The following, my response to Ray, doesn't seem to have made it to the list. Perhaps it was to long in the original form, so I'm shortening it and sending again. If, along with this one, the original appears, please don't feel you have to read it twice.
Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Ed Weick To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2010 3:07 PM Subject: Re: [Futurework] The only exception -- was Living within our means Wow Ray, do you write a good letter! Beyond saying that, I won't comment on the whole thing, but I would like to add a few things myself. You mention building huge churches on sites sacred to Indian people in meso-America. That is something many people have done in many parts of the world. Here's something I wrote many years ago after visiting Mount Rushmore, a place which had been sacred to the Lakota Sioux since time immemorial: I found the faces of the presidents disturbing. Perhaps it was because I am not American and didn't really have much part in what was going on. But why would anyone do that to a mountain? Especially one that is sacred to another people? But evidently I was missing something. Hadn't most shrines and temples been built on the sites of earlier ones? Hadn't it been a time honored tradition to topple one group of gods and raise up a new temple to superior gods in the same place? What the Americans had done to the Sioux, the Romans had done to the Greeks, and the Christianized Europeans had in turn done to the Romans. It is the site that endures, not the temple nor the gods. It will remain sacred, whatever gods of human transience occupy it at a particular time. You also mention the damage caused by lead and zinc mining at Picher, how the white folks were removed from there and how the Quapaw were left behind. You warned that Canada had better be prepared for the same kind of thing in the Chilcotin lands in northern BC. Actually, we've gone through things like that several times. Port Radium at the eastern end of Great Bear Lake is one example. Back in the 1960s and 1970s men in the community of Deline at the western end of Great Bear Lake were dieing of cancer which, the community argued, was caused by uranium mined at Port Radium. In the 1940s and 50s the men had been hired to carry uranium ore from the mine to boats that would transport it the Mackenzie River. Soon after, Deline became known as the "village of widows". Uranium City in northern Saskatchewan is another example. The mine closed in 1982, leaving huge piles of tailing behind. Indian residents of communities in the area felt that the tailings had affected their health. And now we have the oil sands of northern Alberta with people being affected by toxins downstream along the Athabaska River. On another matter, what you say in your email indicates that your ancestry is Cherokee. Little wonder that you see Indian people as farmers and not as hunters and gatherers. Originally, the Cherokees were an agricultural people living in the eastern US, mainly Georgia, until they were removed to Oklahoma in the mid 1800s. Here's something I posted to Futurework back in 1999 or thereabouts, after reading John Collier's Indians of the Americas, first published in 1947. Collier was US Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945. 1830s-1840s - Trail of Tears and United States (Marshall) concept of Indian Nationhood: Five Civilized Tribes removed beyond the Mississippi. Collier (Mentor edition, 1948) focuses on the Cherokee, an Iroquoian people, and the largest of the "civilized tribes". Prior to the American Revolution, the British had repeatedly prevented incursions into Cherokee lands by "borderers" and the Cherokee allied themselves with the British during the revolution. They continued to fight the Americans until 1794, when the signed a treaty with the US Government. This was breached in the letter and spirit repeatedly by the US Government in the subsequent years. In 1828 Andrew Jackson, who had been a famous Indian fighter and borderer and who had beaten the British in the battle for New Orleans, was elected President. Almost immediately, he persuaded Congress to pass the Indian Removal Act, 1830, which enabled him to remove all Indian tribes to west of the Mississippi (the Mississippi had become the new line between the colonized lands and Indian Territory, replacing the Appalachians of the Royal Proclamation). At about the same time, gold was discovered in the remaining Cherokee country, and the Georgia legislature passed an act confiscating all Cherokee land within the state, declaring all laws of the Cherokee Nation null and void, and forbidding Indians to testify in any state court against white men. The Cherokee lands were to be distributed to whites through a lottery system. An appeal from John Ross, the Cherokee Chief, to President Jackson got nowhere. An appeal to the Supreme Court also failed, as the court refused to take jurisdiction on grounds that the tribe was not a foreign nation (and therefore within the legal jurisdiction of Georgia?). Two years later, the arrest of some missionaries who refused to swear allegiance to Georgia while resident in Cherokee territory brought about the famous (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) John Marshall decision that: The Cherokee nation, then, is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter, but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves, or in conformity with treaties and with acts of Congress. (Collier, p.123) This decision was based on Marshall's concept that Indian tribes or nations ...had always been considered as distinct, independent, political communities, retaining their original natural rights...and the settled doctrine of the law of nations is, that a weaker power does not surrender its independence -- its right of self-government -- by associating with a stronger, and taking its protection. (ibid.) Jackson reacted with contempt: "John Marshall has rendered his decision; now let him enforce it." (ibid.) The destructive policies toward the Cherokees continued. A "fictional treaty" which assigned the remaining 7 million acres of land still held by the Cherokees to the US government for $4.5 million which was to be deposited in the US Treasury to the credit of the Cherokees was signed at a set-up meeting. Three years later, US troops and "a non-military rabble of followers", invaded the Cherokee lands and removed the Cherokees to concentration camps. "Livestock, household goods, farm implements, everything went to the white camp-followers; the homes were usually burned." (Collier, p124) 14,000 were forced to trek to Arkansas. Of these, 4,000 reportedly died on the way. A great lie was woven around the exodus: In addressing Congress on December 3, 1838, President Van Buren said: The measures [for Cherokee removal] authorized by Congress at its last session have had the happiest effects...The Cherokees have emigrated without any apparent reluctance. (Quoted in Collier, p.124) Like the Cherokees, the others of the Five Civilized Tribes, the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles were also removed to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. (All above based on Collier, pp. 121-125) A very sad piece of history. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Ray Harrell To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION' Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2010 5:48 PM Subject: Re: [Futurework] The only exception -- was Living within our means Ed, I certainly have feelings for remnant populations all over North and South America. I also have feelings for the populations in meso-America where they have had huge churches built on their sacred sites. Certainly that is preferable to having the sites bulldozed for oil or a pipeline. But still... Are you comfortable with a Wolverine parka? My family has always worked with our people but in most cases, other than myself, behind the scenes. Because they held no standing in court until 1936 and couldn't worship and could even be sterilized without their knowledge in Indian Health services until 1978 (when both were revoked by Congress), they chose to assimilate and hide their identity. In some relatives they even forgot who they were because what "was assumed" wasn't taught lest everyone be thrown out of the "Hiding Bushes." I was in New York City by then. Because of all of that hokum (what we call ukstaha or brown smelly liquid exuding from the bottom of two leggeds) my family worked in Indian Schools, lived in Indian communities but never made a big deal about being Indian. They just WERE. Meanwhile my mother's skin was white and so is mine. It opened the door for me to many white institutions where I heard what they said about my relatives but I was told to keep my mouth shut and learn because the learning was important for the "people". It never was about "justice." My father worked in Creek Indian schools but his real accomplishment was at Picher in the Lead and Zinc Mining community where he raised an Indian and Mixed school from the lower 15% in the nation to the 88% based on a core curriculum built around the Arts and Physical Education. Arts for the mind, Physical Education to purify the body from the pollution. The 88th % shows what happened to their academics as a result. There have been movies about that town and school and many books written since it grew, prospered and persisted even though it was declared the number one toxic site for lead and heavy metals in America. Eventually a tornado and politicians decided that the best thing to do was to remove the white residents and give the land back to the Quapaw to clean up. (But that's another atrocity story. Looks like Canadians are getting ready to repeat the formula in BC.) My edoda then went on to school in his fifties at the same University where I got my undergraduate. At 55 he earned two doctorates in Psychometrics (testing). Eventually the results of the Lead poison killed him. As the oldest male child of seven children he died before any of the others at 76 while his other brothers have lived and worked into their nineties, without the lead exposure. The youngest brother who smoked and taught for a year at Picher, died his eighties from lung cancer. He was the only one that smoked. The other two brothers are still alive and one just celebrated his 70th wedding anniversary with his Creek wife who was a famous piano teacher in Oklahoma. Etc.
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