Lance Morgan, a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, is the chief executive officer of Ho-Chunk, Inc., the tribe's economic development corporation. Ho-Chunk Inc owns Indianz.Com and AllNative.Com.

Well the government finally got Osama Bin Laden. That is good news as far as I am concerned. There will be a special spot for him in Hell for what he did on 9-11.

What was strange is that during the announcement of it all, it became known that the greatest modern terrorist’s government code name was Geronimo, an Apache war chief. Oh great! Why are tribes all of a sudden terrorists? This isn’t really a one-time thing. It is a trend actually.

When the Prevent All Cigarette Trafficking (PACT) Act was introduced into legislation as a federal law in 2009, Congressman Weiner from New York stated that Indian tobacco sales were supporting terrorism and had to be stopped. Maybe we should give Mr. Weiner an ironic or funny code name too, but alas nothing comes to mind.

When I first heard about them calling Osama bin laden Geronimo, I didn’t think it was a big deal. I am generally not the type to be offended over these types of things. Heck, I even saw the weak and clever logic behind it. Geronimo hid out in the mountains for years and the government could find him either—same as Osama.

But two things changed my mind. First the government denied it was a slap in the face to Indians and said the name was just a coincidence and was randomly chosen. Ha, well that is obviously less than the truth! Secondly, Osama wasn’t in the mountains, he was hiding in the suburbs of Pakistan’s capital probably near a Starbucks or the mall.

Given this new information, I am now more upset, but still not really offended. I want the government to give him a new nickname. Maybe one that is more fitting for a guy hanging out in a million dollar compound in the suburbs. How about randomly picking the Kennedy’s — they had a compound in the suburbs. Oh that wouldn’t be appropriate — we don’t dehumanize white people in America.

How would people react if Osama’s randomly chosen code name was a famous non-Indian soldier like Eisenhower, Washington, or maybe Lincoln. See what I mean? It doesn’t sound so good when his code name is a famous white person.

Interestingly, we give Pakistan over $1 billion a year to help us fight the War in Afghanistan and they were obviously hiding Osama while taking our money. I once gave an impromptu dinner speech to the Pakistan government’s highest ministers while I was visiting Harvard one day for a lecture on Indian issues. The US Government had sent all of these Pakistani ministers and their staff to the Harvard Kennedy/Geronimo School of Government because we were friends now and we wanted to teach them how we govern.

The speech was on how our government treats tribes and we did a comparison of their tribal issues. It was actually pretty cool and everyone I met was very cordial and impressive. They seemed very interested in our tribal situation and had obviously seen some Indian movies and had been routing for us.

Anyway, back to the outrage. It is bad enough that Indians and Tribes are mascots and increasingly international terrorists. Now we are not just any terrorists, but the most notorious terrorist in history. Being Indian just keeps getting harder all the time mostly because I am actually running out of interesting ways to be offended.

Contact me at hochunk@aol.com

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