THE PSYCHOLOGISTS are right: the American Indian did not believe in potty training. Maybe that is why European Communism failed and the Indian didn't. Incidentally, my (American) mother sat me on the potty chair at dinner time, so I still have some anger but haven't joined a street gang.

...but for several lifetimes. Or it should be, if it isn't murdered in the meantime.

COUNCIL CHIEFS from Glasgow will fly to the United States this month to return a Sioux shirt believed to have been worn by a fallen warrior at the Battle of Wounded Knee.

Friday Book; CRAZY HORSE BY LARRY MCMURTRY, WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON, pounds 12.99

THE GOOD news is that the US military has struck a blow for religious tolerance, allowing its servicemen and women to practise a traditional native American religion.

Cultural Notes: David Treuer

GENESIS OF AN ECO-MYTH

HOW, WHEN, and speaking what language(s) did man first cross from the Old to the New World?

AT ABOUT 5pm on Monday, under a Pacific drizzle, the hunters returned triumphant to Neah Bay from the open ocean. Their 30ft trophy, attached by nylon ropes to a small motorboat, bulged pathetically from the waves, mottled with barnacles and the scars of its final battle. This was their gray whale, pledged to them by treaty with the United States government.

Yuppie is the best known, Sinbad the latest. But there's an acronym for everyone.

"WORK" IS harder to define than one might think. The Concise Oxford Dictionary informs us that work is "expenditure of energy, striving, application of effort or exertion to a purpose". However, there are many ways of purposively expending energy that do not count as "work". In the late 17th century the scientist Robert Boyle remarked that "tennis, which our gallants make a recreation, is much more toilsome than what many others make their work". Two hundred years later the philosopher John Stuart Mill observed that "many a day spent in killing game includes more muscular fatigue than a day's ploughing".

THE CAMBRIDGE Boat Race crew was rewarded for its winning efforts on Saturday with a huge silver Quaich presented by the sponsors.

A SIOUX warrior, on horseback, tramples a fallen cavalryman; a coal barge passes underneath. As General George Armstrong Custer breathes his last, the cathedral of Notre Dame gleams in the distance.

SUPPORTERS of the American Indian leader Leonard Peltier, jailed for the murders of two FBI agents during a gunfight on a reservation in 1975, have made a personal appeal to the Prime Minister for help in securing his release.