Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
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The
Mille Lacs Lake Band of Chippewa Indians is once again in
the news. The B.I.A. is using the
Minnesota D.N.R. to weasel out from the Mississippi Chippewa Treaty,
and is
trying to re-negotiate the terms and take what they haven’t stolen over
the
past 150 years. The State of Minnesota
is calling it an “accord,” the Mille Lacs Band is calling it an
“agreement,”
and the Indians are calling it a “treaty.”
When the U.S. first signed both sides of the Mississippi
Chippewa Treaty,
they planned that the third, excluded party, the Anishinabe Ojibway
people,
would be extinct within a generation or so.
The Anishinabe Ojibway couldn’t sell the land, nor the
resources,
because Grandmother Earth is an inseparable part of our religion and
our
identity—and the U.S. knew that. So, by
legislation and executive order, England, the United States and the
Northwest
Territories created “Chippewa Indians” out of the White European fur
traders
and their Métis children.
At
the time that the Mississippi “Treaty” was negotiated,
neither the Anishinabe Ojibway nor the French Métis spoke
English. The “Treaties” were negotiated in
English. Although we have done
extensive research at document repositories, and have requested copies
from
both the Bureau of Indian Affairs and from the United States Senate,
there seem
to be no copies of either the negotiations nor the “treaties” in any
language
except English. (You can bet that Boris
Yeltsin has a copy of the weapons-limitation treaties in Russian.) Even if the archivists did come up with a
copy in Chippewa, it wouldn’t make any difference, because the Chippewa
language has the same European thought-patterns and embedded values as
the
European language of English.
Minnesota
Viking media-created “folk hero” Bud Grant is going
around laying the groundwork for angry confrontations about fishing at
Mille
Lacs Lake, just like Dean Christ did in Wisconsin.
(One wonders about the coincidence of Bud Grant’s onetime Viking
quarterback just seated on the Minnesota Supreme Court.)
The P.R. coming out of the opinion-makers’
offices in 1993 isn’t much different than it was in the 1830’s: the
media is
urging the wagon-trains to circle, the brave cavalry is closing flanks,
and the
mythological Indians are whooping it up.
It’s the same hyperbole and crooked scheming—for the same
purpose:
swindle and grand theft of Aboriginal Indigenous peoples land and
resources. It worked in the 1800’s, and
Western European history is full of lies and distortions that need to
be debunked.
It’s
to the advantage of the State of Minnesota to polarize
the communities here using hunting and fishing rights, and to have
contentious,
even violent demonstrations on one or both sides of the fishing issue. The State of Minnesota is promoting “catch
and release,” but what they are really doing is “bait and switch.” While the environmentally conscious hunters
and fishermen of Minnesota are busy demonstrating against the Indians,
the
Minnesota “conservation agency,” the D.N.R., (which, along with the
B.I.A., is
a dumpground for political hacks who feed off pork barrel legislation
and other
public carrion) are stabbing the White sportsmen in the back. While you sportsmen are “Indian bashing,”
your own fair-weather friends in the D.N.R. will be raising hunting and
fishing
license fees, and blaming you for their milfoil and other environmental
mismanagement. Since the Europeans have
been here, they have polluted the water just like it is in Europe. The D.N.R. is promoting “catch-and-release”
because most of the fish are too contaminated by toxic pollutants to
eat.
The
conspicuous and highly publicized quibbling about
fishing: how big is the “tribal zone,” and probably the mesh-size of
gillnets,
and other trivia, also obscures some billion-dollar questions that
neither the
State of Minnesota nor the Department of the Interior want to air
publicly:
particularly water rights and mineral rights (like the Mesabi Iron
Range, and
the value of all the ore ever removed from there).
There are a handful of Anishinabe Ojibway people still
surviving,
who were forcibly removed from their homes preparatory to the mining
operations—people who are still the legitimate owners of everything
that was
either “ceded” or not ceded by the Mississippi Chippewa Treaty.
The
“treaties” are being negotiated through the Mille Lacs
Band of Minnesota Chippeway Indians 1934 Indian Reorganization Act
“Tribal
Council.” The “Indians” have no say-so,
nor input, into this “tribal government.”
“Indian country” is just as fictitious as Disneyland, where all
of these
caricatures of “animated” make-believe animals occupy the twilight zone
in the
inner sanctum of regimented Indo-Europeans’ minds.
For example, there is a little rat named “Mickey Mouse,” who was
born in Hollywood and who speaks English.
The United States Congress foreshadowed Hollywood, and created
the
Minnesota Chippewa Indians, and then they invented Indian Tribal
Councils. The voices you hear from these
fictitious
“tribal” caricatures are also in English, scripted by their W.A.S.P.
puppet-masters, just like all of the voices you hear at the United
Nations are
also cast in the single rigid framework of narrow-minded European
thought.
If
you want to demonstrate, I suggest that you demonstrate
against the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the United States Congress, and
the State
of Minnesota, if you’ve got the guts.
These are the responsible parties, who invented the caricatures,
forged
the “x-marks” on expedient “treaties,” who forcibly relocated the
Eastern
Anishinabe Ojibway in the death-marches of 1850 and 1851, and who have
created
and continue to aggravate this corrupt mess.
Don’t make the Anishinabe Ojibway, or the Indians, into a
scapegoat,
because we had nothing to do with it.
The pious Christian crooks, who are supposedly the moral leaders
in the
White communities, are by their silent complicity, condoning the
vicious
“Indian racket,” just like the “good Christians” who supported Hitler’s
scapegoating of the Jewish, Gypsy, and other peoples during the
Holocaust. This ancient pattern of Western
European
“Civilization;” the occupation of other peoples’ land, is a pattern
which the
Indo-Europeans have repeated over and over again for thousands of years. Because of your hierarchial thinking, it
never changes. Minnesota’s present-day
scapegoating of both Anishinabe Ojibway and Indians is virulent
right-wing
hatemongering, of the ilks of Pat Robinson, David Duke, and his
far-right
cronies. (The focussing of attention
away from industrial pollution to “secondhand smoke” is another
right-wing
diversionary tactic, typical of the Reagan-Bush administration, just
like
“abortion,” and the misinformation which masks the problems of
homelessness,
unemployment and slave-labor minimum wages—scapegoating and Willie
Horton
blame-the-victim tricks. The Lame Duck
is on the way out, but the consequences of his right-wing policies to
destroy
families and family values are still here.
The sacrilegious Right has played a big part in the U.S.
government’s
latest try at terminating the “Indians” and abrogating the Treaties. They have told so many lies that they don’t
know which lie is the “truth,” and have fallen for their own propaganda
that
Aboriginal Indigenous people are “Indians” and the self-serving lie
that the
“treaties” were once legitimate.)
The
negotiators for the “agreement” or “accord,” or whatever
you want to call it, are strongly advised to scrutinize the United
States Code,
Title 18, Sections 1961-68. Neither the
Chippewa Indians, nor the United States Government, nor the State of
Minnesota
(nor the Northwest Territories, nor the Pope, for that matter) own the
land and
resources in question. The Chippewa
Indians, by colluding with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the State
of
Minnesota, and continuing to participate in the dishonest “Indian”
identity and
promoting the fictions that the “treaties” are legitimate and “Indians”
are the
same as Aboriginal Indigenous People, are putting themselves in
violation of
the RICO Statutes. Indian gambling and
Indian treaty-making are both racketeering.
You got away with it a hundred years ago, but this is a new age,
and
there are a number of Anishinabe Ojibway people who speak English
fluently. We, the Anishinabe Ojibway
have a right to exist as a Sovereign Nation on our own land.
My
telephone number is (218) 679-2382 and my mailing address
is P.O. Box 484, Bemidji, MN 56601.
Wub-e-ke-niew
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