Native Americans are cool!

Call me naive, but I thought white people in this country were pretty much over their racial prejudice toward the natives. Then I worked in Idaho during the chinook salmon season and discovered that is not the case. The Grandfather Clause in the Endangered Species Act allows the Shoshone tribe to fish for chinook salmon, but since the chinook is a threatened fish the season is closed for the rest of us. Now, working for the Idaho Fish and Game I could totally understand the frustration. The tribe uses gaffs to spear the fish, and it's a lethal technique. They can't necessarily tell whether the fish is male or female before it's too late. Unfortunately, the more female fish they take, the fewer females we have to spawn, and the fewer eggs we have. During spawning we can use a male to fertilize two different females, but we can only use a female once. I felt the frustration, but I also felt it on the other side.
Consider the plight of the modern Indian. Reservations were traditionally located on the poorest land, and most tribes were made to live with their traditional enemies. For example, the Sho-Ban tribe in Idaho is comprised of the Shoshones and the Bannocks, and further west the Sho-Pais are the Shoshone and Paiute tribes. If you want to go even further west the Klamaths and Modocs were forced onto a reservation together in the mid-1800s, a condition at least partly responsible for the Modoc War (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). At the Fort Hall Reservation near Pocatello, Idaho, there are only enough jobs for about half the people. Some of my colleagues have said, "Well, they should go off-reservation then." Right. Let's think about what that entails. To get a job off the res, first there needs to be some sort of transportation. As far as I can tell, some of the prejudice against the Indians comes from them 'getting all this money from the government and having shiny new cars all the time.' Those are the ones we see. What about the ones we don't? It costs money to relocate or to get a taxi, money that many of these people don't have. Besides, there is safety in numbers, in knowing that your neighbors will not take an instant dislike to you just because you happen to be Native American.
I'm not saying the tribes are blameless. The tribes are supposed to stay 100 feet away from the weir (picture a bunch of spikes driven into the river bed close enough together to prevent fish passage, and you've got a pretty good idea of what a weir looks like), and there is a fluorescent orange spike driven in at the 100-foot mark. Over the coursse of three weeks that marker mysteriously moved closer and closer to the weir. Did tribal people move it? Most likely. Yet don't shenanigans like that go on in white society? Yes, there were some younger guys who came in and were totally obnoxious, but doesn't that also go on in white society? I think, then, that it is unfair to blame things on Indians when the same things go on everywhere, regardless of race, creed, or color.
Perhaps the worst comment I heard was, "Countries have been taken over before. They should just get over it." Countries have been taken over, but the Masai are still living their traditional lifestyle. When I went to Guyana I noticed that our guides, stripped of all the modern trappings like T-shirts and outboard motors, were living just as they had for hundreds of years. There is a huge difference between having your country taken over and being stripped of your language, customs, and religion. The Native Americans here just had the misfortune to be living in more accessible areas than the rainforest or desert.
I was the research data technician at the hatchery, so every morning I was down at the trap taking data. I recall one of the fisherman coming to watch about the time the white folks gathered around started commenting on tribal fishing. He stood there and listened for a while and then walked off, his back rigid with anger. When I had the opportunity to talk with him later the first thing I said was, "I really feel the need to apologize for my coworkers. I can't imagine what it feels like to have to listen to your people talked about like that."