Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
|
The
White Earth Land Settlement Act was an underhanded
backroom deal from the first draft. WELSA continues the U.S. policies
which
created the Indian Treaties, the Halfbreed Scrip, the General Allotment
Act,
the Minnesota Chippewa Commission, the I.R.A., and Indian Gaming blood
quantum
vouchers. WELSA was not intended to the
few surviving Aboriginal Indigenous people of White Earth; WELSA was
designed
to scapegoat the Indians that the U.S. created, benefitting only the
Whites and
the Indian in-group, who are also White, at least on their patrilines.
The
purpose of allotment was to destroy Aboriginal Indigenous
communities, and to steal the land and resources. The
Catch-22 is that the Indians who have been used to steal from
the Aboriginal Indigenous People have never owned the land they were
selling,
so every generation or so, the U.S. has to use more Indians to steal
the same
land over again. When there weren’t
enough poor French people who had already been turned into Indians, the
U.S.
Government used the carrot on a stick of “land” and “payment” to give
people
who had been labelled “poor White trash” the racist insult label of
“Indians.” (According to their
genealogies, more than eighty percent of the allottees at White Earth
were
Indo-Europeans who had been turned into Indians.) The
Euro-Americans are still promoting Indians: to try to prop up
their invalid land titles, to promote their mythological version of
history,
and to hide the genocide of the Aboriginal Indigenous people.
The
United States Department of the Interior explained
allotment in internal memorandum 81642/82069: “Land allotment, under
the
general and special allotment acts, has been mandatory.
To each Indian—man, woman, and child—living
and enrolled at a specified date, a separate parcel of land has been
attached. The residual lands,
fictitiously called “surplus,” have been mandatorily bought from the
tribes by
the government and thereafter have been disposed of to whites.
“...
Allotment, commenced at different dates and applied
under varying conditions, has divested the Indians of their property at
unequal
speeds. For about 100,000 Indians the
divestment has been absolute. They are
totally landless as a result of allotment.
On some of the reservations the divestment is as yet only
partial and in
part is only provisional. Many of the
heirship lands, awaiting sale to whites under existing law, have not
yet been
sold, and the Indian title is not yet extinguished.
Under the allotment system it will inevitably be extinguished.
“...
Through the allotment system, more than 80% of the land
value belonging to all the Indians [sic] in 1887 has been taken
away
from them; more than 85% of the land value of all the allotted Indians has been
taken away.
And
the allotment system, working down through the
partitionment or sale of the land of deceased allottees, mathematically
insures
and practically requires that the remaining Indian allotted lands shall
pass to
whites. The allotment act contemplates
total landlessness for the Indians of the third generation of each
allotted
tribe.”
The
White Earth Land Settlement Act is just one more in a
string of dirty deals, using Indians to steal from the Aboriginal
Indigenous
people, and give the most valuable plunder to the Whites.
In a flurry of publicity, the few surviving
original allottees (people who are now over the age of 93) got big
bucks. After public opinion was molded and
the main
opposition was distracted, WELSA changed its tune, and the people who
aren’t
part of the “in” crowd are getting screwed.
Why isn’t WELSA dividing the present value, or the 1925 value
plus
compound interest, among the surviving heirs of allottees, instead of
inventing
marriages, changing blood quantums, making up rules about wills, and
all kinds
of other shenanigans, to make sure that most of the money stays with
the
Whites, or goes to Chip Wadena? If a
dying woman wills her property to her young son, where else but on an
Indian
reservation is the will disregarded so that Chip, U.S.A. & Co. take
the
first two-thirds share? For that
matter, if the land of the allotment is in what the U.S. claims as
“public
domain,” why can’t the heirs get together and get their land back, and
maybe
put together a new reservation without I.R.A. tribal crooks like Chip
Wadena,
Butch Brun and Roger Jourdain, and have those “Indian Givers” in
Congress give
you your Indian Sovereignty again. The
White man tells Indians, “with one stroke of the pen, you no longer
exist,” so
that’s probably why it doesn’t bother them to keep trying to steal the
same
land over and over again. Each
generation, the descendants of the White immigrants come up with a
variation of
the same old boilerplate scheme.
The
WELSA act that was passed by Congress was written to be
full of loopholes, and intended to get people fighting against each
other. That some people are scheming
against their
own relations for a bigger share of the WELSA pot is an example of why
there is
no solidarity among Indians. If you
Indians could get together, you could lobby for a rider to the WELSA
act: that
when the present White landholder dies, the land goes back to the heirs
of the
allotment; the Whites are paid for “their” land in 1910 prices, divided
among
all of the relatives of the deceased landholder since 1900, and the
most
corrupt county officials get to keep the money for any deceased heirs
they can
find or invent—then Whites can fight among themselves.
The
White man over-ran the Aboriginal Indigenous people with
poor white trash that he turned into “Indians.” Now,
Indians don’t have any land, and the White man is still
trying to buy time, scheming to put the insoluble problems, dilemmas,
and
quandaries that he has created through his greed onto the next
generation. The policy-makers are trying
to keep enough
Indians to hide the genocide for another few years, and hoping that
nobody will
notice that the White immigrants do not have valid land title, nor
eminent
domain, on this Continent.
How
many times has the U.S. Congress issued Sovereignty to
their Indians? At the Treaties,
Indians, who did not have Aboriginal Indigenous Sovereignty, gave up
French
Sovereignty or whatever it was.
Conveniently, these Indians got their Sovereignty back, under
Trust,
just in time to give it up when they signed the Indian gaming
agreements. Somehow, the in-group Indians
just got
another dose of Sovereignty from the Indian-givers in Congress, so now
they’re
discriminating, sexually harassing, and breaking labor laws in the
Indian
Casinos. Indian Sovereignty is a
legendary invention of the U.S. Government, and members of Congress
doesn’t
have to follow the laws they write themselves (for example, Senator
Packwood
and B.I.A. Regional Indian Leader Barlow).
The so-called Indian Sovereignty created by the U.S. Congress
does not have
jurisdiction over either Aboriginal Indigenous People, nor Whites. Another word for Indian Sovereignty, is
apartheid.
The
American English language, and its embedded Euro-American
culture, are designed to insulate the people who are stealing the most,
from
responsibility for their actions. Why
should the mostly White casino employees, who are complaining about
unfair
labor practices, be surprised? How can
you expect gambling, which is designed to steal a certain percentage of
the
patron’s money, to be honest? If people
are looking for a scapegoat for “Indian gaming,” they should look at
the
Department of the Interior, which created this crooked mess using my
stolen
resources, and your tax dollars; they should look at the U.S. Congress,
which
legislated the corrupt I.R.A. infrastructure; and they should also take
a look
at the White stockholders of the White-managed Casino corporations.
My telephone number
is (218) 679-2382 and my mailing address is P.O. Box 484, Bemidji, MN
56601.
Wub-e-ke-niew
|
|
|