Besides insulting Obama with a Step-N’-Fetch-It, “darkie musical” swipe, people who know her say she refers regularly to Alaska’s Aboriginal people as “Arctic Arabs” – how efficient, lumping two apparently undesirable groups into one ugly description – as well as the more colourful “mukluks” along with the totally unimaginative “f**king Eskimo’s,” according to a number of Alaskans and Wasillians interviewed for this article.FWIW, this does not surprise me.
While I have very little in the way of first hand recollections of bigotry in Alaska, (I actually have fond memories of living there, I left there just before I turned 7 in 1969), my mother occasionally related a story about her brush with movie making, specifically a movie called Joniko and the Kush Ta Ta, which was a fairly standard wilderness adventure, where a kid has to travel a great distance in a boat to get help for an injured man, and faces an Tlingit* equivalent of a demon known as the Kush Ta Ta (or maybe it's his imagination) along the way.
In any case, the child actor playing Joniko, Tony Tucker Williams, broke his arm, and they needed a stunt double, and somehow or other my mother got a call, there were only about 400K people in the state at the time, so it was a small place, from a local working for the production, asking if she knew of a "breed" about 12 years old or so who could work as a stunt double, as the "full bloods" weren't photogenic.
These attitudes are not, or at least were not, that common in the late 1960s, and I don't imagine that the oil wealth entering the state has helped, if the House of Saud is any example.
*Don't call a Tlingit an Eskimo, it would be viewed in the same manner as someone calling a Spaniard a Frenchman, which is to say not well at all.
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