Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
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On
May 27, 1993, the Red Lake Chippewa Tribal Council passed
a resolution to hire Claire Henderson as a Research Consultant under
the Cross
Cultural program, to “authenticate” the Red Lake Chippewa history. I don’t know why the Tribal Council needs to
spend an undisclosed amount of money to find out who they are (they
could have
asked me for their genealogies, and I could have given them their
French family
trees, for free.)
Since
the Boston Tea Party, White people have been dressing
up as Indians. The Indian Claims
Commission cites “North-West [Fur] Company employees, disguised as
Indians,”
who were threatening to attack Lord Selkirk in 1817.
Since the Europeans got here, they have been pretending to be
Aboriginal Indigenous people, stealing our identity in order to fight
each
other and steal our land.
IDENTITY
CRISIS:
In
December of 1992, James Kirkpatrick wrote a column for the
San Diego Union, entitled “The fight over certifiably ‘Indian’.” The issue on the surface was Public Law
101-644, which was about who was a real Indian, and had a right to sell
certified Indian art. Kirkpatrick
wrote, “Ironically, many artists without a drop of Indian blood may be
certifiably ‘Indian’ under the law.
These are the descendants of Caucasians who managed by chicanery
to get
on the famous—or infamous—Dawes Rolls.”
Federally
Recognized Indians are issued plastic laminated
CDIB (Certification of Degree of Indian Blood) cards.
The United States Government evades responsibility for the
making
and un-making of Indians by saying that Blood Quantum is “Tribally
Determined”
from the Base Rolls established under the 1934 Indian Reorganization
Act of the
United States Congress. These Base
Rolls had to be approved by the Secretary of the Interior—the Red Lake
Base
Rolls were approved by the White man running the U.S. Department of the
Interior on November 10, 1958.
According to the I.R.A. Constitutions, enrollment resolutions of
the
I.R.A. Councils, enrolling anybody, also need to be approved by the
White man,
or “his duly authorized representative.”
A Federally Recognized Indian becomes a ward of the U.S.
Government,
under U.S. Trusteeship. This means that
Indians are automatically defined as legally incompetent people who
cannot own
any land. If “Indian” was a real
culture, they wouldn’t have to teach Indian culture in school.
Kirkpatrick
also writes, “the child of a full-blood Indian
father and a Euro-American mother may not be called Indian at all and
may have
no tribal rights. Bizarre.” Kirkpatrick
does not understand that
“full-blooded Indian” is not the same as having only Aboriginal
Indigenous
ancestry. Ahnishinahbæótjibway are patrilineal, and we
are not “Indians.” The United States
Government is legislating
Indian inheritance through the mother, which is a standard colonial
tactic. In Ahnishinahbæótjibway tradition, a woman
marries into the Dodem of her
husband, and her children are born into their father’s Dodem. Euro-American culture is also
patrilineal—that’s why there are so many new last names on the Red Lake
Rolls. These are White men’s names, and
these people have been made into Indians under the White man’s colonial
rules.
HEALTH CARE:
Clinton
is promoting a plan of “universal health care
coverage,” under which everybody in the United States will have access
to
health care. The President’s Surgeon
General started talking about preventative medicine, and everybody
jumped all
over her for threatening the C.I.A.’s golden goose, the lucrative
illegal drug
trade. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Clinton has
said much publicly about “prevention.”
What
about the homeless and the unemployed? If
a person is homeless and is sleeping
under the bridge, and gets pneumonia from exposure, or hypothermia,
will he be
eligible for health care? If he’s
admitted to the hospital under Universal Health Care, he’ll get pumped
full of
antibiotics, and have a warm place to sleep for a few nights. Then, when he’s cured, will he be sent back
to live under the bridge, and get pneumonia again?
What
if a guy comes to the hospital with gunshot wounds, and
he dies of lead poisoning. It seems
like the main kind of “preventative medicine” that the White House is
talking
about, is blaming abstracts and inanimate objects.
I suppose that the kind of solution that the Clintons would
propose to stop this kind of lead poisoning, would be to blame the lead
bullets, and propose closing down the lead mines. Then,
so the lead miners would not be put out of work, they’d
solve the problem by creating a bigger law enforcement bureaucracy,
hiring more
police and raising the tax on cigarettes to pay for it.
NUCLEAR
WASTE:
The
Chairman of the Mescalero Tribe, a good friend of Roger
Jourdain’s, is accepting nuclear waste, agreeing to a radioactive
nuclear
dumpsite on the Apache Reservation.
What thousands of White Cavalry couldn’t do, it only takes one
Indian
Reorganization Act Tribal Chairman to accomplish: killing both the
Aboriginal
Indigenous people and the Mexican mestizos with radioactive poisons. Roger Jourdain is running for Tribal
Chairman at Red Lake; the Indians and the Wanna-Be’s will have Band
elections
in May.
OLD INDIAN
PLATITUDES:
People
used to quote what they called an Old Indian Saying:
“Don’t judge a person until you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins.” I don’t hear this much, any more.
Now, the new Indian Leaders, like Clyde and
Vernon Bellecourt, and Russell Means; and the 1934 I.R.A. Indian
Leaders, like
Earl Barlow, Darrell Wadena, Butch Brun, Roger Jourdain, ad nauseam,
are
wearing Florsheim shoes, and wouldn’t let you ride a mile in their
Cadillac.
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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