The way I see it, the April Fool’s issue made fun of a lot of things. The consent posters, hippies and the new art building all got slammed. Of course, none of these articles are the cause of contention lately on campus. That’s because we’re hippies, we’ll use the new art building and we do respect the consent campaign, when all is said and done. We laugh at these things because we are laughing at ourselves. Now here we are, having published an article in a joke newspaper insert that laughs at Native Americans. That’s different. It was not written by a Native American, and there aren’t so many Native students at Whitman to read it. People stopped laughing.
We are attending a school founded in honor of a white missionary doctor who tried to indoctrinate the Indians whose land he plopped himself down on. I do not personally think Marcus Whitman is the colonial devil, but I am also quite sure his murder was not part of a ‘massacre,’ all things considered. In Cayuse tradition, medicine men who failed to cure their patients were killed. The healer knows it’s coming. If he was not strong enough to cure his patients, he had failed his calling. Whitman failed to stem the smallpox outbreak his caravan of European Americans brought to the Native tribes of northeastern Oregon. He was killed for his failure.
He was white, as was his wife. The outrage of American lives lost put their deaths down in history as a massacre. No such word is used for the deaths of the thousands of Native Americans (note: also Americans) during Western expansion. We pay $42,000 a year to celebrate his memory and not necessarily theirs. And then Indians took over Bridges’ office.
I take a different view on this controversy than most regular contributors to this paper, it seems. Writers on campus are up in arms because their freedom of speech has been jeopardized. I don’t feel jeopardized in the slightest. I frankly feel like this campus-wide argument wouldn’t be taking place if the article in question had been written better. The satirical spin in “Indians take over Bridges’ office” is obvious, but the author’s ease with satire is not.
The comics who are successful in handling satire, racial satire especially, tell their jokes from a place of experience with the subject matter. Chris Rock was born in the South in the ’60s and grew up in Brooklyn, being bused to a white school where he encountered constant abuse. Today he makes fun of white people and black people, because his life has been irreversibly affected by both. People laugh at his jokes because he’s been observing race politics in America since 1965. We figure he has to get his material from somewhere.
When the Pio came out with the “Whitman College Native American,” I wondered who was writing for the newspaper that regularly observes and deeply understands the experience of First Americans. I came up short. Which makes writing flippantly about scalpings and relating them to real tribe names deeply, deeply problematic.
On one hand, we are obviously a bunch of twentysomethings who aren’t making a career of comedic journalism backed by years of experience and knowledge of our subject matter. On the other, larger hand, however, as writers for this newspaper we get paid out of ASWC funds, which come out of the tuition paid by the students of this College. And if someone who’s paying me to write is deeply offended by something I write, it’s absolutely the least I can do to take his or her grievance seriously.
Of course I believe in free speech. My columns swear and complain and rant all the time. If I couldn’t write it, I would cover myself in red paint and sit in front of Reid screaming something about menstruation. And I would expect to be taken seriously, because I have a history of menstruating. More than that, I would expect to be taken seriously because my experience of the world was under attack and we’re supposed to be living somewhere that lets me freely say so.
But I also believe in picking your battles, and choosing an article which I found pretty poorly written as your case in point for free speech is not the best idea. If I can be convinced that this writer would be comfortable sending his article into the Umatilla: or better yet Navajo: reservations as a representation of the Pioneer’s best satire, because he’s that sure of his message, I will hear him out. For now, though, I am truly disappointed that a school so fraught with Native American history chooses to introduce the topic via an ethically questionable article in a joke issue. Journalism can do better than this.
