- Chapter VI -
            Euro-American perspectives

            The Western Europeans have written more than a thousand books about Chippewa Indians.[i]  None of them is an accurate description of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway or other Aboriginal Indigenous people, because these books and other documents have been written from an European perspective.  The Lislakh patriarchal languages have been developed over the centuries to obscure the possibility of egalitarian society--and even when Western European historians, social scientists, and other writers are face-to-face with egalitarian people, their language imposes a hierarchical, male-dominated structure on their perceptions and understanding of the real world which is around them.  Very few Western Europeans have critically examined the deepest structures of their languages using the hypothesis that other structures actually exist--and even fewer have transcended the linguistic patterning of their mind to see beyond.  They do not have the grammar, the vocabu­lary, or the mythic and syntax structure to describe egalitarian, Aboriginal Indigenous people in our own context.  As the feminists who have struggled with such surface problems as Ms., his/hers, and chair-persons know, the Western European languages are Man-made, strongly influenced by the medieval male Church hierarchy.  The meaning of English-language words continues to be mutated, restructur­ing linguistic reality to meet the needs of the ruling patriarchs.  Even high-class White women are disadvantaged by the English language.

            There are a few books which have been catalogued as having been written in the so-called Red Indian languages.  Those which I have seen are written in Chippewa, not Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, are hierarchically structured, and are frequently the work of Christian missionaries.

William Warren's "Bible of Chippewa History"

            William Whipple Warren, Indian historian, had an article and a book published.  The article, Oral Traditions Respecting the History of the Ojibwa [sic] Nation, published in 1852,[ii] was either edited or ghosted by Indian Agent Henry Schoolcraft, who apparently used William Warren to give writing which promoted Schoolcraft's agenda an aura of legitimacy.

            The book attributed to William Warren has been called the "Bible of Chippewa Indian History:" History of the Ojibway [sic] People, published thirty-two years after his death, by the Minnesota Historical Society in 1885.

            Despite a precautionary preface written by Roger Buffalohead in the reprint edition of 1984, the implication remains that W.W. Warren wrote about the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.  Warren's book is based on a manuscript which passed into the hands of his fellow Minnesota Territorial politician and treaty-maker Hon. Henry M. Rice after Warren's death, and eventually was donated to the Historical Society; his notes have not been preserved.  Warren claimed to speak the Ojibway [sic] language "perfectly,"[iii] although the language he spoke was the fur trade Creole of the Métis.  He served as an interpreter for the 1847 Treaty of Fond du Lac, of which Henry Rice noted[iv], without understand­ing the irony, that "the Indians [sic] said he understood their language better than themselves."

            Warren claims the matrilineal Crane Clan of the Chippewa Métis people, which has no relationship to the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Dodems.  By his own admission he was a product of Western European civilization, a European subject with a European patriline.  Warren's father was a White man, patrilineal descendant of Mayflower Pilgrims who migrated from beyond the East coast, and became involved in the fur trade and later in the United States Government Indian Service.  His mother was Mary Cadotte, a Catholic French Métis woman without an Ahnishinah­bæó^tjibway Dodem, whose family had been a part of the fur trade for several generations.  William Warren married the daughter of a Scottish-born fur trader and one of his "several" Métis wives, and he served in the Minnesota Territorial legislature.  One of William Warren's sons, William "Tyler" Warren, born in 1848, followed his father's interest in Indians by becoming a partner in a Wild West Show headquartered in Philadelphia.

            The Warrens are White Indians with matrilineal roots in the fur trade.  They are not Aboriginal Indigenous people.  Mary Cadotte is the only Indian ancestor for a great many of her more than five hundred descendants who became enrolled Indians, more than a hundred of whom received land allotments on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota.  One of Mary Cadotte's daughters married a White man, three of whose patrilineal descendants are presently recognized as Chippewa Indian Chiefs at Red Lake; this is nearly half of the seven hereditary Chiefs which the United States Government appoints as token advisors to the I.R.A. Red Lake Chippewa Tribal Council.  (None of the U.S. Govern­ment's Chiefs at Red Lake have an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Dodem.)  These Lislakh people have taken on the identity of Indians, and the Western Europeans are promoting these subject Indians as though they were Aboriginal Indigenous people.

            William Warren was writing from the perspective of his times, a White Indian man with an East-Coast education who seems anxious to please his White friends.  His book is a mish-mash of pure fantasy, a re-hash of the ugly stereotypes which White writers continue to promulgate about "wild Indians," and a pandering to mid-nineteenth century theories, including that Indians are the lost tribes of Israel.[v]  (Since many of the French Métis people misidentified as Indians were Moorish mixed-bloods when they got off the trans-Atlantic boat, there is a kernel of truth to this.)  Warren's book also includes a wealth of oral history, but whose history?

            Warren traces the history of the French Métis he is writing about to "the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, about the Gulf of the St. Lawrence River."  He chronicles the Métis beginning on this Continent, and their subsequent migrations and conflicts in a florid parody of Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway syntax, and uses sacrilegious misinterpretation of Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Midé scrolls to bolster his and Schoolcraft's fabrications.

            In the mid-nineteenth century, much of the English-speaking peoples' concept of "history" was a chronicle of battles and Kings.  Warren wrote from this world-view, soliciting[vi] "details about 'all the events of importance that had happened ... especially the battles their ancestors had fought with their many and different enemies."  His book is filled with battles, torture, bloody fights, attacks, wars, massacres and feuds.  Warren tries to justify occupation by conquest, implying that this violence is Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.  He sprinkles his book with detail which he says is about the "Ojibway [sic]" (a few slivers of which could have been derived from an European perspective of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway), but most of what he is writing is about the European and Métis frontier: the battles between the French Métis and the Spanish Mestizos and the British Mixed-bloods; the bloody fights between brigands[vii] of voyageurs, the violent conflicts between fur companies, some of which are also documented in other sources, for example the:[viii]

            conflict between the Hudson's Bay Company and the North-West Company.  [Tanner] was present in the interest of [the] former company when its employees seized the latter's trading fort at Pembina in June, 1816.  Tanner states, "In forty days after we left Rainy Lake, we arrived at Red River, and took the fort at the mouth of the Pembinah, without any difficul­ty, there being few or no persons there, except squaws and children, and a few old Frenchmen ..."

            Warren was a White Indian who was writing about Métis history and Métis traditions.  Either he or his posthumous co-authors intentionally confused the Métis with the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.  There are a number of other so-called Indian books, written by so-called Indians, using the same paradigm.

Anthropologists

            Anthropologists and other social scientists have tried to study every people in the world, seeking to understand the holistic reality of humanity over space and time, and the patterns of culture, with scientific rigor.  When I was young, there were several anthropologists on every Indian Reservation, and although there are no longer Ph.D. students walking around with notebooks, social scientists are still studying the Reservation: using the Indian court system and other Euro-American institutions both as a source of data and as a tool for manipulating the community (for example, family violence).

            One of the problems with anthropology is that science is, itself, an artifact of Western European culture, and is saturated with the values of Western European civilization.  Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway society is egalitarian, and this fundamental understanding of the reality of We the People, Grandmother Earth, and Grandfather Midé, is central to who we are.  Anthropologists, to whom egalitarian societies "exist only in theory,"[ix] state unequivocally:

            [I]n actuality, all societies assign status, implying hierar­chy of one sort or another.  Status is based on the relative merit of an individual in comparison to others in a group.  Some individuals are judged more highly, and some more lowly than others.  ...  In stratified societies, status is rewarded with social advantage [power over others] as well as prestige.  All societies require leadership of some sort.  ...  The role of shaman, or medicine man, ... gives him individual advantage over others ... he is of higher status.

This is a projection, a self-serving interpretation made through a distorting lens, the "glass wall" of Lislakh culture.  It is a reflection of the Western Europeans' long history of domination by theocracy or centralized states deriving authority from the dogma of a religious hierarchy, and has nothing to do with sovereign Aboriginal Indigenous peoples' social organization.

            If anthropologists came into our community with courtesy and respect, trying to find common ground rather than defining us in their terms, they would see us differently than they have.

            Anthropologists have a long tradition of social engineering, as explained by Margaret Mead in 1942:[x]

            ... the British invented a special use for anthropologists as advisers to the government.  In colonial countries, where a small colonial staff had to administer large areas filled with native people speaking diverse languages and practicing a large number of strange and diverse customs, there are always administrative problems: Why is there a sudden outbreak of headhunting in the gold-fields? ... What will be the response of a tribe of two hundred fishing people if the government moves them to other land?  These are recurrent situations, and some governments retained anthropologists to find immediate answers to these vexatious questions.  Trained to get the outlines of a situation quickly in cultural terms, the anthropologist was asked to find the source of the trouble and to suggest satisfactory answers.  His answers had to be within the rules the colonial adminis­tration as set up ...  education was too long a process. ...

The anthropologists, and the masters they serve, have been approaching their inter-relationship with Aboriginal Indigenous people from the perspective of, "I own this, this is mine," instead of, "Hello.  Can I come in," and working with us as human beings equal to themselves.  With hierarchical attitudes of superiority, no matter how subtle, they are creating their own barriers between themselves and egalitarian peoples.  Margaret Mead saw these barriers as an advantage, and explained in 1976:[xi]

            It's a lot easier to study the cultures where you can't marry people, where there's such a gulf that that kind of over-identification doesn't occur.  The minute you study a culture where you might marry them, or adopt their children, or be adopted by them, you get new complications.  Extreme ones.

Dr. Mead was answering an interviewer's question about anthropologists who "joined the tribe."  This was a one-sided question: in Western European culture, White men can marry Aboriginal Indigenous women, but White women are not supposed to marry Aboriginal Indigenous men.  There were miscegenation laws against this.  The cases in point cited by the interviewer were male anthropologists.  The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway and many other Aboriginal Indigenous societies are patrilocal, meaning that when one of our women marries a White man, her relationship to her birth people changes--she has married into her husband's people, and in some very important ways her social identity becomes that of a White woman.  (The Métis of Canada are just now confronting this.)  Western European social science is a one-way street: the anthropologists' studies of their subject people are considered legitimate science, but the Western European social structure and social engineering precludes reciprocity.

            The Western European society which draws the anthropologists' agenda does not intend to live in egalitarian harmony with Aboriginal Indigenous peoples.  They do not plan to leave our resources unexploit­ed.  The élite of anthropological ethical institutions, Cultural Survival of Harvard University, helped draft the International Cultural Survival Act of 1988, which included:[xii]

                        Historical processes do not make small traditional societies disappear.  Greed and a lack of understanding, however, do.  Such groups are weak and tempting targets to the development programs that they are presumed to hinder or in the name of States that they are presumed to subvert.

                        There is no reason, however, that indigenous and tribal peoples cannot survive, both physically and culturally, the rapid changes that contact with expanding industrial societies and economic and political institutions brings. ...

                        As the push to exploit the resources of the Earth reaches the remaining untouched areas of the world, contact with isolated societies is inevitable [sic]--but their destruction is not.  These vulnerable societies need the benefits of modern life [sic], but to survive they need the ability to choose how much they will adapt and how long the process will take.

                        Their survival is important for our own ... indigenous peoples have rich storehouses of information ...

Cultural Survival does not address the Western Europeans' claim of purported rights to come onto Aboriginal Indigenous peoples' land and exploit the resources, in many cases destroying the permacultural subsistence base.  I am suspicious of anybody who tells me that change on their terms, no matter how nobly they perceive them, is inevitable.

Of anthropologists and Indians

            Margaret Mead wrote in 1965,[xiii] "We know that if we can get a cultural description exactly right it will have the effect of making those who are characterized by it laugh harder and more warmly than they would at a similar characterization in some other culture."

            United States Government ethnologist W.J. Hoffman described the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Midé:[xiv]

            This opposition [to Christianity] still exists among the leading classes of a number of the Algonkian [sic] tribes, ... many of whom have been more or less isolated and beyond convenient reach of the Church.  The purposes of the society are twofold; first to preserve the traditions just men­tioned, and second, to give a certain class of ambitious men and women sufficient influence through their acknowledged power of exorcism and necromancy to lead a comfortable life at the expense of the credulous. ...

Hoffman and other U.S. ethnologists were locked into their own culture, and even on the rare occasions when they talked to Aboriginal Indigenous people rather than the Métis informants with whom they were more comfortable, they saw their own projections.  The Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway have never had a hierarchical society, and using our Grandfather Midé to gain power over other people remains unthink­able.

            Indian Reorganization Act Chippewa Chairman Roger Jourdain kicked the anthropologists out of Red Lake Reservation in the 1960's.  This was a meaningless gesture.  As is made clear from their lists of informants,[xv] the anthropologists were studying the Chippewa Indians.  Roger Jourdain might have been worried that the anthropologists would find out that he and most other Chippewa Indians are impostors, that they are really French Métis.  There is a rapport between the Chippewa Indians and the White anthropologists that does not exist between either one of these groups and the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.  The Chippewa Indians have the same religion, the same values, and the same hierarchical language structure as the anthropologists who were studying them.

            University Indian Studies departments are also promoting the artificially created Indian identity.  According to many Indian Studies departments, a good way to be a Real Indian is to put on your feathers and go to pow-wows, just like the Boy Scouts playing Indian.[xvi]  (Roger Jourdain and his entourage started vicious rumors about Mike Stately, who is a professional police officer, because his wife wanted to start a Boy Scout troop on the Red Lake Reservation.  The Boy Scouts' Indian programs run into conflict with the Federally Recognized Indians, who want a monopoly on plagiarizing Aboriginal Indigenous peoples' identity and culture.)[xvii]

            The pow-wows Indians sponsor have nothing to do with the Aboriginal Indigenous peoples' religious and social gatherings.  These Indian pow-wows have music with a European cadence, costumes out of Hollywood, and big-money prizes.  It's a three-ring circus, complete with unintentional clowns, a Barnum and Bailey show of wanna-be's easing the White man's guilt.  The Euro-Americans have yet to come to terms with the massive genocide of the Aboriginal Indigenous peoples of this Continent.

            Anthropologists have wasted a lot of ink, written a lot of fantasies out of their own sub-conscious about Indians, while Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway just sat back and watched with amusement.  Some of the anthropological studies of Indians read like Rorschach tests of the anthropologists.

            Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway have been observing the Europeans and Euro-Americans for more than a hundred years.  French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss[xviii] suggests that "third world anthropologists come study" the Western Europeans.  It would be fun to write anthropological studies of the Euro-Americans, and tempting to use their own styles of anthropological writing to describe the paradoxical structure of their decadent and unbalanced society: their anarchy of laws which do not apply to the law-makers, their foolishness, the rapacity of their economic system, their criminal behavior, their detached relationship to reality and paucity of common sense, and their violent male-centered social hierarchy and its consequences.  There are a lot of good people who are Euro-Americans, but the ethos of their culture, and of the leadership to which they have acquiesced, is written very clearly in the past five hundred years of their history and in their present relationship to this land.

            The Euro-American nouveau riche spend a lot of time, effort, and energy finding European nobility in their family tree, although some branches of their family tree break abruptly at this Continent's Atlantic Coast.  Some families changed their names, some people said they were orphans, records were lost or destroyed, but the prison boats kept going back and forth, exporting resources and bringing indentured labor to the Virginia Company and other corporations exploiting the resources of this Continent.  Schoolchildren are told that the Founding Fathers said "all men are created equal,"[xix] and that anybody could be President.  But, the hierarchical social system of the Euro-Americans has its roots in Europe, and there is a very restricted upper class.  Only a White European man can become President (the U.S. Constitution refers to the President with a specifically male pronoun), and the majority of U.S. Presidents have been related by blood to the European royal extended family.[xx]  There is a hereditary class of a few privileged people, and then there are the homeless, and those in prison, those working for minimum wage, and all the rest.  Every once in awhile, about once a generation, there is an economic depression and inflation, designed to create problems which keep people in their station in life.

            In the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway culture, each person holds their personal Sovereignty.  No human being holds Sovereignty over another.  That is one of the crucial differences between the hierarchical and egalitarian cultures.  We had no need for greed, competition or violence.  Our philosophy and our religion were connected to reality and in harmony.  That's why our land was the way it was when the Europeans got here.  It was beautiful, it was a generous paradise.

            There was enough for everyone in our primeval forests.  I remember the old-growth trees which remained in my childhood, the White Pine, so big that three men couldn't get their arms around them.  Many of them were so old that they were living here before Columbus was born.  Now, our Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway permacultural infrastructure has been destroyed, in accordance with Western European free-market economics and the self-proclaimed apex of cultural evolution upon which that economic philosophy is based.

            The Euro-Americans have written an enormous body of Indian mythology to justify what they have done.  They have used the more than one hundred Indian Reservations which they established as social laboratories, studying captive people like animals in a cage, after they have destroyed our ecosystem and our food supply, and hooked us into their dollar-economics scheme.  Now, they are studying us in the context of the culture of poverty they have created: food stamps, unemployment, and despair.  Why aren't they studying us in our Aboriginal Indigenous context of an intact ecosystem and self-sufficiency?  The Euro-Americans are using their Métis people to redefine Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway history to fit their own paradigm--while destroying the Métis at the same time, turning them into Indian wards of the United States Government under trusteeship.

            Anthropologists are re-defining the Aboriginal Indigenous peoples of this Continent as Indians because, in their perspective, Indian "is the one term that applies."[xxi]  The nature of the Indian identity is such that this is a human rights violation, as well as being inaccu­rate.

            The social scientists and social engineers did not realize their war culture would draw Aboriginal Indigenous people into their off-Reservation labor force as a part of their war machine, and that some of us would thereby have the opportunity to learn their language and study them in their own context--that we would go beyond dismissing their behavior as incomprehensible foolishness and a very strange gift from Nanaboozho,[xxii] and understand how these Western European people really think.