Sam Deloria: Confronting Dick Cheney about his racist remarks

I read an ICTMN story about a roast for Cheney, held in New York and attended by, among others, Joe Lieberman. Cheney reportedly told a story about a “one-shot antelope hunting contest in Wyoming, in which the loser has to dance with an Indian squaw…” It reportedly also included some other tasteless jokes about waterboarding. If it were a movie about a banquet of arrogant Nazis boasting about their depredations, there would be ominous soundtrack accompaniment, foreboding future disaster. Reading the story and thinking about what it says about the country’s “elite” made me sick, and a bit frightened.

A few weeks later, my wife and I attended a dinner in Colorado that was also attended by Dick Cheney and his wife. He was standing somewhat apart from the crowd, visiting with various people who approached him. I waited until he was free and approached, introducing myself again; he again seemed to remember me. I told him I had read the story about the roast, and he got an “I know what is coming” look in his eye. I said, “Dick, I don’t know if you remember, but I am an Indian; you don’t know my wife, but she is an Indian. Do you know what an awful word ‘squaw’ has become? Do you really mean to say that our women are so low on the human scale that having to dance with an Indian woman is punishment, a form of humiliation?”

Immediately he said, “Well, you have to understand, that is the system in Lander [Wyoming]. That is the way things are done up there.” I said, “What system? There is a system in Lander that requires you to talk like that?” “You need to understand the system,” he kept saying. “What is the power in Lander that made you tell that story in New York? What the hell are you talking about?” He proceeded to make his escape, apparently having given up any hope that I was capable of understanding the system in Lander. I had the satisfaction of saying a bad word as he walked away, a bad word invariably, including this time, followed by the word you. But it wasn’t satisfaction enough. The guy who laid waste to Iraq in order to change its system cowers before the racist imperatives of Lander, Wyoming?