocent ol’ me - of anything “dirty”.  

Much as the famous logo of the North Dakota Sioux warrior made famous by the UND hockey team, designed by an Indian, Bennett Brien, the Land O’ Lakes girl presents an entirely positive image to the normal viewer.  In the case of the UND Sioux warrior, he represented strength and winning spirit and dignity. The girl on the Land O’ Lakes package presents a picture of innocence, purity, grace dignity and hospitality. And what if they just presented humor?  We don’t object to that anywhere else . . . except if it’s Mohammed.  

It was perhaps inevitable.  I actually had wondered sometime past how long the Indian girl on the package would remain under the radar.  The sad part of this as far as the Indian community is concerned, is that as these depictions of Indian culture, whether designed by the sentimental non-Indian artist or the Indian artist evoking his own  culture, disappear, so will our memory of an entire people, a race which dominated North America for hundreds of years and developed its own special culture, possessed numerous languages, literature, skills unique to themselves.  As this fades, and it surely will, we will be left with the occasional “time-outs” or pow-wows in which people of Indian ancestry recall their roots for a day and then go back to the hum-drum of everyday life, putting away their native customs and costumes.  Like Brigadoon, in a way. Just as the whimsical Scots of Brigadoon bear little resemblance to the everyday practical Scots I know (and love) the summer soldier Indians will become a quaint caricature of themselves. Few still retain or pass their languages along.  

The pictures of warriors and Indian maidens, hunters and native women, have served as a reminder to all of us of a storied past, a people to be respected and sometimes feared but never boring or ordinary.  When we no longer see these images the memories, too, will soon be gone. 

There is no evidence that the image on the package of butter promotes sex trafficking.  That is one of the most absurd claims I have heard. When, 92 years ago, this image was chosen to represent the product, it was obviously intended to give the impression of purity and excellence.  What you hope you are getting when you buy the product. When we saw the image of the Sioux warrior on the ice at a UND hockey game we imagined an invincible leader, the “unbeatable foe” of our opponents.  The “Fighting Sioux” was a name of honor in hockey.  

Perhaps Ruth Buffalo is a real go-getter adversary of those who have exploited Indian people.  Maybe she has done something substantial to stop sex trafficking and drug abuse. That would be great.  I’m all for it - we should all be active adversaries against these evils. We should all be advocating for a better life and better conditions for Indians as well as all peoples.  I did a survey a few years ago where we were looking for feedback from Indians about the medical services available to them. Not one of those I interviewed had anything positive to say about the services available to them on the “res”.  It was a gloomy picture indeed. This is something that we should take an interest in reforming, not getting rid of positive images of lovely women and handsome men representing Indians. Ruth Buffalo is an attractive lady. (She might also object to the term “lady”, but it’s a good English word.)  Why she should want to abolish pictures of attractive representatives of Indian people visible anywhere? It seems almost like a form of cultural suicide - “genocide” - to quote Buffalo herself. In any case, what we see is apparently in our own mind’s eye, the “the eye of the beholder”. What she sees is sex trafficking.  She can see what she wants. Obviously it was not the intention because nothing says “what I want to put on my dinner table” like a sex trafficker. If activists like Buffalo have had personal experiences which have predisposed them to dislike images of pretty girls, that is called “projection”. It isn’t real for the rest of us, however twisted the point of view of some individuals.  What people like Ruth Buffalo represent is a kind of psycho-terrorism.  Such people attempt to sculpt our thoughts through language, through abolishing certain words or images they don't like.  They should not be viewed by the rest of us as in any way "benign", but rather, as menacing.  They are thieving our culture.

The problem is not with these images but with people who make a career out of political malingering.  People like Ruth Buffalo. They, in turn, are used by the white people of the political left to attack America and its history.  In all of history there have been cultures which have come and gone. We remember them by the imagery we still have. In the Golden Age of Greece they didn’t package butter with Greek athletes or Greek maidens in a tunic or chiton.  But we have images on urns and vases and in statues (at least as long as they are allowed to exist in our era). In the Roman era they didn’t put their famous figures on an ice rink, but we have statues of them and coins with their images survive.  We have their images in our minds and imaginations because we have seen representations of them.  

Thank God they didn’t have Ruth Buffalo and her sisters back then.  If they did we would have no pictures or statues, maybe some dry descriptions no one would read which would conjure up no images even if we did.  The history of Greece and Rome, of eras before and since, would be meaningless in our mental landscape - that landscape would be barren of humans.  Has Ruth Buffalo ever stopped to think that perhaps these positive images of Indians are valuable to Indian children and youth? Does she object to the cultural image or the image of a pretty woman - as a woman?  In time, in our lifetime if you are reading this, the mental image of the Indians of North America will soon be rendered a fine mist by these activists and will disappear. That will be too bad not only for their descendants but for all of us.  Our whole culture - that of Indians as well as Caucasians will, in the end, be the victims of terminal wokeness perpetrated by woke terrorists.  

There is no word for “good bye” in either Lakota or Ojibwe.  Maybe that’s for the best.

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