- Chapter VIII -
        Identity and stereotypes

            Indian is a fabricated identity which Western European civiliza­tion has applied to the Sovereign Aboriginal Indigenous peoples of these Continents, as well as to mixed-blood and White people under Western European control.  None of these people are Indians.  The Indian identity is a projection, a mythology embodying characteristics which the Western Europeans do not wish to recognize in themselves.

            The Western Europeans have come, uninvited, into other peoples' lands, trying to redefine reality for their own benefit.

            Western European stereotypes and labels are used to create identities which prescribe behavior for those who accept these external definitions as a description of themselves, pre-empting their own knowledge of who they are.  (Stereotypy is also defined as "abnormal repetition of speech or phrases, etc., as seen in some phases of schizophrenia."[i])  According to British psychiatrist R.D. Liang:[ii]

            ... the best way to control and manipulate an individual is not to tell them what to do; that always generates resistance, hostility and defiance.  Instead, tell a person who and what they are.  They will end up eating out of your hand, or in the case of the mass media, out of the sponsor's hand.  ... [The media] are mutually reinforcing resources in the American struggle for identity.

Synthetic identity is a means of externally-manipulated control both for individuals and for groups.  People who do not have full command of the English language are especially vulnerable.

            Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz describes the process of imposing an artificial identity:[iii]

                        Definers (that is, persons who insist on defining others) are like pathogenic microorganisms: each invades, parasitizes, and often destroys his victim; and, in each case, those whose resistance is low are the most susceptible to attack.  Hence, those whose immunological defenses are weak are most likely to contract infectious diseases; and those whose social defenses are weak--that is, the young and the old, the sick and the poor, and so forth--are the most likely to contract invidious definitions of themselves. ... In short, he who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other: he who defines thus dominates and lives; and he who is defined is subjugated and may be killed.

Why would anyone want to control someone else's identity, if they did not have a social engineering agenda?

            Labeling is done to maintain the hierarchical class system, so that the Western European élite can continue to live a life of luxury at the expense of everybody else.  Western Civilization's identities create conflict between artificially created and artificially separated groups of people who might otherwise stand together and address the class system which oppresses them all.

            Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway do not have a hierarchical class system.  We have always been an egalitarian and non-violent people.  We do not need to label people, and we do not need to force people into categories.  Each person is put on this Earth for some purpose.  We are not here to destroy or control others.  We are here to live as human beings, and to contribute something to this world.  The Europeans see it different­ly, and they have left destruction and great human suffering everywhere they have gone.  Our religion will not permit the kind of violence which is part of European values and culture.

            The exact meaning of the word, Indian, is unclear, and has been since, whoever the Indians were defined as being at that time, they were categorically excluded from representation under the U.S. Constitution.  As William E. Unrau, wrote in his biography of Indian U.S. Vice President Charles Curtis:[iv]

            ... the framers of the Constitution had provided no legal definition of the term "Indian."  Neither had the War Department or the Interior Department, the cabinet officials that had successively been responsible for the administration of Indian Affairs in the United States. ... Curtis also realized that Congress could make or unmake an Indian regardless of genealogy, ethnological data, treaty commitments, or tribal preference.  So could an employee of the Indian Office, acting under his interpretation of federal law or the directive of an adminis­trative superior, as Curtis knew well from personal experience.

The United States Congress American Indian Policy Review Commission answered the question, "Who Is an Indian?" in 1977:[v]

            The Federal Government, State governments and the Census Bureau all have different criteria for defining 'Indians' ... and even Federal criteria are not consistent among Federal agencies. ...

The word democracy is just purposefully as vague and elusive as the word Indian:[vi]

            The words democracy, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.  In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides.  It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.  Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.  That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something that is quite different.

Both "Indian" and "democracy" are words which are used for social control.  The word, Indian, refers to an invented, mythologi­cal identity, and is a racist slur.  If you replace the word "Indian" with the word "Redneck-Honky" or "Nigger"--or any of numerous other categorical epithets which are a part of the American English language--in the volumes of United States Statutes, bureaucratic regulations, or in the books about Indians or American History; or in any of the other derogatory stereotyping that has been written, filmed, and said about so-called Indians, then their tone becomes clearer.  There are no such people as Indians, and never have been, just as there have never been any "Redneck-Honkies" or "Niggers."  My use of such words is in observation of the institutionalized racism of any society which would coin such words and use them to apply destructive identities to others; and also in compassion for those who have accepted such definitions of their identity and their history, rather than claiming the self-esteem that is rightfully theirs as human beings:[vii]

            "Thank God for Our Blessings"

                        Had my ancestors not been slaves, life for me would be different.  I would be living in the jungles of tropical Africa, exposed to the diseases and insects found in that region.  I would walk around in my bare feet with a metal ring in my nose, and around my waist I would wear a loin cloth--if I could afford one.

                        At night I would try to sleep on a dirt floor of a one-room hut.  Then on holidays we would feast on elephant stew, roasted grasshoppers and the milk of a coconut.

                        I get on my knees each night and thank God for permitting my ancestors to come to America as slaves.  That was the great blessing to our race, and I am thankful for it.  Since members of my race have traveled from the status of headhunters and cannibals to that of members of Congress in Washington, in less than 344 years' time, there should be no question about the abundance of opportunity for the negro in America.

            Aboriginal Indigenous people have often been called savage, primitive and uncivilized.  Savage comes from the Latin word silvati­cus,[viii] which means "belonging in the forests."  The word, primitive, likewise comes from the Latin primus, which means "first," and is the root of the English word, prime.  Uncivilized originally referred to people who are outside of the domain of Western European control, meaning "not citizens."  The negative and derogatory connotations which are attached to these words in English come from projections which are used to justify the Western Europeans' treatment of the people to whom these projections have been ascribed, and, once the intended victims accept these as defining their identity, to subjugate them within the system.  Coercing internaliza­tion of culturally-imposed definitions was a part of the covert curriculum of compulsory education fifty years ago, both in African-American segregated schools, and on the Reservations.  Jim Crow was outlawed for African-Americans when Plessey was overturned in Brown vs. The Topeka Board of Education--but apartheid still remains for those people caught in the definition of Indian.  The doctrine of "separate but equal" was determined to be unconstitutional for African-Americans in 1953.  In 1994, so-called Indians have separate and not equal, including a separate Civil Rights bill despite the Indian Citizenship Act enacted seventy years earlier.

            The Euro-Americans use the terms Native Americans and American Native as politically correct alternatives to the term Indian.  These Western European categories do not apply to Aboriginal Indigenous peoples of this Continent.  The abuse of these terms, like the word Indian, is a vehicle for racism and Jim Crow.  Native (which the dictionary defines as "one born in a particular place or country") "Americans"  "from Americus Vespucius," a.k.a. Amerigo Vespucci, "Italian merchant and adventurer"[ix]).  The use of Native American as an euphemism for Indian is further obscuring the issue by putting a label on top of a label.  The dictionary definition of the compound term, Native American:[x]

            characterized by a reddish or brownish skin, dark eyes, black hair, ... embracing the aborigines of North and South America,

specifically refers to the French and Spanish Moorish immigrants, as well as the Métis people created by the European colonizing strategy of genetic engineering.  Literally, Native American and American Native mean anybody born under Western European definition on these conti­nents.

            Indian is a mythological identity and an ambiguous word.  The elaborate Federal Government hair-splitting, over who is a Federally Recognized Indian, and of what Indian blood quantum, hides a foundation of lies under a mountain of intricate nonsense.  Indian blood quantum is an elaborately detailed pseudo-identity which the White man applies to people caught as Indians under Euro-American control.  Indian blood quantum defines, down to the last 256^th,[xi] the criteria for apartheid established under the aegis of the U.S. Constitution, and has nothing to do with a person's Aboriginal Indigenous ancestry.

            If prominent Indians did not get Federally recognized dollars to be Indian, and there were not continual public relations efforts about Indians (from Tonto to Billy Jack to Dances with Wolves), if there were not a huge Federal bureaucracy devoted to maintaining Indians, then Indians would disappear.  The United States would be left with the few surviving Aboriginal Indigenous people, and huge questions of genocide and theft of Aboriginal Indigenous peoples' land and resources.  The inescapable reality is that the Euro-Americans are on somebody else's land, and the violence which they used to steal this land will continue to warp and distort their own culture until they face their history honestly.

            People who claim to be Indians tell me, "I have to go get my Traditions."  But, what are the traditions of being Indian?  Selling stolen property?  I have heard many Indian women on this Reservation say, "Ish, he [meaning an Indian man] is going with a White woman."  But, they don't say anything about themselves having children with several different White men.  These racist Indian women have White patrilines, and generation after generation, the number of White surnames on the U.S. Government Indian enrollments increases as Indian women marry White men, and their children continue to be defined as Indians.

            The U.S. Government is aware that Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway lineage is patrilineal, admitting this as background information in contemporary reports, but distorting it and writing as though the Ahnishinahbæó^tji­bway exist only in the past tense:[xii]

            "the Tribe [sic] was patrilineal and divided by clans [sic--Dodems] usually named after animals.  The Great Medicine Society [sic] con­trolled [sic] the Tribe's [sic] movements, although the Tribe's [sic] social organization was relatively loose.  This society caused a hindrance to the missionaries who tried to bring christianity to the Ojibways [sic].  These people believe that all animate and inanimate objects had a mysterious power of manitou living in them [sic].[xiii]  Much of the Tribe [sic] today is mixed with English and French blood.

According to the genealogies which we have researched, most of the people defined as 'Red Lake Chippewa Indian' by the United States Government are Europeans.  The Métis and Euro-Indians have never been the same people as the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway.  The U.S. Government defines patrilineally White mixed-bloods, including some who are officially categorized as 15/16 White, as Federally Recognized Red Lake Chippewa Indians.  Exactly what do they mean by "Indian Traditions?"

            Many Indians have told me, "I hate White people," and the people who have said it the loudest, have a family tree full of Whites.  But they've been told that they're Federally Recognized Indians so often, that they actually believe that they are Indians.  They don't know what an Indian really is, so they adhere to the Euro-Americans' racist stereotypes and the Hollywood images slavishly, engaging in self-destructive behavior and losing all of their self-esteem.  These Euro-Indians are led to believe that they are the Aboriginal Indigenous people of this Continent, and they are not.[xiv]  How can the Indians "hate White people," when they themselves are White?  Maybe this paradox is a part of the Indian Tradition, one of the many vicious facets of the social engineering which has been applied to people caught in the web of Indian identity.  The White social engineers do not feel a personal responsibility for what they have done to the Indians they invented and whose identity they control, because they deal with these people in the abstract.  Lislakh social engineering is a diabolical scheme, and the human suffering that comes from internal­izing their stereotypes is needless.  The Indian identity is racist, and needs to be trashed.  The Aboriginal Indigenous people should put up a monument in Washington, D.C., as a reminder to future generations of the cost and consequences of such social engineering.

            White Indians claiming that they hate White people has always seemed strange to me.  The Indians also say, "we are a conquered people," and maybe what they intended to say, handicapped by their limited English, is that the English conquered the French here, and they hate the English for what they have done to the French as a part of the conquest.  Making the French into Indians was a dirty trick.  I do not hate White people, although I dislike what the Whites who are posing as Indians are doing: the genocide they have abetted here, their destruction of the ecosystem, and their alienation of Ahnishinahbæó^tji­bway land.

            After I began writing about the identity of the Ahnishinahbæó^tjib­way in my newspaper column, some Chippewas, including the officially constituted Chippewa Indian Bands, began stealing half of our name, and referring to themselves as "Ojibway."  No matter what they call themselves, they do not have an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway Dodem, they are patrilineally Lislakh people, and they are not the Aboriginal Indigenous people of this Continent.  (A few of the White Indians are so caught up in their Indian identity that they go around telling Aboriginal Indigenous people how to be a Real Indian.)  However, some of the people who used to identify themselves as Indians have also said to me, "I read your column, and I understand what you are saying.  The Bureau has been lying to us all these years."  There are millions of people on this Continent who have some Aboriginal Indigenous ancestry.  Instead of getting caught up in the hocus-pocus and demeaning stereotype of the Indian identity, they should be proud of who they are as human beings, of their real identity.  When they call themselves "Indians," they are promoting racism.

Debunking racist stereotypes

            Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway have been defined by the Euro-Americans for more than a century, and have a right to explain who the Indians who have been packed into our communities to replace us, really are.  Aboriginal Indigenous people, including the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway, need to debunk the racist stereotypes which have been applied to us, and address the racist institutions which promote them.  We must address the racism it its roots, and getting rid of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indians they support in that racist identity, is a start.  I have better things to do with my money than pay taxes to support bureaucrats who are in complicity with the genocide of my people.

            Some of what I write might be labeled volatile and inflammatory.  I expect this--labeling writing which is outside of the narrow allowable parameters of debate is an old European strategy of social control.  I have answered articles in the newspapers with letters to the editor calmly explaining an Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway viewpoint, and have heard, countless times, "We can't print that, that's inflammato­ry."  If Euro-Americans find other points of view inflammatory, then they had better ask themselves some hard questions about the long-range effects of that kind of thinking on their people.  The Euro-Americans promote the image of diversity of cultures, but the only perspective that appears in the mainstream media is an Eurocentric viewpoint.  All people have something valuable to say.

            What has been written, both by Euro-Americans and their Chippewa Indians, about the Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway is not only inflammatory but it is also untrue.  The time has come to set the record straight, and to have open, honest dialogue about the reality of what has happened, and continues to happen, on this Continent.

            I have watched too many of my people die from trying to live out the vicious stereotypes of Indian.  I have seen my people die of suicide, heartbreak, alcoholism, tuberculosis, germ warfare, murder, beatings, and outright genocide.  The Indians have stood by silently, or aided and abetted the United States Government, in complicity with the genocide of my people.

            Name calling and getting angry are a means of keeping others at arms' length, avoiding communication rather than solving problems.  Instead of mindlessly repeating the mistakes of the past, we need to sit down and talk; have dialogue.  Stereotypes and labels keep individuals from communicating with each other as human beings; they keep subject communities in conflict and turmoil, and maintain the constant crises which the European élite uses to divert attention away from themselves, and so retain power.  Without racist stereotypes and labels, the class system would not function.

            The élite create benevolent images for themselves, from behind which they can steal other peoples' Sovereignty and enslave them without having those people question their right to do so.  The ideas of superior and inferior, of subordination and maintaining your station in life are so deeply embedded in the Lislakh ways of thinking that their subject peoples do not even question them.  These people have been abused by the hierarchy for so long that they have become desensitized to its violence.  There is class conflict, but it is set up between classes which are right next to each other on the hierarchy, to direct the attention of the oppressed away from their oppressors.  Under the direct violence of capitalism, communism, imperialism, Christianity and Manifest Destiny, the Western Europeans have taken the resources of Aboriginal Indigenous peoples all over the world, and have used socialism to redistribute the stolen resources to their own in-group.  The violence has to come to an end.  The only way that it can be stopped is for people to understand how they are being manipulated, and why.

            Drugs, alcohol, and prostitution are brought into subject communities to disable the grassroots community structure.  The Western European money system, and the false images of identity which are a part of that money system, are used to induce sell-outs in the subject community to bring self-destructive patterns and substances of chemical warfare into their communities.  The money system is promoted as a system of free market exchange, but drugs and alcohol are a hidden part of the mathematics of economics which, like gambling, allow the élite to get something for nothing.  How many millions of hours of peoples' lifetimes, that could be used within the communities, are stolen either directly by drugs and alcohol, or indirectly through the money system as it applies to the hugely inflated prices of alcohol and illegal drugs?  The present epidemic of alcoholism and drug abuse is worsened by carefully tailored external images, e.g., that the peddler of death is "cool."

            The people at the pinnacle of the hierarchy depend on who they really are, and what they are doing, being invisible to the communities they control.  (How many people outside of the inner sanctum can even name these people?)  They also depend on people accepting identities imposed for social control.  These artificial identities are essential to perpetuating racism.  The grand manipulation which Western European social engineers have been using since they landed here, has gone on long enough.

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 Notes for Chapter VIII

[i].Webster's New World Dictionary, page 1314, Op. cit.

[ii].As paraphrased in Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction, Ad Media's Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America, Signet Classics, 1974, page 70. (Emphasis his.)

[iii].Thomas Szasz, quoted in Paul A. Escholz, et. al., Language Awareness, 1974, page 39.

[iv].Mixed-Bloods and Tribal Dissolution, Charles Curtis and the Quest for Indian Identity, pages 2-3, Op. cit.

[v].United States Congress, American Indian Policy Review Commission, Final Report, submitted to congress May 17, 1977, Volume 1, page 89.

[vi].Paul Escholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark, editors, Language Awareness, 1974, page 26.

[vii].From a letter written by Zeke Crumpton of Hampton, Virginia, and originally published in the Christian Science Monitor, reprinted in Common Sense, Leader in the Nation's Fight Against Communism, Issue No. 447 (20th Year), Union, New Jersey, March 15, 1965

[viii].The New Century Dictionary, page 1618, Op. cit.

[ix].Ibid, page 38.

[x].Ibid (emphasis mine), pages 38-39.

[xi].For example, the 1936 Minnesota Chippewa Tribe Base Enrollments.

[xii].The Red Lake Indian Reservation, Its Resources and Development Potential, Bureau of Indian Affairs, The Planning Support Group, Billings, Montana, Report No. 253, March 1979, page 8.

[xiii].This is an Indian and White perspective, and is inaccurate.  This distortion is an example of the way in which Western Civilization's racist institutions discredit other people.  It would be more accurate to say, "All things are connected."

[xiv].During an official trip to Washington, D.C., in August of 1993, the Bureau of Indian Affairs told the I.R.A. Tribal Chairman of the Red Lake Chippewas that he should refer to himself as an "aboriginal."  (The Aboriginal Indigenous people from whom he is descended were probably the Teutonic Tribes--his paternal grandfather was a German immigrant.)

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