Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
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June 21,1993
Professor
Lanai Guinier
University
of Philadelphia Law School
Dear
Professor Lanai Guinier,
We
are writing in the hopes that you or one of your
colleagues may be able to put us into contact with a lawyer who is able
to take
on the establishment in a case involving Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples’
Sovereignty and human and natural rights.
I
am an Anishinabe Ojibway—I am not an “Indian.” I
live on my ancestral Aboriginal Indigenous
homelands, which the White man calls “Red Lake Indian Reservation.” For several years, I have been writing a
newspaper column in the Native American Press, clarifying the identity
of the
peoples who are here, and standing up for my peoples’ rights. I have been addressing the problems in the
community,
and have been addressing the violence which has been brought in by
external
forces such as the United States Government.
The philosophy of the Anishinabe Ojibway has always been
non-violence. There were no wars here, and
we do not have
a word for “war” or “peace” in our Anishinabe Ojibway language.
The
historical background which led up to the present problem
includes that the United States Government is trying to re-define both
the
Aboriginal Indigenous People and the French Métis, and make us
into “Indians,”
which is an artificial identity. I told
the United States Supreme Court and the Bureau of Indian Affairs that I
am not
a “Chippewa Indian,” and I turned in my “Indian Enrollment Card” to
Justice Thurgood
Marshall, who kept it.
We
have been working for the last eight years, researching
the genealogy and the history of Red Lake, debunking the lies which
have been
told about the Anishinabe Ojibway. The
people who signed the Red Lake Treaty were not Anishinabe Ojibway—we
can prove
with meticulously documented genealogies that they were French
Métis who the
U.S. Government re-defined as “Red Lake and Pembina Chippewa Indians.” As is proven by the transcripts of the
Treaty Negotiations, the Red Lake Anishinabe Ojibway did not sign the
Treaty. As was said at these
negotiations, we cannot sell Grandmother Earth, which is our identity,
our
birthright, and a part of our religion the Midewiwin.
This relationship to the land, our religion, our philosophy, and
our non-violence, is why our permacultural ecosystem was intact, why a
person
could drink the water from any lake or stream—and for that matter, why
all
newcomers were greeted as friends. If
we had been the violent, warlike people presented in the projection of
Western
European Civilization, the “Indian” stereotype, Columbus would have
never
landed.
The
Anishinabe Ojibway people define ourselves, in accordance
with our ancient Midewiwin religion, in terms of our patrilineal
Dodems, which
White anthropologists have translated as “Clans.” I
am of the Bear Dodem, as were my father, grandfather,
great-grandfather, and so on into time immemorial—as is my son. The Métis people who are maintained
here by
external forces do not have Anishinabe Ojibway Clans/Dodems. They are patrilineally European.
At
the present time, there are approximately eight thousand
people on the Red Lake “Chippewa Indian” rolls. Of
these, about two hundred are actually Anishinabe Ojibway—the
rest are White people, French Métis, and others, many without a
drop of
Anishinabe Ojibway blood.
The
United States Government uses these “Chippewa Indians” to
maintain the fiction that our Anishinabe Ojibway land was ceded; as a
smokescreen to hide the massive genocide of the Anishinabe Ojibway; and
through
the intentional blurring of our identities as “Indians,” to maintain an
occupation force under U.S. control in what remains of the Anishinabe
Ojibway
community. The “Indian culture” which
is fostered by external forces is one of violence.
Red
Lake Reservation is categorized as one of two “Closed
Reservations,” meaning that the land was never allotted.
The United States Government unilaterally
and fraudulently [we have documentation to prove this] forced the 1934
Indian
Reorganization Act onto Red Lake Reservation in 1959, and at the
present time
is dealing with this external government called the “Red Lake Chippewa
Tribal
Council” through the Western European Sovereignty which unilateral U.S.
Statute
assigns to the Secretary of the Interior under what they call the
“Sacred
Trust.” The reality is that it’s an
occupation force.
There
is an island of land claimed by the State of Minnesota
on the Red Lake Reservation, called the “Redby Townsite,” which
originated from
a railroad patent unilaterally granted by the United States Congress. The “Redby Townsite” went through a land
company, and much of it ended up in White hands, as planned. There remain some parcels of land which are
on the State of Minnesota property-tax rolls, and for which Beltrami
County
collects a “garbage tipping fee” although they do not collect the
garbage.
THE CASE: On
June 12, at approximately 7:30 p.m., I
called my son, who was living in a house for which I have been the
care-taker
for a year and a half, on the Redby townsite.
By some circumstance, I telephoned him at the particular moment
that two
Métis Indians had broken into his house, and were in the process
of assaulting
him. Myself and the other people with
me could hear him screaming over the phone, “Don’t kill me, don’t kill
me,”
after which the phone went dead. The
assailants had torn the phone out of the wall.
I immediately left for Redby, and the Reservation police were
called. I took my son to the hospital
for X-Rays in Bemidji, 37 miles away.
(I am enclosing a copy of the hand-out that the Bemidji Hospital
gave
him.) The Reservation [Bureau of Indian
Affairs] Police did not arrive until we were ready to leave for Bemidji.
I
and my son filed assault charges both in the Bureau of
Indian Affairs (which is called a “CFR—Code of Federal Regulations”)
Court at
Redlake, and with the County Attorney in Bemidji. In
the French Métis culture which prevails on the Reservation
because of their majority population, the “traditional” way of dealing
with an
assault is to perpetuate the violence by going over and beating up the
assailants. Some friends of mine
offered to “even the score” by beating up the people who tried to kill
my son,
but I said no. We need to use their
law, and address the violence which is in this community.
The
Red Lake B.I.A. police have not even picked up the
assailants for questioning—one of them is the son of a police officer. The Beltrami County Attorney is claiming
that he has no jurisdiction over “Indians” on the land that the county
claims
in Redby townsite, although these “Indians” were created and are
defined by
imported European law. They are
shirking their responsibility, and they are enabling the genocide of
the
Anishinabe Ojibway to continue, and are covering up the grand theft of
the land. I repeat, there is no such
person as an
“Indian,” and never was. The County
Attorney is colluding with the long-term U.S. policy of obscuring the
issues by
claiming that the European immigrant Métis are the same people
as the
Anishinabe Ojibway. The Métis
Indians
are not indigenous to this land. The
Beltrami County Attorney is caught up in the United States Government’s
structure of artificially defined apartheid based on illusory “Indian
blood
quantum” [which has nothing to do with Aboriginal Indigenous ancestry].
As
a parent, I am understandably upset about the assault of
my son, but I am also concerned about the larger issues.
We have done the background research to
prove that the people I am saying are Europeans are, in fact, Europeans. The paper “sovereignty” wielded by the
Bureau of Indian Affairs has been consistently used to oppress the
Aboriginal
Indigenous People, through their subject people, their created
“Indians.”
Throughout
the course of their history on this Continent, the
Europeans have consistently refused to recognize the inherent
Sovereignty of
the Aboriginal Indigenous People here.
And yet, it is our land and resources which underwrite the
United States
economy and the U.S. monetary system.
Our people have been going without in our own land.
We, the Anishinabe Ojibway, are neither a
“minority” nor an “ethnic group”—those few of us who have survived the
centuries of genocide remain a Sovereign people, and we have an
inherent right
to exist on our own land.
There
is much more detail, but we don’t want to make this
letter too long. Do you know of a
lawyer who is willing to take on the United States Government, the
governments
originating out of Western European thinking in the United Nations, and
is
willing to use this particular case as a lever to get at the broader
issues? The immigrant European Nations,
including
the United States Government (which bases its legal system, including
so-called
“Indian law” on British Common Law, Roman Statute law, and
Judeo-Christianity),
has consistently refused to recognize the inherent Sovereignty of the
Aboriginal Indigenous Nations of this Continent. They
are bringing a foreign law onto this land, and although even
the [European-law] United Nations says they do not “recognize” us, are
implicitly
acknowledging our existence through their unilateral writing of
labyrinthine
“Indian law,” the paper “Indian Sovereignty” used by the U.S.
Department of the
Interior, and their use of “Indians” to obscure the genocide. This stealing of Aboriginal Indigenous
Peoples land and resources, this consistent refusal of Western European
Civilization to recognize the Aboriginal Indigenous peoples and our
inherent
right to exist unmolested on our own land, and the ongoing genocide,
must come
to an end. The violence must be
addressed. We have, over the course of
the last eight years, already done much of the background research, and
we can
win.
Thank you.
Wub-e-keniew,
a.k.a. Francis Blake, Jr.
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