the drunk windtalking welder

coming back from Moab we gassed up in Tuba City, and there were 3 dudes hanging out in the shade next to the back exit of the quickie mart. Its about 1pm, one of em starts giving my friend Stan the pitch for a handout, he actually brings up how his people were the windtalkers during ww2 and how much America owes them, Stan escapes and he turns on me…drunk, slurring, telling me he had recently been up in Colorado working as a welder for $32/hr, but now he’s back here and broke. And apparently making a full-time job out of panhandling people stopping for gas.

So let’s recap: the man has skills that pay some good wages, but not in the middle of nowhere Arizona where no one is building anything. He knows about money, and a job, and how hard work equals good salary. He knows good work for him involves travel. He chooses to return to Tuba City.

I’d like to ride like Lance Armstrong, but not train. I’d like to be rich, but not work. I’d like to have a job that completely maximizes my skills, but be able to work from home. I’d like to bang the hottest chicks in the world, but do no situps, buy no flowers, and put up with no attitude. At the risk or massively over-generalizing, I am so damn tired of hearing complaints from Tribes or tribe members about how hard they have it cause they can’t escape the poverty and hopelessnes of the res, but, YOU NEVER HEAR THEM SERIOUSLY CONSIDER MOVING!!! Everything is a trade-off. You live where you call home, you don’t have a fixed schedule, or sprawl or pollution, you live around people you know and are part of your community, you don’t have gang crime and high property taxes and traffic, or work-related stress, no one says how great those things are on the res? The res has problems, but it also has attractions for some. Why is it that trade-offs are common sense, but both Native Americans and everyone else seems to ignore commons sense when talking about the res? Its like our collective hard-on for the small American farmer who is no longer efficient or particularly good in his chosen field or able to survive without intrusive government assistance — we have this sentimental or guilt-laden or simply co-opted view of an issue and want to have everything at no cost. We want Native Americans to be able to live on the res, but have it be like Scottsdale.

White people just enable this sort of thinking by not making the discussion about economics, and instead suggesting that we need to help the Indians, that somehow the way they are perceived to be living is wrong and must be corrected. The windtalking welder knows this quite well, it laced his entire pitch. He didnt say “can I earn some money from you”, he said his people helped America 60 years ago so should get paid now, that he didnt have work because he was in Tuba City not that work was unavailable to him. The problems we see on the res go with the lifestyle. The Tribes (generally) have made it really clear that they like their location and will go to incredible lengths to preserve their locations, that their homes and their connection to the land is the most important thing to them, that they are a community and not a group of individuals. Clearly, the people who choose their connection to their tribe as their social identification (as opposed to an unencumbered free agent in a liberal democracy…or, your typical mainstream American) don’t want the lifestyle changes that are the cost of higher standards or living and cures for many of their res’s problems. So why is there such a liberal guilt about it, and why do we look at drunk windtalking welder and think this is a problem with the res? Its what it is, its the trade-off, it will work itself out, or it won’t. Trying to fix someone is just hubris. Who are you to say its wrong? Who are you to say it needs fixing? And why should I pay to fix it for someone who ignores the economic forces that are as crucial to my way of life as his connection with his home is to him?

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