Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
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Dr.
Michael Trujillo was nominated by Clinton to head the
Indian Health Service, “a troubled agency,” according to an Associated
Press
report. In this report, the I.H.S. is
“often criticized by Indians for being inattentive to their health
needs.” What do you expect from external
forces
running socialized medicine for another group of people?
The Indian Health Service serves at least
two functions, one of them mandated by the International Rules of War
for
Occupied Territories.
Emily
Seegar, Washington-based spokeswoman for the Mille Lacs
Band of Chip-away Indians, is quoted by the A.P. as being “happy with
the
president’s choice.” Dr. Trujillo is
described as a “full blooded Indian.” I
don’t know whether or not Dr. Trujillo is an Aboriginal Indigenous
Person, but
I know that he is not a full-blooded Indian.
There is no such person as a full-blooded Indian on these two
Continents, and if such a mythological invention of the Europeans shows
up, he
should be in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.
There
are many horror stories that can be told about the
I.H.S. When a person goes into an
Indian Hospital with a ruptured appendix, the doctor says, “take two
aspirin
and call me in the morning [if you’re still alive].”
I wouldn’t send my pet dog to the local Indian Hospital, and if
I
had any say about what’s being done on my own land, I’d kick the I.H.S.
out of
here, and send their Indians with them.
The
United States needs to be seriously concerned about what
the Indian Health Service has done in the past. For
one example, ask all the women who have been sterilized
without their consent by the I.H.S.—this needs to be publicly
documented. Then ask about the medical
experimentation
done by the I.H.S. No matter what
kind
of person is nominated to the I.H.S., or as Commissioner of Indian
Affairs,
they cannot change the structure of the racist institutions for which
they
become time-buyers and scapegoats. No
matter who gets the job, the entrenched bureaucracy and their bosses
the
special interests, do not change. It’s
in the nature of bureaucracy to become crooked and corrupt. The whole bureaucracy of the I.H.S., and the
Bureau of Indian Affairs could be filled up with “fullblooded Indians,”
and it
still wouldn’t change the nature of these racist institutions. Former B.I.A. Commissioner John Collier
described the kind of Indians who will work for these institutions as
having a
“white-plus psychology,” by which he meant that such “fullblooded
Indians” have
a White patriline and super-White values.
TREATIES, RETROACTIVE: Under the Treaties, and
the U.S.
Trust Responsibility, any relationship between “Indians” and the U.S.
is deemed
“purely political,” and the Judicial Branch of the U.S. Government did
not
tread on the Executive Department’s Indian Country.
Retroactive Willie has now assigned the Judicial Branch of the
U.S. Government to help with the Mille Lacs Chip-Away Treaties. The present Mille Lacs “Tribal Government”
is based on United States Government legislation unilaterally enacted
in 1934,
part of the purpose of which was to abrogate the Treaties.
The Minnesota Chippewa Tribe was created by
U.S. legislation unilaterally enacted in 1889, and the purpose of the
Act of
January 14, 1889 was to abrogate the Treaties and steal the land. The “Indian Treaties” and the “Indian
Tribes” which made these Treaties, exist only at the pleasure of the
U.S.
Government, and have nothing to do with internationally valid land
title. The Honorable State Senator Charlie
Berg got
off the hook, because the United States’ negotiating with itself and
the State
of Minnesota over the 1837 Treaty will drag on for decades, obscuring
the real
issues.
One
reason for dragging the Treaty process out, is that there
are no more forests. The ecosystem has
been destroyed, and the fish and the wildlife have nearly vanished. As the last of the fish and game disappear,
the Indians are setting themselves up for some good ol’ redneck and
Fundamentalist Indian-bashing, being blamed for the consequences of the
White
man’s shameful and disgusting policies toward the environment. If you Indians are so interested in hunting
and fishing, I suggest you go on a real “fishing expedition,” up to the
State
Legislature and to Washington. There
are some real sharks there, though, and catch-and-release might not be
such a
good idea. (You might have to use
another White man’s fishing technique, spear-and-release.)
Don’t let your lawmakers tell you any
whoppers—ask them some serious and hard questions about their policies
of destruction
toward the ecosystem. What’s the point
of having “hunting and fishing rights” if there’s nothing left to hunt
or
fish? While you’re at the Capitol, ask
the U.S. Department of the Interior why they are intentionally
destroying the
ecosystem, polluting the water, and blowing up ducks’ nests.
I
notice that nobody’s saying anything about the Black Hills
Treaty. Another reason for dragging the
Treaty Process out for another couple of decades, is that in 1977 the
U.S.
Senate American Indian Policy Review Commission predicted that the
Final
Solution (genocide; in modern politically correct terminology, “ethnic
cleansing”) would be finalized by the year 2027: that there will be no
more
Aboriginal Indigenous People on this Continent in thirty-four more
years. This Final Solution has been the
U.S.
Government’s agenda since the days of the Continental Congress.
As
Mr. Austin Abbott praised Senator Dawes (of the Dawes
Allotment Act) during the 1890 Lake Mohonk Conference of Friend of the
Indians,
“These treaties are made with tribes.
You have already signed the death warrant of the tribal relation
in
disestablishing the reservation system: and, when the reservation has
gone, the
tribe has gone. The party of the second
part no longer exists.” The United
States Government has not changed its genocide policy toward Aboriginal
Indigenous People, and now they tell their Indians, “with one stroke of
the
pen, you will no longer exist.”
According to my crystal ball, the U.S. Government will abrogate
the
Indian Treaties, and terminate the “Indians.”
Their agenda has not changed.
PURLOINED SCROLLS: In
the Opinion section of Sunday’s Star
Tribune, Robert Treuer wrote an article fostering the lie that the
Anishinabe
Ojibway are not from here. Much of his
information comes from U.S. Government Bureau of Ethnology writings
done around
1889, when the United States had a vested interest in promoting their
Chippewa
Indians, who did migrate from the East and who were warring with their
European
brothers. The researchers were locked
into their own culture, and even when they talked to Aboriginal
Indigenous
People, saw only European mythology and stereotypes.
The introduction to one of the documents on which Treuer based
his article reads, “the purposes of the [‘Mide’] society are to give a
certain
class of ambitious men and women sufficient influence through ...
exorcism and
necromancy to lead a comfortable life at the expense of the credulous.” As Midewiwin of the Bear Dodem, I will tell
you that in our culture there are birchbark longhouses, but there have
never
been “Grand Medicine Lodges” where we were falsely alleged to worship
the
Devil. The Anishinabe Ojibway never had
a Devil until he immigrated with the White man from Europe, and we
never
“worshipped the Devil.” We have no
Hell, and we have no Hierarchy. What
the U.S. Government researchers wrote were projections of their own
racist
minds: slanderous misinterpretations of our language, our values, our
culture,
our writing, our history, and our spirituality.
As
Treuer implies, language plays a formative part in
culture. The major informants cited by
Hoffman and Treuer’s other sources were not Anishinabe Ojibway (which
means
“We, the People”); they were Chippewa Indians with White patrilines who
were
not part of the Midewiwin, and who did not speak the Anishinabe Ojibway
language. We have read their names in
these old books, and have done their genealogies. Why
talk to Chip-away Indians?
There are living Anishinabe Ojibway elders of the Midewiwin who
will
tell you the truth of our very ancient Traditions: we come from
Grandfather the
Midewiwin, and Grandmother Earth—and we have always been right here, we
are the
Autochthonous People of this very place.
We tell the Europeans who we are, and they still don’t
understand. They are so imprisoned by the
limitations of
their European languages that they can’t see what’s right in front of
them.
Treuer’s
“migration story” interpretations of our Midewiwin
scrolls are about as accurate as Nazi “interpretations” of the Torah
would be,
for many of the same reasons (maybe Treuer doesn’t know what he’s
doing,
promoting this propaganda). I don’t lay
all the blame on the Nazis—I haven’t met any publicly acclaimed
Judeo-Christians who have gotten their Ten Commandments right yet,
either. Why don’t White writers get their
Traditions
straight, before they try to scramble up my culture?
The way that these European immigrants have destroyed the
environment says more than enough about their own Traditions, culture,
and
language.
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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