What I'm reading and why

I get cranky every time I pay my satellite TV bill. We added HBO and Cinemax a few months ago, and I wonder "Why?" when the bill comes due. More often than not, we have 100 channels and there's nothing on.

But I recently watched "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" on HBO and was thankful I kept paying the bill. The docudrama about U.S./Native American relations in the Old West is airing every day in June, so tune in if you haven't already.

Only until I watched the movie did I realize the politics behind laws regarding Native Americans and the perplexing rationale behind those laws and policies. When the credits rolled, I saw the movie was based on a book and thought, "I should get that book." Then I realized, "You know, I think I already HAVE that book." Sure enough, a paperback version sat on my bookshelf, untouched since I bought it at a garage sale a few years ago. I'm glad I can anticipate future reading interests so well.

I thought this passage from the book (written in 1971 by Dee Brown) was so eloquent and sad:

"Their musical names [of the tribes] remained forever fixed on the American land, but their bones were forgotten in a thousand burned villages or lost in forests fast disappearing before the axes of twenty million invaders. Already the once sweet-watered streams, most of which bore Indian names, were clouded with silt and the wastes of man; the very earth was being ravaged and squandered. To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature -- the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, the soil, and the air itself."