This is the 2004 New Nickel, the Peace Medal Nickel, modeled after Thomas Jefferson's 1804 Peace Medal, which he presented to Indian chiefs at the time of the Louisiana Purchase. According to the U.S. Mint the Peace Medal Nickel "shows the hand of a Native-American and the hand of a European-American clasped in a friendly handshake below a crossed pipe and tomahawk." The crossed pipe and tomahawk suggest the white man's interpretation of the Indian way of life. There is a time for relaxed smoking from your long pipes, and there is also a time for the hatchet, for bloody, inefficient slaughter or maming, also deforestation. But when the pipe crosses the tomahawk it's time to understand who is ahead of who and what your role is. As Indians, you are all about pipes and hatchets. That's how you're different from us. In another way we are the same. We are the same in the limpness of our handshakes. We don't appreciate displays of strength or comeraderie. We don't allow action renderings of political gestures. On both hands an unmistakable extension of the index finger - the definition of limp. Was such limpness customary at the turn of the 19th Century? I just don't know. But this appears to me how sworn enemies would shake hands if forced into it by politics, not "friendly" at all. This shows the handshake as a gesture of empty formality, where one side still secretly denies the humanity of the other. And I hardly think in an age of such feminization of males this is the right choice of handshakes to consecrate on our currency. This sets a bad example, encouraging our young people to shake like soulless eunuchs.
