Dear HCN,
In
“This land holds a story the church won’t tell,” (HCN, 9/30/02: The
Royal Squeeze) your editor, Ray Ring, writes that “historic
preservation advocates and environmental groups … fear the
giveaway (that is, the sale of 940 publicly owned acres of the
Mormon Trail to the Mormon Church) would set a precedent for
transferring more public lands to special interests.” Ring then
goes on to say that “American Indians, in particular, would like to
take over public treasures such as Devil’s Tower National Monument
in northeast Wyoming.”
Following Ring’s line of
thinking, an entire indigenous race is to be understood as a
special interest. Yet these American Indians do not seek some
commercial and private pursuit, but instead a token repatriation to
a conquered land.
Such thinking represents not
only a gross insensitivity but a confusion of public and private.
Substantive steps towards reconciliation with American Indians, for
what can be termed nothing other than genocide, are the least that
we, the descendants of the perpetrators, can
do.
This, I would argue, is in the public
interest.
Don Smith
Boise,
Idaho
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Indians are more than “special interest” group.
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