Letters to the Editors

Drive to Tampa on new parkway would be super

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 18, 2001

Editor: The scheduled opening of the long-awaited Suncoast Parkway is set for the first week of February.

For those of us who go to the Tampa area once a week or more and who have to travel U.S. 41 or Gunn Highway, this will be wonderful and eagerly watched and waited for.

Wouldn't it be great for the thousands headed south from our area to the Super Bowl, the Gasparilla parade and other festivities next weekend to be able to go in style? Or non-stop?

If I were in charge, I would open it as far north as it is complete and eliminate the tolls for that weekend. The good will from this would be incalculable for the future and very much appreciated for the present.
-- Thomas Gowdy, New Port Richey

Festival's American Indian depictions are offensive

Editor: When Commissioner Peter Altman speaks about authenticating our Native American heritage, what is he referring to? Is he American Indian? Where does he receive his teachings? What natives give him teachings? What nations do they represent?

The Pasco director of Florida AIM, Ruby Beaulieu, is an American Indiangrandmother, an elder and a federally recognized tribal member. She has witnessed this Chasco Fiesta event and is appalled at what she has seen. She is hurt as a human being by the waynative people are depicted as white people with "war paint" on their faces whooping and hollering.

Native people, for your information, are doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, mothers, fathers, students. These people like Altman have created a carnival for monetary gain from a mostly ignorant tourist population.

We are offended by this very sick definition of a people who were brutally murdered, afflicted with foreign diseases and through the act of genocide forcibly removed from this area of Florida a long time ago.

Caricatures, made-up white people and dyed feathers, do not honor these ancestors. It only makes their modern relatives sick with disgust. Altman needs to meet and talk with real native people and organizations like Florida AIM to receive an education of what honor really is.
-- Glen Douglas, director, Native Earth Education Project

American Indian group's leader should lighten up

Editor: Regarding the recent article of the complaint by Ruby Beaulieu and AIM that the Chasco Fiesta's Indian theme is demeaning to the American Indian:

Ruby Beaulieu and AIM, please, lighten up and get a life.

When we can't make a little fun of ourselves without that nasty "racial" term coming up, we are in big trouble.

Next she and AIM will say that our "Hug a Pet" (a pet therapy group) can't take part in the Chasco Fiesta parade by dressing the dogs in American Indian costumes to give the audience a warm and fuzzy feeling because it is demeaning to the American Indian and AIM.

If anyone should object to the costumes, it should be the dogs. Mercy!

Maybe Ruby and AIM should go back a few years to enjoy life. When I was in the Air Force stationed in Germany, one of our top non-commissioned officers was an American Indian whom, naturally, we called "Chief," and he did not object. In fact, he got a kick out of it. Do you know why?

Chief and his extended family owned Cherokee, N.C. He and I would sit around talking about how his family would lease the land and souvenir shops to the "Round Eyes."

He always laughed and said that if you saw someone standing in front of a souvenir shop wearing an Indian headdress and waving to the passersby, you know it was not an Indian. They had too much class.

The whole point of the above is that they, the American Indian, were not offended by people playing Indian. Why should they be offended? They were raking in the big bucks renting the property.

And, most important, they had the proper prospective on the world. Laugh and the world laughs with you; complain and you are one sorry creature.

Lighten up, Beaulieu and AIM. Enjoy being a people.
-- Kathryn L. Robinson, Holiday

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