What is that thing you go home hats are good.

[snarp]

I don't know what this is supposed to be, and I don't think I want to try and find out (their main page is entirely Shockwave, for absolutely no earthly reason), but... it's a wise old Native American woman who says "real strong," and I think she's, is she propagandizing for some kind of Lewis and Clark fan society? And I think what the last frame is trying to say is, "Whitey didn't kill them all, get off our backs."

...okay, I lied. Apparently I did want to try and find out. There's a sort of similar-looking page at LewisAndClark200.gov, which... yeah... .gov. There's an essay there by a Native American guy with a lot of extremely cagy sentences, like,

It is felt by many Indian people the three factors with greatest effects on Indian people and our country were the fur traders, organized Christianity and the U.S. Government.

and

If there is anything to celebrate with the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, it is the fact that the American Indian people are still here and are working on that survival.

They're working on it.

There's a bio following the essay - but it's not a bio of the actual author. The author is named "Gerard Baker," and the bio is of the much more impressive "Altwin Grassrope."

And then there are some print ads (PDF), in a somewhat different tone, which make my skin crawl with the power of patronizing.

I don't know anything about the Lewis and Clark expedition because I am not an eight-year-old boy from the 50's with a little hat and all, but, I mean - the dudes were surveying the land for the government so that people of European descent could move into it, correct? I don't care if they were well-behaved enough to get along, briefly, with the people they were planning on overrunning - they still knew what the plan was. I really don't think you can set them up as emblems of cultural tolerance.

(And having just looked up Sacagawea, and read about the way her husband got away with treating her... no.)

It's been about ten days since I started writing this entry, and I still don't have any conclusion aside from "augh!" (which is the title of the text file on the desktop), so I'm just going to post it now to get it out of my head, and go read Fruits Basket.