Attribution: Grand Canyon National Park, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports the keeper remarking that celebrating the indigenous people and Columbus on the same day is such a fox-in-the-henhouse situation as to be beyond insulting.
During his long journalistic meandering the keeper had many occasions of contact with native people: sleeping under the county snowplow with Frankie at Lac du Flambeau, being hoodwinked by young pranksters on a fictionalized bear hunt, watching a loon fly out of the mist at a sunrise celebration for an honored elder, drinking beer with Jimmy Moccasin, picking up the hitchhiker from Alaska, delivering a piano to the elder center at Kachina, spending a week with the audacious assignment of defining the native American culture.Â
The list could go on and might add Phyllis’s Canadian childhood with indigenous friends.
The keeper and Phyllis marked the day reminding each other of their immigrant status and trying to act more like guests and less like thoughtless oppressors.
