And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
To try to pin the deeply racist cast of American Manifest Destiny, the
most potent ideological vehicle of one of the world��s pre-eminent
campaigns of ethnic cleansing, makes about as much sense trying to
attribute all the war crimes of Naziism on one little mustached
vegetarian whose master-race fantasies were in no way unique to Germany
in the glory days of European imperialism. In the years leading up to
Naziism��s rise to global prominence, let it be remembered that Rudyard
Kipling poetically implored the leaders of the dawning American empire,
to ��Take Up the White Man��s Burden�� from the twilight power of the
British empire.
Let it be remembered that in Alberta and in other jurisdictions in the
USA, Native women and men were subjected to a disproportionately high
rate of involuntary sterilizations until into the 1970s. In Alberta
there has been no popular push for a thorough public investigation into
this province��s undoubted crime against humanity as formalized by the
existence and application of a draconian Eugenics Act until 1971. That
was twenty-six years after the big Nazi eugenics program had
demonstrated the brutalities lurking behind legal terminology such as,
��mental hygiene,�� a close verbal and conceptual cousin of ethnic
cleansing. In the case of Alberta, the provincial government tried to
use the Canadian constitution to protect itself from being sued by the
its sterilized victims, the survivors of a program that in its final
years put Native people under the surgeon��s knife at a rate ten times
that of all other groups in proportion to their overall numbers in the
population.
No, we are not all Nazis. To our society��s credit, we eventually
opposed Naziism with the full energy of our military, industrial and
ideological energy. Moreover, with some few exceptions the leading
lights of the ethnocentrically misnamed �West� (whose dominance of
America is actually based on the invasion of Indian Country from the
east) tried to steal themselves against allowing any repeats of the
horrors visited on jews, on gypsies on communists and on homosexuals--
all condemned targets of the vast eugenics scheme that was the major
biotechnological pillar of the Third Reich��s social policy.
As we leave the twentieth century, with the ghastly horrors of Rwanda,
East Timor, Tibet, Guatemala, Cambodia and now the Balkans to
demonstrate how entrenched genocide has become in the contemporary human
condition, let us remember how we entered the century. Let us remember
World War I and the origins of word, �balkanization.� The ethnic horrors
of the unglued Yugoslavia puts us face to face with the burdensome
legacy of the White Man��s propensity for murderous ethnic hatreds This
propensity is well understood by Indigenous peoples around the world,
peoples who have never had some sort of equivalent of a war trial at
Nuremberg to render a judgment of history on the systematic murders of
their children, of their parents and of the ecosystems that
diminishes the future of all our babies, born and unborn.
When Columbus arrived in America, there were in the vicinity of 2,200
languages spoken on this hemisphere, by far the densest concentration of
linguistic diversity on the planet. The death of most of those
languages aids and facilitates the holocaust deniers that would say our
home and Native land is not a place of ethnic cleansing. And with this
denial, Bruce Clark is mocked and demeaned by Mr. McKay on behalf of
Canada��s most powerful media monopoly. The lawyer is disbarred and
subjected by the Southam chain to today��s media equivalent of a public
flogging for the crime of untiring persistence, against all manner of
assaults to his person, his family, his colleagues and his reputation,
in raising the question of complicity in genocide as a genuine issue
that truly does cast a shadow over many legal establishments, even our
own hemisphere, or, perhaps, more true to say, especially in our own
hemisphere.
In this fast stride through some of the more repressed episodes in our
own society��s unbroken heritage of ethnic cleansing, let us not forget
the year 1871. That was the date when the Congress of the United States
passed a law stating that no more treaties would be made with First
Nations-- that year even the fiction of obtaining some kind of official
consent for the appropriation of their ancestral lands would henceforth
be eschewed. From this date forward, Indian Country became a
thoroughgoing totalitarian regime under the power of the Bureau of
Indian Affairs, whose authority came from nowhere else other than the
end of the guns of the US cavalry.
In legislating their way out of their own constitutional principles as
articulated in the John Marshall decisions and the Northwest Ordinance
of 1787, the USA clarified its rogue status outside the rudimentary
international laws of Aboriginal and treaty rights-- laws which were
adopted in the days when Indian peoples retained the power to resist
western expansionism, as they did especially in our war with the United
States in 1812. In that conflict former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson
wrote that it had become necessary to hunt the Indian down in Canada--
to ��exterminate�� Indian people altogether or to push them with ��the
beasts of the forests into the Stony [Rocky] Mountains.��
The USA��s original recognition of ��Aboriginal rights to the soil�� was
largely forced on Great Britain��s republican offspring in the era when
the Long Knives�� war on Indian Country was also a war on Canada. While
the USA made several hundred treaties with Indian nations between 1778
and 1871, not one of these has even remotely been respected, making the
image of the USA as an enforcer of international codes of conduct a sad
farce.
Meanwhile, the of Canada John A. Macdonald, was less able to afford the
price of Indian wars without a transcontinental railway and without an
effective army, began in 1871 to seek a begrudging acquiescence from
First Nations for replacing the Crown authority of the Hudson��s Bay
Company with the Crown of the new Dominion. Once some treaties were
made, once some of the key Indian leaders like Big Bear and Poundmaker
were incarcerated as political prisoners, the government of Canada
enforced with increasing aggressiveness the Indian Act, which became for
a time in the 1930s the most singularly repressive statute in the world
for the governance of Indigenous peoples. Indian religious ceremonies
were prohibited and it was made illegal even for registered Indian
people even to raise money to purchase stamps or to travel to meetings
if the purpose was to press some Indian title or claim.
While some of these provisions were removed after 1951, when Naziism did
force on Canadians some reckoning with there own heritage of White
supremacy, registered Indians continued to be constrained within the
paternalistic authority the federal state. Meanwhile, in much the same
way as the days when the violence on Indian Country was celebrated by
Frederick Jackson Turner and others as a dynamic factor in the genesis
of American democracy, major crimes against Indians frequently go
uninvestigated, let alone punished. On the other hand the Indigenous
peoples of North America are often a majority of the prison inmates
especially in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. As in
many oppressed colonies, prison proved to be a kind of university for
the ��militant�� American Indian Movement, which first took shape in the
late 1960s to react against the continuing genocidal conditions that
kept so many Native Americans poor, unemployed, and subject to the
internalized violence of substance addiction, domestic violence.
So what has this all got to do with today? After all, isn�t part of the
frustration with the so-called ��militants�� of Indian Country they seem
so obsessed with conjuring up the past and making light of the
opportunities and positive changes in the present? Paul McKay��s
Southam article reflects well this sense, suggesting that somehow there
is something illegitimate about going into the distant past for
directives on what should take place in our own time. McKay
characterizes Bruce Clark as ��the renegade lawyer who spent two decades
cultivating militant native clients with arguments dating back to the
1700s.��
Perhaps if Clark was an economist or a sociologist rather than a lawyer,
more could be made of this. But that is not how the law works. Try
driving up to a crossing point along the Canada-US border and telling
the officials there that this line on the land was put there in 1783 or
1818 or 1846 and that you weren�t alive then and that the laws made in
those days thus aren�t applicable. And yet at the same time as those
lines were being drawn on Indian Country, other laws were being made
that expressed rules and regulations about how what we call in today�s
language, existing Aboriginal and treaty rights were henceforth to be
dealt with.
And now, here��s the good news that Bruce Clark brings. While genocide
is the overwhelming theme of Europe��s colonization of the continent,
there were redeeming flickers of humanity here and there that resulted
in instruments like Queen Anne��s court for Indian land disputes being
established in 1704, or the more well known Royal Proclamation of 1763
being entrenched in the constitutional foundation of British imperial
Canada. This Royal Proclamation provides the key to understanding the
laws beneath both the formal establishment of Nunavut only days ago and
the negotiation of the Nisga�a Treaty in British Columbia. The Nisga�a
Treaty in particular is a veritable test case to establish who is to
give and take what when it comes to the art of Canadian compromise on
the middle ground where Indian Country meets the land of the newcomers.
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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