- Chapter IV -
            Indian treaties

            Indian is an English-language word, which came through the Late Latin, Latin, and Greek languages, and originally referred to the River Indus; it comes from the same roots as the word Indo-European.[i]  There is also a folk etymology which is gaining currency: the word Indian came from the Spanish "en Dios," referring to the Judeo-Christian God.  The word Indian is not indigenous to this Continent, and does not refer to the autochthonous peoples of this Continent, who are linguistically invisible in the Western European languages.  Indian is an euphemism for European subject person.  The English word, Indian, is defined by the dictionary[ii] as "a. Of or pertaining to India or the East Indians; also, noting, belonging to, or pertaining to the race embracing the aborigines of America ..."[iii].  Indians and Aboriginal Indigenous people are not the same people.  In the 1950's people admitted this, and many of the same individuals who now vehemently proclaim their Indian-ness, openly referred to themselves as "French Canadians."  Neither the Indians, nor the Europeans who created the Indians, have a sense of their own identity.  They do not know who they are in the same way that an Aboriginal Indigenous person does.

            In the ancient religious philosophy of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, life is based on a circle: a circle of equals rather than a hierarchy, inter-connected spheres of life in harmony with each other.  The Europeans' culture, like all hierarchies, is based on a power struggle.  There was no patriarch in our society, and there was no power struggle.  There are no words for war, or peace in the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway language.  There is no word for God, no word for Devil, no word for Chippewa, and no word for Indian.[iv]  Our language and our culture are inseparable from our all-encompassing religious philosophy; for us all time, all thought and all action, is within the non-violent context of Grandfather Midé and Grandmother Earth.  Our land and our forests are, and have always been, an integral part of our religion, our philosophy and our very identity as Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.

            One does not sell his/her identity; one does not sell one's relations, one's family burial ground, religion, nor philosophy.  In the treaty-making process, the Euro-Americans dealt with their subject people, the Chippewa Indians whom they had created through coloniza­tion, mythology and genetic engineering.  These people were not from here, and had no deep connections to this land.  The United States Government expediently dealt with Métis and White Indians who had Western European values rather than Aboriginal Indigenous ones.  As Indian Commissioner Thomas Morgan wrote in his 1892 Report to Congress, to suggest that mixed-bloods were not Indians in terms of their right to claim the property of the putative tribe:[v]

            would unsettle and endanger the titles to much of the lands that have been relinquished by Indian tribes and patented to citizens of the United States.

The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway had no part in any of the U.S. Government's Indian treaties or agreements.

Various European territorial claims

            The European subject Métis who have been defined as Indian wards of the U.S. Government under trusteeship, have no legally defensible rights.  Whatever rights they claim as Indians are administered through Chief Jim Crow and his squaw, A-par-theid.  The United States' dealings with their Indians, in Treaties and subsequent documents called Agreements, did not relate to the European concepts of eminent domain, consummated national title, and imperial dominion.  This cornerstone of the relationship between colonial nations and the territory which was presumed to comprise them (for the sake of brevity referred to as eminent domain), had already been claimed by European nations under their doctrines of right of Christian royalty to discovery, sometimes subject to consummation by exploration and occupation.  The eminent domain claimed by European nations was divided and transferred among themselves under various facets of their so-called International Law under war and peace.  The unipartite and indivisible, holistic inter-relationship of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Midé and other Aboriginal Indigenous nations to Grandmother Earth was considered irrelevant, and was redefined by the racist European colonizers as "aboriginal occupancy" invested with approximately the same rights as a "wild animal."  This is an European perspective, derived from imperial Roman Law, which has no validity on this Continent.

            The part of what is now called the State of Minnesota, west of the Mississippi, had been claimed by Spain, then France, then Spain, and in 1803 the European claim of eminent domain was transferred to the British-Americans of the United States, under the Louisiana Purchase.[vi]  The land east of the Mississippi River, in the area now designated as part of the State of Minnesota, had been claimed by the United States since the end of the American Revolution in 1783, at which time the boundary to the west of Lake Superior was described as following the line of water communica­tion to the Lake of the Woods, through that Lake to its Northernmost point, and then proceeding due west to the Mississippi River.[vii]  In 1787 this somewhat mythological[viii] area was made a part of the Northwest Territory, and in 1819 the United States built Fort St. Anthony and renamed Fort Snelling, on the East Bank of the Mississippi River where the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area has been built.  Indian treaties had nothing to do with any of this, although treaties between the European sovereigns did.

Indian treaties

            By the time the British and British-Americans began negotiating Treaties with Indians, there was a large population of Métis people who were identified as Indians.  They had White or other Lislakh fathers, and had lost their identity and values as Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway or other Aboriginal Indigenous people.  These Métis Indians were the people with whom the treaties were signed.  The Indian treaties were written by the Europeans and Euro-Americans with the assumption that the European Sovereigns already had eminent domain, and what the Indians were ceding was usufruct and tenancy, giving up their rights of occupancy so that the territory ceded could be occupied by White settlers and their Black slaves.  The Whites implied that the Indians could cede Aboriginal Indigenous peoples' rights, which they could not.  Chief Justice John Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court put it:[ix]

            The Indian territory is admitted to compose a part of the United States.  In all our maps, geographical treatises, histories, and laws, it is so considered.  They [the Indians] acknowledge themselves in their treaties to be under the protection of the United States; they admit that the United States shall have the sole and exclusive right of regulating the trade with them, and managing their affairs as they think proper. ... They occupy a territory to which we assert a title independent of their will, which must take effect in point of possession when their right of possession ceases. ... The Court has bestowed its best attention on this question, and after mature deliberation, the majority is of opinion that an Indian tribe or nation within the United States is not a foreign state in the sense of the constitution ...

This decision, which led to the Cherokee Trail of Tears in 1832, and is the one usually cited in U.S. claims of jurisdiction over Indians under what is called Sacred Trusteeship, was decided on the basis of Métis people whose Sovereignty was already held by the European hierarchy.  The Cherokee Indian leader, John Ross, was "descendant on his father's side of a trading family of Scots"[x], and "in [the Cherokee] settlements were many mixed bloods resulting from the influx into Cherokee territory of Virginian settlers, British Tories, and itinerant peddlers from Germany."[xi]  Marshall's decision was decided in accord with a philosophy of Natural Law in which the Supreme Lawgiver, the summa "of reason and might, justice and power"[xii] was the Trinity of Christian Deity, as mediated through Roman Law.  This remains a racist world-view in which Aboriginal Indigenous people are beyond the paradigm, non-existent in terms of rights defined by Western European civilizations for themselves.  It also has absolutely no application to Ahnishinahbæ­ó^tjibway and other Aboriginal Indigenous people, or any of our rights or property.  No matter what claims the Judeo-Christians make about the omnipotence of their God and thus their world-view, such philosophies do not belong on this Continent.

Pembina negotiations 1849-1851

            Minnesota was categorized by the White man as a politically distinct territory in 1849.  At that time, Minnesota Territory included not only the area later defined as the State of Minnesota, but also much of North and South Dakota.  The United States Census of 1850 enumerated six thousand, seventy-seven people in Minnesota Territo­ry.[xiii]  The Census enumerated Whites as well as French Métis people.

            In 1850, Major Woods reconnoitered the "North-Western Frontier of the Territory of Minnesota" at the behest of Secretary of War,[xiv] acting as an advance man for the treaty-making expeditions to come.  He described his meeting with the Chippewa Métis Indians at Pembina:

            I told them I had been sent to that country by the President (these people recognizing no authority but that emanating from the President) to examine it and see them; that the President was a stranger to them and their country; that he was anxious to bring them within the protecting guardianship of the United States; to provide them, as our other Indian tribes, with such necessities of life as were now beyond their reach; to encourage and aid them in habits of life that would place them above a dependence on the game of the plains for their subsistence; ... that it was his ardent wish that our frontiers might be traversed in safety by Whites and Indians; that he would adopt measures to enforce this wish by sending large military forces into the country ...  I urged them to organize themselves into a band, and appoint their chiefs[xv] that they might have some order and government amongst them­selves with chiefs ...; that as they were, if the United States had any business to transact with them, there was no person to address from whom the wishes of the people could be obtained, &c., &c.

            They replied to me by several speakers, in substance: that they had separated from the Chippewas of Lake Superior a long time back, and came to that country in the pursuit of game and furs ...  Their "old men" say that the buffalo have decreased by about one-half within their recollec­tion; that the reflecting portion of them see very plainly that the buffalo must eventually disappear, and their children will be left to starve. ... They could not agree about their chiefs and requested me to appoint them, which I declined; but after much fruitless discussion, with no prospect of agreement amongst themselves, I told them that there were three men, whose names I gave them, that had been highly recommend­ed to me as suitable men for chiefs. ... They came back the next day in a body, and informed me that they had agreed upon the men I had nominated to them.

                        "Sakikwanel," in English "Green feather," to be principal chief

                        "Majekkwadjiwau," in English "End of the Current," to be 1st 2nd chief

                        "Kakakanawakkagan," in English "Long Legs," to be 2d chief.

            These are the men they selected, with my assistance, for their chiefs.  I did not feel authorized to appoint them, and intended to do it conditionally and submit their credentials to the Governor of Minnesota Territory, and the Superintendent of Indian Affairs therein; but finding that a conditional exercise of authority in the matter would only give rise to further dissentions [sic], I presented these chiefs with appointments, in writing, dating the 24th of August, '49, and gave each of them a medal.

            I am happy to say that, since my return, Governor Ramsey has approved of my course.  After the above narrated ceremony was over, I again spoke to them, and told them what was expected of them in their intercourse with whites, with half-breeds, and with each other, and with neighboring tribes.  I told the chief what were their duties, and also the sub-chiefs.[xvi]

Major Woods also organized the French people he identified as half-breeds:

            On the 24th of August these people had returned from their Spring hunt, and about 200 of the hunters came to see me.  They had appointed four men as their speakers.  I told them that in virtue of their Indian extraction, those living on our side of the line were regarded as being in possession of the Indians' right upon our soil;[xvii] that they were on our frontiers treated as component parts of the Indian tribes; that they either came under the Indians' laws or regulations, or formed such for themselves.  I urged them to organize themselves into a band under a council or chiefs, invested with ample authority to act in their name, in all matters which might arise to affect their interests ...  The next day they returned in about the same numbers, and presented me with nine names as the committee they had selected for the future government of the half-breed population within our borders.  Mr. Wilky, the first on the list, is the president of the committee.  He is a French half-breed, of a good character, well disposed toward the United States, and intelligent.  The other eight of the council are men the most esteemed in the country, and friendly toward the United States.  They say it is their wish to become agriculturalists. ...  Their desire for a military post is urged ...

            As the letter of the Secretary of the Interior to the President, in relation to that frontier, was sent me with my instructions, I ventured to suggest to them that the United States contemplated opening that country for settlement.  To do which it would be necessary, first, to extinguish the Indian title.  ... The half-breeds are delighted at such a prospect, and would readily acquiesce in reasonable treaty stipula­tions for the country.  The Indians are more phlegmatic of their high appreciation of such a blessing ... The still more distant Indians that have their abode on the Missouri river, ... and Red Lake, ... must be dealt with by expeditions and a vigorous policy.[xviii]

            The half-breeds are much more numerous than the Indians in this Department.  They are mixed bloods of different tribes which have spread themselves from the stony mountains to the Atlantic ocean.  We have counted the descendants of thirteen different bands.  ... The half-breeds are mild, generous, polished in their manners, and ready to do a kindness; of great uprightness, not over anxious of becoming rich ...  They are generally gay and fond of enjoyment; they affect music, there being but a few, comparatively speaking, who do not play the violin.  ... We see but slight dissensions in their families, which are for the most part numerous.  ... The half-breeds number over five thousand souls.  They first established themselves at Pembina, near the mouth of the river of that name, about 1818, when they had with them a resident Canadian priest.[xix]

            In 1851, two years after Major Woods had done the groundwork, Governor Alexander Ramsey of Minnesota Territory went to Pembina to make a treaty with the Pembina and Red Lake Chippewa.  He was accompanied by an escort of dragoons from Fort Snelling, commanded by Second Lieutenant James L. Corley of the Sixth United States Infantry, and "equipped in excellent style for active service."[xx]  The expedition's guide was Pierre Bottineau, who sometimes wore a White man's hat and sometimes a half-breed's chapeau.  The 1851 Treaty Session began September 15 at Norman Kittson's fur trade post at Pembina.  According to Willoughby M. Babcock, who recorded the proceedings, "some two hundred and fifty members of the Pembina and Red Lake bands of Chippewa" were present.  There may have been a few Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway who were present as third-party observers; however the Chippewa Métis and French Métis were the Indian principals of the treaty.  Babcock wrote that, "in addition there were several hundred half-breeds--the actual occupants of the land in question, who were not slow to press their claims for compensation should the government agree to purchase it," as well as other Indians.  Although Woods had informed the half-breeds, two years earlier, that they were to be treated as Indians, at that point the "United States barred them from 'participation in the treaty council', so during the negotiations they stood around the negotiating table."[xxi]  The treaty was made by Alexander Ramsey and Reverend J.P. Bardwell during two days of "holding informational interviews with the chiefs and headmen" who had been appointed by U.S. Government officials, after which Alexander Ramsey abruptly adjourned.  It provided for the cession of a tract approxi­mately thirty miles wide on each side of the Red River, annuity payments (some of which had already been spent at Kittson's trading post), and consolida­tion with "other bands of Chippewa."[xxii]  This 1851 Treaty was rejected by the U.S. Senate during the Spring of 1852.

            Alexander Ramsey made certain that the people he dealt with the next time would be unable to speak English.  In 1852, he issued an executive order abolishing the teaching of reading, writing, and English to both the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and the Indians, and "the substitution of manual-training system.  He was supported by all Indian agents of Winnebago, the Sioux, and the Ojibwa [sic].  This had an effect on Red Lake as the mission or religious school was abandoned in about 1855."[xxiii]  Some Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway at Red Lake are convinced that Ramsey's executive order has not yet been rescinded.

The 1863 treaty at Old Crossing

            In 1863, under the Abraham Lincoln Administration of the United States, Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey again "negotiated a treaty" with a group of people the U.S. government defined as the "Red Lake and Pembina Bands of Chippewa Indians," i.e. predominantly French Métis.  On September 21 of that year, he came to the "Old Crossing" of the Red Lake River, which was on one of the main routes of the Red River Oxcarts.  Governor Ramsey's military escort included "180 mounted men, 68 army (6-mule) wagons, 13 ox wagons, and a half dozen other vehicles."[xxiv]  It included the 8th Regiment of the Minnesota Volun­teers, the 1st Regiment of the Minnesota Mounted Rangers, the 3rd Minnesota Battery, United States Army Indian Scouts, and probably more of the United States Army than is enumerated by Ramsey, since Captain Ruffee (who later was Indian Agent at Red Lake and Leech Lake, when these Reservations were under military control) was there.

            On September 22, according to Governor Ramsey and Indian Trader Ashley Morrill's official journal (which the U.S. Government hid for more than a century as classified information), the French Pembina Métis arrived, along with Hole-in-the-Day and a number of professional Indian treaty-signers.  Ramsey writes that he did not want the Pembina half-breeds there, but he delayed the negotiations until they got there.[xxv]  He justified including the Pembina half-breeds in the negotiations by writing:[xxvi]

            [T]he Pembina Indians are completely under the control of their half-breed relatives, and could not have been induced to come unless accompanied by the latter, who have been long accustomed to consider themselves, to a certain extent, the real owners of the soil, and as having even a greater interest in any treaty for its purchase than its far less numerous or powerful aboriginal occupants.

Alexander Ramsey[xxvii] counted "579 Indians, 24 half-breeds ... of the Red Lake Bands," of whom most were Chippewa Métis, and a few were Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway who were observing the proceedings.  Ramsey also enumerated "362 Indians and 663 half-breeds" from Pembina, most of whom were the French, French Métis, and Scots associated with Norman Kittson's fur trading post on the Red River.  Ramsey also wrote that "nearly all the half-breed [French, British, and Métis] population from Saint Joseph" were at the Old Crossing, as well as a number of United States-Appointed Chiefs from Leech Lake and Crow Wing.

            The 1863 Old Crossing negotiations were against the backdrop of the Civil War.  Métis men were serving in the Union Army as both volunteers and draftees,[xxviii] and their descriptions of the violence they had seen were discussed both among their own people and in the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway community.  Because of the massive war expenses incurred by the Union, Ramsey was under considerable pressure to finalize the treaty, so that the Red River Valley could be sold to White settlers, and the proceeds credited to United States accounts in the U.S. Treasury.

            The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway were also aware of the "exterminate or relocate" programs being carried out at that time by the Cavalry against our relatives, the Aboriginal Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains.  Ramsey specifically alluded to the mass execution of 38 Aboriginal Indigenous men, hung in Mankato, Minnesota on December 26, 1862, and the imprisonment of nearly 300 more.  In 1863, the bounty-payment paid by the State of Minnesota for Indians' and Aboriginal Indigenous peoples' scalps was raised to more than one hundred dollars, and white settler Nathan Lamson had been paid $500 by the State for a scalp.[xxix]  Some of the Métis and other Indian scouts were among the scalp-bounty hunters.[xxx]

            On September 23, Governor Ramsey gave a speech which opened negotiations for what was presented as a right-of-way for a road across the Red Lake Ahnishinahbæ­ó^tjibway Nation.  Ramsey had unsuccessfully tried before to get the Red Lake Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway to sell our land, and his talk about right-of-way was misrepresenting his purposes.

            Governor Alexander Ramsey recorded his speech introducing the treaty in his journal:[xxxi]

            Now, there is growing up a trade of considerable importance between the British settlements on the north and the American settlements on the south. ... Now, this is a trade which cannot and must not be interrupt­ed.  And their Great Father, feeling this, and desirous to prevent any trouble between his white and red people, has sent us here to come to some understanding with you about it.  Their Great Father has no especial desire to get possession of their lands.  He does not want their lands at all if they do not want to part with them.  He has more land now than he knows what to do with.  He simply wishes that his people should enjoy the privilege of traveling through their country on steamboats and wagons unmolested.

            In 1863, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway did not speak English.  The Pembinas, the Chippewa Métis and the other Indians spoke French and Chippewa Creole, but they did not understand much English, either.

            The negotiations were translated by Paul H. Beaulieu, a  Frenchman whose patrilineal ancestor was French immigrant Pierre Hudon dit Beaulieu.[xxxii]  Paul H. Beaulieu's father was a French Canadian who came from Montreal to Wisconsin in the early nineteenth century, to manage the fur trade post at Lac du Flambeau.  Ramsey mentions[xxxiii] that Paul H. Beaulieu, had a "thorough acquaintance with the Chippewa [Métis Creole] language."  He neither spoke nor understood the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway language, and he had no inkling of what the Midé religion was about.  The transcripts of the proceedings were written in English only, by Governor Ramsey and Indian Agent Morrill.

            The same Paul H. Beaulieu had been employed by the Bureau as a part of the forcible relocation of Chippewa Indians and Ahnishinahbæó^t­jibway from Wisconsin and Eastern Minnesota in the 1850's.[xxxiv]  Paul H. Beaulieu and his relatives played an important role for the United States Government in subsequent dealings as proxies for the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, and with the United States' subject Chippewa Indi­ans.[xxxv]

            Pembina Trader Norman Kittson had been running steam-boats up and down the Red River: cutting forests as fuel for the wood-fired steam-boilers, starting forest fires.  These steamboats had a tendency to blow up--and they were operating in an area which was at that time hotly contested by rival factions of Europeans.[xxxvi]  Part of the Indian stereotype of the Euro-Americans was to blame Indians for the Whites' mishaps and misdeeds.

            Ramsey himself does not admit doing so, but he referred quite forcefully to "depredations" committed by "Pembina Indians" against the steamboats, making threats of retaliation against both the Indians and the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway for the alleged attacks on the steamboats.[xxxvii]

            Indian Trader Norman Kittson was allocated one hundred thousand dollars in the 1863 Treaty--at a time when the common working man earned less than a hundred dollars per year.  Ramsey used the Euro-Americans' execution by hanging of the Lakota people in Mankato as an example of possible United States action if Kittson were not paid for the steamboat through ratification of the treaty.

            In the European concept of war and peace, there has to be a confrontation in order to have a treaty.  Throughout the history of the Indian treaties the Europeans created confrontations in order to push their agenda.  Over and over (the Boston Tea Party is one of countless examples), people under European Sovereignty, whether White colonists, Cavalry, or Euro-Indians, precipitated incidents for which the Aboriginal Indigenous people were held liable.  Tanner's Narrative records "danger of attack by North-West [Fur] Company employees, disguised as Indians."[xxxviii]  Also, many of the so-called Chippewa Indians who were involved in the 1863 and other Chippewa treaties were French Métis who had been defeated in the French-and-Indian wars, and relocated as a conquered people.

            In spite of Governor Ramsey's classical Treaty strong-arm tactics, the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway categorically rejected the proposed treaty of 1863.[xxxix]  As Little Rock explained to the Treaty Commissioners (and was inaccurately translated), Aboriginal Indigenous people cannot sell our sacred relationship to the land nor our religion:[xl]

            What I am to say I speak with truth and confidence.  I want the earth to listen to me, and I hope also that my grandfa­ther may be present to hear what I have to say, and I invoke the Master of Life [sic.  This is a mistranslation--he said Grandfather and meant Midé] to listen to the words I have to speak.  I hope there is not a single hole in the atmosphere in which my voice shall not be heard.  My friend, the question you have laid before us is of great importance to us.  We have heard the words you have uttered, and under­stood them partially. ... Now, my friend, I am going to show you how we came to occupy this land.  The Master of Life [sic] placed us here, and gave it to us for an inheritance.  ... The Master of Life [sic] gave us the river and the water thereof to drink, and the woods and the roads [sic] we depend on for subsistence, and you are mistaken if you think we derive no benefits from them.  The Master of Life [sic] gave it to us for an inheritance ...

            Now, my friend, I am going to show you a little.  You know partially what I am going to say.  Here, on this track [sic], is where my grandfather was placed--the one who made the soil.  The Master of Life [sic], when he put you here, never told you that you should own the soil; nor, when the Master of Life [sic] put me here, did he tell me that you should own the soil.  I see the place that was made for you on the other side of the great sea. ... The words that were told to my great-grandfather you shall hear, but not comprehend. ...

            And now that which he has given to his children for an inheri­tance has been shaken to the winds.  You have trodden it under your feet.  My friend, at the time I speak of they put four doors (pointing to the four cardinal points) for my great-grandfather's house.  They put persons to guard the doors--a guard at each door.  This is what was spoken by my great-grandfather at the house he made for us.  He was the one who spoke it.  And these are the words that were given to him by the Master of Life [sic]: 'At some time there shall come among you a stranger, speaking a language you do not understand.  He will try to buy the land from you, but do not sell it; keep it for an inheritance to your children.'"

Little Rock spoke from the heart.  I ask my Euro-American readers, would you sell an heirloom which had been in your family for nearly a million years?  Would you sell your identity, your religion, the graves of your ancestors, the very foundation of your lives?  I don't need to ask the Indians, because I know what they did.  The land was not theirs.  Would they have sold it, for less than two cents an acre, if it had been theirs?  I think not.

            According to Governor Ramsey's version of the proceedings, Little Rock is quoted as saying later in the Treaty proceedings, on Tuesday, September 29,[xli] that he, Little Rock, had decided on boundaries for the land that was to be ceded--boundaries which just happen to be exactly the same boundaries as the Treaty Commission intended when the negotiations began.  Little Rock is further quoted, by Ramsey, as saying that he "speak[s] on behalf of the chiefs, braves, young men, women, and children."

            As an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway who knows how our people think, I find it improbable beyond the remotest vestiges of credibility that the same person made both of the speeches which Ramsey attributed to Little Rock.  A Chippewa Indian would not have known (and they still don't know) enough about the Midé to give the earlier speech, and the Chippewa interpreters did a very bad job of translating it.  An Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway would have never claimed that they spoke on behalf of other Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway in agreeing to sell land, even under the threat of imprisonment and hanging from the gallows which Ramsey apparently made.[xlii]  What the White man writes as American History, including his version of Red Lake history, is filled with references to Indians speaking on behalf of everybody--that these Indians would do so is one of the reasons Lislakh people were used as Indians and Indian Chiefs.  For an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway to behave in this way would be a sacrilegious violation of our fundamental principles including that of personal Sovereignty.  Claiming to speak for others in the way that Ramsey alleges Little Rock did was, as Noam Chomsky terms it,[xliii] beyond "thinkable thought" for Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.

            The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway were aware of the Euro-Americans' standard Treaty-making procedure of having Indians sell land which was not theirs to sell.  The Red Lake Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway refused to agree to the Treaty, and remained at the negotiations until Governor Ramsey and his contingent left on Sunday, October 4, to make certain that agreement would not be made "for" the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway in our absence.  Ramsey records the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway's unanimous consensus against the Treaty as belonging exclusively to one man, writing that[xliv] "May-dwa-gun-on-ind,[xlv] however, it was evident, was the only obstacle in the way."

            What began as a right-of-way negotiation was taken to Washington D.C., where it was re-written as a boilerplate land cession treaty with which the U.S. unilaterally took about eleven million acres.  The people who actually agreed to the land cessions and payment to the fur traders in the treaty were not Ahnishinahbæó^t­jibway, and were not indigenous to this Continent.  Two of the people who allegedly agreed with X-marks as "Pembina Warriors" actually used their French names--Joseph Gornon and Joseph Montreuil.  Another, who the U.S. Government appointed as a Red Lake Indian Chief, was a Frenchman named Racine who used the name Kah-nun-dah-wah-wenzo as a professional treaty-signer, and who also helped "sell" land at the treaties of Sandy Lake, Gull Lake, and Boise Fort.  All of those who assented to this fraudulent treaty were European subject people who had no claim to Ahnishinah­bæó^tjib­way land.  Some of the Chippewa Indian Chiefs who helped legitimize the theft of Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway land were Scouts in the U.S. Army[xlvi] (including Chief White Cloud and Chief Red Bear); some had been Civil War draftees.

            In the winter of 1863-4, May-dwa-gan-on-ind, the "Red Lake Chief [sic] who had refused to sign the treaty ... walked a hundred and fifty miles [to White Earth] to lay his troubles before Bishop Whipple."[xlvii]  Whipple recorded in his diary that he left for Washington to inform the U.S. government that the Red Lake Indians [sic] did not know the character of the treaty they had made and that it was "from beginning to end a fraud..."[xlviii]

            The U.S. Senate took the 1863 Treaty and amended it in New York so that more land could be alienated with the use of Halfbreed Scrip.  One of the so-called Red Lake Indian Chiefs who was taken East to agree to the April 12, 1864 Amendments died of the persuasion he was given there.  Rotgut whiskey was used by the U.S. Government as standard procedure to procure "agreement" to Indian treaties.  As the widow of another victim of deadly Eastern treaty persuasion said over the body of her husband, "I told you not to touch that thing [whiskey] which has killed so many of our people.  Had you paid attention to my warning you would not be where now you are."

            Bishop Whipple was at the 1864 Amendment meetings as unpaid counsel to those he called Indians.  He is quoted by a historian who knew him personally as saying he "might as well have whistled against the wind,"[xlix] and later wrote that the role he played in Washington was "one of the severest personal conflicts" of his life.[l]

Halfbreed Scrip

            The U.S. issued Halfbreed Scrip on Section 8 of the 1864 Treaty Amendments, under the philosophy explained by William E. Unrau, biographer of mixed-blood Vice President of the United States, Charles Curtis:[li]

            Mixed-bloods played a pervasive role in the diminution of the Indian land base [sic] in the United States.  A critical examination of certain articles that were inserted in land-cession treaties from the Jefferso­nian era until the termination of the treaty mechanism in 1871, granting allotments or special concessions to mixed-bloods, suggests that without the cooperation of the mixed-bloods, tribal dispossession by the federal government would have been more difficult to accomplish.

                        Building on antecedents dating back to pre-Revolutionary America, exclusive benefits for mixed-bloods were regarded as rewards for assisting Indian Office personnel and for services on Reservations or at the treaty table and, more often than not, were justified on the "civilizing" impact they would have on the tribes [sic] as a whole.

Eighty thousand acres of virgin white and norway pine was cut on lands claimed with Red Lake and Pembina Half-Breed Scrip, and then the first issue of scrip was cancelled amid allegations of fraud.  The U.S. Government proceeded to issue a second set of Scrip in the 1870s.  It was the same old fraud all over again.  The timber companies used Halfbreed Scrip to gain access to the timber.  According to the 1880 McIntyre Report:[lii]

            1. Large numbers of pieces of [scrip] have been issued to persons who were not residents of the county ceded.  (The Treaty VII Article (13 Stat. page 690) [stated that applicants] 'may be located upon any of the lands ceded by said Treaty.')

            2. To people that were dead.

            3. To people not related to the Treaty Indians.

            4. To the same person under another name.

            5. To 'Senior' and 'Junior'--both one person.

            6. To the husband, and again to the widow, 'as his heir'

            Large numbers were defrauded out of the benefits by the parties who took their applica­tions, and in very many instances the name of the person fully entitled by age birth and residence have been forged not only in making the application and election but in the making the Powers of Attorney to receive the scrip from the Indian Office to locate and sell the lands at the local land office.

            There seem to be 3 classes in which fraud has occurred and which call for official notice.  What shall be done:

                        1. Where patents have already been issued?

                        2. Where scrip has been located but as yet not patented?

                        3. Pending applications for scrip? ...

About five hundred pieces of Halfbreed Scrip, covering 160 acres apiece, were issued, to anybody that was around.[liii]  The issuance of Scrip to White men was justified by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1871:[liv]

            There were found ... certain white men who were heads of mixed-blood families.  In order to give these families the benefit of the treaty, it was necessary that the husband or wife should be enrolled, and it was considered as doing less violence to the treaty to enroll the white husband and father as a mixed-blood, than to call the wife the head of the family. ... That Agent Gilbert himself did not put the claims of those white men upon equality with those of the half-breeds is evident from the fact that he collected from them, or allowed to be collected, a commission of $25 each before the delivery of the scrip.

Fevered speculation followed Scrip issue, and for a time there was a flurry of (illegal) Scrip trade in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

            The B.I.A. condoned timber piracy right on the Reservations, telling the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway that they "couldn't do anything about it."  The United States Government tacitly encouraged men whom they publicly condemned as "timber thieves."  In the early 1900's, the U.S. justified the theft by collecting stumpage, a fee which was a hidden tax.  The statute was enacted from H.R. 4384, with which the 48th U.S. Congress replaced the statutes derived from H.R. 846.[lv]