Column: Muckleshoot Tribe succeeds despite harsh history

Throughout my childhood, Muckleshoots were the recipients of some of the most bitter racial comments I ever heard. Disparaging remarks about them were far more common than similar barbs aimed at African-Americans, probably because, at the time, there weren’t any blacks around here.

After such a corrupt, violent and cultural-destroying history, one could hardly expect the members of this artificial tribe to make a rapid recovery and readily accept the white man’s manicured lawns, freshly-scrubbed homes and Christian religion. But dissipated as they were, the Indians tried as best they could to regroup and develop a society that preserved some of their native beliefs and ways. They built several dilapidated homes that tended to confirm the white’s bigoted opinions.

One time when I was just a little kid, I remember driving through the reservation with my father, just as an Indian fellow stumbled and fell down the front steps of a house with a bottle of booze in his hand. I asked my dad what was wrong with that “Indian guy.” My father, who wasn’t an especially bigoted man, nevertheless quickly replied, “That’s just another drunken Indian.”