Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
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According
to Sunday’s Minneapolis Star Tribune, “the Clinton
administration has discovered India,” and “the [real] Indians are
miffed,”
because they don’t know whether Clinton is bringing the White man’s
Manifest
Destiny, or whether he’s touting Western European Democracy. Either way, the Indians lose.
The Clinton administration recently
appointed an Indian ambassador, so presumably they’re getting ready
from some
Indian Treaties. We all know what that
means.
The
Indian fakirs’ political opinions on these Indian fakirs’
affairs have not been heard in the outside world, unlike the opinions
of the
Indian fakers in Washington, D.C. The
voices of these latter, mythological, Indians, are amplified and
repeated, so
that it seems to the world that the Indians are alive and well in the
U.S.A.,
and nobody notices what’s happening to the Aboriginal Indigenous people.
The
Minneapolis Tribune also commented, in their “World and
National News” summary, on the old, worn-out issue of Indian land
cessions
giving Indians the “right to an education.”
The focus this time is Head Start: that every Indian should have
the
inalienable right to be taken away from their family as a very young
child,
again, and placed in an institutional setting like Head Start, where
the State
can teach them how to be a real B.I.A. certified Indian, regardless of
family
income, religious preference, or national origin. The
anonymous writer parroted the tired, trite phrase, “tribes
traded land for education,” without bothering to think about who traded
whose
land to whom, and exactly what is meant by “education.”
If Western European civilization is that
great, why does the educational system have take near-infants away from
their
families and brainwash them into being Indians?
SWEETER NEWS:
The
sap is rising in the maple trees. In
harmony with the rest of Grandmother
Earth, everything is starting to wake up from the Winter’s big sleep. The crows are back and making a racket; and
there are big clouds of steam coming out of the sugarbush.
Making maple sugar is a lot of hard work,
but it’s worth it. The sugarbush is
connected and in harmony with Grandmother Earth, and maple sugar is a
Traditional Ahnishinahbæótjibway food which
is healthy, and in balance.
EASTER
DINNER:
The
White man’s rites of Spring include Easter dinner.
I was going to have Easter Bunny and
dumplings, but there were no rabbits.
The White Indian loggers cut down the woods, and then the crazy
White
man sprayed the ditches and powerline right-of-ways with Agent Orange
and
D.D.T., and the only Easter Bunny I’ve seen this year has been in the
Sunday
Comics. I try to be tolerant of other
peoples’ traditions, so we had an Easter dinner anyway.
We got a ham, and then to honor Passover, we
got some Matzo bread, and had ham sandwiches on Matzo, with deviled
Easter eggs
on the side. I figured I might as well
try to be culturally tolerant, rather than discriminating among
competing
White-man traditions. I went and looked
for an Easter-bunny tree, but they’d already been logged out.
PRAIRIE
ISLAND:
The
debate over expanded high-level nuclear waste storage at
Prairie Island is approaching meltdown.
Lobbyists on both sides are diverting the debate away from the
critical
issues. The White man’s
mis-understanding of relationship to the land is that a few greedy
leaders can
ruin an ecosystem for what amounts to eternity, make money, and then
walk away
to another new frontier. Their language
is disconnected from nature, they do not know what is real and what is
not
real, and they apparently have not gotten it through their thick heads
that
there is no place else on this Earth to go.
If the Mississippi Valley is contaminated with high level
radiation, it
can not be fixed. There are no more new
frontiers. The Circle has come around,
and even the White man will not be able to run away from the
consequences of
his abuse of this land.
Nuclear
power—“Atoms for Peace”—is about the White Man’s
guilty Burden of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and Bikini and Eniwetok and a
lot of
other places), and it is about the ultimate in greedy centralized
control and
mindless worship of the abstract God of Technology.
There are alternative energy sources, and even if there weren’t,
what possible use of electricity, what conceivable job, is worth a
twenty-thousand year legacy of cancer, birth defects, AIDS-like
radiation
sickness, mutant new diseases, and devastation of the ecosystem? The White man tells those he tries to
exploit, “be civilized like us.” You
cannot keep raping Grandmother Earth.
INDIAN
HOUSING:
One
political wag asked me about the Housing Authority at the
Red Lake Tribal Council. They wanted to
know about what happened to the birch veneer, and some missing French
Doors. Rumor is they were part of a
sweetheart contract with kickbacks. The
person who told me the story was hard-of-hearing, and thought they had
lost
some French Moors. I don’t know why
anybody thought I would know where French Doors (or French Moors) go to
when
they’re missing—I stay as far away from Frenchmen pretending to be
Indians as I
can. Anyway, they came and asked me to
solve their problems for them. I told
them to go to the White man in charge of the Bureau of Indian Affairs,
because
he’s the one who created Indians. They
didn’t like that idea, so I suggested they ask Chairman-for-life Roger
Jourdain, or his sidekick Butch Brun; they know all about those French
immigrant things that got lost.
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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