And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: <+>=<+>KOLA Newslist<+>=<+> FROM UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE FOR RELEASE: WEEK OF AUGUST 27, 1999 COLUMN OF THE AMERICAS by Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez THE 500TH BABOON AND OTHER MONKEY BUSINESS An old American Indian adage says: "When the Europeans came, we had the land and they had the Bible. Now we have the Bible and they have the land." For the Cheyenne and Arapaho, it may have to be amended to read, "And now, the baboons also have the land." Last year, the University of Oklahoma was awarded $1.74 million in federal grants to take 7,500 acres of Cheyenne and Arapaho treaty/reservation lands in Oklahoma and make it into a research lab for 500 baboons. The land transfer didn't get anywhere then, but right before the August recess, Republican Sen. Don Nickles attached a rider to an agriculture bill that would allow for such monkey business. "The rider was attached in the middle of the night," said Susan Harjo of the civil rights Morning Star Institute in Washington D.C. The Cheyenne and Arapaho signed their treaty with the U.S. government in 1851, giving them 51.2 million acres. They're down to 10,000 acres, said Harjo, who is Cheyenne. The Fort Reno lands, which include the 7,500 acres in question, should have been returned in 1948 when the U.S. Army abandoned the fort. Decades of double-dealing by the Oklahoma congressional delegation has resulted in a failure to return the lands to their rightful owners, she said. Her plea to the government: "Return the lands now!" In other monkey business, we have reports that police in Cambridge, Mass., are being taught that pepper spray is less effective against Mexican-Americans and other ethnic types because of their long exposure to spicy foods. This is a "modern" police department teaching this in 1999, purportedly presenting this information in a "professional manner." What's next -- people of color are immune to riot sticks because they've been exposed to the hard knocks of life? So we enter the millennium just the way Europeans entered the American continent some 500 years ago, wondering if the indigenous populations were human. It took them 50 years for the Catholic Church to answer that in the affirmative, yet it seems that the official answer has yet to be publicized widely. This, we believe, is what has historically led to injustices such as racial profiling and the disproportionate incarceration of people of color and the poor -- or by its real name, dehumanization. It is these kinds of attitudes that have jump-started the anti-immigrant, anti-bilingual and anti-affirmative action movements -- the belief by some that nonwhites are less than human. We thought we had turned a corner on the hate-radio-driven politics of the '90s, yet that seems not to be the case. In New York, a community in Queens -- with lots of immigrants -- is contending with anti-immigrant billboards. In California, the Anaheim school district has just passed a resolution calling on the U.S. government to bill immigrant-sending countries (read Mexico) for the education of immigrant children in that state. The unambiguous message of the billboards in Queens is "Go Back to Where You Came From!" Perhaps New York was chosen for the billboards because boats would have to depart from that city in order to make their way back to Europe. And in Anaheim, community organizer Lupe Lopez is getting not-so-veiled e-mail threats for her role in opposing the mostly symbolic resolution. Well, the resolution wasn't actually so bad. At the suggestion of Lopez, the school board attached a midnight rider that will also consider what it owes in back rent for being part of a government that illegally took half of Mexico and illegally took all of what is today the United States from native peoples. It agreed that by its next meeting that they will also have determined how much they owe for benefiting from use of hardworking Mexican farm laborers. Of course, the school district did not actually attach this midnight rider (that was our joke). However, the district's call for what amounts to reparations could indeed open up Pandora's box -- a box (containing the free use of slave labor) that the U.S. government would no doubt rather keep tightly shut. What should instead happen is that the United States and Mexico should convene to discuss how to treat immigrants like the hard-working human beings they are, rather than as criminals or some form of subprimates. COPYRIGHT 1999 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE Gonzales/Rodriguez can be reached at PO BOX 7905, Albq NM87194-7905, 505-242-7282, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <+>=<+> http://users.skynet.be/kola/ http://kola-hq.hypermart.net <+>=<+> if you want to be removed from the KOLA Email Newslist, just send us a message with "unsub" in the subject or text body <+>=<+> Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html doctrine of international copyright law. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ UPDATES: CAMP JUSTICE http://shell.webbernet.net/~ishgooda/oglala/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
