On a visit to the Mesquakie Settlement during May of this year, one elder told me that there were too many distractions for the children to fully comprehend the traditions as she had learned them as a child. As I reflected on her comments, I realized that she truly had cause for alarm: Although Mesquakies have contended with many, many great pressures since their removal and return to Iowa during the last century, they have only in recent history had to contend with the all-pervasive power of television to create, destroy, distort, form, mold, and shape images of reality -- although television is less brutalizing than some educational experiences many Mesquakies had in Bureau of Indian Affairs schools
