Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
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May
21, 1992
Jim
Klobuchar
Minneapolis
Star Tribune
425
Portland Ave.
Minneapolis,
MN 55488
Dear Mr.
Klobuchar,
This
letter follows up our conversation just before you went
to Alaska; you requested that we write a letter summarizing what we
were trying
to tell you.
What
we are saying is that the history that the United States
is operating under, is seriously distorted.
We are, also saying that the vast majority of people who claim
to be
“Indians” are an entirely different group of people than the Aboriginal
Indigenous People who were here before the Europeans got here. There is no word “Chippewa,” nor “Indian” in
the Anishinabe Ojibway language. There
were no “Chippewa Indians” here, in Ojibway Country, before the
Europeans got
here. We can prove—we have done the
research,
and would be glad to show it to you if you want to come look at it—that
out of
the approximately 8,000 “Chippewa Indians” on the Red Lake rolls, for
example,
only about 300 of them are actually Anishinabe Ojibway People. The rest of them are either Metis
(mixed-bloods), or they are 100% Indo-European/African in ancestry. The problem is not that they are who they
are, but that they are pretending to be somebody that they are not—they
are
trying to be Aboriginal Indigenous People; in order to hide the
genocide of the
real Aboriginal Indigenous peoples.
For
the Anishinabe Ojibway People, the line of inheritance is
through the father—patrilineal just like the British, the French, and
other
cultures where the woman takes the man’s name and the children enter
their
father’s patriline. For the Anishinabe
Ojibway People, the land is held jointly, through the Clans and
Dodems,
which are patrilineal. The Chippewa
Indians, on the other hand, have matrilineal (passed through the
mother’s line)
clans—because on the patrilineal side, they are White people. Ojibway people are matriarchal—the political
power is ultimately held by women—but inheritance of the Clans and
Dodems is
patrilineal, and our residence is patrilocal.
These
distinctions are important, for several reasons. One
of these is “sovereignty.” Anishinabe
Ojibway Sovereignty has never
been ceded [the people who signed the Treaties were Metis people, whose
Sovereignty was already held by the Europeans]. Chippewa
Indian Sovereignty, is, and always has been held by the
Whites [ultimately, through the Christian Church—from an Anishinabe
Ojibway
perspective, the Whites’ Church and State are not separate]. Specifically, in relation to “Indian gaming”
and suchlike, the Sovereignty which is being used is the delegated
Sovereignty of the Secretary of the Interior of the United States,
who is
“clothed with Sovereign immunity arising from various United States
court
decisions arising from United States Code, Title 25, Section 463, for
example. This does not have anything to
do with Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples Sovereignty—and the various
Indian Gaming
operations benefit the White “Indians,” not the Aboriginal Indigenous
People,
anyway. Anishinabe Ojibway Sovereignty
is held jointly [not “in common”] by all of the Anishinabe
Ojibway
people, through the Midewiwin religion, through the Clans and Dodems. The land is sacred for the Anishinabe
Ojibway people; it cannot be sold, it is an inseparable part of our
identity and
our religion. This was explained to
Alexander
Ramsey and the other Treaty negotiators during the 1863 “Red Lake and
Pembina”
Treaty, for example. The Anishinabe
Ojibway people said, “Grandfather [our religion] says we cannot sell
[Grandmother Earth].” The Chippewa
Indians—at that time mostly French, French-Moorish, and French Metis
people—are
the ones who signed that “Treaty.” They
did not have any Sovereignty (some of them were drafted to fight in the
U.S.
Civil War; some of them were veterans from other White man’s wars; at
least one
and probably several of the “Chiefs” created by the White men were old
“Indian
Scouts” who were a part of systematically destroying the Aboriginal
Indigenous
Peoples). Furthermore, the Chippewa
Indians did not own the land that was allegedly “ceded.”
This is one of the reasons that the U.S.A.
has a vested interest in keeping “Indians,” by maintaining the fiction
that
Chippewa Indians are Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples, time is bought for
the
fraudulent Treaties (on which the U.S.’ “title” to the land rests).
There
are a couple of other big reasons why it’s in the best
interests of the United States to maintain the fiction of “their
Indians.” One of them: genocide. We figure that the pre-Colombian Aboriginal
Indigenous population of Red Lake’s original land area was several
million
people. The first decimation of our
people came before the White people got this far inland: bubonic
plague, the
first of many smallpox epidemics, and all of the other diseases that
the Europeans
brought to this Continent. Then, for
200 years, the Europeans were here, as a part of the fur trade, as part
of a
number of military and “exploring” expeditions, then as
settlers—directly
killing Aboriginal Indigenous people.
(The State of Minnesota had a bounty on scalps until the 1870’s.) It was not until after Adolf Hitler’s rise
to power in Germany, that the United States began seriously re-working
their
openly stated policy of genocide of Aboriginal Indigenous peoples on
this
Continent.
Wub-e-ke-niew
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