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

Greetings, pilgrims and immigrants.   Just about everybody survived the big cold spell during the first week of February, and they’re still here... but cars wouldn’t start, water pipes were frozen up, school busses were running late and one day the schools were closed by the Governor because it was too cold.  In fact, he kept the children home, but he made their moms go to work, leaving the children home alone or their mothers desperately looking for child-care.  What he should have done is given moms the day off, with pay.  The Western European nuclear family structure leaves people extremely vulnerable—with an egalitarian extended family, there wouldn’t have been such a problem.

SOVEREIGNTY:

            The 1957 Webster’s dictionary defines apartheid as “the policy of strict racial segregation and discrimination against the native Negroes and other colored peoples as practiced in the Union of South Africa” [U.S.A.].  When applied to non-European people, any Western European ideology, such as capitalism, communism, socialism, democracy, and big organized religion, is also de facto apartheid.  U.S.A. Indian law and Indian reser­vation “sovereignty” is the pattern of segregation upon which the Europeans based their South African apartheid; this kind of exploitive and dehumanizing relationship to indigenous peoples is an integral part of Western European colonial thinking and ideology.  The resulting tremendous injustices to both the people and the land can’t be fixed with human rights activism or civil rights movements; affirmative action won’t do it and neither will raising the minimum wage.  Instead of dealing with the problems of apartheid/Indian “sovereignty” on a case-by-case symptomatic level (and thereby entrenching the system), people who are sincere about wanting to fix the problems need to scrutinize the English language, Western hierarchical values and linear thinking, and the fragmentation of society created by nuclear families.

WELFARE REFORM:

            I drove by the State Capital last week, when the Legislature was in session, and all I could smell was pork.  Many of the lobbyists and vested interests were hurrying and scurrying around to get their fair share of the Tax Dollars and Tax Breaks, looking for government subsidies for their businesses and investments, and at the same time crying out for “welfare reform,” “tax breaks” and “get government off our backs.”  So, what’s the beef?  Social workers, case-workers and Human Services administrators get a far more comfortable standard of living from the Welfare system than their scapegoated clients do.  The problem is crooked English.  The upper and middle classes are “subsidized” by pork; it’s only the poor who get “welfare,” and only the powerless, many of them excluded as societal classes from the mainstream economic system, who are socially sanctioned for being poor.

But, from an Ah­nish­i­nah­bæót­jib­way perspective, the whole country is on “welfare”—the Western European immigrants have been on welfare subsidized by Aboriginal Indigenous peoples’ resources and property for the past five hundred years, and our wealth is just about gone.  Plundering our land is why many of the European immigrants left their homeland—they didn’t take care of the land they left, and they’re not taking care of this land, either.  They act as though they have no roots and no responsibility for their own future generations... here today and gone tomorrow, highly mobile fly-by-night people who only know how to sing “patriotic” songs like “this land is your land, this land is my land” as they leave a ruined ecosystem behind them, such as the abandoned iron ore pits which once provided “jobs, jobs, jobs” that are now “gone, gone, gone.”

WHITE PINE:

            According to a staff editorial in the February 8 Minneapolis Star Tribune, another endangered species is the White Pine.  A 1913 botanical reference book describes the typical White Pine (Pinus strobus) as being 225 feet tall, and about 33 feet around the trunk—leaving a stump 10 and a half feet across.  In 1980, the Minnesota D.N.R. published a pamphlet describing the biggest trees in Minnesota and in the U.S.A.  The largest remaining White Pine in the entire state of Minnesota is part of a puny remnant of the magnificent Ah­nish­i­nah­bæót­jib­way old-growth forests which were once here—in Sec. 16-143-36 at Itasca Park.  This D.N.R.-proclaimed “champion” tree is about 4½ feet in diameter, and only 112 feet tall.  After more than a century of corporate welfare granted to the logging companies, the largest White Pine remaining in the entire United States is a dwarf and a runt, less than half the size of the typical tree at the turn of the century: a “record-making” tree in Maine which is 5.8 feet in diameter, and only 147 feet tall.

Rather than scrutinizing their own history, including the U.S. Government’s using guns and violence to give away the Aboriginal Indigenous peoples’ land and resources (which kept the U.S. budget balanced for a century—in 1890 there was a multi-million dollar budget surplus resulting from the sale of White Pine and unallotted Aboriginal land), the Star Tribune quotes un-named sources blaming hungry deer for devouring the White Pine, writing that deer are attracted to the “soft, silky needles ... like bees to flowers.”  The ecology is has been plundered to the point that it’s totally out of balance, and the vast cedar swamps where the deer herds used to winter are a vanished ecosystem, either logged off or flooded into extinction by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other “water management” agencies under the immigrant Western Europeans’ apartheid administration.  The deer herds are no longer balanced, as they are supposed to be, by wolves, and if hungry deer nibble on White Pine, it’s because they don’t have anything else to eat—their natural food supply is gone.  A moratorium on cutting White Pines is a very good idea—they should have done it a hundred years ago, before the ecosystem was destroyed ... they should put a moratorium on their greed at the same time.  Forests are not a renewable resource, and the Ah­nish­i­nah­bæót­jib­way’s permacultural base and beautiful old-growth forests were a completely different thing than the ugly caricature and ecological farce of “tree farms,” which are not forests at all.  Translating crooked English, Western European “resource management” really means “subsidizing the rich” and “managing to destroy everything.”

PRECINCT CAUCUSES:

            The Presidential hopefuls, perennial candidates and Rushist clowns have been providing comic relief in the Iowa winter for the past several months, self-righteously promoting volatile and contradictory issues (such as abortion and teen-age pregnancies), attacking the nuclear family and creating public frenzy for the media poll-cats who specialize in “interpreting” [molding] public opinion.  Webster’s dictionary defines “polled” as “with the wool, hair, etc., cut off or trimmed,” but it’s more like fleecing the flock and pulling the wool over their eyes.

ACHY BREAKY HEART:

            When Ed Gheen of Wisconsin was arrested for his violent crimes, he told the sheriff, “Aw, have a heart.”

On Valentine’s day, did Cupid put an arrow in your heart?  Caveat emptor.  Be good, and if you can’t be good, be careful.

My telephone number is (218) 679-2382 and my mailing address is P.O. Box 484, Bemidji, MN 56619.

Wub-e-ke-niew