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Chapter 14 – An Outside Retrospective
– Journey to Red Lake

            Journey to Red Lake
            I. Introduction
            II. Wub-e-ke-niew’s and Clara’s Home
            III.  The “Sugar Bush”
            IV.  Their Ahnishinahbæótjibway strategy
            V. “Indians”
            VI. The timeliness of this work
                    A. Sovereignty
                    B. Cultural Preservation
            VII.  A longer-range strategy

            “Journey to Red Lake” was a literary collaboration and dialogue between Wub-e-ke-niew (and I), and David Dunn, Institute of Cultural Affairs activist from Colorado.[1] Written in the spring of 1992, it began as an October 1991 ‘site visit’ report written by David Dunn for the Mystery School in New York.  Mystery School students had generously contributed to a community gardening project that Wub-e-ke-niew had launched as chairman of the economic development committee of the Red Lake Peoples Council, and other projects on Red Lake reservation including some of our historical research.  That research was intended to empower the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway community, in part by ‘repatriating’ crucial documentary information at Red Lake, and underlay much of We Have The Right To Exist.

            A person outside of Aboriginal Indigenous traditions might not realize the deep significance of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway having access to historical documents--which should have always been available.  History and genealogy are a part of our traditional oral culture, but because of the Métis and other Indians who have been packed on top of our community by the U.S. Government, it has been absolutely crucial to have this information in documentary form.  Every community, and for that matter every individual, should be able to get information about their genealogy and their history, but the Bureau has consistent­ly told Aboriginal Indigenous people that this information was confidential, or that the records had been burned.

            The information which has been so vital to the community has also been kept away from the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway in the past through financial engineering.  In the lower socio-economic strata into which Aboriginal Indigenous people are channeled, there has not been the kind of money necessary to do extensive archival research.  The U.S. Government has supported itself for two centuries by appropriating Aboriginal Indigenous peoples' resources and land--why would they fund the very people from whom they've been stealing, doing research to uncover the details of their crimes?[2] 

 

“Journey to Red Lake” is intended to provide chronological perspective on the processes that are at the center of this dissertation.

               The version of “Journey to Red Lake” included here, is from Wub-e-ke-niew’s and my computer data backups; the two WordPerfect 5.1 documents for which we kept off-site backups have DOS file dates of February 18 and April 4, 1992.  It has been only very lightly edited from the last ‘exchange’ with David Dunn, and presents a portrayal of the work with which Wub-e-ke-niew and I were involved for a decade, a glimpse of a moment now-past from a sympathetic outsider’s vantage, and a few snippets of the intense “ongoing dialogue” that Wub-e-ke-niew invited the world to engage in with him.  As he’d explained it in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuillar two years earlier, “If we are going to preserve this planet, this kind of [violent hierarchical abstract] thinking has to change – nonviolently and with ongoing dialogue.  We must work together, with respect and harmony, to undo the horrendous and terrible damage that has been done to all people.”[3]

               “Journey to Red Lake” is a part of that broader dialogue: between David Dunn, who sought to understand, and Wub-e-ke-niew, who endeavored to clarify Dunn’s understandings.

               One of the major changes, from 1992, which would be made if “Journey to Red Lake” were written now, would be in our understanding and use of the word, “sovereignty,” which word Wub-e-ke-niew was using from an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway context – the personal sovereignty possessed by each individual in an egalitarian society.

 

Journey to Red Lake

A dialogue among activist and writer David Dunn,

Wub-e-ke-niew, Clara NiiSka, and other Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway

... toward the Transformation of Society

 

I. Introduction

               Jean Houston has followed the cultural revitalization and historical and genealogical research work of Wub-e-ke-niew of Red Lake for several years.  Wub-e-ke-niew is an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway – an Aboriginal Indigenous person of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Nation – whose life is committed to the survival of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and other Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples.  As Wub-e-ke-niew says, “We have a right to exist.”  Mystery School participants have sent financial contributions to the Red Lake Peoples Council, through which Wub-e-ke-niew is working, for several years, that allows Wub-e-ke-niew and the other Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway working with him, to continue their work.  But though Jean has spoken with Wub-e-ke-niew at length over the years, and Dr. Joy Craddick (among others) has supported his work and corresponded regularly, until my visit last October no one from the Mystery School had accepted Wub-e-ke-niew’s invitation to visit Red Lake.

               The purpose of this report is thus to share images of a visit which David Dunn made October 18-22, 1991, to describe what he perceived as the significance of Wub-e-ke-niew’s work, and to suggest ways in which interested people can share in and support this work.  Because much of David Dunn’s writing is produced in a collaborative manner, he sent his drafts of this report to Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara for their review, correction, and comment.  What follows is a synthesis founded on David Dunn’s original report, with many of Wub-e-ke-niew’s comments in italics.

               Because Wub-e-ke-niew’s Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway world-view and David Dunn’s well-educated and very thoughtful Euroamerican one are quite different, Dunn tried to illustrate contrasting perceptions by keeping much of his original material alongside Wub-e-ke-niew’s clarification or addition.  For example, he had used the lower case “a” and “i,” interpreting the words aboriginal indigenous as an adjective.  Wub-e-ke-niew sent the reminder, however, “ ... there is a reason we are using ‘Aboriginal Indigenous’ as a proper noun.”  Wub-e-ke-niew continued,

            Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway means, in our language, “We, the People.”  This has been our identity here, in our own land, from time immemorial.  We are the People of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Nation.  The nature of identity is a crucial part of our work.

            As a part of the colonizing process, the Euroamericans have created the artificial identities of “Chippewa,” “Indian,” and “Native American,” and “American.”  These identities are defined and owned by the Europeans, and are not Aboriginal Indigenous identities.  When a person is caught in an artificial identity, they do not own themselves, and cannot be honest with themselves and with the world, because these artificial identities are dishonest.

            The distinction between “Chippewa Indian” and “Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway” is critical.  In fact, it’s so important that there is a United States Government law still in effect (Title 25, United States Code, Section 479) which tries to change “Eskimos [which is a derogatory insult, and not the name of the Inuit People] and other aboriginal peoples” into “Indians.”  The Euroamericans are doing international mischief, and human right violations, through the artificial identities that they have created.

            Most of the people called “Chippewa Indian” by the United States Government and the media are, in fact, Indo-European people: with Indo-European ancestors, Euroamerican values, and an Euroamerican world-view.”

 

               In David Dunn’s initial collaborative piece, he included the longer comments that Wub-e-ke-niew sent are included as notes in the appendix.  “Wub-e-ke-niew’s thoughts are rich and of deep importance,” Dunn wrote. Wub-e-ke-niew is an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Person, speaking about himself and his people.  Here, in effect, is his own introduction, taken from a letter dated December 10, 1991:

               Learning from another culture does not need to be a ‘crash course.’  Understanding comes when one takes it easy, absorbs things gradually.  Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway culture is based on a different understanding of what it means to be a human being, than the understanding of the Euroamerican cultures.  Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway means ‘We, the People,’ but what it also means is that all of us can stand together in harmony.  What we are asking is ‘learn with us.’  We are not going to tell people what to do.  It is not our way to tell people how to live and what to do.  What we are seeking is harmony and peaceful co-existence.  What we are also saying is that ‘We, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway have a right to exist.’

 

II. Wub-e-ke-niew’s and Clara’s Home

               Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara live in a 16 x 32 foot, one-room cabin heated by a wood-burning stove made from a metal barrel.  The cabin got line electricity in 1990 (to run the computer), but has no running water or indoor plumbing.  The Bureau of Indian Affairs (B.I.A.) provides Potemkin Village housing for the people they call ‘our Indians’ on the Reservation.  This government housing program is used for political leverage and community control – virtually no Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway live in those B.I.A. houses.

               Wub-e-ke-niew’s and Clara’s cabin is, in fact, a wonderful home.  The half to the right of the door is bedroom, living room, library and office; the half to the left is kitchen, dining room, pantry, and archives.  Books line the walls to the ceiling; a photocopier sits atop a treadle sewing machine by the window; a microfilm reader with about 60 rolls of microfilm, computer, and small desk fill the North wall beside the bed.  Several filing cabinets are filled with articles, documents, newspaper clippings, and other materials used in Wub-e-ke-niew’s historical research, community development, and writing.  Their cabin on Red Lake looks and feels more like a scholar’s hideaway than a Northwoods “shack.”

               Wub-e-ke-niew used the U.S. Army and a tour of duty as an MP in Germany during World War II to expand his horizons.  There were striking parallels between Occupied Germany and the U.S. occupation of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.  Wub-e-ke-niew’s native language is the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway language.  During the eight years he spent at the Red Lake Catholic Mission School, he was beaten every time he got caught speaking a word of his native language.  The Reservation schools taught, and still teach, a “Basic English” with a vocabulary of 400 words.  Wub-e-ke-niew reasoned that the only effective way to deal with the European-Americans was to learn their language and communicate in their own terms.  He is widely read and intellectually keen.

 

III.  The “Sugar Bush”

               Wub-e-ke-niew is an Aboriginal Indigenous person: Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway of the Bear Dodem.  His ancestors are the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, who have been one with the land around Red Lake for many millennia before the arrival of the French and British explorers, trappers and traders, and “Chippewa Indians.”  By virtue of her marriage to Wub-e-ke-niew, Clara has entered the Bear Dodem of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, and the two are now articulate advocates for the rights of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway to live on and maintain stewardship of the land still held jointly by the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.

               “The Land” is sacred reality for the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, “Grandmother.”  It may be difficult for people whose world-view is based on hierarchical, patriarchal Judeo-Christian traditions to see this: Our land, our identity as Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, our Personal Sovereignty, our jointly held Sovereignty as the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, and our religion the Midewiwin, are all an inter-connected part of the same totality, and are not separable.  “Grandmother Earth,” “Grandmother Moon,” “Grandfather Sun,” and “Grandfather the Midewiwin” are all one family.  One does not overpower the other, they are harmonious, all Sacred -- of all of us, connected, in harmony with the Universe.

When I go out the front door in the morning, I am in my Peoples’ ‘church. ‘ The sky is the dome of our cathedral.  I don’t have to change my identity, like the Europeans try to, because I see that somebody else has more resources than I do.  We, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, have kept the land that was given to us ... at the beginning of time; we have maintained our resources here.  I don’t have to go try to steal something that belongs to somebody else.  There was no word for “war” (and no word for “peace”) in the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway language.

 

               Wub-e-ke-niew’s and Clara’s work revolves around providing a catalyst for the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway to reclaim their own identity.

            A people without history (or with a made-up history), without their language and their culture and their values, cease to exist as a People.  European-Americans (including the “Chippewa Indians”) have no language, or history, or culture of their own – it’s all an extension of Western European language, history, and culture.  They do not own their own identity because they do not have any Sovereignty.  They are using European Sovereignty, held by the Judeo-Christian Churches, to occupy this land.  The European-Americans just got through dropping bombs on their own “Holy Land,” the land of their roots.  They do not understand “identity” as it is connected to the land – over the centuries this understanding has been taken away from them.  What they call “Science” and “Philosophy” and “Religion” has operated within the structure of the Euroamerican hierarchy to disenfranchise the common People, until they no longer know what they have lost.  The outside surface of their society changed with the Renaissance, but they are still operating in a Medieval structure.  All they have left is violence and Machiavellian deception, and in order for anyone to survive, we need to look at the violence and lies that have permeated their history.  The Europeans just got through dropping bombs on their own Holy Land.  In that land, Jehovah, God, and Allah have all been manipulated to support violence.  The “leaders” of the Indo-European societies have been acting like megalomaniacs, with enormous egos; and their Gods have not had the backbone to stand up to them.  We cannot tolerate this violence anymore; this is a new era and violence is an outmoded, outdated and archaic strategy and must cease.  If these Gods are going to be manipulated, they must be manipulated in a more harmonious manner, so that all Peoples can live as human beings.  The time for sacrificing human beings for War has passed.  We, as all Peoples, must work towards a better world.

 

               Clara and Wub-e-ke-niew live in about five hundred acres of “sugar bush” or maple forest on the shore of lower Red Lake, about thirty miles north of Bemidji, Minnesota.  The land of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, some of which is called “Red Lake Reservation,” or “Lac Rouge” by the French, is the last significant parcel of unceded and unallotted land still continuously held by Aboriginal Indigenous People in the United States.  “We, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, have a right to exist,” says Wub-e-ke-niew.  “We are working to stop the genocide of our people.”

               The sugarbush of which Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara are stewards is a remnant of the vast forests that once covered most of this continent.  Most of the forests have been cut down because of the structural greed of Euroamerican society.  The forest once typical of Northern Minnesota was a mosaic of maple, oak, birch, popple, tamarack, cedar and spruce, punctuated by towering pines, dotted with meadows, and linked with rivers and lakes.

This forest environment was a permacultural environment maintained by the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway to provide everything that we needed.  The ground under the pines was cushioned by pine needles, and walking on it was like walking on a thick carpet.  The ecology was in balance, and the forest was a bountiful home for everybody.  There was an abundance of nuts and berries: blueberries, strawberries, chokecherries, juneberries, wild plums ... plenty for the birds and animals, as well as the people.  In the cedar swamps, the trees were so dense that it was dark during the day.  There were deer trails in the woods so ancient that they had been worn at least a foot deep into the ground.  When I was a boy, we used to climb the old White Pine trees.  The branches were so thick that we could lay on them like a hammock, hidden.  I remember all of this, from when I was a child, and in fact there are still a few photographs of these woods still around.  Now, the forest is gone.  The White Pine, so big it took three men to put their arms around them, have all been cut down.  The wildlife is gone, because everybody’s home has been destroyed.  The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway grew Mahnomen, which the White People have mutated into labor-intensive “wild rice,” in the lakes of their homeland for millennia before the arrival of the Euroamericans.

            One of the tactics which the Anglos use to disenfranchise – and steal from – everybody else: the French and Indian Métis, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, and the “lower class” of their own people, is using what they call “Democracy.”

            An example of the elite’s entrenchment of their chosen people, under the guise of democracy, comes from the history of the North West Territory of the United States.  In the original North West Ordinance, “Democracy” was initiated on the basis of heads of households who held more than 500 acres of land, who were the only people with a vote.  Only the elite had 500 or more acres; the usual homestead was substantially less than 500 acres.  In the Indo-European land tenure system, individual people own “property,” but they do not own land.  That’s why they pay “property tax,” and why they are subject to “eminent domain.”  “Eminent domain” does not encompass Sovereign Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway land, because this concept is an European concept.  The “Indians” cannot question this system, because he owes his very existence to the Euroamerican system – but the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway can, and do, question it.  “Democracy” was a con job from the very beginning: the wealthy elite set up the structure for the control of the land and the so-called democratic system.  When their control was entrenched, then they extended the “democratic franchise” to other groups.  The elite still control the so-called “democratic process,” for example in drawing gerrymander lines to exclude or divide other groups of people.  The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway still have an intact, egalitarian government, in which the land and the power is held jointly by all people.  Our Traditional government has been consistently misrepresented in Euroamerican history, as “primitive communism,” in which land and power were held “in common,” which is not the case.  Labels, stereotypes, and pejorative descriptions have been used throughout the White man’s writings to discredit our egalitarian Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway system.  We are writing our own history, now, to debunk all of these racist lies and stereotypes.

            We do not need the sham ideologies of “democracy” – or “communism.”  If we use the alien ideology called “democracy,” the Chippewa Indian squatters on our land will vote us right out of existence, as they have already tried to do.  Most of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway have been exterminated in the genocide, and those of us whose families have survived are a numerical minority even on our own land.  There are certain “Chippewa Indian” (French Catholic) families, maintained in Red Lake by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Catholic Church, who have had enormous numbers of children in every generation (certain of these White “Chippewa Indian” men have fathered more than fifty children, not necessarily with the consent of the women involved).  The Bureau of Indian Affairs “brought in Democracy” through the Indian Reorganization Act after the Aboriginal Indigenous People were outnumbered by the “Indians” on each Reservation, drawing the “district” lines and otherwise setting up their so-called “democracies” so that the Indians under the Bureau’s control are the ones who continue to hold (White) “Democratically Elected Power.”  We are not talking about revolution, and we are not talking about violence.  We are talking about who we are, what has been done, why, and how.  We, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway do not need this fraudulently imposed, alien system on our own land.

            We do not need to “assimilate” into anybody else’s model of who we ought to be.  We cannot be compelled to be something that we are not, and believe that the Indo-European system of using imprisonment to force people to fit into a system designed for the benefit of only the elite, is a human rights violation.  The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Nation did not have, or need, prisons and jails.  “Assimilation” is just another word for “domestication,” and mental and spiritual disenfranchisement for the benefit of the upper-class elite.  We do not want to become either domesticated animals or “exotics” in a zoo, and it is time that the Concentration Camps called Reservations that were forcibly imposed on our land were examined and the walls torn down, like the Berlin wall.

            Time has not stood still for us; we are not (and never were) Hollywood Indians living in tepees.  We have purchased, with our natural and cultural resources which were stolen from us, the right to use any idea and any concept from any culture, and as a Sovereign People, have a right to choose what we believe is best for us – and to reject what we believe is harmful, disharmonious, untrue or unethical.  We have tried, over the years, to fit – along with the “Indians,” into the White man’s system.  Most Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway  people have lived among the Euroamericans for a time.  With regard to our own land, we developed and submitted innumerable grants including the Chippewa Indians without distinction or discrimination, in economic development and other proposals, which were rejected by the Foundations.  It has reached the point where we have to stand up and speak out: this is who we are, and this is what we see.

 

               The October weekend David Dunn visited Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara at Red Lake, the leaves were already fallen from the trees and the air was chill as they walked to the shore of Red Lake an eighth of a mile from their one-room cabin.  The damp wind that blows off the lake makes a person unaccustomed to the climate shiver, even while the sun is still warm.  Wub-e-ke-niew points out the place where he and Clara boil maple sap in the spring, and he shows me the maple trees which have been cut down: stumps from where the wood was taken to make fine furniture for White people in the Cities, and other maple trees simply cut and left to lay in the woods.  These maple trees were cut by “Chippewa Indians” under the direction of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, the United States Indian Reorganization Act “Tribal Council,” and the U.S.-Government run “Red Lake Mill.”  The United States Government has consistently followed a policy of destroying Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples’ permacultural food resources in order to bring us under their control; in order to destroy our self-sufficiency.

               This observation brings me to the subject of genocide – not genocide in the abstract, but genocide in the immediate particulars of the lives of my hosts on an October weekend visit to Minnesota.  Wub-e-ke-niew speaks about the cutting of ancient sugar maples as “environmental racism.”  He means by that a systematic destruction of the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway (and other Aboriginal Indigenous) People by outsiders destroying our food supply and ecological base.  When you step off the plane at the Bemidji airport and ride north to Red Lake in Wub-e-ke-niew’s little old Honda Civic, you are riding into a scene of battle and death, not just of sugar maples, but of Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.

               Wub-e-ke-niew recalls experiences from his own life.  The United States paid both Catholic and Protestant Christian Churches to establish boarding schools on the Reservations as a part of an program explicitly described in U.S. Government documents as designed to destroy the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway language, culture, and traditions.  Wub-e-ke-niew attended the Catholic St. Mary’s Mission School at Red Lake for eight years in the 1930’s.

            This schooling was “compulsory education.”  Many of the White “Chippewa Indian” children were day-school students, living at home with their parents.  The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway children were “boarding school” students, separated from our families and confined to the school grounds.  We were forbidden to speak our native language.  At night, the lights in the dormitory were turned out.  Then, twenty minutes later, they were turned back on again, and the Prefect came in, to beat the children who had allegedly committed small infractions during the day.  He would walk down the rows of beds in the dormitory.  We never knew whose bed he would stop by, pull down our blanket, and beat us with a leather strap, as we lay in our beds.  Retribution came without warning and without explanation.  All one knew was that if you trespassed in the slightest way beyond the rigid rules of thought and conduct, or even if we were alleged to have violated some rule, we would be beaten in the night.

            Children were chloroformed for “running away,” that is, leaving school to go home without authorization.  We were whipped at the whim of a Priest or Prefect, or, for example, if a Nun happened to overhear somebody speaking Ojibwe.  The Prefect kept a clipboard with everybody’s name on it.  We were ‘policed’ all day long.  As for the ‘tattlers,’ even if what they reported wasn’t true, the child was beaten.  The Priests and Nuns would believe a lighter child over darker one.

 

               David Dunn wrote, “As I listened to these stories, as I looked at the substantiating evidence (for example, copies of B.I.A. purchase orders for large quantities of chloroform), I experienced a kind of pressure build-up inside my brain.  I struggled to integrate what I was hearing with my accepted images of America.  At first, I could not allow such images to take up residence in my mind.  As stories and documents confirmed the reality of inhumane ends and means, the flood of unacceptable truth seemed to fill the limited space between my rejecting brain cells and the side of my cranium until the pressure threatened sanity itself, and I was forced, to save my own unity and peace of mind, to allow the painful truth of an eyewitness to rest, at least quietly, if not comfortably, beside my old images of my forbearers.”

               “Gradually,” David Dunn continued, “as I relaxed in the midst of Wub-e-ke-niew’s and Clara’s hospitality and good will, their stories of how Hitler had admired American policies and practices applied to “Indians” (documented by excerpts from books written by Hitler’s ministers); of how the Bureau of Indian Affairs keeps Aboriginal Indigenous People under its thumb: through the economic system, through the Reservation political system and housing allocations, and by using White “Indians” (who are not indigenous to this land) both as a cover and a scapegoat; of how corporate interests even today threaten Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway land and resources, I was able to allow myself to begin to enter the context within which Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara live, and glimpse the world through their eyes.  The pressure within my mind was less; the heartache was greater.”

               Wub-e-ke-niew added, “The Bureau of Indian Affairs used the English language to intimidate and cheat us; until the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway learned to speak European-American English, we could not defend ourselves.”

 

IV.  Their Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway strategy

               Wub-e-ke-niew began working for social change for his people in the 1960’s.  He was one of the founders of the American Indian Movement, and started the first “Indian Survival School” in the United States, which at that time was called the American Indian Movement Survival School in Minneapolis.  He pressed the A.I.M. board to support economic development in the urban community, and resigned after the “Chippewa Indian” people who had gained control of A.I.M. told him that they supported more demonstrations, rather than working for an economic base for the urban Indian and Aboriginal Indigenous Communities.

               In 1981, Wub-e-ke-niew decided that he had to return to his land, to shed the externally imposed identity of “Indian,” and to strengthen his Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway roots.  In 1984, he started writing to address the problems faced by both the Indian and the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.  In 1985, the Red Lake Peoples Council was formed, initially as a political organization to address the problems on the Red Lake Reservation through the Indian Reorganization Act structure that has been put in place by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

               In 1986, after having done considerable background work on Foundation Grants, Wub-e-ke-niew was elected Chairman of the Economic Development Committee of the Red Lake Peoples Council.  One of the best grant-writers in Minneapolis-St. Paul donated thousands of hours of his own time, working for two years with the I.R.S. to get 501 (c) 3 nonprofit status, doing personal appeals the influential people in the Foundation community, and writing and presenting innumerable grants to fund economic development on the Red Lake Reservation for both the “Chippewa Indian” and Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway community.

            The problem that the Red Lake Peoples’ Council could not overcome, is that the Chippewa Indians do not own their own Sovereignty.  The Chippewa Indians were created by the United States Government, and they are under the control of the B.I.A.  The B.I.A. can ‘make or un-make an Indian,’ and in the course of the Peoples Council’s promoting a slate of candidates for I.R.A. Tribal Council Office, through Roger Jourdain, their federally-installed, federally-recognized, and federally supported tribal council chairman, the B.I.A. took the title “Hereditary Head Chief” away from Archie King, the Chippewa Indian that they had given this title to.  At that point, the social and genetic engineering that the Bureau is doing in here became unavoidably clear.  Living off of the Reservation, even in the Minneapolis ‘Indian’ community, the subtle manipulations of the community by the B.I.A. and the corporations that lobby the Department of the Interior were not as apparent.

            The Red Lake Peoples Council’s economic development proposals were written for both ‘Chippewa Indians’ and Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, without making a distinction between these two ethnically, historically, and culturally distinct groups of people.  With the exception of Mystery School donations (with which we were able to purchase a tractor and other agricultural development tools, and promoted and worked on community gardens until the B.I.A. responded with vigorous gossip campaigns shaming those who maintained gardens as “white farmers”), the Red Lake Peoples Council met with unexplained – but consistent – turndowns from foundations.  The Grant writer was personally distressed.  “I don’t understand,” he said.  He blamed himself, although we assured him that the turndowns were no reflection on his undeniable competence.

            At this time, we had also begun working on historical and genealogical research of the Red Lake Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.  We discovered that documents that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had told them were “confidential,” or that “they don’t exist, they burned up in a fire,” were in fact intact, public-information records available from the National Archives and other historical repositories.  We scrutinized records that the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway had unsuccessfully tried to see for many years – from an Aboriginal Indigenous perspective.

            The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway community had always known (it is part of our oral history) that the families claiming to be “Chippewa Indians” were, in fact, not Aboriginal Indigenous people; for many of these “Chippewa” families our oral history is quite specific and extends back to their French Métis roots in the fur trade era.  However, we had not had access to documented proof.  Although we had been quite aware of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ promotion of the interests of the Chippewa Indian community, we had never before been able to read the Bureau’s policy papers.  The older people of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway community remembered the last surviving members of families who are now completely gone.  The documents of our history had been hidden from us for generations.  Some of our Sacred Records of the Midewiwin (on birchbark scrolls) are still being held by the Smithsonian in Washington.

            We now held in our hands documents proving systematic genocide of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway at Red Lake – and of the Bureau’s covering this genocide with non-Aboriginal “Indians.”  Looking at the full picture is painful, but now that we see what, specifically, is being done – and how it is being done and how it is being hidden, we can work to change it.  Our goal is the survival of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway in our own land.  We, the People, have a right to exist.

 

               Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara are documenting the genealogy of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, and of the Chippewa “Indians.”  The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway have an unceded, unalienated Sovereign right to Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway land.  The Chippewa “Indians” are being used by the United States, for the United States to claim that this land is “Federal land,” administered by the Department of the Interior “in trust” for Chippewa Indians.  The Chippewa Indians signed “Treaties” with the Euro-Americans who held their Sovereignty, to sell Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway land that did not belong to them.  Based on the genealogical information they have compiled, Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara can trace, back to Europe, the ancestry of many of these “Chippewa Indians.”

            What we are saying is: “We, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, and other Aboriginal Indigenous People, have been here for countless millennia.  We are a real, distinct people, with a deep and ancient relationship to this, our land.  The ‘Indians’ promoted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the mass media are not the same people as we are.  They are mostly Euroamericans, caught up in an identity created by the Europeans.  For historical, political, and economic reasons that we can detail, the Euro-Americans have a vested interest in maintaining their category, ‘Indians.’  We, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and other Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples of these Continents, have a right to exist.  We are not ‘Indians.’”  This is apparently a difficult concept for Euro-Americans to hear clearly, or to deal with.

 

David Dunn wrote, “When one allows the category ‘Aboriginal Indigenous Person,’ one faces the ethical and moral dilemmas related to the destruction of culture,” genocide, “and expropriation of land.  Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara, and the other Aboriginal Indigenous people, are made invisible by the omission of any demographic means for counting representatives of the original inhabitants” of this continent, in their own land.

               But the distinction of who is “Aboriginal” is not so simple, because it is defined differently by the United States Government and other heirs to the Indo-European colonizing traditions of “Western Civilization,” than it is by the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and other Aboriginal Indigenous people.

             The U.S. Government does not acknowledge the category “Aboriginal” person.  The “Chippewa Indians” know perfectly well what the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway are talking about, and in private conversation with Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway (particularly when given copies of documentation), most of them readily acknowledge that they are “French-and-Indian,” or “mostly White.”  The first cousin of the present [1934 U.S. Indian Reorganization Act] “Chairman of the Red Lake Tribe of Chippewa Indians,” says, quite candidly, “Who the hell does he [the Chairman] think he is?  He should quit playing ‘Indian.’  He doesn’t belong there, he’s a goddam White man, just like me.”  However, when in their capacity as paid “Indian” spokespeople for the U.S. Government, the Chippewa cannot acknowledge its relevance.  The United States holds their Sovereignty and their identity.  The Chippewa Indians are not free people.  The histories that “Chippewa Indians” write about Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway are no different than the histories that other Euroamericans write about us.

            As are the Euroamericans through “surnames,” the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway are “patrilineal.”  Patrilineal means “inheritance through the father’s line, and is a completely different concept than patriarchy, which means, “political power is held by men.”  The heritage of the Dodem, ... the jointly held Sovereignty of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Nation through the Midewiwin, are passed from father to son. (The patrilineality of Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway heirship has stood up in U.S. Court.)  The ultimate human political power in the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Nation, however, was matriarchal – held by elderly women “Clan Mothers.” 

            Thus, if an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway man marries outside the local group, as was the tradition, his wife is brought into his Dodem of the Midewiwin, and his children are born into it.  But, if an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway woman marries outside the Aboriginal Indigenous community, in the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway tradition, she joins the community of her husband, and her children are born into her husband’s community.  Both the Euro-American policy-makers and the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway were explicitly aware of this.  During the nineteenth century, the Euroamericans asserted their Sovereignty over the mixed-blood children of Aboriginal Indigenous women (as well over the French Métis who were entirely Indo-European in ancestry), drafting these mixed-blood and Métis people to fight in their wars, and in many cases enumerating them on the Census (the first U.S. Census enumerating Aboriginal Indigenous People was in 1900).  There are explicit B.I.A. policy papers specifically advocating the use of Whites the Bureau called “squaw men” to “civilize” (i.e. destroy the Aboriginal Indigenous Sovereignty of) the Aboriginal Indigenous community.

            Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara stressed in this context that we were talking about patrilineal heirship, rather than “racial purity.”  When an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway man marries any woman, of whatever racial background, she and her children are Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway without discrimination.

            Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway patterns of patrilineal heirship and patrilocal residence worked beautifully among the Aboriginal Indigenous Nations, all of which were composed of Sovereign individuals jointly holding their National Sovereignty through their religion.  The Patrilineal Dodems  were interwoven into the fabric of Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples’ peaceful co-existence all across the continent.  When a woman marries a man with a Dodem, she takes part in his identity, takes her place in the circle of inter-related Sovereign people that are a part of his place on the Land.  Part of the way that the harmonious, peaceful co-existence between Aboriginal Indigenous People was maintained, was through the movement of women from one group to another through marriage. 

            Thus, for example, when a Lakota man marries an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway woman, she becomes Lakota, and when an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway man marries a Lakota woman, for example, she becomes Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, and as she becomes an elder, she becomes a “Clan Mother” of his Dodem – with a lot of influence in the community.  She also maintains her kinship ties with the Lakota – and through the aggregation of married-in woman at her birth-home, with other Aboriginal Indigenous People all across the Continent.  She did not lose her roots, she gained another People.

            When Aboriginal Indigenous people talk about the “Circle of Nations,” ultimately they were talking about people who all have kinship ties with each other, because of this out-marriage of women.  All of the “Tribes” were in peaceful co-existence, nobody was claiming authority or power over another.

 

            Euroamerican men, including “Indians,” who do not hold their personal Sovereignty, and who are “subject peoples” [look up “citizen” in a good older dictionary[4]], changed the harmonious balance of our Traditional kinship infrastructure.  In a sense, they were pawns who were not responsible for, or in control of, the larger pattern of what happened.  They were used in a process of colonial expansion through genetic and cultural engineering – a process that has been documented to have been a part of the Indo-European colonizing process all over the world.  From South Africa to the Inuit Arctic, creating group mixed-blood peoples whose Sovereignty is held by the Indo-European colonizing power has been an explicit aspect of colonial occupation.  Those “Chippewa Indians” who do have some Aboriginal Indigenous ancestors, are by the Euroamerican societies that hold their Sovereignty, forced into a role of “broker,” colonial agent, fifth columnist against their mothers’ people, and ultimately smokescreen for the genocide of the Aboriginal Indigenous people.  (Most of the “Chippewa Indians,” however, do not have any ancestors who are indigenous to this land.  Many of them were already Métis people when they got off the boats from Europe: French Moorish people from the Islamic occupation of Southern Europe.)  They are stuck, powerless to regain their own personal Sovereignty, as long as they continue in the mythological identity created for them by the Euroamericans, that of “Chippewa Indian.”  The Chippewas say, “we are a conquered people.”  They are, in fact, a conquered people, from the “French and Indian Wars.”  The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway are not “conquered,” we are still Sovereign.  We never went to “war” – there isn’t even a word in our language for “war” (or one for Indo-European “peace,” either).  We are a non-violent people.

 

V. “Indians”

            Wub-e-ke-niew added an extensive section on “Indians” to David Dunn’s initial “Journey to Red Lake,” (double-spaced here for readability):

            “Indian” is a category, and an identity, created by the Euroamericans.  There were no “Indians” here before the Europeans got here.  “Indians” are a mythological people: a projection out of Euroamerican and European culture, a part of their dichotomy of “civilized” and “savage.”  “Indian” people do not own their own identity; in order to find out who they are, they have to watch Hollywood movies, read “Indian” books, and otherwise look toward the Euroamerican holders of their identity.  I have received letters and visits from “Indians,” in which they literally asked me, “is this who I am?” or in which they combed through the innumerable and conflicting U.S. Statute and Bureaucratic definitions of “Indians,” trying to figure out who they were supposed to be.  They know that they are not Aboriginal Indigenous people, but take the material culture of Aboriginal Indigenous people, along with the (sometimes vicious) stereotypes of “Indian” from the European culture, and try to live the role of their supposed identity.  They don’t know who they are.

               Many self-identified “Indians” have come over to look through [Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara’s] genealogical material , searching through generation after generation for an Aboriginal Indigenous ancestor, trying to cling to something that they aren’t, and never were.  Some try to be “super Indians,” taking their cue from Hollywood’s “Noble Savage,” walking around in feathers and turquoise and saying “ugh,” and playing out the White man’s stereotype.  Some of these obviously European people have had a “revelation” from reading a book about “Indians,” and come over all dressed up in buckskin, beadwork, and turquoise, trying to tell Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway how to be “real Indians.”  It’s funny, but it’s sad.  If these people could get out of the box that they’ve been put into, and reclaim their own legitimate identity, they could really be somebody, make some positive contribution to the world.  As long as they’re stuck in the artificial identity of “Indian,” they cannot be honest, and are hurting both the Aboriginal Indigenous people – and themselves.

               Aboriginal Indigenous People are a free and Sovereign people.  In order for us to remain free and Sovereign, we have to help the other people become free.  In writing our own history, we have to debunk the myths, stereotypes, and labels that have been used by the Euroamerican elite to control everybody else.  We have to be a catalyst for the “Indians” – and other people – to find out who they really are, and to regain their personal Sovereignty.  The White man cannot do this, because he created the Indians for a purpose, and has a vested interest in keeping people “Indian.”

               “Indians” were used by the Anglo-Europeans to claim this land.  The “Indians” did not have much choice about signing the “Treaties,” they had to sign them because they were a conquered people, without Sovereignty of their own.  The people who signed the Red Lake Treaty of 1863, “The Old Crossing Treaty,” were the descendants of French refugees from the French and Indian war.  They didn’t own any land, but they were caught in a crooked scheme, in a social engineering process that they did not control, and did not have any choice about signing.  Now, we can start debunking the myths and labels and stereotypes, and lies, and come to terms to what really happened.  We can write our own Aboriginal Indigenous history, from our point of view.  We, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, are not a conquered people, and we are not a conquering people.  We are looking for peaceful and harmonious co-existence, and we are going to survive as a People.  We have a right to exist.

 

VI. The timeliness of this work

               David Dunn continued with the narrative of his “Journey to Red Lake”:

               When one thinks of reality [in an Indo-European context], as physically and geographically delimited, a project coming out of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Nation, visible to visitors in a small cabin on the shores of a Northwoods lake, can seem like an obscure effort at best and an irrelevance at worst.  What we are doing is within the Traditional structure of Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway society.  The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway are, by our ancient traditions and values, an extremely tolerant and peaceable people.  The racism and greed of the Euroamericans, directed toward our people, has reached the point where we must speak more directly and forcefully – toward both the Whites and “their Indians” – than we would normally consider “polite.”  What we are doing is part of a larger, joint movement of Sovereign Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway within our community.  Egalitarian, jointly Sovereign People do not say, “Follow me! I am your leader!” but rather build from the consensus of the community, each person contributing what they can, doing what they will, within the context of the larger harmony.

               In a holographic universe, in which boundaries are creations of the mind that block both information and communion, a project’s relevance is determined by its relationship to the creative historical process and its prominence limited by choice.  At the moment, Wub-e-ke-niew’s work has a low profile nationally.  It is, nevertheless, of utmost importance because, at its heart, it is about Sovereignty and the preservation of humanity.

            What we are doing is not invisible here.  We can see the effect of the issues we have raised both on the Reservation, and in the reactions of the broader White society.  The intensified mass-media promotion of “Indians” is an example.  Our research has already had a strong positive impact on the self-esteem of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.  When one person stands up and reclaims their identity, then others are empowered to reclaim their identity, also.  The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway – ‘we the people’ – at Red Lake are under intense pressure because we are the last Aboriginal Indigenous People within the United States still living on our own Sovereign, unceded, unallotted homeland.  During the last ten years, there has been an intense, “take it while we still can” pressure by outside White interests on our resources.  For example, clear-cut logging of our forests is being done, under the disguise of “Indian economic development,” at a devastating rate.  There have been, using the Indian Reorganization Act “Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians,” several efforts at selling our Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway rights to hunt and fish on our own land; twice in the last two years the “Red Lake Chippewa” have moved to mortgage this land to White interests, and open it up to White taxation.  Without the genealogical and historical information that we have, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway probably would have lost our land.

 

A. Sovereignty

            Wub-e-ke-niew is an Aboriginal Indigenous person of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Nation.  His patrilineal ancestors have lived right here, on the shores of Red Lake, for many thousands of years.  Wub-e-ke-niew was born into the Dodem of the Bear, the Bear Dodem, and into the Midewiwin.

            All Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway are Sovereign.  Our National Sovereignty is held jointly, through the Dodems in the Midewiwin.  Each person holds our own personal Sovereignty.  This is a totally different concept than the Europeans’ “Sovereigns,” who seem to always be wanting to build up armies, their national pastime is going to war, which is a worn-out way of looking at the world.  We – all of us – need to work together to make this a better place to live, rather than being stuck in an endless cycle of War-and-Peace, bombing and rebuilding, conquest and re-conquest.  We do not see this unending violence as “civilization.”  The strongest word for conflict in the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway language is a word meaning “two or three guys having a disagreement.”  We also do not agree with the European idea of “peace,” which is an extension of their war, and is just as violent: involving occupation and humiliation and theft of resources, and leads directly back into the other phase of Indo-European War-and-Peace.  Somewhere, we have to break the cycle of violence: political violence (both war and passing unilateral legislation), economic violence, sexual violence, environmental violence, and violence to the integrity of human beings.  We have to stop the Indo-European merry-go-round, the endless violent cycle of “War” and “Peace.”  [Study the definitions of “peace” in a good, older dictionary.]  An integral part of our Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Sovereignty is responsibility – and harmony.

            Every Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway person holds their own personal Sovereignty, and with every other Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway person, jointly holds the Sovereignty of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Nation within the Dodems and the Midewiwin.  A Traditional [“leader”] does not tell anybody what to do or how to be.  That kind of arrogance doesn’t work in a society fundamentally organized as an association of Sovereign people, where one of the underlying premises is respect for everyone else.  [Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway society is profoundly egalitarian, and those who take any role of leadership hold] an obligation to the People, not (as usually happens in Indo-European hierarchies), a parasitic relationship “over” people.

 

               The genealogical and historical work that Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara are doing, including identifying and documenting the ancestors of both the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and the “Chippewa Indians,” is important in part because it provides the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway with documentation to back up what had previously been “only” oral history.  Using the documentation provided by this research, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway are asserting their identity, beginning to debunk the lies and disinformation embedded in Euro-American versions of “history,” and re-asserting their rights to their Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway homeland.  They do not recognize the right of European or Euro-American institutions to claim Sovereignty over themselves or their unceded land.

               Wub-e-ke-niew makes the point that the French and British explorers tried to claim Sovereignty over the lands they visited, and the Peoples who offered them initial hospitality, as an extension of the Indo-European doctrine of the alleged “Divine Right of Kings.”  The movie Black Robe recently portrayed the mission that brought Roman Catholic priests to this same part of the world “to bring civilization to the savages.”  The story concludes that the tragedy of this “salvation” was the extinction of the “saved.”

               We need to understand the differences that have led to such injustices, and to look at the historical/cultural baggage of “Western Civilization” which enslaves their own people, trapping them so deeply in hierarchically regimented thinking, stealing their personal Sovereignty and relationship with the [universe, Grandfather Midé and Grandmother Earth], putting them in artificial “identities,” and regimenting them so thoroughly that most of them do not even see what they have lost.  We also need to look at the unspoken assumptions underlying this “civilization” and the “world religions” associated with it.

            Europeans or Euro-Americans (from our perspective they are both part of the same thing) are trying to lay claim to our land, our religion, to Grandmother Earth.  How can the Europeans come into our community, write their own title to some of our land, and build a “church.”  The land is already sacred, it is one with our religion, it is our Cathedral of which the sky is the dome.

 

               The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway believe, in fact, that Sovereignty rests fundamentally in the individual (Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway did not have a “state” in the Indo-European sense of alienated Sovereignty held by an elite group of people, Church hierarchy or “Royal Family”).  The underlying Indo-European “claim” to these continents rests on assertions made by the Roman Catholic Church, through the European “Royal Sovereigns,” split between the Protestants and the Catholics when Henry VIII removed himself from Catholic (Judo-Christian) Sovereignty.  Wub-e-ke-niew makes the point that fragments of “sovereignty” delegated by the State, or the Archbishop, Pope, or King is an artifact of Indo-European hierarchy, not personal or joint Sovereignty.

               Thus, the early Indo-European explorers, explicitly acting under delegated Sovereignty under “royal charters,” fundamentally violated the beliefs of the Aboriginal Indigenous People of these continents when they tried to impose a foreign ideology and said that they had laid claim to this land.  Wub-e-ke-niew believes that the original injustice is not made less by actions based on the consequences of, and/or the reinforcing of this Indo-European claim.  It is no more just now, to deprive Aboriginal Indigenous People of their land, livelihood, or fundamental rights than it was a century ago.  When Euro-Americans say, “this is my land, here,” they need to come to terms with the genocide that was done here, in order to make it what you call “my American land.”  To me, it has always been, for many millennia, Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway land, and it still is part of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Nation.  It is not “Indian land,” and it is not “American land.”  When Americans say, “this is my land,” the responsibility for the genocide that was done to take it goes with the assertion of ownership of the land.  We also need to seriously address the ongoing genocide of Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples: on this continent and in the rest of the world.  Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara are drawing a line: “stop the injustice here.”  We do not come out of the Judeo-Christian/Islamic tradition, we do not believe “an eye for an eye.”  Violence for violence only perpetuates the violence.  Our people lived here in harmony once.  We are looking for harmony, arising from the roots of each people, internationally.  We are seeking to build a truly harmonious, egalitarian, not just “peaceful” world.

               The issue with which Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara are wrestling is not just Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Sovereignty.  We are also working for the Sovereignty and freedom of all the people – that’s why identity is so important.  They are talking about not just personal Sovereignty, but also economic, political, and cultural Sovereignty.

Aboriginal Indigenous Sovereignty is all together; it is not broken up into pieces.  Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway hold their own personal Sovereignty; the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Nation’s sovereignty is held jointly, in the context of an egalitarian society in which every individual holds their own Sovereignty.  This is a fundamentally different way of looking at the world than Indo-European “assigned,” fragmented, hierarchical “Sovereignty.”  When you see it, it is simple.  It is possible to have stable, egalitarian, harmonious societies of joint Sovereigns.  That is what the Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples of this continent had here for many, many millennia.

 

The net effect was to force dependence on B.I.A. “rations,” and later “commodities” from the Department of Agriculture.

European mercantile economics are an integral part of European colonizing history; forcing individuals or local groups of people into the “global economy” through alienation or destruction of local resources of self-sufficiency brings these people under greater “control.”

The U.S. and the States have also used legislation to gradually encroach on the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and other Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples’ self-sufficiency.  For example, the State of Minnesota claims “sovereignty” over fish.  Under Minnesota law, it is “illegal” to take a fish off the Reservation, even as a gift to a friend.  The way the laws are written, one is supposed to throw away “rough fish,” rather than giving them to the hungry.  This, and similar legislation, enforces monopoly market access through a few White wholesalers.

               Wub-e-ke-niew points out that there is effectively no local economy, when people are forced to be dependent on the government for food and shelter.

Patronage is administered through an inter-related clique of elite “Chippewa Indian” families, most of whom are direct patrilineal descendants of the European fur trade elite, and some of whom were granted feudal “monopoly territories” by the King of France before the French Revolution.  The B.I.A. plays one faction of these Chippewa Indian families against their cousins of another faction, strategically maintaining their control over the Chippewa Indians and consolidating Bureau – and their tribal council – control in the community through allocation of housing and jobs.  With a de facto Reservation unemployment rate of over 90%, virtually no independent economy, and most housing owned by the Government, this is a very effective means of control within the Chippewa community.

 

Self-sufficiency is structurally denied under these conditions; and as long as these people allow themselves to be trapped in the “Chippewa Indian” identity, they are trapped, because this kind of paternalistic control by the B.I.A. is an integral part of the artificially created “Chippewa Indian” identity.  This, in large part, is why our economic development proposals did not work.  The Chippewa Indians are not Sovereign.  The long-range plans of the Bureau of Indian Affairs are still oriented toward eventual assimilation/annihilation of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Nation, covered by the continuing existence of the “domestic dependent,” delegated Euroamerican “quasi-sovereign” Chippewa Indians, under the economic, political and identity control of the U.S. Government.

               Wub-e-ke-niew also completely rejects the claim of the Chippewa Tribal Council, organized under the provisions of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act of the United States Congress, operated under the control of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, constitutionally delegating authority to the “Secretary of the Interior or his duly authorized representative,” to “sovereignty” over any Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.  This I.R.A. Constitution was implemented, under false pretenses (according to documents from the B.I.A.), on the Red Lake Reservation only after the Chippewa Indians constituted a numerical majority on Red Lake Reservation.  There are no Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway from Red Lake in this Chippewa Tribal Council.  The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway still have our own, Sovereign Aboriginal Indigenous government.

               The United States Government claims title to the land of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Nation.  An illustrative current example is the Bureau of Indian Affairs proposal, endorsed by the Chippewa “Tribal” Council, to run a new water main along the shores of Red Lake, rather than a few hundred feet inland, along the highway.  Although Wub-e-ke-niew believes that the water main would be more effectively placed along the highway (the land has already been cleared and leveled, and the predominantly Government housing is built with reference to the highway rather than the lakeshore), an easement for the water main would open a crack to private, commercial interests hoping to purchase choice waterfront properties.  The Red Lake Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway “lost” almost all of the waterfront property along Lake of the Woods through a similar process of “easement” and “condemnation.”  In addition to the problems created by the “easement,” there are Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway’ graves, most of them unmarked, all along the lakeshore.  The Chippewa Indians may not care about these graves, because the people buried there are not their people, but these people are the ancestors of the contemporary Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.

               To put it in its historical, global context, the issue here is the question of the right of any government or organization to claim Sovereignty over an individual or group.  When is there a right of eminent domain?  In the rain forests of the Amazon basin at the expense of both the virgin timber and the ecosystem of the planet, as well as the Sovereignty and survival of the Aboriginal Indigenous People of the Amazon?  What right do the Hispanic Brazilians have to mortgage the assets of the Aboriginal Indigenous people of the Amazon, and then destroy these Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples’ permacultural infrastructure and eventually the people themselves, in order to pay that debt?

               Who may claim Sovereignty in Yugoslavia?  Do the Serbs have a right to impose their control over the Croats?  Do the Lithuanians have the right to require their Russian-speaking neighbors to give up speaking Russian and learn Lithuanian?  Do the Russians have the right to compel the Aboriginal Indigenous People of Siberia to give up their languages and speak Russian?  What are the assumptions at the base of European-derived, colonial “National Sovereignty?”

            The attempt to classify both the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and Indo-European people as “Chippewa Indians,” and then claiming “eminent domain” over the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, using the category of “Chippewa,” is a strategy suited to con artists and pirates.  “Eminent domain” is an European concept and a racist idea.  Europeans do not hold National Sovereignty, nor eminent domain, on this Continent.  They are on other Peoples’ property.  Maybe where the answer lies is in the “other plateau,” a further dimension, that Dr. Jean Houston was talking about, where each person takes back their own personal Sovereignty – and the responsibility and values that go with it – and go back to having a deep relationship with the land, and being a steward of the land.  It would be nice to see polluters become stewards, and to see the Euro-Americans change direction away from destroying us all.

 

               The issue of Sovereignty is an obstinate Gordian knot.

The heirs of “Western Civilization” see Sovereignty as an element of centralized State control; a direct conceptual and structural heritage of the “God Kings” of early Indo-European history.  Although this Sovereignty has been slightly mitigated by various forms of “Constitutional Monarchy” and “Representative Democracy,” ultimate control of all “citizens” is held by the centralized Church/State hierarchy, with administrative control held, de facto, by a small, inter-related group of elite families.  The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and other Aboriginal Indigenous People also see National Sovereignty as ultimately deriving from their inter-relationship with [Grandfather Midé and Grandmother Earth], held by each person through their direct relationship with the[m], through their religion.  The Sovereignty of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Nation, and other Aboriginal Indigenous Nations, is a joint Sovereignty; a stewardship truly by the People, of the People, and for the People.  Each person retains their own Sovereignty, and government depends on consensus and persuasion, not compulsion.

 

Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and other Aboriginal Indigenous Societies are truly egalitarian societies.  “Eminent domain” is a null concept; everybody has a say in the way that the land should be kept as a part of this joint stewardship.  This is a key issue that demands disentanglement, for on its resolution rests the peace of much of the world, and perhaps the well-being of the planet itself.

               To put a finer point on the matter, around the issue of Sovereignty hover the issues of personal and cultural identity, political power and independence, and economic self-determination and profit which lie uneasily at the heart of most conflicts on the planet today.  One of our goals is to empower all peoples to reclaim their own personal Sovereignty, and the responsibility and harmony that are an integral part of it.

            Change is coming; there is a way that the Peoples who are now here can find a way to live in harmony.  It can no longer be regulated from the top.  Culture comes from the People, all the People.  Culture is not something that comes from the top of an hierarchy, with the elite saying, “This is culture.  I define it, and I can buy it.”  Sovereignty is the land, the religion, each person’s own identity in relationship to the Earth, the Universe, [Grandfather Midé and Grandmother Earth].  We, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway are working toward freedom.  When some people are not free, nobody is free.

 

B. Cultural Preservation

               By virtue of the fact that they live in a simple home in the sugar bush, grow their own food, live gently on the land, fish, act as stewards of the maple trees and make syrup which they share with friends and neighbors, they are preserving the culture of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.  There is, however, far more that I do not, and perhaps can not know.  The Midewiwin tradition, like any spiritual path, is an enigma to the outsider.  We talk of the “Great Mystery” because a human being is only a speck n the Universe – a human being can not expect to understand everything ... .

            We are seeing the consequences of the one-dimensional way that the Europeans have looked at the world.  Everybody, if anybody is to survive, needs to grow into something else that is beyond this one dimension.  Traditional Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway look at the world in many dimensions.  Everything is connected and everything is here for a purpose.  As much as the White man is telling us, often arrogantly, about his “scientific expertise,” by attempting to control the world, he is destroying it.  Just plain common sense is enough to see that what they have done is terribly destructive.  They are wrecking the planet for everybody.

 

               At the moment, Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara are focused on preserving the right of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway to exist; on preserving the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway rights to this land, on catalyzing the regeneration of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway community, and of restoring the harmony that is an integral part of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Nation.

We cannot do this by using the linear, direct “leadership” model of hierarchical Indo-European society – the means must be in harmony with Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Tradition.  When we first started working in this direction, we thought that perhaps Wub-e-ke-niew’s grandchildren would live to see the fruits of what we had begun – we are working to restore what has been damaged over a period of a hundred years.  In the past few years, we have seen more accomplished than we had once hoped to see in our lifetimes.

 

               It is possible to conceive of a larger task, i.e. documenting the culture of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and making it available to the world.  Within David Dunn’s cultural framework, he understood culture to be a process, a matter of remembering, evaluating, reinterpreting, and re-appropriating the system of values, beliefs, and institutions that define a people, thinking of culture as a dynamic of sending out new shoots and putting down new roots, much like a wild strawberry plant.

This is contrast to the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway conception of culture.  We see culture as a harmonious, dynamic equilibrium, the living tranquility of a “climax ecosystem,” a mosaic of different individuals in mutually beneficial, harmonious co-existence.

 

               From David Dunn’s point of view, it is hard to see how the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Tradition of the Midewiwin can survive.  It is inherently a family tradition ... by definition, it is not a group that seeks converts or new members.

Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway are born into the Midewiwin (Midé).  Through the kinship ties that are one of the fundamental foundations of Aboriginal Indigenous society, the Midewiwin co-exists with the quite similar religious/spiritual traditions of the other Aboriginal Indigenous People.  The Midewiwin has traditionally been closed to people who are not Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, although, particularly under the conditions of occupation, there are exceptions.

            The Midé is a part of everything.  It is connected to everything, to all aspects of life of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.  Religion is not “apart.”  A person can come into the forests and feel the spirituality of our religion.  When an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway person prays, the prayer is between that person and the [spirits, Grandfather Midé and Grandmother Earth].  Complicated ceremonies are not necessary and neither is a “broker.”  When a person offers up tobacco, it is there: the feelings, who you are in the Universe, everything.  It is not something to be conquered, to use in “converting” or subduing other people, not a means of expansion.  The Midé is living in harmony.  Everything is sacred, all of life is lived in the context of spirituality, harmony and connectedness are a two-way street.

            The reason that most Indo-Europeans (including Euro-Americans) cannot see how a non-expansionist religion could work, is because they are not Sovereign – they do not know who they are, they have an identity problem (just like the “Indians” do).  They are looking at what is happening through an European, exploitive model of culture, rather than in terms of harmony.  The Midé has been here, on this land, for many thousands of years.  We were here before Adam was evicted from Eden.  We are still here.

 

               In a planetary age in which people are beginning to notice the loss of the former richness and variety of the “gene pool” – both in a genetic and cultural sense – that is, in an age when both species and cultural traditions are becoming extinct at an alarming rate, a very real dilemma arises.  If, Dunn writes, we grant that our ancestors fundamentally violated the Aboriginal Indigenous People of the land, people who nonetheless survived as bearers of a tradition which may be of fundamental importance as a source of wisdom about how to live in a humane relationship with each other ant the earth, how are we to benefit from this tradition without perpetuating the violation of the very people whose traditions we find of increasing relevance and interest.  In short, how can we learn without destroying our source of knowledge?

               Put within the context of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, can the recovery and preservation of ancient traditions proceed with the limited means of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway community, or must this work seek the support of outsiders?

The question that we, as Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway see, is “how can we set you free?”  How can we interest you in becoming a human being?  How can we persuade you that – whatever the benefits of your position in the hierarchy – you are losing more than you are gaining.  How can you change your language (which has violence, hierarchy, and exploitation embedded in it), so that you can speak honestly about the world ... so that once free, your language will not drag you back into the old prisons?  How can we help you find your own path to becoming unregimented people, to braving the bogey-men in your sub-consciences who have kept Indo-Europeans in their regimented boxes for so long?  How can you find your own personal Sovereignty – how can you reclaim your humanity, your harmony, your stewardship of the land and your responsibility?  There is a way of harmonious co-existence, where the Sovereign co-existence of all peoples (African, Asian, European ... everybody) is possible in harmony.

            Much of our territory may be occupied, but we are not a “conquered people.”  We have survived, and we will survive.  All of us have a right to exist.

            In the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway way, nobody tells anybody what to do.  Children have their own Sovereignty – although they are also taught to respect their elders.  People see for themselves what needs to be done – and they do it without somebody else having to tell them what to do.  What people do, is up to them.  Teaching and learning are by example, by experience, by dialogue.  For one person to tell another person, “This is the way the world is, because I said so, or because God told me so,” is simply not done.  The Europeans could not comprehend this kind of good manners when they first came here (they called us “child-like” and a lot of other things) – and most of them still can’t comprehend it.

            We cannot tell the Euro-Americans what to do.  We do offer the observation that currently they do not have a healthy society – and that their social imbalance is a threat to everyone.

 

               David Dunn wrote in 1991 that the issues he raises are not rhetorical questions.  “Neither do I know the answers.  I believe that the answers will be created, not in the process of debate, but by living within the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway tradition and acting to preserve its wisdom for the world.”

VII.  A longer-range strategy

               In his original report, David Dunn broadened the context “for a moment,” from Wub-e-ke-niew’s and Clara’s genealogical and historical research and the inherent issues of Sovereignty and cultural preservation which their work addresses, to include the overarching challenge of supporting the economic, political, and cultural development of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, and of the Chippewa Indians of Northern Minnesota.  It is my intuition, Dunn wrote, that the economic self-sufficiency and political self-reliance of both groups of people, i.e., the Chippewa Indians, and the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, will be blocked if the question of either’s identity and destiny is left unaddressed.

            The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway cannot tell the Chippewa Indians what to do, or who to be.  We have been telling these people, with increasing emphasis, that they should be honest with themselves – and others – about who they really are; that they do have a legitimate identity (which is neither “Chippewa Indian” nor “Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.”)  The Chippewa Indians are trapped in a fraudulent identity, and through this fraudulent identity they are hurting both themselves and the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.  They know that they are not who they claim to be, and their dishonesty is really hurting them.  When they honestly come to terms with who they are, then, and only then, they can become free people.

            The Chippewa Indians are presently stuck in a relationship with the Bureau of Indian Affairs that very closely parallels a relationship of domestic abuse.  Both the B.I.A. and the Indians are stuck in this dishonest identity; and because of the dishonesty, they blackmail each other.  The Bureau and the Chippewa Indians are in a parasitic relationship with each other, and so it becomes a love-hate relationship.  They have a low-class status within the context of the U.S. Government.  The Chippewa Indians do not have any “political clout.”  Within the context of their externally imposed identity as “Chippewa Indians,” their only political possibility is to act as paid spokespeople to further the agenda of the United States Government, Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs.  Neither the Indians nor the Bureau of Indian Affairs are Indigenous to this land.  The Indians and the Bureau of Indian Affairs are both hiding the genocide of the Aboriginal Indigenous People on this continent; that’s why the still exist.  The U.S. Government needs the Chippewa Indians to keep hiding the theft of land, and resources, and the historical Holocaust and ongoing genocide.  The Chippewa Indians need the Bureau of Indian Affairs (and Hollywood) in order to stay “Indian.”  This dishonest farce is being funded with the proceeds from stolen Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway resources, and with taxpayer dollars, which could be put to better use.

 

               It might be possible for people of whatever tradition to provide, along with the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and other Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples, a network that will extend their capacity and give more than moral support.  Although Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara are an effective team of two, within the framework of the larger Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway community, their work is only one strategic part of the larger task of community rebuilding.  Although their work of identity building is critical, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and virtually all other Aboriginal Indigenous Peoples are confronted with the monumental task of repairing shattered permacultural ecosystems, helping deeply wounded individuals to find their own path to healing, and rebuilding plundered and distorted infrastructures.

            The damage that has been done to just the environment, in Red Lake over the course of only slightly more than a century of intensive Euroamerican “resource exploitation,” is incredible.  The total fair market value of everything that was taken out of here, plus interest and inflation, is not enough to put it back, the same as it was.  The cost of somewhat restoring what was destroyed, would be more than a thousand times the money that was “made” from destroying it.  This kind of “economics,” plundering what the generations yet to come will need for short-term money making, is, Wub-e-ke-niew emphasized, simply and profoundly insane.  Only a crazy person would do something like that.  Some of what was destroyed can be repaired.  Some of can be restored, working with the processes of Nature, over a period of several centuries.  Some of it is probably gone forever, and what they were hoping is that the Aboriginal Indigenous People would be gone forever, too, and that nobody would be left to question what was done.