Your Irish analogy isn't very good. The Irish appeared to be more law-abiding than they should have been. My favorite story of the times concerns the cart loaded high with food on its way to the landlord's warehouse. The driver had to tell the starving people lining the road to attack his wagon and take the food - which, under his urging, is exactly what they did.
Then, when he got to the warehouse, he complained about thugs who had attacked him and stolen the food. Sounds Irish, doesn't it?
The famine was, of course, a land problem. It's always a land problem. One notes that in modern Ireland, a measure of land reform has taken place. A greater percentage of Irish own their own homes now than do the Brits (who desperately need land reform). Maximum ownership is apparently 5,000 acres of land. At the time of the famine, an absentee landholder could own a whole county - and did.
Ordinary houses in Ireland are now larger than those of the Brits. With 17 times the population, to equal the pace of the Irish, the Brits would have to build 917,000 homes.
They manage 170,000. (Back in the 50's the building rate was about 200,000 - maybe more.) Old buildings are not for tourist viewing. It's where the Brits live.
Bertrand Russell said that all wars are really wars over land. He was right (including the contemporary possibility). And, as is mentioned in the article, the object of the Indian wars was land. However, it's always better to paint the other guy with horns and a forked tail and that is what was done. So the whites battled while the Indians massacred.
Whoever owns the land owns the people (and also owns industry and by extension the politicians). Even Marx pointed out that the industrial revolution was financed by the landlords. You'll recall that 150 years later some 6,000 own two thirds of Britain and most of the Brits own nothing, or perhaps a postage stamp size under their home.
Actually, the 60 million Brits live in 24 million dwellings (the post-war Labor government called them accommodation units). The 24 million "dwellings" sit on 4.4 million acres (7.7% of total Brit land). Three quarters of the population live on only 5.8% of the land, about 3.5 million acres (total 60 million). The land component of their accommodation unit will be from half to two thirds of the total cost. In other words, a third of the price of the house will go to building the house - two thirds will buy the right to build it.
To drive the lesson home, the council tax (property tax) on an average home will be $935 a year, while the stately homes of the landowners receive an average $20,887 in subsidies.
What has this to do with the Indians?
The Brits were slaughtered in quantity over many centuries and the situation now is essentially the same as that of the Indians. Here, relatively few Americans are now landlords of the rest of us. (Harpers put it as 5% owning 95% of the privately held land. You'll remember my comment that one landholder owns more land in California than all the homeowners put together.)
So, modern economics recognizes this basic problem. In the 900 pages of the "best selling" economics textbook (McConnell) "land" is cited four times and land reform gets two paragraphs. (Close to five million students have already studied this stuff.)
Contrast this with Classical Analysis, in which all production comes from the interaction of Labor and Land. Even the multiplier of production - Capital - is a product of Labor and Land.
Perhaps, to paraphrase, economics is too important to be left to economists.
Said Henry George:
"The progress of civilization requires that more and more intelligence be devoted to social affairs... not the intelligence of the few, but of the many. We cannot safely leave politics to politicians, or political economy to college professors. The people themselves must think, because the people alone can act."
Those bloody idealists!
Harry ---------------------------------------------------------------
Ray wrote:
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?
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
<http://www.msnbc.com/news/880211.asp?0dm=N14SO>http://www.msnbc.com/news/880211.asp?0dm=N14SO
----------
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
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>http://IndianCountry.com/?1044810992
****************************** 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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