I remember thinking American Indians were just like our Derry people. Except their Dole looked different, and wasn’t as crowded.

It was sad to note during the week that those most gentle and forgiving of people, the Native Americans, are now just like the rest of the Americans.

A young man on an Indian reservation in Minnesota managed to prove this by first shooting his grandparents and then, grinning and waving, mowing down pupils and staff of Red Lake High School.

It was a thoroughly American thing to do. The job of the white man is now done.

After a long and well-documented history of shooting Indians down like dogs, the white man has finally taught them, by example, how to wipe themselves out.

Anyone who has ever spent time on an Indian reservation will be astounded that such a thing should happen in such a closely-knit community.

I was lucky enough to hang about one or two of them in the 70s.

I liked these reservations right away, although I could see that the Indians (let’s call them Indians, it’s what they themselves prefer) were not being treated well by the United States government.

The inmates of the reservations I visited were generally cheerful souls although it was clear that chronic unemployment, gambling, alcoholism and a general lack of pride and loss of identity had clearly taken its toll.

I remember thinking they were just like Derry people. I bonded with them. We were one. Except that their Dole looked different, and wasn’t as crowded.

And I have always been amazed at their total lack of rancour towards the Irish.

Indians have a soft spot for us. It’s almost as if nobody told them that the United States Cavalry, the outfit that practically wiped the redman from the Great Plains in the latter half of the 19th century, consisted almost entirely of post-Famine Irish emigrant bucks from the likes of Mayo and Galway who would think no more about running a sabre through a crowded tepee than they would of lighting up a cheroot after eating a plate of beans. I wasn’t going to tell them. Not me. And speaking of the Irish Famine, weren’t the Indians the only people in the world who sent aid to us starving Paddies? Don’t ask me how, but the sum of precisely £114 apparently arrived on these shores in the late 1840s, a gift from Indians (I think it was one of the Dakota tribes) to our great-grandas. And this was round about the time the Ulster-Scots were frog-marching them to places they didn’t want to go and just before the Bog Irish came over to finish off their brothers further west.

And, in spite of it all, they still like us.

A delegation of Indians recently arrived in Derry/Londonderry. A few eyebrows were raised when they conferred warrior-status on the current Sinn Fein mayor. The surprised mayor was made up as a warrior by an individual known as Chief Nigel Big Pond.

This very newspaper briefly chronicled the event and I was pleased to see that the delegated hack referred to the chief as Mister Big Pond. It reminded me of the time pop singer Meat Loaf and I happened to be staying at the same London hotel. A voice came over the public address system in the lobby announcing that a limousine had arrived for a Mister Loaf.

Anyway, Mister Big Pond said that the Indian people were extending the hand of friendship after two centuries of hurt over the Trail of Tears, during which 4,000 Cherokee lost their lives (1838-9) when they were (as I briefly alluded to earlier) marched west of Georgia to Oklahoma by men under Commander-In-Chief and President, Andrew Jackson, an Ulster-Scot who regarded Carrickfergus as home.

The mayor addressed the assembled Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole representatives and compared the annihilation of Native American Culture to the erosion of Irish culture and language during the same period.

“During the cowboy and Indian films,” trumpeted the Mayor. “I was always on the side of the Indians!”

That’s pushing the envelope a bit, I thought, even for Sinn Fein.

Originally published in The Belfast Telegraph