Editor,
A journalist is sometimes like a good scrabble player. The ideas for an article, like individual letters for words, can be arranged in different order and the message of the article can read different ways, just like the same letters can spell entirely different words.
My speech at University of New Mexico's law school was definitely scrabbled in Ryan Floersheim's Sept. 23 Daily Lobo article.
He ended the article with the ideas I began my talk with. He added a good deal of words, which read so logically that it seems likely I said them. Even his closing paragraph inverts the order of my thoughts.
But direct quotation marks should never be placed around interpretations, interpolations or even simple re-wordings.
And there are inaccuracies in Floersheim's article which create a misleading impression.
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His third paragraph says "several American Indians dawned [donned] false glasses." I saw only one such student, who immediately following the speech behaved with corresponding immaturity. He clearly had serious and previous problems with authority, and showed a disrespect, which made me doubt his "Indian" orientation. He frothed out irrelevant abstractions not based on anything he'd heard, but on his own resentment of adults.
Floersheim says I intended in my speech to "show the discrepancies between the values that Christianity [Christians] promote and their violent history, especially toward Indians." Not true. "Can A Christian Pull the Trigger?" was part of my title, but I showed historically that they had pulled the trigger, and that America was in fact built by such Christians. That part of my speech encouraged Americans to keep their weapons, and not be duped by the pseudo-Christian, self-righteous sentiment of left-wing communist psychology, which says to surrender your evil guns.
I referred to no "Congressional Act of 1619." There was no Congress then. I referred to a law made in the Virginia colony.
I did not say, "The atrocities committed by the white man since the day of Columbus must be brought to light and learned from." I said I deeply admired the courage of Columbus. "He's my kind of man," I said, in reference to his bravery for making a voyage into his own theory.
I never encouraged American Indians to foster resentment or rebellion against America or the white race. I recognize the inevitable sense of tragedy in American Indian people, yet, for the future, I believe American Indians must consider a new ideological approach to society and our role in it.
Floersheim completely omitted the most important response. Mr. Leonard Redhorse, a Navajo law student and respected thinker in his tribe, said, "Let me tell you that most of the Indians I know think like our speaker." This was the revelation of the evening.
Aside from the inaccuracies of hasty journalism, Floersheim's piece demonstrates that he could not hear me as a conservative American Indian, but instead heard a liberal activist with "controversial" contradictions. Had he arranged the ideas of the article accurately, however, and included Redhorse's response, I should not have appeared so inconsistent in his article.
David A. Yeagley
