This news really has to make you wonder about what’s wrong with some people in Kansas:

Many Manhattan High School alumni fondly recall the ceramic mosaic of an Indian head — the school’s symbol — that was formerly in the floor in front of the school gymnasium.

Now they’re hoping to restore the Indian to its former glory and install it in a place of honor at the school.

The history of when the Indian mosaic was taken out of the floor — and eventually relegated to storage — is a little hazy at this point. But alums say they recall the mosaic as a source of pride — and torment.

“The seniors used to make the underclassmen shine it,” said alumna Cam Feltner. She recalled as well that it was understood that no one was to step on the Indian at any cost.

There’s something creepy about their used of the phrase “restore the Indian to its former glory”. This is not a shrine to Indians, it will not refer to the origin of the mascot, or the people who the mascot represents. So what “glory” do they mean, exactly?

At one point in the early 1970s, some students brought teacher and coach Earl Gritton’s Volkswagen in through the gym and pushed it part way onto the Indian. Gritton’s wife Lois said the students chickened out and ran off before they got the car fully on top of the mascot.

By the time MHS alum Larry McCarthy arrived at the school in 1973, the Indian was protected by the aforementioned fence. McCarthy heard tales, though, of seniors throwing sophomores onto the fenced-in Indian and making them spit shine it either with their rear-end or a rag.

It would be one thing if they decided to explore the significance of the mosaic in relation to the fate of the Arapaho, Comanche, Kansa, Kiowa, Osage, or Pawnee tribes (all natives of the area that became Kansas). Maybe they could review how Indians served to protect Kansans, such as Pélathé’s famous ride to the city of Lawrence to warn them of raiders from Missouri.

But no, this group apparently not only thinks it honorable to have an “Indian head” as a plain mascot, but to enshrine it as a symbol of years of maltreatment and disrepect. Needless to say, this is a fine example of how some public school “associations” can be so far out of touch with modern values and progress in diversity that they grasp for comfort in historic symbols of how/when they “ruled” their roost. This reminds me of the colonials who never could adjust or recover from the news that they were misinformed about inequality of race, color, creed…

“We’re pretty sure we’re going to take it on as a project,” said Fiser. “Quite a few of the officers and directors have said, ‘let’s take this on.’ We think it’s a great thing to do to preserve history and tradition for our high school.”

I can think of a hundred other things an alumni association should do to preserve a real history and tradition of their school, instead of futzing around with a controversial mosaic that plays up cluelessness and insensitivity.

Call David Fiser if you would like to give him your opinion about the project and the mascot: 913-537-9123

Ironically, the Indian model of using resources without claiming exclusive rights has become a hot topic again today. Groups around the world, such as IndiCare, are joining together to debate and fight against digital rights legislation that criminalizes sharing, with the French leading the way within the Western legal system. Do they have the strength and courage to stand up to the recording industry?

As far as the history of this sort of conflict goes, we can only hope that the DRM battle does not end with the industry bringing in some big guns. Now that historians are reporting how the West was really won, PBS provides some chilling insight of the method of extermination practiced by soldiers “protecting” their territory:

Big Foot decided to lead his people away from the possibility of further violence at neighboring Standing Rock and headed farther south toward the reservation at Pine Ridge, hoping to find safety there. Increasingly ill with pneumonia, he had no intention of fighting and was flying a white flag when soldiers patrolling for roving bands caught up with him on December 28, 1890. That night Big Foot and his people camped near Wounded Knee Creek, surrounded on all sides by soldiers.

The next morning, the soldiers set up several large Hotchkiss guns on a hill overlooking the camp and began confiscating the Indians’ weapons. When a gun accidentally went off, they opened fire, and within a few minutes, some 370 Lakota lay dead, many of them cut down by the deadly Hotchkiss guns as they sought shelter against a creek bank. The soldiers even pursued fleeing women and children, shooting some as far as two miles from the site of the original confrontation. One Indian witness remembered:

A mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing… The women as they were fleeing with their babies were killed together… and after most of them had been killed a cry was made that all those who were not killed or wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little boys… came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there.

Right. The question of heritage is not so simple. Is the Indian head mascot a celebration of positive contributions and diverse opinions, or displays of egregious power and disrespect? And aside from that, is the money spent restoring a mosaic from a gym really helping promote a positive heritage and contributing to a richer sense of community for students, let alone the school alumni?

1939 was the year Solomon Linda recorded “Mbube” with The Evening Birds. 3rd Ear Music Forum has a nice write-up of the man who wrote the song commonly known as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”:

This one’s for Solomon Linda, then, a Zulu who wrote a melody that earned untold millions for white men but died so poor that his widow couldn’t afford a stone for his grave. Let’s take it from the top, as they say in the trade.

[…]

What might all this represent in songwriter royalties and associated revenues? I put the question to lawyers around the world, and they scratched their heads. Around 160 recordings of three versions? Thirteen movies? Half a dozen TV commercials and a hit play? Number Seven on Val Pak’s semi-authoritative ranking of the most-beloved golden oldies, and ceaseless radio airplay in every corner of the planet? It was impossible to accurately calculate, to be sure, but no one blanched at $15 million. Some said 10, some said 20, but most felt that $15 million was in the ball park.

Which raises an even more interesting question: What happened to all that loot?

The problem with information is the ease of transfer. For example “identity theft” means someone else can profit by taking your identity and using it for their own financial gain without authorization. We all have multiple identities, if you will (e.g. father, brother, friend, son, boss) and an artist’s identity is often their business (singer, writer, comedian, etc.). The difference here seems to be that Solomon Linda was somehow convinced to transfer his identity/creation for only ten shillings.

Part Four: in which a moral is considered Once upon a time, a long time ago, a Zulu man stepped up to a microphone and improvised a melody that earned in the region of $15 million. That Solomon Linda got almost none of it was probably inevitable. He was a black man in white-ruled South Africa, but his American peers fared little better. Robert Johnson’s contribution to the blues went largely unrewarded. Leadbelly lost half of his publishing to his white “patrons.” DJ Alan Freed refused to play Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” until he was given a songwriter’s cut. Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” was nicked off Willie Dixon. All musicians were minnows in the pop-music food chain, but blacks were most vulnerable, and Solomon Linda, an illiterate tribesman from a wild valley where lions roamed, was totally defenseless against sophisticated predators.

Last July I posted a comment on Bruce Schneier’s blog about Kamikaze pilots and their love/loyalty to their family, as opposed to a devotion to their Emperor or nation:

I recently heard a compelling radio report that interviewed Kamikaze pilots who survived. They discussed their reasons for “volunteering” and the shame involved in surviving or never having a chance to fight. It radically changed my understanding of why/how these men chose self-sacrifice as a form of attack — often as a measure of loyalty to help protect their family. This idea of extended honor and preservation through personal sacrifice seems like the sort of glorious afterlife theme I often hear with regard to today’s Islamic bombers, although they seem to infer radical Islam is the family (since parents are unaware to avoid detection or because of their natural objections to the conflict).

I probably could have been a little more clear, but the point I was trying to make is that personal sacrifice is justified by some kind of attachment to principle and purpose.

The Allies almost invariably portrayed the kamikaze pilots as men with feverish devotion to an evil leader. What if they were portrayed as men devoted to protecting their families and their livelihood (as if a common perspective were possible at the time)?

I went on to say:

Ohnuki-Tierney’s book (Kamikaze, Cherry Blossom, and Nationalism) on the “tokkotai” or “special attack corps” echoes this theme. She discusses the way in which the Kamikaze were told by the state that they needed to “volunteer” to “defend their country against American invasion”, but they ultimately carried with them a variance of religious, philosophical, and utopian ideologies that they individually used to justify self-sacrifice. She even goes so far as to suggest that many of the pilots borrowed Christianity from Europe to provide them with a model of sacrifice for others and the notion of life after death.

This suggests that the men were indeed thinking individuals that not only had to be persuaded/enlisted to sacrifice their lives, but that their individuality stuck with them until their last moments.

The Guardian Unlimited just posted a story called “We were ready to die for Japan” that is based on an interview with a pilot that survived. The survivor reinforces this notion of individual agents struggling with the ethics of suicide attack:

He has little time for the notion that the young men who flew into enemy warships did so happily in a selfless display of loyalty for the emperor.

“We said what we supposed to say about the emperor, but we didn’t feel it in our hearts,” he said. “We were ready to die, but for our families and for Japan. We thought people who talked seriously about wanting to die for the emperor were misguided.

“It was more like a mother who drops everything when her child needs her. That’s how the kamikaze felt about their country.”

In a literal sense, the idea of “mother” might seem appropriate, but what if the word is interpreted as a more general concept such as “caregiver” or “provider”? The article continues:

Mr Hamazono is certain that, had he been able to see his mission through to its conclusion, his final words would have had little to do with Japan’s wartime state Shintoism or its spiritual figurehead.

“Mother … that’s the only word. You have only seconds left,” he said. “The idea that we laughed in the face of death is a myth.”

Not an easy problem to solve, clearly, from a general perspective and it begs the question of how to understand the majority feelings and perhaps try to change them so that hope replaces hopelessness, trust replaces fear.

One has to wonder if a similar perspective for today’s bombers will surface fifty years from now? In a nutshell, what/who is really winning hearts and minds in modern conflict?

Someone suggested to me that many of the suicide bombers and soldiers recruited/trained by al Qaeda may in fact come from families who have already been forced to make sacrifices as non-combatants, or come from orphanages in remote and depressed regions around the world.

In that sense, the idea of defending one’s “mother” takes on a strange twist since the more conflict in a region the more orphans in want of a replacement for mother…

How should we define “family” and what is justified to defend it/them?