Reflections from the Ah­nish­i­nah­bæó^t­jib­way (We, the People)

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s program “restoring wetlands” on private land is “on the chopping block,” according to Sunday’s Minneapolis Star Tribune.  “Restoration” of wetlands is yet another rip-off coming out of linear Western European thinking, out of harmony and out of balance.  In the same way that a tree farm has no resem­blance to an old-growth forest, a “restored wetland” is nothing like the natural and intact ecosys­tems which the Euro-Americans have de­stroyed.

What the Western European immigrants are doing in trying to “manage” the Aboriginal Indigenous peoples’ permacultural ecosys­tems which were here, does not make sense.  They do not under­stand the delicate inter-relationships and harmony, and because they do not have Grandmother Earth under regimented, hierarchical control, they fearfully call everything “wild.”  From an aborigi­nal per­spective, their thinking is wild and crazy, out of balance and suicid­ally self-destructive.

One example of this kind of wild and demented thinking was the dredging of the channel of the Red Lake River, done by the United States Government in the early 1960’s.  In their wild-eyed planning policy publication, “The Red Lake Indian Reservation, It’s Resources and Development Potential,” the U.S. Government itself describes their own project as having “destroyed one of the great natural habitats for fish and wildlife plus one of the best nesting grounds for ducks in the United States.”  Permacul­tural hunting and fishing were never part of the old European—or the Indian—culture, and for genera­tions the U.S. policy has been to destroy the ecological base of the aborigi­nal indigenous people, as well as our families, culture and language; domesti­cate and enslave us, “change [our] life­style.”  The BIA wants to “civilize” us by destroying our tradi­tional food supply, to force us into their economic system and make us buy groceries at their in-house supermarkets.  But, the human body is not designed for the kind of food that they are selling, laced with preserva­tives, food additives, and other toxic chemi­cals.  The aboriginal food supply, which was healthy, is gone; the white man’s food gives the people who eat it medical problems including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

POCAHONTAS: Another symptom of the guilt which the Western Europeans feel when they allow themselves to become even vaguely aware of the enormous holocaust of both land and people here, is their compulsive (hand-washing) re-inventing of the Indian mythology.  In the last century, their grandfathers killed millions of people, while drugged on greed and deluded under Manifest Destiny and another hypocritical philosophy called “my brother’s keeper.”  Stealing land and resources from a non-violent people was too easy, and the plunderer’s grandchildren have come into their inevitable next phase of history: guilt and denial.  In order to try to ease their collective social con­science, they keep forcing their own European half-brothers into the role that they invented of “Indians.”  Over and over again, they re-enact the mythologies of the trea­ties, replaying their self-serving fraudulent Indian mis-stories to the hilt, reliving their re-runs and déja-vu, trying to hide from the nightmarish reality of their own history and legitimize their fraudulent claims to this land.  As long as they remain prisoners of their imported English language, they are caught in this vicious guilt-ridden cycle.

The Indians are created and owned by the White man, so they go along with his scheme.  Some “socially conscious” Indians are protesting the Disney movie Pocahontas because of the “multi­cultural” heroine’s mythological measurements, but none of them talk about the reality of the genetic engineer­ing which is inherent in both the Pocahontas story and in their own history: it takes a squaw-man to make Indians (who always have a White patri­line).  Celebrating Indians in the White media will not bring back the Aboriginal people nor our indigenous culture—the White man’s Indians are foreigners like he is.  The White man said he was going to destroy the indigenous people of this continent, and over the centuries, he has.  Re-creating Indians, and re-inventing “traditional culture” under the White man’s paradigm, is the same kind of thinking as plant­ing tree farms and calling these disharmonious eyesores of chemical-laden mono­culture “forests,” or bulldozing holes and calling them “re­stored wetlands.”

RE-INVENTING THE TREATIES: The Red Lake DNR’s publication, “Red Lake Natural Resource News,” recently promoted public meetings about the Red Lake dam.  The way that such foreign bureaucracies work: the “proposed reservoir regulation plan” is already cut, dried and ready to implement, and the public meetings are merely to provide a rubber-stamp of community approval (this is how import­ed Western European democracy works—it’s manipulative dishonesty is masked by public relations couched in crooked English).  Although the DNR does not say so in their article, their long-range plan includes “construction of more dams ... along Clearwa­ter and Red Lake Rivers,” justified as “restoring ... fish and wildlife habitat [wetlands]” but actually flooding more Red Lake land for the benefit of the sugar-beet farmers downstream.  If they’re serious about the ecology, they should remove the dams entirely and let the Red River Valley flood like it has since time immemorial.  The “wetland” controversy is a con job which does not benefit the ecology—it’s a politically motivated buy-off for selected landowners, and a smokescreen which stinks like a rotten red herring.  White agribusiness has no intention of allow­ing the natural ecosystem to regenerate over the centuries re­quired to heal the indigenous perma­culture.

The DNR mentions that the Army Corps of Engineers has “reviewed the trea­ties” to support their authority to wreck the watershed on the Red Lake Reserva­tion, while implying that their operations will create better hunting and fishing.  The Treaties were land cession documents, and that’s all they were.  The ones relating to Red Lake did not mention hunting or fishing.  The people who actually signed the treaties were immigrant people with European patri­lines, who did not own the land, and neither the 1863 Treaty nor the 1864 Amendment dealt with the cession of the land, the lakes or the aboriginal people right at Red Lake.

However, the “1889 Agreement,” the signing of which was celebrated as “Indepen­dence day” with a Real Wanna-Be Indian Pow-wow last weekend, did have to do with the ceding of land and lakes here: allegedly transferring both land and water into U.S. trustee­ship and opening it to allotment.  Sunday’s Bemidji Pioneer guiltily mis-represents history for their own self-serving interests, lying by calling the proceedings of 1889 an “agreement reached between the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians and the U.S. Government on July 6, 1889.”  In reality, the U.S. Congress passed a bill in January of 1889, which was used to simultaneous­ly create the white man’s Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and to claim the land at Red Lake as being “sold” by the “Chippe­wa Indians” of Minnesota—although neither the U.S. Government nor the so-called Chippe­was have ever had any jurisdiction at Red Lake.  The people who really own the land at Red Lake are the Dodems of the Ah­nish­i­nah­bæót­jib­way, who did not agree to the U.S. Gov­ernment propos­als and did not sign the “Agreement” celebrated by the White wanna-be’s who call them­selves Indians.  The dirty dozen who actually signed the document as “Chippewa Indians,” selling land that was not theirs, did not belong here, and they all had Europe­an patri­lines—they were: John English, A.R. Jourdain, Amos Big Bird, William Sayers, C.A.H. Beaulieu, Nah-ge-shence (Joe Mason), J.C. Roy, James Fairbanks, John Beaulieu, J.B. Jourdain, Roderick McKenzie, and Johnny Spees.  The “x-marks” alleged to have been made by the indigenous people are forgeries.

PRESIDENTIAL HOPEFUL: I wonder if one of the planks in Larry Flynt’s presiden­tial platform will be supporting Hollywood Indians—will he have top-heavy (48-17-36) Pocahontas pose in the centerfold of Hustler magazine?  Russell Means claims that Disney Inc.’s fantasy is an “important historic achieve­ment,” writing as a hierarchi­cal Chief for his mythological Indian race.  So much for stereotypical actors who live in La-la Land.

My telephone number is (218) 679-2382 and my mailing address is P.O. Box 484, Bemidji, MN 56601.

Wub-e-ke-niew