Mayor Bloomberg is all for cultural sensitivity and tolerance... except when he's not. Hizzoner speaks on New York/Haudenosaunee relations:
"I've said this to David Paterson, I said, 'You know, get yourself a cowboy hat and a shotgun,'" Bloomberg was quoted as saying in the NY Daily News.
"If there's ever a great video, it's you standing in the middle of the New York State Thruway saying, you know, 'Read my lips - the law of the land is this, and we're going to enforce the law,'" added Mayor Bloomberg.
Indian Country Today asks, Where is America's outrage?
if anyone in America should understand Native Americans, it should be Bloomberg. He is a part of an oppressed people: Persecuted, dispossessed and eradicated. Being Jewish, Bloomberg should feel the same way Native Americans do.
After all, to the Seneca and the Iroquois Confederacy or Haudenosaunee, northern New York state is our Israel. We are the freedom fighters and defenders of the land, not the cowboys. The cowboys are the invaders and looters.
We have lived in the area from time immemorial; we have a constitution predating European contact and a federation of nations that American founding fathers studied to replace a system based on a monarchy. We are an ancient people with our own language, customs, spirituality and government, living on our own homeland; our Israel...
Bloomberg's blindness to our history must not be limited to only him. The rest of America seems not to care very much.
America seemed at least mildly interested in discussing Native American sovereignty not too long ago, when the Iroquois Nationals were recently denied the right to travel on their own Haudenosaunee passports to Britain. As one would suspect, that interest in acknowledging currently extant current treaties and sovereignty issues only extends so far. |
