Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
|
To the Editor:
According
to
yesterday’s Bemidji Pioneer, the I.R.A. Tribal Council passed a
resolution, 8 “for” and 0 “against,” calling for a referendum on
amendments to
the Red Lake Constitution. There was no
open discussion of the implications of the present Constitution in
1958, when
it was brought in here. There were no
meetings on the Red Lake Reservation, with the Anishinabe Ojibway
community,
about this Constitution, which the pathological liars at the Bureau
(the old
people call this “forked-tongue speaking”) said was a “revision” of the
1918
Constitution. However, there were
innumerable meetings over the years within the context of the Bureau of
Indian
Affairs, with the shyster lawyers and with the Department of the
Interior—the
people who stood to gain from the resources which have been plundered
since the
Constitution was enacted. In the
Bureau’s documents from that time, the word was “dare not mention” to
the
Anishinabe Ojibway people that this was an I.R.A. document, a blank
check for
the United States Government to steal.
The Bureau spent 24 years manipulating factions in the Red Lake
Community, trying to get this crooked I.R.A. constitution in here in
the first
place.
There
have been no community meetings on the proposed
amendments to the Constitution. There
should have been community meetings “town hall” meetings, and democracy
on Red
Lake about the proposed amendments, instead of presenting the
amendments,
already written, in the Bemidji paper about a month before the election. It’s a new era: Anishinabe Ojibway people
have learned how to interpret Crooked English and crooked laws, and the
old era
is gone. The old way of interpreting
White European laws will no longer work.
No matter what the results of the proposed referendum
turn out to
be, no matter what changes are made in the 1958 Constitution, it is still
an Indian Reorganization Act Constitution, and whether it states so
openly in
the Constitution or not, it’s still subject to the review and over-ride
of the
Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Secretary of the Interior, which holds
Indian
Sovereignty. (The Catch-22 is that they
are trying to include the Sovereign Anishinabe Ojibway people, with the
Clans
and the Dodems, in the same category of “conquered people” as their
Indians.) We need to throw the whole
Indian Reorganization Act out of the Anishinabe Ojibway Nation, and go
back to
Traditional Anishinabe Ojibway Sovereignty.
We, the Anishinabe Ojibway, also need to file human rights
violations—and
genocide charges—in World Court, about this 1934 Indian Reorganization
Act
Constitution and its implications. We
are not Chippewa Indians. We are
Anishinabe Ojibway People on our own unceded Nation; we have a right to
exist
and neither the Chippewa Indians nor the United States Government has a
right
to impose an external form of government on us. Whether
they call it “Democracy,” “Socialism,” “Civilization,” or
“Communism,” it’s all European idiot-ology.
Wub-e-keniw,
aka
Francis Blake, Jr.
Red Lake
 |
 |
 |