Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
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INDIAN
TAXES, AGAIN: In Wednesday,
June 18,
staffwriter Pat Doyle published an article in the Minneapolis Star
Tribune. According to the article,
headlined “County
to get a fraction of its request from tribe,” the Scott County board
has
“settled” for only two hundred thousand dollars a year from the
Shakopee Sioux
to pay for “road maintenance, law-enforcement and court costs
related to
the casino in Prior Lake.” Is this an
exclusionary rule, or is it an inclusionary one? Is
Scott County trying to tax the Sioux, is this an insurance
policy, or is this just a plain old shakedown?
Bud Grant has been
telling his
fishing buddies that we’re all equal under the law, and that no group
of people
should have special privileges. But,
then again, that’s not how the U.S. Constitution (or the Declaration of
Independence) reads. Both in the
fourteenth amendment, section 2, and in Article I, Section 2,
Subsection 3, the
U.S. Constitution clearly says, “excluding Indians not taxed.” They put it there twice, so that you
wouldn’t forget it. The Bureau of
Indian Affairs has spent years (ever since a few Indians finally became
literate) trying to put spin on this clause, telling people (with a
straight
face and tongue in cheek) that this part of the U.S. Constitution means
“sovereignty.” But, the Founding
Fathers referred to “merciless Indian savages” in their Declaration of
Independence, so I doubt that they had “sovereignty” in mind, not even
the
“limited sovereignty” of “domestic dependent nations” (no matter how
the BIA
defines these crooked, ambiguous words).
What this slippery English, “excluding Indians not taxed,”
really means,
is not including Indians under the protections of the U.S. Federal
Constitution—that Indians are Constitutionally prohibited from owning
land or
having representation in the U.S. Government.
Bud Grant is
talking about a
“level playing field,” but he’s not dealing with the facts. Bud Grant has probably been out in the sun,
fishing, too long, and he’s only thinking about hooking suckers. Perhaps the time has come to repeal this
little clause in the U.S. Constitution, especially now that President
Clinton
wants to address racism, or else to amend the Constitution, and to
change the
“ex” to “in.” But, then again, instead
of calling the Great White Fathers racist or apartheid, a person could
give
them the benefit of the doubt, and call this devious little phrase a
“typo.”
I don’t know what
the Scott
County Commissioners are complaining about.
If they want to treat the Indians just like everybody else,
instead of
having the Indians pay special fees, they should just negotiate an
in-lieu-of-property tax settlement. To
be fair, they could charge the Indians: the Scott County rate on the
price that
the White man claims to have paid for the land, from “the Indians.” If they used their own assessment of the
price of the land, when they said they were paying for it, Scott County
wouldn’t be entitled to one red penny from the “red man.”
They wouldn’t get anything, because even ten
percent of nothing, still comes out zero.
POLITICKING:
In the last election,
President
Clinton’s campaign slogan was “building bridges to the twenty-first
century.” I guess that a lot of people
wanted to be bridge-builders, because he got elected.
But, Clinton and the Democratic Party didn’t let you in on the
full details: that these are toll bridges, that they want to build. You have to pay to get on, and you have to
pay to get off.
On the other side
of the
aisle, Newt Gingrich has been censured by his colleagues—but he still
has
ambitions to become President. He wants
to forget about his shady past, his money-making schemes and good ol’
boy
deals. Bob Dole, who was defeated, has
paid Newt’s fine, so Newt is hoping to start his Presidential campaign
with a
clean slate. His new campaign slogan
will be, “burning bridges.”
Tony Blair, the
British Prime
Minister who recently got elected into Parliament, his campaign slogan
doesn’t
make much sense. His slogan was,
“radical center.” It got him elected,
but does anybody know what it means, besides bamboozling people with
socialist
pork, or maybe just empty words?
FLOODGATES: The Army Corps of Engineers’ floodgates at
the top of
the Red River watershed are bulging at the seams. I
suppose they’re waiting for a drought, so that the sugar beet
growers down in the floodplain will have water for irrigation. But, there are other gates.
Twenty five years
ago,
Watergate was in the news. The White
House “plumbers” were trying to close the gates for the twenty-first
century. Since then, there have been a
lot of other “gates” in this supposedly open society.
There was Iran-gate, and there was Whitewater-gate.
There’s Finn-gate, and then there’s Bill
Gates. Just recently, there was
Heaven’s Gate. In Minneapolis,
developers are talking about building “Gated Communities” to protect
the
opulent from the unwashed masses ... and then you have prison gates. Last but not least, there’s San Francisco’s
Golden Gate. Have a good day.
My mailing address
is P.O. Box
484, Bemidji, MN 56619, and my telephone number is (218) 679-3984.
Wub-e-ke-niew
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