Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
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After
reading the 1991 and 1992 management agreements between
Chip Wadena and Gaming World International, I was taken back in time to
the
Indian Treaty-making era. I said to
myself, “this agreement sounds familiar.”
The faces have changed, and times have changed, but the
Euro-American
paradigm of relationships with Indians is the same as it was a hundred
and
fifty years ago. The moral obligation
of Manifest Destiny is still there—the White invaders are still acting
as though
they have a God-given right, and also a duty to steal from Aboriginal
Indigenous people, using Indians, which is an European perspective. The Indian Agents like Barlow, and the
Indian Traders, have always gotten a hefty commission, although in the
late
twentieth century there isn’t more land to steal and give away, so some
of the
payola was in vouchers.
The
management agreements, which have been informally called
“compacts,” gives Gaming World International 70% of the Shooting Star
Casino’s
take. 30% goes to the “Tribe.” (Under the definitions used by the B.I.A. to
describe 1934 I.R.A. Indian Governments, an “Indian Tribe” consists of
the
three executive officers of the Tribal Council, so Darrell “Chip”
Wadena is the
“White Earth Tribe,” and Indians remain P.O.W.’s without any legal
rights.) Gaming compacts are just a bad
re-run of the broken treaties: the only “Indians” who benefit are the
Chiefs
that the U.S. Government created, just like at the Treaties. The scam artists are still at it, and the band
plays on, and on.
TRAIL OF
STUMPS:
The
Sovereign Red Lake 1934 I.R.A. elections are starting to
heat up, and Indians are coming out of the brush (which is all that’s
left of
the woods now) and throwing their hats into the ring.
In the March issue of the Minneapolis Circle, there is an ad
promoting laminated plastic photo I.D. cards for all of their Indians. This is political ploy to get all of the
absentee voters registered to vote—this is one of very few services
that the
I.R.A. Tribal Council offers to people who live off of the Reservation
(who the
in-group call “outsiders”).
Chairman-for-life Roger Jourdain passed a resolution so that
people
living off the reservation—“outsiders”—couldn’t run in the I.R.A.
Tribal
Elections. They want to use your absentee
ballots to put who they want in office, but if you need some kind of
assistance
from the Red Lake Tribal Council, well, the urban people I’ve talked to
have
been told to “Go to Hell” by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and their
Tribal
Councils. Now, get this: the Photo
I.D.’s will be issued at the Minneapolis Indian Center on the afternoon
of All
Fool’s Day.
TUBERCULOSIS:
The
Tuesday, March 15, Minneapolis Star Tribune, had a
front-page article with a headline announcing that “Minnesotans find
evidence”
that Europeans did not bring tuberculosis to these continents. At the very end of the article, after the
jump to an inside page, the “News Services” who wrote this anonymous
front-page
article admit that “there is a risk that the specimens ... were
contaminated by
TB bacteria in the laboratory.” This
questionable science is being heavily promoted because the
Euro-Americans are
trying to ease their guilt about the genocide they have committed here,
in a
process of historical revision. If
tuberculosis had been a disease of Aboriginal Indigenous people here,
we would
have some immunity to this imported disease.
The Euro-Americans knew that we did not have any tolerance to
their
diseases, and openly used their diseases as a means of genocide. As the good Christian policy-makers
discussed at the 1890 Lake Mohonk Conference, 1890 (from a paper, “The
Indian
Health Question,” by Dr. Martha M. Waldron).
These Friends of the Indians were trying to change the identity
of the
Aboriginal Indigenous people into Indians, and slandered us by
stereotyping us
as “full-blood Indians.”
“The
full-blood Indians [sic] have less endurance than
the half or mixed-bloods; and when attacked by tuberculosis or any form
of
scrofula, they perish more quickly. ...
The well-attested fact that consumption is the scourge of the Indian [sic]
in the climate of Dakota, where pulmonary diseases among whites are
almost
unknown, points conclusively to the fact that there has been and
is that, in
the peculiar conditions of Indian [sic] life, which engenders
the
disease. ... The more thoroughly the
contagious nature of tuberculosis is established, the more terrible the
present
condition of the Indian appears. It is
stated on good authority that tuberculous cattle are constantly sold to
and
consumed by the Indians [sic].
Their only hope is in a common knowledge of every-day affairs,
which
shall protect them from their enemy, the unscrupulous white man ...”
I
lost both of my parents to the White man’s disease of
tuberculosis and my great-grandfather (and most of the rest of my
relatives) in
the many smallpox epidemics which were planted by the United States
Government
at Red Lake. These diseases were
intentionally brought into Aboriginal Indigenous communities as a part
of
Western European Civilization’s Divine Mandate of genocide.
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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