Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
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While
I was digging through my papers looking for another document, I came
across
some copies of B.I.A. records I’d misplaced, about taxation on the Red
Lake
Reservation. According to these files,
the Bemidji Daily Pioneer published a list of delinquent Red Lake
Reservation
taxpayers on January 11, 1924: Whites, Citizen Indians, and certain
“non-citizen Indians.” None of these
people against whom Minnesota School District Number 119 levied a ten
percent
personal property tax in 1923 were Ahnishinahbæótjibway with a Dodem (although two
of them were later defined by the U.S.A. as “4/4 blood quantum
Indians”). These White man’s Indians were
being used to
set a European-law precedent. The plan
was to use this motley group of B.I.A. employees, French Métis,
and “lumberjack
bastards” (who were already citizens prior to the 1924 U.S. Indian
Citizenship
Act because of their Indo-European patrilines) as a purported proxy for
the Ahnishinahbæótjibway, institutionalizing State
and local taxation of everyone’s personal property on Red Lake
Reservation.
In
his greed, the White man over-reached, and the deal fell through. Part of the justification used for the
taxation levied in the early 1920’s was payment for schools, and the
long-range
goal was to use property taxes to steal this land—as was done on the
allotted
Indian reservations. But, under the Act
of January 14, 1889, the United States unilaterally mis-appropriated
more than
three million acres of Ahnishinahbæótjibway land at Red Lake. The
Ahnishinahbæótjibway never consented to the sale
of our land. The U.S. Government knew
that our Midé philosophy means we cannot sell land, and wrote
the 1889 Act so
that Ahnishinahbæótjibway land would be taken on the “consent” of
the Métis Chippewas
throughout Minnesota. As with all
“Indian land sales,” under both Indian Treaties and subsequent
“Agreements,”
one part of the title to the Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples’ land was
stolen by
Indian proxy “sale,” and another part claimed by the White man with a
Judeo-Kristian ritual.
During
the meetings which were held in 1889, the assembled Indians and Ahnishinahbæótjibway were told by the crooked
Minnesota Chippewa Commission that there would be “payments.” When I was young, Métis people and
other
Chippewa Indians relied on the oral history of the lies told at the
July, 1889
meetings, and would tell me, “you know, you Red Lakers are going to be
rich
some day.” The Minnesota Chippewa
Commission lied to the Chippewa Indians they were using to sell Ahnishinahbæótjibway land, as well as to
everybody else. Under the provisions of
the 1889 legislation which had already been passed by Congress, there
would be
no annuities or big lump-sum payments.
The proceeds from the sale of our stolen land was squandered on
boarding
schools, support of missionary religious institutions, B.I.A. operating
funds,
and other instruments of genocide used to destroy the Ahnishinahbæótjibway families. The
schools for which the White man wanted
to levy a ten percent personal property tax, had already been paid for
under
the unilateral United States Act of January 14, 1889.
There
was much grumbling and dissent about having to pay for the schools
twice. The B.I.A. considered their Indians
dumb and
inferior [they claimed “scientific evidence” that the Indians’ I.Q. was
about
70], but they weren’t that dumb, and the files contain a number of
letters
written by the Chippewa Indians protesting the taxation and proposed
tax-forfeiture. The U.S. reconsidered
their strategy, and the Department of the Interior wrote an opinion
which
included, and I quote, “as the United States has not fully carried out
its
object and purpose toward them, and they and their property still
remain under
its exclusive jurisdiction and control, it is believed that, under such
circumstances, the State is without authority ... to interfere.” The United States had been operating their
Indian Reservations as concentration camps in which even the “proceeds
of
Indian labor” were confiscated under U.S. trusteeship of the Indian
wards of
the Western European Government, and continues their encroachment under
the
White “Indian Sovereignty” given to their 1934 I.R.A. Tribal Councils.
PLUNDER ECONOMICS: Roman law has
always been based on an
economic system in which self-proclaimed “royalty” applied their laws
to other
races of people (but not to themselves), committed genocide and
colonized
[stole] other peoples’ land and resources.
In order to hold and expand their colonies, the heirs of the
Roman
empire have used the dual strategy of genetically engineering the
colonized
people [for example, Indians], and forcing their own narrow
hierarchical
world-view onto their subject people through their own languages and
the
Creolization of the languages of the people they colonize.
Chippewa is such an hierarchial Creole
language.
Encroachment,
ecological plunder and self-serving ambiguities within their languages
and
their laws are defined by the heirs of the Romans as “the spread of
$ivilization.” When Columbus claimed that
he had “discovered” this Continent for King Ferdinand and his Queen,
Isabella,
and claimed it under the authority of the Holy Roman Empire, this began
encroachment which has continued unabated after Henry VIII’s break with
the
Papacy. The Good Kristians, who broke
the Ten Kommandments, and are still breaking them to this day, were
encroaching
on Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples as they established missions across
the
Continent. The Manifest Destiny openly
proclaimed by the United States in the last century was blatant
encroachment,
allegedly justified by the dual encroaching assertions, “God is on our
side,”
and “they weren’t using the land or ‘developing’ the resources.” (Greed is a mental illness co-dependent with
encroachment.) The Western Europeans use
of germ and chemical warfare, including deliberate infection of
Aboriginal
Indigenous people with tuberculosis and smallpox, was genocidal
encroachment.
Trying
to re-define the Aboriginal Indigenous people by lumping them in the
same
Western European category as their White Squaw Men—Indians—has always
been
encroachment, and signing Indian Treaties with the U.S.’ patrilineally
White
Indians was further encroachment.
Creating concentration camps euphemistically called Indian
Reservations,
operating compulsory-education boarding schools under the aegis of the
Indian
Treaties and Indian “Agreements,” and forcing Ahnishinahbæótjibway to take on the identity of
Kristian Indians who spoke broken English, are all encroachment.
The
Euro-Americans tried to encroach at Red Lake by taxing automobiles,
horses and
wagons in 1923. This attempt was
unsuccessful, and in 1924 they unilaterally and inaccurately re-defined
Aboriginal Indigenous people as “non-citizen Indians” again, and
further
encroached by passing the oxymoron Indian Citizenship Act.
By that time, most of the people on the
Reservation had gone through the compulsory-education boarding schools,
and the
Euro-Americans thought that they had brainwashed the Aboriginal
Indigenous
people into becoming Indians. At Red
Lake, “Indian citizenship” did not mean voting—it translated into slave
labor:
being forced to build roads for the encroaching Euro-Americans, under
what was
called a “poll tax.” Encroaching
“democracy” belatedly followed the poll tax, with the 1934 Indian
Reorganization Act, patterned after the imported White government, and
controlled by the U.S. Department of the Interior.
The
I.R.A. form of encroachment government was unilaterally imposed by the
U.S.A.
at Red Lake in 1958. In the 1970’s, the
State of Minnesota used the White man’s I.R.A. for further
encroachment, and
used the Euro-Americans’ “Indian Sovereignty” to finally levy a State
tax on
automobiles at Red Lake, by issuing State “vanity” license plates
(which say MN
in the corner) through the I.R.A. tribal council. The
State of Minnesota Highway Patrol stops older cars with “Red
Lake Plates” frequently—the State is obscuring the encroachment by
hassling
people, doubling their revenue, and laughing all the way to the
Auditor’s
Office. This is classical European
encroachment-sovereignty, aided and abetted by Chairman-for-Life Roger
Jourdain. The U.S.A. gave you Indians
at Red Lake “Indian Sovereignty,” and now is using the ambiguities of
this
“Sovereignty” to tax you twice. Poll
taxes were made unconstitutional under the 24th Amendment, but
apparently under
the Jim Crow of Indian Sovereignty, such taxes (under another name) can
still
be legitimately applied to “Indians not taxed.” Seat
belt fines and cigarette taxes are both part of this White
man’s protection-racket of encroachment.
Every time a centralized government taxes a person “for your
protection,” they are taking another small part of your freedom. Like the Mafia, the governments’ protection
racket is just another shakedown.
The
State has used encroachment—the schools, the “welfare” system, and
taxation to
take away any autonomy that Indians ever had as wards of the government
under
Trusteeship. For generations, the U.S.
policy-makers have assured each other that the “Indian problem” would
be solved
by the elimination of the Indians, and their Indians have been told,
“with one
stroke of the pen, you will no longer exist.”
The White man created the Indians, and because he owns the
Indians’
identity and is the definer of Indian culture, he can unilaterally
abolish
Indians.
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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