Letters To The Editor

WHALE HUNT

Critics ignoring tribe’s rights

Regardless if the Makah had hunted the whale without using motor boats and rifles, people would still have complained. Instead of a long fight, the whale was taken as quickly and humanely as possible.

What irritates me is certain individuals’ lack of respect for the Makah tribe’s treaty right to hunt the whale. What is the difference between someone’s treaty rights, in comparison to someone’s Constitutional rights? For some reason, the activists do not see them both as being equally the same, but they might if their rights were ever violated.

What kind of country would America be if people’s civil rights were violated the same way that the activist groups are doing with the Makah’s treaty rights?

Why should Yugoslavia, Iraq or other counties honor and uphold treaties with the United States if Americans cannot with Native Americans?

What upsets me also is the way people reacted to the whale hunt, by making racial statements, bomb and death threats toward the Coast Guard and Makah people. This should show just what kind of people they are and how they think.

It is easy to criticize something you don’t understand because you either have no knowledge or you are not part of that culture. It disgusts me to know there are people who have no regard or respect for another race’s cultural ways.

Whales are without a doubt beautiful animals. But the bottom line is the Treaty of Neah Bay guarantees the Makah the right to hunt whales. Period. Mark Ramos Spokane

Issues not black and white

Re: “Makah merely followed a path long-established” (May 21).

Once again your “From both sides” editorials take a serious issue and attempt to make it an either-or choice; and in that you encourage the very radicalism you claim to despise.

Many of your readers don’t have to choose whether to demonize one side or the other. We see, in this and other issues, the shades of gray that give both sides some good points and bad. In your own way, you are just as culpable as the circling helicopters. JoAnna Williams Princeton, Idaho

Indian traditions were wiped out

You have to be an Indian to understand the Makah whale hunt. Most of the traditions and spiritual beliefs were obliterated with the coming of the Europeans and missionaries. During the ethnic cleansing in America, Indian spiritual beliefs were termed witchcraft and evil. I feel cheated out of my own culture.

Many mixed emotions come up in me during this controversial whale hunt - or is it a witch hunt? My tribal people were salmon fishermen, hunters and gatherers, but I was raised without salmon, because there were none.

I learned to hunt and respect the animals that I hunted. I didn’t become aware of the size of a deer’s antlers until 16 years ago, when I was on a hunt in the game reserve on our reservation with my non-Indian husband. We came upon two big white-tail bucks. I had two tags, but I took only one of the bucks. While I was silently thanking the downed animal for its sacrifice, my husband was in awe of the antlers. I didn’t see the antlers as trophies. I only saw the animal’s size and the meat.

I wonder how many young Makah know how to hunt, kill, dress out and eat the whale and truly enjoy it? It’s traditional, but maybe it would’ve been better to have a reenactment of the hunt and kill, and then celebrate the life of the whale? If the white-tail deer were near extinction, I would not hunt them. I couldn’t kill a whale, but I’m not a Makah. Gloria J. “Jeannie” Maki Colville, Wash.

Caught between two worlds

I have mixed feelings about the whale hunt issue.

During the Vietnam War, I was stationed at a remote radar site in Alaska (1970-71), part of the early warning missile defense system. There was an Eskimo village that I visited occasionally and got to know some of the people there. An interesting man was a Catholic priest who lived in the village and whose mission was to bring the people back to their traditional ways. Since statehood, the Eskimos had become citizens and were entitled to welfare. Food and supplies were flown in to the village, along with alcoholic beverages, which many of them consumed.

So they didn’t need to hunt for food any more, but the priest was encouraging them to hunt anyway. Mostly they hunted walrus and seal and used the skins and tusks for different things, including making boats and canoes, as well as artifacts which were sold or traded. From my brief experience, it seems to me a great tragedy that the “civilized” world had taken away these people’s way of life from them - not by violence or force, but through supposed kindness and welfare.

On this part of the continent, the reservation system and the Bureau of Indian Affairs has not been much better for the native peoples here; perhaps an example of the inherent oppression of any form of socialism. And Indians are in a difficult position today, not really belonging to the mainstream and not being completely sovereign, either. Ron Yorke Spokane

ENVIRONMENT

EPA didn’t do homework

I went to the EPA meeting in Wallace and heard from the local miners about things that seemed to surprise the EPA representatives. First, they were asked if they had included Mother Nature’s natural healing and cleansing of toxins after 18 years since the Bunker Hill mine was closed in their assumptions about the metal contamination. They said they hadn’t taken that into consideration.

Then they were asked why they were designating Larson as the headwaters of the South Fork, when above Larson they used to mine for copper. They didn’t know about that either. Ben Cope, EPA tech, gave the slide presentation for the EPA, and it specifically designated Larson as headwaters and pristine, but showed the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River being contaminated by everything, except the St. Joe River, and the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene.

To us, they had mathematically decided where the toxins might have come from, but they hadn’t done much local research to make much sense. They also said they were being sued for missing their 1997 deadline for this project, and it looked like they were in a hurry to get it done. Their use of so much mathematical jargon indicated they weren’t really interested in finding real sources, just stick it to the Silver Valley. Joanne Peters Kellogg

Metals cleanup impossible

The Chambers of Commerce in the Silver Valley should be congratulated for their honesty in the current controversy concerning water quality in the Coeur d’Alene Basin. The business community of the Valley has admitted, at a recent EPA meeting, that the Coeur d’Alene River is so polluted by naturally occurring toxic metals that there is no hope of ever achieving water quality that will meet the EPA Gold Book criteria. This is the accepted criteria for almost every other community and urban area in the country.

A chamber brochure given out at the EPA meeting acknowledges that naturally occurring lead levels in Coeur d’Alene River mud have been measured at over 1,000 parts per million. This is twice the level that is considered safe. This high level of naturally occurring toxic metals in conjunction with the mining wastes would, of course, preclude the success of any cleanup. It appears that little can ever be done. As the brochure explains, “There are hundreds, if not thousands, of locations in the Coeur d’Alene River Basin where lead and zinc deposits are exposed on the surface.”

I know of few business organizations with the integrity to inform the public of safety hazards which will so adversely affect their long-term economic development. Thank you for reminding the public, tourists and any future developers, that the Silver Valley is now, and shall forever be, polluted with toxic heavy metals.

Paul Valanoff Moscow

Reporter rewriting history

Ken Olsen recently attempted to rewrite history when he wrote about the Upper Priest Lake land exchange between the Forest Service and a timber company.

The Spokesman-Review’s own archives show that environmentalists, the timber industry and even the media supported public acquisition and protection of the largest contiguous block of old-growth red cedar in the continental United States.

The Spokesman-Review editorialized at the time (“Ancient cedars are worth saving,” 9/27/95), chiding the Forest Service to “quit fiddling and get busy saving an ancient stand of red cedars at Upper Priest Lake … With industry and environmentalists joining hands, nothing more is needed but for the Idaho Panhandle Forest Supervisor David Wright and the U.S. Forest Service to find the will to save the entire land.”

The Spokesman-Review clearly believed in the public value of the exchange noting,“The worth of the Riley Creek property includes its value as wildlife habitat. Black bears and grizzlies roam the area during the spring; moose, in the winter.”

In covering the exchange two years later (“Sacred grove of cedars belongs to public now,” 10/4/97), the paper heralded the event: “One of the nation’s most valuable stand of trees is safe from chain saws, thanks to a land swap completed Friday between the U.S. Forest Service and a sawmill owner.” The article went on to quote supporters, including environmentalists, timber industry and the Forest Service.

The Spokesman-Review’s recent coverage of the transaction is nothing short of a rewrite of history. Karl S. Laws Clearwater Land Exchange, Orofino

THE WAR IN THE BALKANS

Put yourself in Serbians’ place

The late ex-Beatle and rock martyr John Lennon wrote a song about peace called “Imagine.”

Now imagine that you’ve spent the past few years protesting the actions of your lawfully elected president - a man you consider a corrupt Marxist, who lies at will and has the ethics of a venereal streetwalker. Now imagine that your wife and children are on a city bus that, because of the actions of your hated president, is hit by a laser-guided, 2,000-pound bomb (that is sheeted with a phosphorus coating) which is designed to “fragment.”

The resulting explosion rips the intestines out of the kids and their mother. The burning phosphorus covers their skin and fills their lungs, insuring an agonizing death.

Unfortunately, this recently happened in the city of Nic, Serbia.

The bombs came from an American aircraft in the undeclared war on the sovereign nation of Serbia. And it is not an isolated incident.

When the Chinese Embassy was bombed by mistake, the Clinton administration claimed that intelligence sources were outdated. But these are the same sources that the Air Force has been using for 3,500 sorties per day for over 50 days.

How many innocent people have been killed, and for what reason?

I just hope that the guy whose family was brutally killed isn’t brushing up on his German/French so he can get a job handling baggage at a European airport which services American 747s. Richard G. LeFrancis Jr. Coeur d’Alene

Who are the good guys?

The longer our bombing campaign of terror against the people of Yugoslavia continues, the harder it is to tell the good guys from the bad guys. There is something profoundly evil, barbaric and criminal about the wealthiest nation on Earth systematically destroying with impunity the economy and infrastructure of a small nation that has barely rebuilt itself following the tremendous devastation of World War II.

Despite our ever-helpful government’s best attempts to explain to us dunderheads why we are destroying a country which has committed no aggression against us or our allies, I am still confused.

It can’t be because of genocide, since we’ve killed more people and caused more suffering in two months than were killed in the year preceding our involvement. It can’t be because we deplore ethnic cleansing, since we freely used ethnic cleansing of Native Americans during the period of U.S. expansion. Hopefully, Native Americans won’t misinterpret our newfound abhorrence of ethnic cleansing as meaning we are serious about correcting our past injustices or we may have to return vast amounts of territory to them.

It can’t be that we’re horrified by reports of systematic rapes, since rape was commonly used to terrorize and dehumanize slaves during slavery.

Unfortunately, U.S. history is filled with the same type of atrocities, brutalities, massacres and mass graves that we accuse the Serbs of. Luckily for us, there was no foreign superpower at the time capable of stopping our territorial ambitions for a greater America. Fred Carani Leavenworth, Wash.

GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Republicans use cheap tactics

I believe the Republican Party’s goal in politics is to smear the Democrats, as they have done to President Bill Clinton.

I believe, deep down, they think that this is the only way they can win anything. They try to stop him in any decision he makes, at every turn in the road.

And they call themselves Americans. J. “Coop” Cooper Greenacres