Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
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On
September 21, 1863, Governor Alexander Ramsey came to the
“Old Crossing” of the Red Lake River, which was on one of the main fur
trade
routes for the “Red River Oxcarts.” The
next day, according to Governor Ramsey and Indian Trader Ashley
Morrill’s
official journal [which the U.S. Government hid for more than a century
as
“classified information”], the French Pembina Métis arrived,
along with
Hole-in-the-Day and a number of professional Indian treaty-signers. On September 23, Governor Ramsey gave a
speech which opened negotiations for what was presented as a
right-of-way for a
road across the Red Lake Anishinabe Ojibway Nation.
After talking about the advantages of trade, Ramsey said, “Now,
this is a trade which cannot ... be interrupted. And
their Great Father, feeling this, and desirous to prevent any
trouble between his white and red people, has sent us here to come to
some understanding
with you about it. The Great Father has
no especial desire to get possession of their lands.
He does not want their lands if they do not want to part with
them. He has [stolen] more land now
than he knows what to do with. He
simply wishes that his people should enjoy the privilege of travelling
through
their country on steamboats and wagons unmolested.”
Ramsey had unsuccessfully tried before to get the Red Lake
Anishinabe Ojibway to sell our land, and his talk about “right-of-way”
was
fraudulently misrepresenting his purposes.
In
1863, the Anishinabe Ojibway people did not speak
English. The Pembinas and the Chippewas
spoke French and Chippewa Creole—they did not understand English either. After one of his failures at “Treaty-Making”
in 1849, Alexander Ramsey had made certain that the people he dealt
with the
next time would be unable to speak English. In 1852, he issued an
executive
order abolishing the teaching of reading, writing, and English to both
the
Anishinabe Ojibway and the “Indians.”
In both the brainwashing institutions known as U.S. Government
Schools,
and in the Missionary’s schools, the curriculum was “manual labor.”
What
began as an alleged right-of-way negotiation was taken
up to Washington, D.C., where it was re-written as a boilerplate land
cession
“Treaty” stealing about eleven million acres.
The language of the “Treaty” is standard Government Issue
“Indian
Treaty.” The people who actually agreed
to the land “cessions” and payment to the fur traders in the “Treaty”
were not
the Red Lake Anishinabe Ojibway, and were not indigenous to this
Continent. Two of the people who
allegedly agreed with “X-marks” as a “Pembina Warriors” actually used
their
French names—Joseph Gornon and Joseph Montreuil. Another,
who the U.S. Government appointed as a “Red Lake Indian
Chief,” was a Frenchman named Racine (related to the Beaulieu’s) who
used the
name Kah-nun-dah-wah-wenzo as a professional Treaty-signer who also
helped
“sell” land at the “Treaties” of Sandy Lake, Gull Lake, and Boise Fort. All of those who assented to this fraudulent
“Treaty” were European subject people who had no claim to this
Anishinabe
Ojibway land.
As
crooked as Ramsey’s original “Treaty” was, it wasn’t
crooked enough for the U.S. Senate, who took the 1863 “Treaty” and
amended it
in New York so that more land could be alienated with the use of
“Halfbreed
Scrip.” One of the so-called “Red Lake
Indian Chiefs” who was taken East to agree to the Amendments died of
the
“persuasion” he was given. The sacred
drug of the White Men (rotgut whiskey) was used by the U.S. Government
as
standard procedure to procure “agreement” to “Indian Treaties.” As the widow of another victim of deadly
Eastern Treaty persuasion said over the body of her husband, “I told
you not to
touch that thing (whiskey) which has killed so many of our people. Had you paid attention to my warning you
would not be where now you are.” This
European ritual still persists to this day—for example weekend binge
drinking. The Ancient Indo-European
Tradition of
Bacchus (the Greek and Roman God of mus-zhah-way and mish-kwe-bee) dies
hard
and painfully.
On
March 3, 1871, the United States Congress abolished Indian
Treaty-Making. It was reasonable that
they abolished it unilaterally, because they had always owned both
sides of the
“Indian Treaties.” Lo and behold, the
snake-oil salesmen came up with new schemes, which depended on a
unilateral
assumption of a fiction they called the “Sacred Trust Responsibility,”
based on
imported European law, racism, and alleged “eminent domain” derived
from the violent
Judeo-Christian God. In 1885, the
scheme-of-the-year was another tax, which they called “stumpage.” The United States Government used “timber
thieves” (from whom they collected “stumpage” tax) as an excuse for
“official”
theft of Anishinabe Ojibway timber.
This particular chapter of ecological mayhem was officially
known H.R.
4384, with which the 48th U.S. Congress replaced H.R. 846.
If
you look at reality instead of the words which obscure the
truth, the only thing that’s changed in the last 107 years is that
there aren’t
very many trees left—and as a direct result of the destruction of the
Anishinabe Ojibway forest ecosystem, the lakes are dying, and the
rivers are
rampaging. The immigrant European
hocus-pocus (called in Crooked English “scientific forest management”)
and
their mentality of greed is making this land a barren rock like Europe. What good is “making money” if your children
get washed away by floods, poisoned by pollution, mutated by radiation,
or
starve? Academic “forest management”
has nothing to do with forests—it’s corporate tree farming run by the
U.S.
Department of Agriculture, and conveys no understanding about what a
forest is
really about. In the interest of
honesty, the United States Forest Service should be renamed the
“European
Plunderers and Tree Farmers [in the back pocket of resource
corporations].” If you put most of the
“forestry professors” out in the woods, they’d get lost.
Many of them have never even seen a real
forest. The abstract curriculum teaches the Europeans and their Indians
that
they are somehow separated from Nature, that they can exploitively
“manage”
Grandmother Earth, and that kind of perverted theoretical thinking has
very
real consequences. You will not be able
to continue burying your head in the sand with your abstract thought. The time will come when you European
immigrants have “intelligently” and “scientifically” stripped away the
buffers
of Mother Nature, and will have to come to terms with the reality that
you
cannot buy, sell, or “own” Grandmother Earth, nor destroy Mother Nature. What you call “America” here is not for
sale, and never has been. Your European
“land title” is a self-destructive delusion.
Seventeen
years after “Indian Treaty-Making” had become
illegal, who should come back to Red Lake, deranged with the mental
illness of
greed, but another Treaty Commission.
The 1889 Minnesota Chippewa Commission slithered around the
boundaries
of crooked Congressional statutes by writing that they were “ratifying
an
agreement,” although they told the people in Red Lake that they were
making a
“Treaty.” The descendants of the
foreigners who were packed onto Red Lake Anishinabe Ojibway land under
the
“provisions of the Act of January 14, 1889,” including Indian
Reorganization
Act Chairmen Roger Jourdain and Butch Brun, celebrate the thievery of
most of
the Red Lake Anishinabe Ojibway land and resources with pomp, ceremony,
fanfare, speeches, and Wanna-be singing and dancing, every Fourth of
July, and
both they and the Minnesota D.N.R. call it the “1889 Treaty.” The Anishinabe Ojibway call it the Grand
Land Theft—and Genocide. More than two
thousand, five hundred documented Red Lake Anishinabe Ojibway people
“disappeared”
in the twenty-five years between the 1863 “Treaty” and the 1889
“repopulation”
by the French Minnesota Chippewas.
These more than 2,500 genocide victims were most of the
remaining
survivors of the Europeans’ earlier Holocaust which annihilated more
than one
and a half million (1,500,000) Red Lake Anishinabe Ojibway. When I write, “complicity in genocide,” I
mean exactly that.
We,
the surviving Anishinabe Ojibway have an inalienable
right to exist as a Sovereign People 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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