Ed and Harry
Harry asked?
> As oil is the lifeblood of the US - does it
have a right to defend itself
> against interruptions in the supply?
> against interruptions in the supply?
Did the Irish Peasants have the right to raid the
warehouses of the wealthy in order to feed their families?
What about the families and towns of India where people
are starving when there is plenty of grain?
There is an interesting article in the NYTimes today
called
"Catholics Debating: Back President or Pope on
Iraq?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/national/06CHUR.html?th
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/national/06CHUR.html?th
In this situation the Pope is a kind of Central Government
and these conservative Catholics have talked themselves into hating all Central
Governments. The issue of the rule of law is a problem to say the
least. I suspect the next answer will be to try to do
away with tithing (as taxes).
In the past, America's "Nazi" period was
called "Manifest Destiny" It furnished the "Final Solution" rational
that Hitler was to use later on the people he didn't like or want
either. Consider the following article by the poet and
intellectual Suzan Harjo for Indian Country Today newspaper:
American Indians see media’s
bias
Historically, press has been our critic, writes columnist
Suzan Shown Harjo
INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY
Historically, press has been our critic, writes columnist
Suzan Shown Harjo
INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY
March 3 — Mainstream press had a
bumper crop of anti-Indian articles last year. The Wall Street Journal seemed to
be on a holy mission to portray Indian people and issues in a negative
light. So did myriad print and broadcast reporters and commentators in
Connecticut and at least half of the shouting heads on cable television.
The capper for 2002 was TIME magazine’s coverage of Indian casinos in two
December issues.
As a result of TIME’s articles,
“members of Congress are calling for hearings” on gaming and federal
recognition, Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawaii, told delegates at a Feb. 24
Washington meeting of the National Congress of American Indians. Senate hearings
will take place in the Committee on Indian Affairs, which Inouye has led in one
of the two top positions since the 1980s and now serves as vice chairman.
“The magazine articles pose a
question: What is a tribe for the purposes of conducting gaming,” said Inouye.
While “personally against gaming,” he said that Indian gaming monies “meet the
long unmet needs of decades of broken promises. As long as those promises are
not carried out, you’ll find me marching with you for gaming.”
Inouye said Indian ancestors would
say, “You’ve done well, you’ve stood tall…you’ve succeeded.” But success has
come with a “whole legion of critics,” he said, counting TIME among them. “Don’t
let the critics tell your story.”
Historically, the American mainstream
press has been our critic, missing and ignoring our story, or deliberately
getting it wrong.
Newspapers’ Role
Greed for Indian land, rather than Indian success, was the trigger for negative reporting in the 1800s and 1900s. Most newspaper families - such as the Hearst publishing empire that was built on Black Hills gold - owned the mines and railroads and were an integral part of westward expansion. True believers in the manifest destiny of whites to own the “new world,” they advocated and instigated violence against Indian people who stood in their way.
Greed for Indian land, rather than Indian success, was the trigger for negative reporting in the 1800s and 1900s. Most newspaper families - such as the Hearst publishing empire that was built on Black Hills gold - owned the mines and railroads and were an integral part of westward expansion. True believers in the manifest destiny of whites to own the “new world,” they advocated and instigated violence against Indian people who stood in their way.
Newspapers were essential to the
federal government’s 1880-1934 “civilization” campaign to eradicate Indian
religions, languages and traditions, including ceremonial dancing. Most of the
stories were written in what one federal circular promoted as a “careful
propaganda” to “educate public opinion against the dance.”
The Army and the Smithsonian in the
late-1800s used newspapers to advertise for “collectors” to “harvest Indian
crania” and “grave goods.” No papers reported on these activities, but
occasionally they reported on Indian skulls of local interest.
One in 1890 in the Rocky Mountain
News appeared under these headlines: “A Bad Ute’s Skull/An Indian’s Brain Pan in
a Denver Gun Store/Tab-we-ap Was a Redskin of the Worst Type/His Career of
Deviltry Was Brought to an End by the Avenging Bullet of a White Man.”
Newspapers of the day publicized
bounty notices on current “uprisings.” A 1922 article in the Rocky Mountain News
reported a $25 reward for those who defeated “efforts to sign the roads into the
Navajo reservation ... The redskins are said to tear out or carry away all
sign-boards.”
The Rocky Mountain News had political
and proprietary interests in the Colorado gold and in clearing the territory of
Indians to get at it. The newspaper started a drumbeat against Cheyenne Dog
Soldiers and other “hostiles” that culminated in the Sand Creek Massacre of a
peace camp of Cheyenne elders, pregnant women and children on Nov. 29,
1864.
The News celebrated the “Battle” of
Sand Creek, lauding the Colorado Volunteers’ “Bloody Thirdsters” as having
“covered themselves with glory.” By contrast, the U.S. Army officers on site
reported it as the Sand Creek “Massacre” and described the soldiers as
“barbaric” and “covered with gore.”
The Chicago Tribune ran a 20-year
retrospective on the Sand Creek “Battle” on Aug. 8, 1887, with subheads:
“Wholesale Slaughter of Indians on the Plains, An Account of the Bloody Fight by
Col. William M. Chivington, the Leader of the White Forces - About Eight Hundred
Redskins Killed in the Engagement - Savage Atrocities Which Provoked the Fearful
Retribution.”
A Senate Special Committee on Indian
Affairs investigated federal-Indian relations and reported in 1867 that white
aggression was the cause of most armed confrontations with Indians. Most
editorials dismissed the important report. Newspapers continued to demonize
Indians and aggressive whites took more Indian land and murdered more Indian
people.
The Washita Massacre
Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, on Nov. 27, 1868, invaded Cheyenne land that had been secured by treaty only one year before in what is now Oklahoma. He attacked Cheyenne Peace Chief Black Kettle’s camp along the Washita. Black Kettle and many of his people had barely escaped being killed at Sand Creek. Custer’s soldiers killed most of them and all the ponies, and raped the surviving women, girls and boys.
Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, on Nov. 27, 1868, invaded Cheyenne land that had been secured by treaty only one year before in what is now Oklahoma. He attacked Cheyenne Peace Chief Black Kettle’s camp along the Washita. Black Kettle and many of his people had barely escaped being killed at Sand Creek. Custer’s soldiers killed most of them and all the ponies, and raped the surviving women, girls and boys.
”The End of the Indian War and Ring”
was the way The New York Times announced the Washita Massacre. Calling it “a
fortunate stroke which ended his career and put the others to flight,” the Times
editorialized: “The truth is, that Gen. Custer, in defeating and killing Black
Kettle, put an end to one of the most troublesome and dangerous characters on
the Plains.”
The American press typically
proclaimed massacres of Indians as battles and actual battles Indians won as
massacres, wildly inflating the number of “redskins” and “hostiles.”
The Battle of the Little Big Horn on
June 25, 1876, was widely reported as the “Custer Massacre.” The Denver Post
headlined one of its stories on Captain Benteen: “Major’s Men Were Lured into
Ambush by Fleeing Redskins/Force of 5,000 Hostiles Surrounded Pursuing Troopers
Who Galloped into Huge Village; Desperate Retreat Prevented
Annihilation.”
Reporters today, even after Congress
apologized in 1990 for the Wounded Knee Massacre, continue to refer to it as the
“Battle of Wounded Knee” and the “last battle of the Indian wars.”
L. Frank Baum
L. Frank Baum wrote about Wounded Knee for The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, a paper he edited and drove into bankruptcy. Best known as a writer of children’s books and creator of the Wizard of Oz, he first penned editorials calling for genocide of Indians.
L. Frank Baum wrote about Wounded Knee for The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, a paper he edited and drove into bankruptcy. Best known as a writer of children’s books and creator of the Wizard of Oz, he first penned editorials calling for genocide of Indians.
His anti-Indian writings in 1890-1891
were so virulent that organizers of a Baum conference in Aberdeen, S.D. a
century later apologized “to the Lakota people for the part that our community
and nation played in the killing of their relatives.”
The Aberdeen planners said, “Baum and
other editors in the area contributed to the climate of fear and hatred that led
to the massacre at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890.”
Weeks before the Massacre, Hunkpapa
Chief Sitting Bull and his half-brother, Chief Big Foot, were placed on the
federal hit list of “fomenters of dissent,” ostensibly for violating the ban
against dancing. Sitting Bull was killed on Dec. 15 by federal Indian Police who
were arresting him. His people escaped to Big Foot’s camp and they all then fled
to the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation.
At Wounded Knee, they were disarmed
by the 7th Cavalry. As Big Foot was dying of pneumonia, he and most of his
relatives were mowed down by Hotchkiss and Gatling guns.
In one editorial, Baum built up the
murdered Sitting Bull, in order to tear down the living Indian people as “a pack
of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them.” Sitting Bull was, Baum
wrote, “an Indian with a white man’s spirit of hatred and revenge for those who
had wronged him and his.
“The proud spirit of the original
owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody
wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull.”
Baum’s white supremacist editorial
continues: “The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are
masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier
settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining
Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their
manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they
are.”
Baum’s Jan. 3, 1891 editorial on
Wounded Knee is another call for genocide: “The PIONEER has before
declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination (sic) of the
Indians.
“Having wronged them for centuries we
had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong
and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In
this lies safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent
commands.
“Otherwise, we may expect future
years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the
past.”
Has mainstream coverage of Indians
and Indian issues improved since those days? Of course it has. But far too much
of it reflects Baum’s disdain masked by this century’s make-up. The only stories
where the Baums of today can really be comfortable are those that ask, “How
‘bout them redskins?”
As the good Senator from Hawaii says,
“Tell your story, speak in one voice, take on your critics. You have one good
weapon: truth. Truth is on your side.”
Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne and
Hodulgee Muscogee, is president of the Morning Star Institute in Washington,
D.C., and a columnist for Indian Country Today.
So Ed and Harry,
What I find appalling is that these old "Manifest Destiny"
arguments are still being raised. There is no excuse for cultural
destruction. There is no rationlization for
genocide. There is no place were the destruction of a million
years of human evolution and cultural knowledge is efficient, economic or
intellecually tenable. If the West can't come up with a better
rational for public action, then the West has not evolved and is still the
Monster that it was when it arrived on these shores. And
that's my opinion.
Ray Evans Harrell
PS: 30 years ago the fraudulent Castaneda books opened
the door to considering that Indians had a viable spiritual life.
The Freedom of Religion Act of 1978 opened that door further for scholars to
prove the truth if not the specific of Castaneda's claims. Recently
the Scientists have been studying Indian languages and finding 21st century
scientific breakthroughs in the ancient languages. Forestry
and Agricultural methods have also proven another area of advanced thinking from
peoples who were considered a little above the animals in intelligence by the
European. Now the issue of whether there was Indian Law is being
approached as well. Here is a good use of that Casino
money. But the Universities will not like what they find for
what it says about them, their history and their culture:
American Indian law is key to
intellectual defense
Posted: February 10, 2003 - 9:00am EST
Posted: February 10, 2003 - 9:00am EST
American Indian sovereignty is a way of being; it is a
way of thinking; it is a political and intellectual structure of great meaning
that deserves the most serious consideration, from its national ethnogenesis to
its most studied cultural dimensions.
The thinking and conceptual framework of the
traditional languages, cultures and governments of American Indians, as
presently studied and discerned, are beginning to provide excellent
perspectives. Theoretic and practical approaches, in the prism of the ancient
teachings, about many disciplines and topics, including the study of humanity in
the natural world, are increasingly being assessed based on pragmatic
results.
Harvard University got the Indian prize last week, and
deservedly so. The Oneida Nation in New York donated $3 million to endow the
Harvard Law School with a professorship devoted to American Indian law. It did
so to signal to the academic community, starting with the august Ivy League
university in Cambridge, Mass., that tribal economic power intends to support
the proper study and research on the richness of Native peoples’ histories and
legal realities in the North America. Oneida Nation Representative Ray
Halbritter, a Harvard graduate, steered the gift of the nation, to "help create
a better understanding of the complex legal issues faced by all American Indians
today and in the future."
The depth and range of experience found in American
Indian cultures is only beginning to be understood and discerned. Many
disciplines have overlapped studies of and about American Indian peoples, but a
basis of studies that transcends specific disciplines is most desired, most
useful and effective. We salute the signal sent by the Oneida Nation (parent
corporate owner of this newspaper) in its endowment of an academic chair at
Harvard University. Endowment is forever when it comes to offering a
programmatic base. This Harvard deserves, after years of sustaining a number of
creative Native initiatives. At a time when other universities are cutting back
American Studies programs, Harvard is defining itself with its best efforts in
law and business development.
The gift supports the establishment of a secure and
quality-guaranteed position that will contribute to the long-term intellectual
study and advancement of American Indian law. The fact that Native nations,
which are doing well through self-determined business enterprises, are moving to
directly support improved scholarship and education of Native legal, social and
historical topics is of considerable common value as a model and strategy of
tribal philanthropy. Ultimately, more and more scholarship and research needs to
emerge from the Indian experience, from the cultural logic, from the Native
intellectual bases. The idea of "the people," is one required principle.
Respectful assessment of human interfaces with the natural world is another.
Woman as the center of family and family as center of nation has great
durability in the cultural thinking as well. There is of course much
more.
The picture is this: Indian sovereignty as a base of
legal reality for some 562 Native nations and communities in the United States,
with its central argument of politically and culturally distinct bases within
the American nation state, must be continually analyzed, understood and lived.
Sovereignty, always a goal, is not always practiced at its desired level. The
quest of Native nations to strive for self-sufficiency and for self-reliance is
to persist in the world as peoples. This inspirational and innovative endeavor
to endow a chair at an institution of higher learning, signaled by Oneida
leadership, challenges wealthy tribes to also endow programs that will support
teaching and research positions, in university and college programs at major
institutions, including tribal colleges, throughout the country. We hope it
starts a trend.
Well-to-do tribes are urged to consider the model. One
of these endowments provided annually or as appropriate for the rest of the
decade seems a great goal. By funding these types of endowed chairs, and by
funding endowments for the tribal colleges and for policy think tanks, the line
of defense on Indian rights can hold. The country needs to hear Native
perspectives. Indian country needs to entertain new ideas and know how events
and trends affect our home communities. Endowments for American Indian legal
scholarship; for education and for research; for communication and expression of
the American Indian standing; these are great and sustainable gifts to the
generations.
This article can be found at http://IndianCountry.com/?1044810992
This article can be found at http://IndianCountry.com/?1044810992
----- Original Message -----
From: "Harry Pollard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Ed Weick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "futurework"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2003 1:05
PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Manifest
Destiny?
>
> Ed,
>
> Very good post!
>
> Something I would like comment on - from everyone, if possible.
>
> Does a country have the right to take steps to handle a perceived danger in
> the future.
>
> As oil is the lifeblood of the US - does it have a right to defend itself
> against interruptions in the supply?
>
> Harry
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Ed wrote:
>
> >Some of you may have read the Mother Jones article by Robert Dreyfus. I
> >posted the URL the other day. It suggests that what is going on, and has
> >gone on, in the Middle East is part of long-term strategy for global
> >dominance that Washington hawks have developed over the past few decades.
> >I've argued something like this in earlier postings, pointing out that
> >both the location and resources of the Middle East are enormously
> >strategic. The power that controls the Mid East may dominate the world
> >during the next few decades.
> >
> >Thus far I've tended to think of this need for dominance in terms of the
> >economy (energy) and power (keeping a lid on terror, etc.), but it also
> >has more idealistic origins. Since its beginnings as a nation, America, in
> >various ways, has been in a state of continuous expansion. During the
> >earlier parts of the 19th Century this expansion was mainly confined to
> >carving and filling out the continental United States. As settlers moved
> >westward from the original colonies, vast tracts of lands were taken from
> >the Indians, Louisiana was purchased from the French, and parts of the
> >southwest and far west were forcibly taken from Mexico. Expansionism
> >continued during the later part of the 19th Century and into the 20th with
> >the Spanish-American War and the building of the Panama Canal. It
> >continued throughout the 20th Century in Central America, Korea and
> >Vietnam. Where it was not militaristic in nature, it was economic. Often,
> >it was both. However, by then it was no longer confined to the American
> >continent. It had gone world wide.
> >
> >While this expansion was at times brutal and typically exploitative, it
> >had to be dressed up in the highest of ideals and principles. During much
> >of the 19th Century, it was part of the nation's "manifest destiny" -
> >something that simply had to happen because it represented a superior way
> >and quality of life. In the 20th Century it was about progress and keeping
> >the world safe for democracy. Currently, though it is most likely about
> >oil and dominance at a material level, it is given the idealistic clothing
> >of constructing global democracy.
> >
> >I heard a commentator on the radio this morning express concerns about
> >what America is doing and where it may be taking us. One of the points he
> >made was that people dream their own dreams and cannot easily dream
> >someone else's. Global democracy may be a fine concept for Americans but
> >may be difficult to export because others have different concepts of how
> >to govern themselves. Authoritarianism at the top does not necessarily
> >preclude democratic institutions at the village or regional level, as was
> >demonstrated in Czarist Russia. Nor does democracy at the top guarantee
> >democracy at the village level, as is illustrated by the re-emergence of
> >regional warlords in Afghanistan. Democracy is almost certainly not a
> >one-size-fits-all phenomenon, and people have to have to decide how much
> >freedom versus authority is tolerable at all levels of society, and then
> >they have to figure out how to practically achieve the appropriate
> >balance. And we may have to accept the possibility that some people will
> >take a very long time to figure it out.
> >
> >Intervention in the affairs of other nations should not be based on giving
> >them a particular model of democracy, but on giving them the means and
> >breathing space to figure out what model might best suit them.
> >
> >Ed Weick
>
>
>
> ******************************
> Harry Pollard
> Henry George School of LA
> Box 655
> Tujunga CA 91042
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Tel: (818) 352-4141
> Fax: (818) 353-2242
> *******************************
>
>
>
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