| | I read The Terror Dream by Susan Fauldi and it was a phenomenal book. One of the most interesting parts was about Jessica Lynch and how the media ignored all the stories of heroic women in combat in Iraq in order to focus on Lynch as a "poor little defenseless girl" story. Reporters concocted stories that enhanced the bravery of the men, portrayed Lynch as a pretty girl instead of a soldier, and when Lynch tried to speak for herself about the experience, she was derided and ignored. What was ignored was Lori Piestewa, the soldier who saved her life and the lives of numerous people in her unit before becoming a statistic -- the first woman soldier killed in Iraq and the first Native American soldier to be killed on foreign soil. And while rich white men made Lynch into their fairy story, Piestewa laid forgotten. I read that chapter in the book and I fucking cried. Our country has this collective delusion that racism has evaporated, and it is just fucking wrong. I'm long past any romanticized notions of military service, but it disgusted me that heroism was scrubbed out for sexism and racism.
In 1903 a man named Omar A.
Turney named a mountain in Arizona "Squaw's Peak", since rich white men often get to name things (particularly mountains in land they stole from native peoples). Since squaw is a pretty racist term, some people were not real happy about this. Native Americans have been trying to change the name for years.
And on April 10th, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names agreed to change the name from Squaw's Peak to Piestewa Peak. That moves me. It makes me happy. She was a hero and damn-well deserves to be treated as one, and I can't think of any better way to renounce the racism of the past. Events like this give me a hope that things will not always be as bad as they are now.
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| | Posted 4/16/2008 8:49 PM - 38 views - 1 comments
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