What Did You Say?

My talk at the retirement home was supposed to be about Native Americans. Instead, I talked about Indians.

Joe Sando, a professor at the University of New Mexico and a member of the Jemez Tribe, explained, “We don’t care what you call us. We call ourselves names we use in our own language. ‘Indians’ is your name for us. We are just glad when Columbus got lost, he was not looking for Turkey.”

When I asked a man who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs if there was much difference between an Iroquois and a Navajo, he said, “Is there much difference between a Swede and an Italian?”

In talking to the old ladies at the retirement home, I learned that most of them were as ignorant about American Indians as a certain former President was about Muslims. There is as much difference culturally between the Muslims of Arabia, Iran, and Turkey as between the peoples of Greece, Germany, and Spain. Maybe more. Greek, German, and Spanish all belong to the same “family” of languages, a group called Indo-European languages. That also includes English.

The Turkish language is related to no other languages in the World except Hungarian and Finnish. It is as different from English as Chinese.

Arabs speak a language which is similar to Hebrew. It is more than a legend that both Jews and Arabs are descended from Father Abraham.

As for Iranians, they speak Farsi, which is another Indo-European language, just like English! Historically the people of Iran had a culture similar to Europeans. Only recently have they adopted some of the restrictive policies (i.e., the suppression of women) which come from traditional Arab culture but which are not part of the teachings of Mohammed in the Koran.

Jews, Muslims, and Christians all worship the same God. Before Mohammad, the Arabs worshiped numerous gods in stones, wells, etc. The Prophet, influenced by the Bible, commanded them to worship one God – the God of Abraham! Christians use different names for God in different languages. In Spanish God is Dios. In Arabic God is Allah.

The more I know about the differences between people, the more I understand that in all this variety, we have common needs and goals. “Our values” are “their values” too.

We may call them by different names, but all people everywhere want the same things: a safe place to live and raise their children, shelter from cold and heat, food. Men need work to provide for their families. Women need time to care for their children. That’s the tradition since primitive times, when men hunted and women stayed close to the cave and gathered up firewood.

Today we want big houses, lots of clothes, money to eat in nice restaurants, plus fancy cars, giant television sets in every room, computers in every backpack, cell phones, and ipods. Our rich economy provides these luxuries for most people. When is it enough? When is it too much?