Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
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The
election is over, and you did it again! You
said you were going to “kick the rascals
out,” and you voted the same old ones, and some new ones who are just
as bad or
worse, right in to office. The American
electorate, most of whom did not look beyond shallow campaign rhetoric
of which
candidate was going to execute the most “criminals,” got just what they
deserved for the next term, while these newly elected rascals raise
your taxes
and steal your autonomy and paycheck.
If there isn’t a big payoff, why would California Senatorial
candidate
spend $20 million of his own money for a $90 thousand a year job, if he
wasn’t
going to get his investment back (plus interest and a big tax break) in
kickbacks and sweetheart contracts.
1492 SYNDROME: California’s
Proposition 187 made history as one of the many election-year con jobs,
diverting the attention of the voters—as the duly elected government
legislatively picked your pocket, while slapping you on the back,
kissing your
babies, making sweet campaign promises and telling you what a great
sucker you
are. The Sunday Minneapolis Star
Tribune quoted immigration reform advocate Sally Vaugn about the
massive
Chicano demonstrations against Proposition 187: “How would people in
Minnesota
feel if 100,000 Canadian immigrants marched through the streets of
Minneapolis
carrying Canadian flags, shouting anti-American slogans? ... The
arrogance is
just appalling.” The ruckus over
“illegal immigration” is like the pot calling the kettle black. If you get right down to the nitty-gritty,
the people who call themselves “Canadians,” “Americans,” and “Indians”
are
illegally here, squatters and carpet-baggers.
The self-righteous people complaining about “illegal
immigration” are
foreigners and outsiders themselves, living on stolen land.
ROLE PLAYING: According
to the Los Angeles Associated Press, former Acting President Reagan
“disclosed
... that he has Alzheimer’s disease.”
Reagan has spent too many years in Hollywood.
When he was elected President in 1980, he didn’t know what was
happening, he didn’t know where he was going, and he didn’t know where
he’d
been. He’d had so many roles in the
movies, it seemed as though being President was just another acting
job, and he
got the difference between playing roles and reality confused. For Reagan, Alzheimer’s has come to the
rescue, and is giving him a post-facto justification for his most-often
quoted
sound bytes, “I don’t remember” or “I don’t recall,” and his
paraphrasing Dirty
Harry, “Make my day.”
KISSING COUSINS: Western
Civilization and their Indian
identity have already destroyed the community and the family, so that
90
closely related Shakopee Sioux can’t get along. I
have always said that there is not one issue about which the Indians
can get together in solidarity, and I know—I’ve tried to get people
together to
improve the community, and there are always Indians who will stab you
in the
back. Maybe one of the problems was
that I’m not an Indian and I’m not a White man, and any time the
Indians manage
to get something done, there is always a White man behind the scenes
running
things. One of the factors is also that
the Indian doesn’t own his own identity—the Indian identity is a
fraudulent
caricature which is given to him by the White man, so that the Indians
would be
used to replace the Aboriginal people.
Living a lie makes it impossible live harmoniously.
The
volatile issue about which the Shakopee Sioux are
quarrelling is tribal enrollment—and the per-capita payments from
Mystic Lake
Casino which come with enrollment. The
Shakopee Sioux are Sovereign and are wards of the U.S. Government under
trusteeship and the self-proclaimed plenary power of Congress; and the
Indian
Casinos are minority business front operations, where management
decisions are
being made by the White man, as they always have been.
Indians are kept—by their very identity—in a
position of political powerlessness, and part of the sham of the Indian
identity is taking their frustrations out on each other.
That’s the way it’s always been, on all the
Indian Reservations and among other oppressed people.
Instead
of quarrelling about “tribal enrollment” and who’s
got more “Indian blood,” why don’t they just pay the Casino per-capita
payments
proportionally, on the basis of Indian blood: a person of 1/4 Indian
blood
would get 25% of what an Indian fullblood would (if proportional
per-capita
payments were made on the basis of Aboriginal blood, very few of them
would get
paid). If the Shakopee Sioux were to
re-determine their Indian blood quantum on the basis of their
genealogy, some
of the present enrollees would get about ten bucks per capita, and some
would
get a buck three eighty—but I guess that’s better than nothing.
Wub-e-ke-niew
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