Home and Native land needs to be defended

Page 5

Dear Editor:

Re: Taiaiake Alfred column, "Understanding the cause", Windspeaker, October 2001.

Mr. Alfred really needs to refrain from commenting upon complex and explosive topics like 9.11. He speaks at one point of "a naive fool" and of those "without a special understanding of world politics."

Indeed.

Alfred's rhetoric does nothing to clarify the issues at hand. He demonstrates a poor understanding of international relations and of global Indigenous issues; poorer still of orthodox Haundenosaunnee culture and values.

The upshot of much of his rant would appear that there exists some sort of parallel between the colonial and post-colonial experiences of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and of those alleged grievances which fuel the proponents of a militant and terrorist interpretation of Islam. By extension this would seem to imply some manner of common cause between such disparate peoples and cultures as those of the Native peoples of North America and the Arab-speaking peoples of the Middle East, with a common enemy to be found in the Euro-North American West.

To deconstruct and critique Alfred's musings line-by-line would require too much time and space. At the very least, glaring contradictions and inconsistencies, like the Taliban's treatment of women, in comparison, for example, with the role and status of women within conservative Iroquois culture, have surely been noted by thoughtful and informed readers. From such an obvious and elementary foundation as this, it is no huge feat to conclude that the outlooks and the values of at least this Indigenous American culture, and of the proponents and adherents of that particular brand of Islamic fundamentalism, are profoundly different.

9.11 demonstrates that we as Native North Americans have more in common with Euro-North Americans (of whichever particular ethnicity) than we do with the backers of militant Islam. At the very least-and most obviously-the North American homeland has been attacked from without. It is not unreasonable to assume that North Americans (of all Native and non-Native varieties) will now mobilize in its defense.

John Moses

Ottawa