Don't Blame the Indians

...Williams recounts Indian and Eskimo orgies of slaughter in grisly detail, culling from firsthand accounts by professionals like John Matthews, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, thus: Asked about what he has observed on the ocean during his walrus research, he doesn't equivocate...

...He left his brains at Wounded Knee...

...For the most part, it's the other way around...

...The first couple of times they get into, walruses, for instance, they just shoot and shoot and shoot until they're out of ammo or the walruses are all gone...

...Indeed," wrote Samuel Hearne, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 47 Chief Factor at Fort Prince of Wales, "they were so accustomed to kill everything that came within their reach, that few of them could pass by a small bird's nest, without slaying the young ones, or destroying the eggs...

...The dismal result is that if walruses and polar bears are slaughtered with promiscuous disregard for their survival...

...There is as much hope of and purpose to preserving it as preserving feudalism among the English or Bantu Zuluism among American blacks...

...No attempt to retrieve . . ." Indians gillnet fishes in season and out, illicitly retailing their dispensation, tribal councils winking broadly while they endow blond, blue-eyed fishermen with fictitious "Native American" blood...

...If they can procure sufficient tongues, they will eat tongues only...

...This is not merely a matter of wastefulness...

...No matter...

...Indian war parties butchered and mutilated their victims, white or red...

...Suffice that Innuits plain like killing the great mammals...

...Conservation of anything other than themselves is irrelevant to natural predators because there are never enough of them to make a difference...

...if such rare avian species as the cackler goose are extirpated from breeding grounds and also jeopardized...

...Recall that obese ass, Marlon Bran-do...

...It is this savage heritage—with respect to wild game, wild game the victims—that our pater-nalistic laws, certain idiot judges, and grandstanding celebrities seek to perpetuate...

...They alternate between feast and famine...

...The post-contact Indian wasted game with gusto...

...There is no longer a sufficient pool of game to survive the wasteful taking, and Indians no longer fish and hunt in the primitive manner that limited their depredations...

...It's so depressing, and so stupid...

...The record seems emphatic on this issue," writes Martin...

...r. Williams sums up this indictment by setting forth a series of trenchant commonsense behavioral observations that will winch howls of outrage out of our sentimentalists...

...Indians will never grow up unless they are made responsible, which means that special treatment of them must cease...

...The bunkum exposed by Mr...

...Sometimes they shoot and the birds drop and they just keep going...

...Evidence builds that mammoth and mastodon were anciently exterminated by the ancestors of that same hawk-nosed creep who weeps glycerine tears at the sight of litter on our roadsides, having apparently never visited an Indian reservation in Oklahoma or North Carolina...

...Regarding "subsistence" use of sea birds and walruses, he says this: "As birds come on the island, there's hundreds of thousands of aukiets and murres .. . and it's just like a release [for the "Natives...

...Undisciplined by law, they will net and kill until there is nothing left...

...The old freshman-biology aphorism that predators control their prey . . . is largely false...

...One of these same sweet, affectionate bitches flew into another killing frenzy two weeks ago, destroying eighteen half-grown mallard ducks in less than five minutes, oblivious to the shouts of my son...

...t terrible cost...

...Obsequiously code-named "Native Americans," which title they may lay claim to no more than anyone else of us who is native born, they are licensed to fish and hunt whatever they please, whenever they please, however they please, and in the quantities they please...

...White men massacred Indians with merciless ferocity...

...When the whales show up, today's Eskimo hunters put on their Eddie Bauer down jackets, step out of their oil-heated, color-TV-equipped homes and converge on migration routes by airplane, snowmobile and ATV...

...My two comparatively civilized pointers, having received a double ration of two heaping bowls each of kibble, nevertheless trapped, slaughtered, and devoured all seven of our three-quarter grown game chickens—some fifteen or sixteen pounds of them...

...Thus ideological perversity...

...Our Eskimos are exempted from the relevant treaties under the ironically named Marine Mammal Protection Act...

...They do not stop "when they have enough" because next time and the time after that they may get nothing...

...Author Ted Williams is a gifted writer (Audubon, Gray's Sporting Journal, Smithsonian) with a passionate commitment to the American outdoors and almost every creature in our wild native American heritage...

...Anybody with the slightest firsthand experience of the natural world knows that blood lust in predators, animal or human, is a fact—that is, anybody whose grasp of the realities has not been devastated by Walt Disney, Marty Stouffer, and that perfectly awful TV series, "Grizzly Adams...

...They shoot golden and bald eagles along major flyways for the feathers, in order to fashion ceremonial headdresses, which they peddle to eager tourists...

...Their nomad hunter culture is an anachronism that may not be tolerated, and which they must be educated into abandoning once and forever...

...Once neglected and even abused wards of the state, Indians now are being indulged in the worst avarices and in their most retrograde (human) instincts...

...The bowhead whale is on the brink of extinction...

...And as for the "culture supposedly being preserved by today's Eskimo . . . hunters," writes Mr...

...The blistering point he makes in Don't Blame the Indians is that we are treating American Indians (a) as though they too were wildlife, to be unnaturally congealed in a kind of cultural amber, and (b) in privileged fashion, like those notorious scofflaws of the U.N., granted a kind of diplomatic immunity under which they thumb their noses at the rest of us while running their four-wheelers over every norm of game management and conservation...

...The Indian, like any predator, has always been an opportunistic killer...

...Curious, isn't it, that the same folk who plaster their bumpers with"Save the Whales" stickers probably support such as Russell Means and his American Indian Movement...

...To put it bluntly," declares historian Calvin Martin of Rutgers, "the Indian was everywhere, except in the Rocky Mountain trade, the principal agent in the overhunting of furbearers...

...They were so sick they could scarcely walk two days, their bellies swollen to the bursting...

...On the rationale that barbarian ways are vital to Indian culture and still critical to Indian subsistence, the most elemental ordinances protecting wildlife are in his case put aside...

...That in fact bowhead whales never were critical to the existence of the igloo set (excavations on hunting grounds in use by Eskimos 700 years have unearthed the remains of just thirty or forty whales, no more) is irrelevant to the Indian lobby...

...Natural predators are opportunistic, taking whatever they can get whenever they can get it...

...They weren't hungry...

...and if valuable game fish like the steel-head salmon are totally eliminated from spawning waters in the Skagit River, or if the fabled king salmon, the chinook, is reduced along the entire Klamath and Trinity river system below that critical breeding population that signifies certain extinction—we may not blame our Indians and Eskimos, Mr...

...Using fast launches and cannons with bomb-tipped harpoons (so much for tradition) they indiscriminately let fly at the whales, destroying as many as three for every one captured:and sometimes abandoning that on the floes...

...Williams is scrupulous to emphasize, but rather lay these insensate tragedies on the altar of All-American Guilt...

...Act of 1971, and other such special-interest legislation to make "super citizens" of the red man...

...Williams emanates from the same compost of sentimental mush as those egregious claims for the wolf that itkills only what it consumes, or that—the silliness begs belief—the North American wolf, miraculously unlike its first cousins in Russia and central Europe, excludes mankind from its prey...

...A blood lust that would be deemed horrid, even sinful, in anyone else is excused, because the popular myth of the noble savage has it that he killed only what he needed, using every last bit of meat, gristle, bone, and hide...

...Indians littered the Great Plains with unused, unwanted cadavers of their kills...

...It's disgusting...

...Guilt and sentimentality have contrived with the Indian Citizen Act of 1924, the Native Claims Settlement Reid Buckley is a novelist and founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking...

...Williams witheringly, it is "as dead as the great auk...