Casual Racism no one bothered to try to hide

I passed the time watching their looping infomercial on a flat screen TV in the window about some other program.

I eventually learned that said TV was "borrowed" from the Quinault tribe. I got conflicting information. Some people said they were THE richest and most powerful entity in the region. 

When I repeated that locally learned trivia, some folks said "one of the richest and most powerful." As if to take them down a notch and go "Naw. Number two, at best. Don't go respecting them redskins or something."

So both Honkies and Spics in town seemed to think "borrowed" meant "They gifted it to us and we don't need to EVER return it because our Christian Lord and Savior clearly put wealthy injuns on planet Earth to be our bitches or something."

I never made a big stink out of it because I wasn't really in any position, socially speaking, to do so and be taken seriously.

I did think to myself if they actually hired me like they kept saying they would, on day one I would be calling the tribe and arranging to return their property to them. 

They never hired me and that TV remained in the window of Aberdeen Revitalization Movement the ENTIRE fucking time I lived in Aberdeen, something like six fucking years.

They probably don't want that piece of junk back now. 

My mom would get extremely het up about stuff like that and it really grinds my gears too. It's almost like I'm related to the woman.

Not shown in the photos on Wikipedia, Hotel Morck in downtown Aberdeen, Washington has a large mural on the backside, filling up the big blank space in the bottom photo on Wikipedia. It's a Native American style image probably by a Native American artist.

I think of it as a Phoenix but it might more accurately be called a Thunderbird.

There was some sort of controversy about someone hoping to redevelop the building and the tribe was objecting because they wanted to do something that would damage the mural, like a put a door there. I think plans to redevelop the building fell through and it probably continues to rot on the corner across from the grocery store to this day.

The lack of the mural or ANY information about it on Wikipedia is part of why I know to NOT trust "reliable public sources" from national organizations about information on anything in a small town, not even a historic building in the National Register of Historic Places.

But I digress.

So I mentioned in a meeting of the Main Street program that this should be a high priority for the executive director, Wil Russoul, because this is potentially an international incident, what with the Quinault tribe technically being a different nation from the US.

Wil Russoul's ego puffs up and he goes on for a few minutes about what an important person he is. Then after emotionally masturbating with an audience, goes back to business as usual and I don't believe he EVER did fuck all about it.

The people in town with a LEGAL claim in the mural were Michael and Sylvia Dickerson and they were on good terms with the tribe. They had some say because of the work of Our Aberdeen on the local murals, many of which they commissioned and came up with local grants to finance.

They probably blocked redevelopment of the building to protect the mural and were extremely concerned about the tribe's feelings about the whole thing.

Wil Russoul is Puerto Rican. He's the aforementioned racist Spic in town pissing all over injuns. As far as I know, all the other assholes I dealt with were honkies.

I'm not counting the Mexican guy I was acquainted with whose White American boyfriend was involved in small town politics because he stayed out of this shit. There were plenty of minorities and minority businesses in town but they generally had the good sense to not attend these idiotic meetings.