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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Less than half-joking aside though, I wonder...

I know it's not going to make any changes in your behavior because you're not a mindless NPC like some of the folk around here are cause you and me are smarter than the average Bear.



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Are they all white men? These characters that you want to strangle in the movie, Brenda?


Oh, Hollywood, Hollywood... Why do you hate me so?

You really don't make it easy being a white brother who just doesn't want any conflict and wants to be left alone for the most part.



I'm hoping I'm wrong, Brenda. But until you tell me I am I'm pretty sure that I'm not.



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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Originally posted by Brenda:
They are all white characters.

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Originally posted by Brenda:

They are all white characters. Like I said Robert de Niro's character, who only seems to go on about the money the Osage have which is why I want to strangle De Niro's character. I am fairly certain I will find other reasons why I want do him in. Also he seems to be the sheriff and doesn't care about investigating Osage murders. All women by the way.

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Your whole review made me laugh, but the part about De Niro was my favorite part.

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And an older couple who were in someone's house talking about 2 children both half breeds that they were watching at a table. The first child is girl of about 5 maybe being schooled. The other child is a boy of around a year old or a little more. The woman was saying they will be worthless and how come the girl was darker than the boy. Then the man said I suppose bible scripture and basically that is why I wanted to strangle those two.

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I don't get the point about bible scripture. Maybe that's something way above my head since I don't subscribe to any religion. I mean that I know so little about the subject matter that I wouldn't know how he could be offensive with it.

And although I would agree 100% that saying something like that is just downright rude and shouldn't ever be said, but I'm wondering aside from the rudeness of saying it out loud if maybe there weren't a little truth to that in 1920's Oklahoma? Everything that is true isn't always nice. I think in 2026 we're long past that ever mattering. I can't genuinely think of a single person I know or have ever known that would shun a white/native relationship. I mean maybe some drunk dickhead at a friend's family party might but I think that person would probably get shut down immediately and likely kicked out of the party for saying it.

What I'm saying is, I would feel bad for those kids 100 years ago. What happened wasn't their fault, but now they're growing up in a world that only had the radio for less than 30 years and hadn't even seen a television yet. I think there would probably be a lot of "racism" going around on the part of everyone in that situation. Depending on how bad the animus a tribe had for any local white people, couldn't you see situations where they'd be banished? I'm sure that making fornicating with white people forbidden wasn't uncommon. Probably not so different than the amount of pregenant white women who were disowned if they went through with the pregnancy, which I'm assuming most did with religion being so much more prominent 100 years ago than it is today.

Hell... I told you about my grandma and grandpa. We're all "white" now, but my grandma was banished from her rich parent's house and life after she dropped out of secretary school and married my poor polack grandpa who was a lower manager at a grocery store. They were in love. Like really. Because they stuck together to the end like only 1 of their kids has managed to do so far, with 1 other still having both partners alive. You could tell the way they talked about each other and what they would do for each other that it was still real all those years later.

But at the end of the day. Everybody always paints whatever picture they want to hand down to the kids and grand kids, but I'm under no illusion about it. I know my grandpa knocked my grandma up. And everybody was deeply Christian and an abortion would have been out of the question for everyone involved. And my Grandpa got to work and raised a family of five kids without my grandmother ever having to work a job a single day of her life after they got married and made the bastard legit. And he never once asked them for a dime. And the only reason any of that generational wealth made it to this side of the family is because eldest sister who died of breast cancer had a heart and didn't give the entire fortune to the other sister that "did the right thing" and married herself a bonafide judge. Most of it went to her, but not all of it.

I bet if I ever asked my mom or any of her brothers and sisters about how their parents met they'd tell me I was full of shit and it all went down the way they told us it went down and they've all convinced themselves of that lie, because hey... why not believe the lie? Didn't hurt nothing to believe in it.

I think the only sibling that would tell me I was probably right is the one we don't have around anymore.





I just get mad at all the modern framing is all. Nobody can be the bad guy anymore except for the straight white guy. We might not all be evil, but if there is anybody evil in the movie it's gonna a straight white dude or a gaggle of straight white dudes.

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I like DiCaprico's character. He seems to have respect for the Osage.

Interesting thing when his character Ernest got married, the ceremony was Osage. Not in a church though there is a scene where he and Anna are in a church.

So far no stereotypes of the drunken Indian.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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Originally posted by Brenda:

They are all white characters. Like I said Robert de Niro's character, who only seems to go on about the money the Osage have which is why I want to strangle De Niro's character. I am fairly certain I will find other reasons why I want do him in. Also he seems to be the sheriff and doesn't care about investigating Osage murders. All women by the way.

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Your whole review made me laugh, but the part about De Niro was my favorite part.

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And an older couple who were in someone's house talking about 2 children both half breeds that they were watching at a table. The first child is girl of about 5 maybe being schooled. The other child is a boy of around a year old or a little more. The woman was saying they will be worthless and how come the girl was darker than the boy. Then the man said I suppose bible scripture and basically that is why I wanted to strangle those two.

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I don't get the point about bible scripture. Maybe that's something way above my head since I don't subscribe to any religion. I mean that I know so little about the subject matter that I wouldn't know how he could be offensive with it.

And although I would agree 100% that saying something like that is just downright rude and shouldn't ever be said, but I'm wondering aside from the rudeness of saying it out loud if maybe there weren't a little truth to that in 1920's Oklahoma? Everything that is true isn't always nice. I think in 2026 we're long past that ever mattering. I can't genuinely think of a single person I know or have ever known that would shun a white/native relationship. I mean maybe some drunk dickhead at a friend's family party might but I think that person would probably get shut down immediately and likely kicked out of the party for saying it.

What I'm saying is, I would feel bad for those kids 100 years ago. What happened wasn't their fault, but now they're growing up in a world that only had the radio for less than 30 years and hadn't even seen a television yet. I think there would probably be a lot of "racism" going around on the part of everyone in that situation. Depending on how bad the animus a tribe had for any local white people, couldn't you see situations where they'd be banished? I'm sure that making fornicating with white people forbidden wasn't uncommon. Probably not so different than the amount of pregenant white women who were disowned if they went through with the pregnancy, which I'm assuming most did with religion being so much more prominent 100 years ago than it is today.

Hell... I told you about my grandma and grandpa. We're all "white" now, but my grandma was banished from her rich parent's house and life after she dropped out of secretary school and married my poor polack grandpa who was a lower manager at a grocery store. They were in love. Like really. Because they stuck together to the end like only 1 of their kids has managed to do so far, with 1 other still having both partners alive. You could tell the way they talked about each other and what they would do for each other that it was still real all those years later.

But at the end of the day. Everybody always paints whatever picture they want to hand down to the kids and grand kids, but I'm under no illusion about it. I know my grandpa knocked my grandma up. And everybody was deeply Christian and an abortion would have been out of the question for everyone involved. And my Grandpa got to work and raised a family of five kids without my grandmother ever having to work a job a single day of her life after they got married and made the bastard legit. And he never once asked them for a dime. And the only reason any of that generational wealth made it to this side of the family is because eldest sister who died of breast cancer had a heart and didn't give the entire fortune to the other sister that "did the right thing" and married herself a bonafide judge. Most of it went to her, but not all of it.

I bet if I ever asked my mom or any of her brothers and sisters about how their parents met they'd tell me I was full of shit and it all went down the way they told us it went down and they've all convinced themselves of that lie, because hey... why not believe the lie? Didn't hurt nothing to believe in it.

I think the only sibling that would tell me I was probably right is the one we don't have around anymore.





I just get mad at all the modern framing is all. Nobody can be the bad guy anymore except for the straight white guy. We might not all be evil, but if there is anybody evil in the movie it's gonna a straight white dude or a gaggle of straight white dudes.

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I like DiCaprico's character. He seems to have respect for the Osage.

Interesting thing when his character Ernest got married, the ceremony was Osage. Not in a church though there is a scene where he and Anna are in a church.

So far no stereotypes of the drunken Indian.

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The scene in the church was after the wedding? To show that they were doing both together? That truly was a Christian church for over 100 years ago.

I wonder if the tension ever really truly die down whenever they were with either side of their family in real life. I remember when my mom first got remarried when I was around 12 years old, I didn't even know there was any racism between whites and Mexicans. Like "adult" racism. I grew up with Mexican kids in school. I don't remember ever hanging out with any until High School and my drinking days afterward, but we were always just cool.

And I never felt an ounce of shame for who my step-dad was for any reason, let alone racism. Later on, especially after getting sober, I think I got a little more judgemental of his own drinking. And I think being as tough and as smart a guy as he was it was a little pathetic just how hard he simps for my mom. But I watched the guy jump up in front of a red laser pointer somebody had put on the waitress. It was just some asshole kids with a new toy. But he didn't know that. His very first instinct when he saw a red dot on a random woman he'd never met until 30 minutes ago was to jump out of his seat and take a bullet for her. I might not necessarily like the guy for our own personal reasons, but I never felt an ounce of shame about him, and truth be told, I never felt safer in my life on days at my mom's house than when he became part of the family. I might of got bullied a bit, but I was never worried about anybody pulling any shit when he was around.

But back to his family parties... maybe after 2 or 3 years of getting together 2 or 3 times a year (and always on WrestleMania because it was a legit Holiday for his family), his drunk sister-in-law "Betty" said some really fuckin' awful shit to my mom. Yelling at her, and I knew enough about my mom that she was the wrong person to yell at. I appear to have blocked out most of the memory right now because it got pretty awful, and I was really crushing on one of his nieces and this was so embarrassing I wanted to crawl in a hole and die.

And I'm sitting here shocked while it was happening because I always liked Betty. She always smiled and seemed genuinely happy to see us. But she started on a rant about how my mom viewed her as a 2nd-class citizen and we ended up leaving the party. There weren't many more we went to after that. I dunno. I found out later that the fact my step dad was the youngest and only one to graduate college and then married 2 white women was always a big problem with some people in his family. Whenever we did go to parties he'd pull out this Mexican accent that he never spoke outside of them. I didn't understand that when I was 12 years old, but I never asked him about it. I get it now.


I hope it stays that way about the drunken Indian. Being called a drunk by somebody after 10 years of sobriety is annoying. I can't imagine what it would be like for people to just automatically assume that of you just based off the fact you're a native man.

I'm sure the people in the Tribes that lost their way like a lot of white people I've known over the years have moved on to a bit harder stuff than that by now anyhow.

We need to actively weed out any stereotypes that aren't legitimate. The word stereotype itself though has been unfairly stereotyped. There are a lot of stereotypes out there that are based off of objective fact, and ignoring all of them isn't only foolish, but can be very dangerous too.

The solution is not to throw the entire pattern away. It's to yank out all of the lies from it so they don't detract from the truths.



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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Originally posted by Brenda:
No worries about laughing. I am not much on writing reviews.

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Oh... I wasn't laughing at the review. I liked it. It really did make me laugh. I don't laugh too much these days. It's always appreciated.

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I'm not eve sure it was scripture or if the character was just meant to be cherry picking the bible. It was something about god laying hands over the earth. I have no idea and it sounded dumb.

Of course the time being in the 20s accounts for a lot of the attitudes towards the Osage. I know that too and calling people lazy which in this time went both ways. Just before the Great Depression and people were already starting to feel it.
Nowadays that time of prejudice is gone. Oh, today for sure they would be shut down. Hell, I've shut down people in my mah jong group for going off.

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Yeah... That's the thing about today. A lot of people are just jerks, and that just goes for people in general and has nothing to do with race or sex or anything else... except in the rarer cases where it actually DOES, and that's why I think it's so important to not throw stereotypes away completely, but we need to actively weed out all of the lies from the net so we can shine light on the truths and only then is anything ever going to really get fixed long term.

Yeah... I'd have my buddy Joe come over and I visited his house all the time. I don't remember what tribe, but both of his parents were Native, and like my step-dad, he spoke better English than most white kids I knew. My mom was in general an embarrassment with her constant yelling about everything, all the time, so I didn't have many friends over often, but I was never worried she'd say anything about me being friends with Joe or even worse saying something real shitty while he was right there. And she never did. And my step-dad was Mexican and I didn't give that a second thought.

Like some of my other friends earlier in life who were from other countries. My one friend's father was 100% Irish and extremely quiet and mild-mannerd man that looked a little like Bill Gates and had a ton of cool tech. And his mother was a Korean woman he met in the war and married. It was an interesting time too, because they are 2 of among maybe 10 or so friends I had over the years whose parents were either 1st generation immigrants or had similar stories where the men met the women while they were stationed overseas in the military. So many of my friend's parents were so difficult to understand sometimes. I was a good kid and I never would be rude about it and did my very best. My friend's mother from Korea was really hard sometimes though. I think I ususally was able to get enough out of her that my replies made sense, but I was REALLY embarassed when my friend called me out for my answer to one of her questions.

His mom was asking me about my mom and I thought she asked me, "Does she walk?". And I'm thinking she means for exercise or something so I said, "Yeah, my mom exercies and sometimes she goes out on walks".

And my friend said. She asked you if your mom works.

Oh shit...



I wasn't trying to be funny. I felt bad about that. Apparently it was pretty bad, because here I am more than 30 years later telling the story as if it happened yesterday. I'm visualizing myself in their house, right by his dining room table where we had both been sitting and drawing stuff... probably X-Men comic characters, before she came back from running errands.

From the perspective of a kid who just expected everyone to know and speak English, I didn't really understand what was so hard about being able to speak English correctly since you already know all the words. Also easy to say when I was still holding out on the idea that I'd teach myself Spanish one day into my mid-20's before I gave up trying to learn it, but that's just another thing I get now that I didn't back then.

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Of course the racism was far worse back then about Natives than now. I am sure those women who chose white husbands rather than men from their own nation would definitely be looked down upon and the children.

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Yes. Absolutely. But that's a big reason why I respect you so much, Brenda. You get the nuance of things, and you're effortlessly able to separate things like harmless jokes from true, evil racism. There is so much to that spectrum, and I doubt there is a single person 100% on the virtuous side as much as I don't doubt that even in 2026 there are still a lot more than 1 of them out there in every race that IS 100% on the evil racism end of the spectrum.

But overall, even despite all the Legacy News the last 20 years trying their best to rile everyone up about race every single day, it's still so much better than it was 100 years ago.

Maybe I'm fooling myself that it ever was better than it is today, but when I was a kid up through my mid 20's it felt like it did. I didn't even know that at the time. I didn't feel antything was special about my time or what we were doing and who we all were hanging out with regularly. It was just the way things were. And that feeling I talk about is only something I feel today when I feel nostalgia for those old times. That general feeling about life when I reflect back on it is tied into that feeling of my various groups of friends over the years and how we were all just a bunch of mixed kids that never put much thought into that. Yeah... We were kids and kids are assholes and we'd say slurs to each other and sometimes even argue or fight over it as we got older, but that really is just little prototype-men doing what men have been hard-coded to do in their DNA. We were all friends. We made conscious choices to hang out with each other. Nobody forced it up on us.

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Yeah, you've told me and that is as bad as being banished because you decided to marry outside your race. Love happens no matter skin colour or money. And banishing someone because of that is wrong. Frankly, I don't think my boss and her husband have forgiven their son for marrying a Thai girl while he is working in Thailand. One night she got upset about the girl's family not doing things the "Christian way" and I said everyone has to learn from the other. She pretended to ignore what I said but that is what I believe is true. Mixed marriages mean the families have to learn some give and take.

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Yeah... and that's hitting on a very real problem. Though I don't know her and I won't say that part of your bosses problem with her daughter in-law wasn't objectively racism itself, but it's hard to say because of the Religious aspect. She could be making subconscious attempts hiding her Racism by using Religion, but from the small amount you've mentioned about her over the years I think that could also just be her making her relationship with religion front and center of her and everyone else's life around her. It could be both.

Religion is a problem. I think for the most part, Christianity in modern times is fine. Your boss being annoying with Religion is unfortunate, but I get the idea that if she wasn't annoying people with her religion all the time, she'd have found something else to annoy everyone with a long time ago. But there are religious ideologies out there that are quite powerful and very dangerous.

I for one like living in a world that's loosely based off of a Christian moral framework, but has more-or-less successfully divorced the religion from the governing body, while still trying to follow the moral principals and allow people to live in a society that works. I don't feel like we're living in that world anymore. And I feel like we're headed down a very dark path. And it frustrates me how many people don't seem to notice or care.

I've seen this movie before. It does not have a happy Hollywood ending.

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I'm glad that you didn't understand "racism" as a child but it is a hard lesson to learn. My mum and dad were driving somewhere with my dad's youngest brother and I don't know what they had been talking about. My brother and I weren't with them. We must have been with our aunt. Anyways my mum said that my brother and I weren't Indians. My Uncle blasted her along the lines of ,"Don't say that again. Me and my brother were and are Indians." My dad didn't say anything but I get the impression from years later that my dad may have been thinking the along the same lines. I hope I am wrong about that but there is no one around for me to ask now.

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Forgive me. I should probably know this by now. Was your mother white then, Brenda?

It sounds to me like maybe they had gotten into a little argument with each other earlier in the day about something while somebody else was watching you, and you may have just been on the tail end of whatever had been brewing that day. It sounds to me like maybe your mom said that because she knew it was going to get under your dad's skin is all. And from little things you've told me about your dad like the incident on the ice rink, I think he was probably thinking about you when he didn't say anything. Maybe he didn't realize that the action you expected him to take was to fight back, but maybe he was just being solemn and taking the heat and not raising his own voice and making the situation worse for his kids.

My dad HATED when my mom did that... all the time. I have so many memories of him saying can we do this without the kids here or something similar. Even after the divorce, and wherever she felt like doing it and in front of anybody who was within earshot.

I wouldn't think too hard on that Brenda. Your Uncle was very adamant, and I've never read anything you've written that would make me think that that your dad wasn't proud of you. His heart was probably just breaking a little seeing his princess have to listen to his parents yelling.

You are making me think a lot about my own situation with my folks. Me and the old man get along great, but there are things that probably should be said. Both the good and the bad. There isn't really a lot of bad with him, so it shouldn't be that difficult if I'm ever in the mood to get real. I don't even know how to attempt something like that with my mom, or even if it's a possibility at this point. When I've had conversations with her over the last 20 years after they put her on bi-polar drugs, she doesn't even remember half the shit that I've ever brought up to her. She won't outright deny anything happened, but she genuinely has no memory of any of it.

But I almost died already this year. The fact I still even have a chance with either of them is pretty lucky. I probably ought to get to that sooner than later before I regret never doing it.

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Alcohol only makes matters like that worse. People in the room like you said want to crawl into a hole or are trying to play peace maker. It is a hard position to be in.

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Yeah. I was a regular at crawling into holes. I've watched my mom eviscerate waitresses for the food being too cold after taking too long, and my tough ass step-dad silently sit there and watch her do it every time. It's mortifying. Being in a restaurant where everybody goes silent like you're in the middle of a movie and everyone is watching the scene play out before them in disgust.

I don't go out much, but if I were in a restaurant today and I saw some woman giving some poor waitress the verbal beatdown of a lifetime while the dad just sat there and did nothing, I'd get up and tell her to shut her dumb fucking mouth before somebody shuts it for her.

BAD MEMORY! BACK IN THE BOX WITH YOU!

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No the church scene happened because Mollie asked Ernest if he had a religion. So she sort of asked him to come to church. He didn't sit with her but they were stealing glances at each other.

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Oh... Okay. That makes a lot more sense. The church was possibly more than willing to open their doors to the natives, but they knew the church wasn't ready to find out they'd already been married in an Osage ritual.

Did they make the scene cute at least? Maybe some tension? Like they both knew they were getting away with something and maybe it was getting them even a little frisky?

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Well, so far I did come across one Native character that was a drinker and maybe heavy because he suffered from what back then was called, "Melancholy". So, he would turn to drink to try and deal with it. That's common enough nowadays. Self-medicating.

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Been there and done the Melancholy benders myself. I don't remember if we began talking here at any point before I started drinking, and probably have very little memory of anything we'd ever said to each other while I was. Some of the best years of my life are just gone. Like I'd had a lobotomy and only the memories of those years are deleted forever with everything else left intact.

And I've never once stopped self-medicating one way or another. I just have to always do my best to try to focus that self-medication through brain-chemical rewards from getting work and projects done. If I wasn't working on that project the last 2 years and I was just sitting around doing nothing, I think I probably would have gone back to drinking eventually and along with how close I came to death earlier this year I have no doubts that I'd be dead right now if I did.

I think we're all a little broken. Some of us are a lot more broken than others though.

It's a pity that self help books and the like don't really work because we're all so different from each other, even though we share so many similarities. On a grand scale, we seem to be fairly easy to herd. But on an individual level is where all the help becomes problematic.

I've just learned what works for me and what doesn't over the years. I'm never going to be "normal". I've long since even wanted to be. And though I can get depressed, especially when the weather gets lousy and I'm not doing what I need to do to keep from being bored, it's not a depressing existence. I just have to be busy. And if I'm not doing physical work I need to be keeping my brain occupied. Doing a billion repetitive tasks on loop is a good way of doing that. Watching most TV shows and movies just don't anymore. If it doesn't hook me and pull me in almost immediately, I could watch a show for 2 hours and not know anything that I just watched because even though my eyes were looking at the screen my mind was on anything but what my eyes were seeing. I don't sit around doing that to myself and I'll just turn something off if I'm not getting into it, but when I'm a captive audience somewhere else, I usually keep my complaints to myself and just zone out for a while. On a very rare occasion I've asked somebody if we could watch or do something else, but it's got to be really, annoyingly bad to the point that I can't even tune it out for me to do that.

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Many nations then and now have young and older ones that have lost their way because of alcohol and other substances.

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Yeah. It's sad. I don't keep up with stereotypes or nothing, but like I said, that's always been a bullshit one in my mind since I am very self-aware and I have quite a few friends over the years that either aren't with us anymore or went to prison for long enough for us to have lost touch.

As if I could sit there and be like "Native Americans are all Drunks!" when I know who I am. What a joke. It was annoying when my aunt who quit smoking made a major production of how bad I smelled at every family party after she quit, but for me to denigrate any group of people for being drunk let alone any individual from that group would be Evil after everything I've done and what I've put people through.

I've watched a lot of people fall. It's funny to think this is one of the few times I could be considered one of the lucky ones. I didn't hang out with bad people. Some of us just made some pretty stupid decisions while we were young, and instead of fixing them or even have anyone around to help us fix them, we just kind of started stacking up bad decisions... one carelessly placed on top of another like building blocks until they all came crashing down. My blocks got dented up pretty bad. But they still work for the most part. Can't say the same for a lot of the people I knew.

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Yes, we do and teach people that just because someone is of a certain race not everyone is like that stereotype. My mum and I knew a lady years ago that my mum would talk to. My mum was over at her place and as ladies are want to do talk about their kids and their husbands. My mum told this lady my dad was Indian and out came the stereotypes. Was he a drunk? Was he abusive? I never saw my dad drunk and I've only heard one story from his sisters about him being drunk once. He never once raised a hand to my mother and he only did it to me once. My poor mum by the time she got home was so upset it took me about 10minutes to calm her down.

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Uggggghhhhhh... I'm getting annoyed just imagining that party. That's exactly what I mean when I talk about white American women all the time, Brenda.



That's just what they do. They're so annoying. Unless I had more data, I don't even believe for a minute any of those questions came from even a hint of a sliver of racism (as in any malicious intent). If they even had any idea how fucking rude they were being and how they were making your mom feel, they never would have done that to her. White American women, in general, are so in their own heads and up their own asses. They live in a world where life is their stage, and they are the main character. We're all just extras in every single one of their stage plays, Brenda.



She probably didn't hang out with her too much after that, huh?

* And of course it's not ALL white women who are like this. But it is a very annoying trend and I believe that's probably the result of media programming for generations that led us here.

It's been my observance that the female of the species is MUCH more prone to hivelike behavior and is much more easily swayed by media, especially when it comes to trends and fashion and conformity. And they know where the women go, the men are going to follow.

More and more people are being "represented", but I don't think any one of them really paying attention is actually going to be happy that happened in retrospect 30 or 40 years from now.

TV is a degenerate platform. You've got a picture in your own mind of pride in your people and you put them on the level that you live your own life and how you treat other people. While those may be noble traits that are more prolific in some Native Tribes when compared to many other "boxes", that's not the Natives you're going to be seeing on TV 20 years from now. By then, if "TV" even exists anymore and it's not all some interactive platform on the internet, everything is going to be the Jerry Springer show. No matter what color they are, everybody on that TV is going to be an idiot and it's all going to be "reality" TV with "influencers" as the stars. Gross.

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I hope they can all go away one day but humans have a short memory about the terrible things we have done to one another.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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Originally posted by Brenda:
No worries about laughing. I am not much on writing reviews.

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Oh... I wasn't laughing at the review. I liked it. It really did make me laugh. I don't laugh too much these days. It's always appreciated.

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I'm not eve sure it was scripture or if the character was just meant to be cherry picking the bible. It was something about god laying hands over the earth. I have no idea and it sounded dumb.

Of course the time being in the 20s accounts for a lot of the attitudes towards the Osage. I know that too and calling people lazy which in this time went both ways. Just before the Great Depression and people were already starting to feel it.
Nowadays that time of prejudice is gone. Oh, today for sure they would be shut down. Hell, I've shut down people in my mah jong group for going off.

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Yeah... That's the thing about today. A lot of people are just jerks, and that just goes for people in general and has nothing to do with race or sex or anything else... except in the rarer cases where it actually DOES, and that's why I think it's so important to not throw stereotypes away completely, but we need to actively weed out all of the lies from the net so we can shine light on the truths and only then is anything ever going to really get fixed long term.

Yeah... I'd have my buddy Joe come over and I visited his house all the time. I don't remember what tribe, but both of his parents were Native, and like my step-dad, he spoke better English than most white kids I knew. My mom was in general an embarrassment with her constant yelling about everything, all the time, so I didn't have many friends over often, but I was never worried she'd say anything about me being friends with Joe or even worse saying something real shitty while he was right there. And she never did. And my step-dad was Mexican and I didn't give that a second thought.

Like some of my other friends earlier in life who were from other countries. My one friend's father was 100% Irish and extremely quiet and mild-mannerd man that looked a little like Bill Gates and had a ton of cool tech. And his mother was a Korean woman he met in the war and married. It was an interesting time too, because they are 2 of among maybe 10 or so friends I had over the years whose parents were either 1st generation immigrants or had similar stories where the men met the women while they were stationed overseas in the military. So many of my friend's parents were so difficult to understand sometimes. I was a good kid and I never would be rude about it and did my very best. My friend's mother from Korea was really hard sometimes though. I think I ususally was able to get enough out of her that my replies made sense, but I was REALLY embarassed when my friend called me out for my answer to one of her questions.

His mom was asking me about my mom and I thought she asked me, "Does she walk?". And I'm thinking she means for exercise or something so I said, "Yeah, my mom exercies and sometimes she goes out on walks".

And my friend said. She asked you if your mom works.

Oh shit...



I wasn't trying to be funny. I felt bad about that. Apparently it was pretty bad, because here I am more than 30 years later telling the story as if it happened yesterday. I'm visualizing myself in their house, right by his dining room table where we had both been sitting and drawing stuff... probably X-Men comic characters, before she came back from running errands.

From the perspective of a kid who just expected everyone to know and speak English, I didn't really understand what was so hard about being able to speak English correctly since you already know all the words. Also easy to say when I was still holding out on the idea that I'd teach myself Spanish one day into my mid-20's before I gave up trying to learn it, but that's just another thing I get now that I didn't back then.

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Of course the racism was far worse back then about Natives than now. I am sure those women who chose white husbands rather than men from their own nation would definitely be looked down upon and the children.

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Yes. Absolutely. But that's a big reason why I respect you so much, Brenda. You get the nuance of things, and you're effortlessly able to separate things like harmless jokes from true, evil racism. There is so much to that spectrum, and I doubt there is a single person 100% on the virtuous side as much as I don't doubt that even in 2026 there are still a lot more than 1 of them out there in every race that IS 100% on the evil racism end of the spectrum.

But overall, even despite all the Legacy News the last 20 years trying their best to rile everyone up about race every single day, it's still so much better than it was 100 years ago.

Maybe I'm fooling myself that it ever was better than it is today, but when I was a kid up through my mid 20's it felt like it did. I didn't even know that at the time. I didn't feel antything was special about my time or what we were doing and who we all were hanging out with regularly. It was just the way things were. And that feeling I talk about is only something I feel today when I feel nostalgia for those old times. That general feeling about life when I reflect back on it is tied into that feeling of my various groups of friends over the years and how we were all just a bunch of mixed kids that never put much thought into that. Yeah... We were kids and kids are assholes and we'd say slurs to each other and sometimes even argue or fight over it as we got older, but that really is just little prototype-men doing what men have been hard-coded to do in their DNA. We were all friends. We made conscious choices to hang out with each other. Nobody forced it up on us.

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Yeah, you've told me and that is as bad as being banished because you decided to marry outside your race. Love happens no matter skin colour or money. And banishing someone because of that is wrong. Frankly, I don't think my boss and her husband have forgiven their son for marrying a Thai girl while he is working in Thailand. One night she got upset about the girl's family not doing things the "Christian way" and I said everyone has to learn from the other. She pretended to ignore what I said but that is what I believe is true. Mixed marriages mean the families have to learn some give and take.

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Yeah... and that's hitting on a very real problem. Though I don't know her and I won't say that part of your bosses problem with her daughter in-law wasn't objectively racism itself, but it's hard to say because of the Religious aspect. She could be making subconscious attempts hiding her Racism by using Religion, but from the small amount you've mentioned about her over the years I think that could also just be her making her relationship with religion front and center of her and everyone else's life around her. It could be both.

Religion is a problem. I think for the most part, Christianity in modern times is fine. Your boss being annoying with Religion is unfortunate, but I get the idea that if she wasn't annoying people with her religion all the time, she'd have found something else to annoy everyone with a long time ago. But there are religious ideologies out there that are quite powerful and very dangerous.

I for one like living in a world that's loosely based off of a Christian moral framework, but has more-or-less successfully divorced the religion from the governing body, while still trying to follow the moral principals and allow people to live in a society that works. I don't feel like we're living in that world anymore. And I feel like we're headed down a very dark path. And it frustrates me how many people don't seem to notice or care.

I've seen this movie before. It does not have a happy Hollywood ending.

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I'm glad that you didn't understand "racism" as a child but it is a hard lesson to learn. My mum and dad were driving somewhere with my dad's youngest brother and I don't know what they had been talking about. My brother and I weren't with them. We must have been with our aunt. Anyways my mum said that my brother and I weren't Indians. My Uncle blasted her along the lines of ,"Don't say that again. Me and my brother were and are Indians." My dad didn't say anything but I get the impression from years later that my dad may have been thinking the along the same lines. I hope I am wrong about that but there is no one around for me to ask now.

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Forgive me. I should probably know this by now. Was your mother white then, Brenda?

It sounds to me like maybe they had gotten into a little argument with each other earlier in the day about something while somebody else was watching you, and you may have just been on the tail end of whatever had been brewing that day. It sounds to me like maybe your mom said that because she knew it was going to get under your dad's skin is all. And from little things you've told me about your dad like the incident on the ice rink, I think he was probably thinking about you when he didn't say anything. Maybe he didn't realize that the action you expected him to take was to fight back, but maybe he was just being solemn and taking the heat and not raising his own voice and making the situation worse for his kids.

My dad HATED when my mom did that... all the time. I have so many memories of him saying can we do this without the kids here or something similar. Even after the divorce, and wherever she felt like doing it and in front of anybody who was within earshot.

I wouldn't think too hard on that Brenda. Your Uncle was very adamant, and I've never read anything you've written that would make me think that that your dad wasn't proud of you. His heart was probably just breaking a little seeing his princess have to listen to his parents yelling.

You are making me think a lot about my own situation with my folks. Me and the old man get along great, but there are things that probably should be said. Both the good and the bad. There isn't really a lot of bad with him, so it shouldn't be that difficult if I'm ever in the mood to get real. I don't even know how to attempt something like that with my mom, or even if it's a possibility at this point. When I've had conversations with her over the last 20 years after they put her on bi-polar drugs, she doesn't even remember half the shit that I've ever brought up to her. She won't outright deny anything happened, but she genuinely has no memory of any of it.

But I almost died already this year. The fact I still even have a chance with either of them is pretty lucky. I probably ought to get to that sooner than later before I regret never doing it.

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Alcohol only makes matters like that worse. People in the room like you said want to crawl into a hole or are trying to play peace maker. It is a hard position to be in.

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Yeah. I was a regular at crawling into holes. I've watched my mom eviscerate waitresses for the food being too cold after taking too long, and my tough ass step-dad silently sit there and watch her do it every time. It's mortifying. Being in a restaurant where everybody goes silent like you're in the middle of a movie and everyone is watching the scene play out before them in disgust.

I don't go out much, but if I were in a restaurant today and I saw some woman giving some poor waitress the verbal beatdown of a lifetime while the dad just sat there and did nothing, I'd get up and tell her to shut her dumb fucking mouth before somebody shuts it for her.

BAD MEMORY! BACK IN THE BOX WITH YOU!

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No the church scene happened because Mollie asked Ernest if he had a religion. So she sort of asked him to come to church. He didn't sit with her but they were stealing glances at each other.

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Oh... Okay. That makes a lot more sense. The church was possibly more than willing to open their doors to the natives, but they knew the church wasn't ready to find out they'd already been married in an Osage ritual.

Did they make the scene cute at least? Maybe some tension? Like they both knew they were getting away with something and maybe it was getting them even a little frisky?

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Well, so far I did come across one Native character that was a drinker and maybe heavy because he suffered from what back then was called, "Melancholy". So, he would turn to drink to try and deal with it. That's common enough nowadays. Self-medicating.

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Been there and done the Melancholy benders myself. I don't remember if we began talking here at any point before I started drinking, and probably have very little memory of anything we'd ever said to each other while I was. Some of the best years of my life are just gone. Like I'd had a lobotomy and only the memories of those years are deleted forever with everything else left intact.

And I've never once stopped self-medicating one way or another. I just have to always do my best to try to focus that self-medication through brain-chemical rewards from getting work and projects done. If I wasn't working on that project the last 2 years and I was just sitting around doing nothing, I think I probably would have gone back to drinking eventually and along with how close I came to death earlier this year I have no doubts that I'd be dead right now if I did.

I think we're all a little broken. Some of us are a lot more broken than others though.

It's a pity that self help books and the like don't really work because we're all so different from each other, even though we share so many similarities. On a grand scale, we seem to be fairly easy to herd. But on an individual level is where all the help becomes problematic.

I've just learned what works for me and what doesn't over the years. I'm never going to be "normal". I've long since even wanted to be. And though I can get depressed, especially when the weather gets lousy and I'm not doing what I need to do to keep from being bored, it's not a depressing existence. I just have to be busy. And if I'm not doing physical work I need to be keeping my brain occupied. Doing a billion repetitive tasks on loop is a good way of doing that. Watching most TV shows and movies just don't anymore. If it doesn't hook me and pull me in almost immediately, I could watch a show for 2 hours and not know anything that I just watched because even though my eyes were looking at the screen my mind was on anything but what my eyes were seeing. I don't sit around doing that to myself and I'll just turn something off if I'm not getting into it, but when I'm a captive audience somewhere else, I usually keep my complaints to myself and just zone out for a while. On a very rare occasion I've asked somebody if we could watch or do something else, but it's got to be really, annoyingly bad to the point that I can't even tune it out for me to do that.

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Many nations then and now have young and older ones that have lost their way because of alcohol and other substances.

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Yeah. It's sad. I don't keep up with stereotypes or nothing, but like I said, that's always been a bullshit one in my mind since I am very self-aware and I have quite a few friends over the years that either aren't with us anymore or went to prison for long enough for us to have lost touch.

As if I could sit there and be like "Native Americans are all Drunks!" when I know who I am. What a joke. It was annoying when my aunt who quit smoking made a major production of how bad I smelled at every family party after she quit, but for me to denigrate any group of people for being drunk let alone any individual from that group would be Evil after everything I've done and what I've put people through.

I've watched a lot of people fall. It's funny to think this is one of the few times I could be considered one of the lucky ones. I didn't hang out with bad people. Some of us just made some pretty stupid decisions while we were young, and instead of fixing them or even have anyone around to help us fix them, we just kind of started stacking up bad decisions... one carelessly placed on top of another like building blocks until they all came crashing down. My blocks got dented up pretty bad. But they still work for the most part. Can't say the same for a lot of the people I knew.

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Yes, we do and teach people that just because someone is of a certain race not everyone is like that stereotype. My mum and I knew a lady years ago that my mum would talk to. My mum was over at her place and as ladies are want to do talk about their kids and their husbands. My mum told this lady my dad was Indian and out came the stereotypes. Was he a drunk? Was he abusive? I never saw my dad drunk and I've only heard one story from his sisters about him being drunk once. He never once raised a hand to my mother and he only did it to me once. My poor mum by the time she got home was so upset it took me about 10minutes to calm her down.

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Uggggghhhhhh... I'm getting annoyed just imagining that party. That's exactly what I mean when I talk about white American women all the time, Brenda.



That's just what they do. They're so annoying. Unless I had more data, I don't even believe for a minute any of those questions came from even a hint of a sliver of racism (as in any malicious intent). If they even had any idea how fucking rude they were being and how they were making your mom feel, they never would have done that to her. White American women, in general, are so in their own heads and up their own asses. They live in a world where life is their stage, and they are the main character. We're all just extras in every single one of their stage plays, Brenda.



She probably didn't hang out with her too much after that, huh?

* And of course it's not ALL white women who are like this. But it is a very annoying trend and I believe that's probably the result of media programming for generations that led us here.

It's been my observance that the female of the species is MUCH more prone to hivelike behavior and is much more easily swayed by media, especially when it comes to trends and fashion and conformity. And they know where the women go, the men are going to follow.

More and more people are being "represented", but I don't think any one of them really paying attention is actually going to be happy that happened in retrospect 30 or 40 years from now.

TV is a degenerate platform. You've got a picture in your own mind of pride in your people and you put them on the level that you live your own life and how you treat other people. While those may be noble traits that are more prolific in some Native Tribes when compared to many other "boxes", that's not the Natives you're going to be seeing on TV 20 years from now. By then, if "TV" even exists anymore and it's not all some interactive platform on the internet, everything is going to be the Jerry Springer show. No matter what color they are, everybody on that TV is going to be an idiot and it's all going to be "reality" TV with "influencers" as the stars. Gross.

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I hope they can all go away one day but humans have a short memory about the terrible things we have done to one another.

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If we could wave a wand we would. I don't know what the answer is.

I want to go back to the time where everybody wasn't thinking about all of this stuff all the time. I'm sure some people always did, but they didn't have the ability to broadcast themselves and become a movement and just take over the public discourse 24/7/365 for years and years.

I just feel sometimes like everything outside my house is a stress that I just have no interest in dealing with anymore.


Thanks for the review and an ability to talk about it. I've enjoyed our conversation so far.

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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Originally posted by Brenda:
After last night not sure if the Uncle is dead but there was huge fire on his place and it kinda looked like he was strung up. So Yaaaaaaaaaaaay!

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That was almost as good as your review.

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Mollie saw an owl which to the Osage means death. She tried to warn Ernest that he was next.

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Also you are getting pretty to good with old William there.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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Originally posted by Brenda:
After last night not sure if the Uncle is dead but there was huge fire on his place and it kinda looked like he was strung up. So Yaaaaaaaaaaaay!

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That was almost as good as your review.

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Mollie saw an owl which to the Osage means death. She tried to warn Ernest that he was next.

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Ruh, Roh.


I'm planning on writing back to your long message, Brenda, but it was a long day and I don't know if I'll get to it tonight.

But I have to know what did the last line mean?

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Also you are getting pretty to good with old William there.

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Maybe I'm blanking, but I can't figure out what that means in the context of what we're talking about, and I looked online to see if it was maybe an idiom I didn't know and drew a blank there.



I read your whole message. I will reply.

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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Originally posted by Brenda:
Yeah, well. If haven't guessed by now. I hated the character with a passion.

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Ya think?

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Luckily Mollie didn't die and neither did Ernest. Many tribes have animals that can mean death or a message of death or just bring a message.

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I know I have a funny story, maybe it was a funny scene from a movie or a TV show that matches this very explanation to a T, except it wasn't to do with Tribal Spirituality. It's like right on the tip of my tongue, but I can't get the memory over the finish line right now.

Something about somebody consulting god, or gods, or trying to get information from a higher power through some sort of totem or fetish, but they're either getting bad info from the gods or they're deciphering it wrong and they thought all of this horrible stuff was about to happen, but nothing does and it turned out the message was just something benign and completely unrelated.

Kinda like the Don't Forget To Drink Your Ovaltine scene from A Christmas Story, now that I think about it.

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Oh, when people would be idiots about us being Indians. My dad would say it was, "Their problem." Because they couldn't or wouldn't try to understand things or putting people down. Stuff like that. They had some friends before I was born that were drinkers, my folks didn't like going out with them. They faded away. So that is what he meant.

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It's cool reading little things about your past like this, Brenda. Not in age at all, but in temperament, you remind me a lot of my Grams. She was a special woman. I only ever saw her cry one time when my Grandpa died when I was 5. She didn't let things bother her. She didn't let people bother her. She wasn't looking for an argument out of anybody. She knew God exists and that she was eventually going to meet him, so I think when she had that figured out for herself, everything else was just happily passing the time until that day. It was like she was sort of above it all, but never in a "snooty" way, just effortless. As if she wasn't even aware of how she carried herself.

"Their Problem".

You're damn right.

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You said, "We are all players on a "someone else's stage". It's a bit of a corruption of a line from Richard the Third one of William Shakespeare's plays.
"We are all just players on a stage. Full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing." is the line.

No worries.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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Originally posted by Brenda:
Yeah, well. If haven't guessed by now. I hated the character with a passion.

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Ya think?

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Luckily Mollie didn't die and neither did Ernest. Many tribes have animals that can mean death or a message of death or just bring a message.

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I know I have a funny story, maybe it was a funny scene from a movie or a TV show that matches this very explanation to a T, except it wasn't to do with Tribal Spirituality. It's like right on the tip of my tongue, but I can't get the memory over the finish line right now.

Something about somebody consulting god, or gods, or trying to get information from a higher power through some sort of totem or fetish, but they're either getting bad info from the gods or they're deciphering it wrong and they thought all of this horrible stuff was about to happen, but nothing does and it turned out the message was just something benign and completely unrelated.

Kinda like the Don't Forget To Drink Your Ovaltine scene from A Christmas Story, now that I think about it.

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Oh, when people would be idiots about us being Indians. My dad would say it was, "Their problem." Because they couldn't or wouldn't try to understand things or putting people down. Stuff like that. They had some friends before I was born that were drinkers, my folks didn't like going out with them. They faded away. So that is what he meant.

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It's cool reading little things about your past like this, Brenda. Not in age at all, but in temperament, you remind me a lot of my Grams. She was a special woman. I only ever saw her cry one time when my Grandpa died when I was 5. She didn't let things bother her. She didn't let people bother her. She wasn't looking for an argument out of anybody. She knew God exists and that she was eventually going to meet him, so I think when she had that figured out for herself, everything else was just happily passing the time until that day. It was like she was sort of above it all, but never in a "snooty" way, just effortless. As if she wasn't even aware of how she carried herself.

"Their Problem".

You're damn right.

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You said, "We are all players on a "someone else's stage". It's a bit of a corruption of a line from Richard the Third one of William Shakespeare's plays.
"We are all just players on a stage. Full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing." is the line.

No worries.

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Oh... My bad. I'm not very well read on Shakespeare. Though when you state that full line, I know I've either read it or heard it before, and it's probably where I came up with it, now that you mention it.

And I'm going to give it 80% odds that I'd heard the phrase from my Grams. And if that's the case, especially after her short term memory started going, she might have said it to me more than once.



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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Originally posted by Brenda:

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You said, "We are all players on a "someone else's stage". It's a bit of a corruption of a line from Richard the Third one of William Shakespeare's plays.
"We are all just players on a stage. Full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing." is the line.

No worries.

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Don't worry about corrupting Shakespeare. A lot of people do that. I love the Bard and I probably got that line a little wrong myself.

I've seen Richard the Third done as a movie, so I sort of know the line.

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