As I indicated earlier, I worked on the reservation, so I'm fully aware of that. I had just arrived in the States, and it was my first job. Quite apart from finding that the US was technologically behind the UK in terms of the internet, and that people had no idea what British Sterling was, etc. and the extreme sexual harassment by one of the white male casino managers, the poverty on the reservation hit me.

For the 11 years I stayed in America, what also hit me was the complete lack of diversity in American life. It was so uniform. I have always wondered about that claim that America is the most diverse nation on earth. I always thought it was singularly homogenous.

Walk down Oxford street in London and you will hear 20 languages in 20 minutes. Plomp yourself into the herart of Cape Town in South Africa, and you will see 10 different cultures, including women dancing bare breasted on the streets for tourism. Stoll in the heart of Africa in the rain forest , and the fragrance of primal forest will tell you of an earth that once existed. Walk around Dusseldorf in Germany and you become aware that unlike the Med, there are no ancient buildings - they are all raized to the ground during WWII. Everything is square, bland, and the outcome of modernism. Ugh.

But America?

All square buildings, people talking on cell phones, no Native American culture in the streets, nothing. WTF? Why are Native Americans not part of American life?

As someone born and bred in Africa, where all types of marriages are permitted, where peple have stalls on the streets, where posters for abortion and penis elongation are quite normal to see, why does American culture lack such diversity?

Why is everything interpreted with only one explanation? Perhaps the lady was having a manic episode. Perhaps she loves the Native American culture. Perhaps it was an expersesion of love. I saw on mockery. Sometimes things are in the eye of the beholder.

There is something extremely fucked about the American mindset at the moment. You have a 50% mental illness rate, and everything is seen as an insult to everybody else.

All I'm saying is that I did NOT see and I do NOT see what happened as an attack on a particular culture. I fully understand that native Americans in America are not part of the community, and I always wondered why, but when one has a hammer and everything looks like a nail, it's time to start worrying.