PINE RIDGE -- Oglala Sioux Tribe President Theresa Two Bulls will declare a suicide state of emergency for Pine Ridge Indian Reservation during a news conference at 1 p.m. today.
Thanks to navajo and a robust crew of volunteers and diarists, the snow emergency on the Indian Reservations in the Dakotas found its way to the TV (thanks, Keith!) and more donations have started to flow. (Navajo's excellent compilation of donation contact info and links here.) My intention is to add a little background to the story, because it's annoying as all get-out that this has ever become a situation for charity.
In the early days of the United States, Indian Affairs was an agency under the War (later Defense) Department. Not unlike the private contractors in Iraq, the Indian agents in the field typically did much better than the people they were charged with protecting and assisting. Often much better.
I have been told that your area news and the National news will not carry the story for my people unless and until CNN carries it. Each day someone has told me they have gone to CNN on Facebook, their website, or called into report our story, since the 12/20/09 State of Emergency was issued.
I was pretty exhausted from moving again for the third time in six months for good reasons, although I had to sweep a few streets till I got the job I moved for. Pictures weren't hung up yet when this racial utterance came out of Steele's mouth.
The 35-year-old chairman was camped on 7,100 acres of wind-swept, snowy land owned by Crow Creek Tribal Farms. The IRS recently seized the tract and on Dec. 3 auctioned it off for $2 million less than its $4.6 million value to pay a purported tax bill for the tribe, a separate legal entity.
The Sand Creek Massacre and the Washita Massacre both led to the Wounded Knee Massacre. The Sand Creek Massacre brought the realization that "the soldiers were destroying everything Cheyenne - the land, the buffalo, and the people themselves," and the Washita Massacre added even more genocidal evidence to those facts. The Sand Creek Massacre caused the Cheyenne to put away their old grievances with the Sioux and join them in defending their lives against the U.S. extermination policy. The Washita Massacre did that even more so. After putting the Wounded Knee Massacre briefly into historical perspective, we'll focus solely on the Wounded Knee Massacre itself for the 119th Anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre.
The entire tribe, elders and children included, is going to be removed by force from their land with no place to go. They are forced to barricade themselves in the tribal office. Using filing cabinets and anything else they can use to secure the building in hopes to protect their culture, their people, and basically everything they have.
We ask that Miwok tribe be allowed to stay in the land they have lived on for 7 years and be given the chance to dialogue with the appropriate legislatures and/or officials about the matter.
The extent to which a Nation denies the genocide it has committed is a measure of that Nation's social conscience. The social conscience of the United States is infected with numerous rationalizations that keep the dark light from shining. Federal and state institutions are named after mass murderers, and the land tells a story of massacres and atrocities that occurred. But the truth is not forgotten, it is denied.
8. DENIAL is the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile.
Genocide is not just denied in the United States, it is celebrated.
The term "redskins" actually refers to the Indian skins and body parts that bounty hunters had to show in order to receive payment for killing Indians, the National Congress of American Indians argued in a brief filed before the high court.
What we shall see, is that denying the genocide of the American Indian is for ideological or economic reasons. What we need to know, is how specifically people deny the genocide of the American Indian.
I want you to give all these chiefs of the soldiers here to understand that we are for peace, and that we have made peace, that we may not be mistaken by them for enemies.
As early as 1933, Raphael Lemkin proposed a cultural component to genocide, which he called "vandalism." However, the drafters of the 1948 Genocide Convention dropped that concept from their consideration.
One must make a connection between making profit from cultural components considered sacred, and to the severe damage done to the indigenous culture being preyed on and profited from. While indigenous people yet suffer the effects of a 500 year Holocaust, the overall dominant culture adheres to genocide denial. Plastic Medicine men charging money for fake ceremonies and the people who pay them is the issue at hand. Why is the desecration of Native American ceremonies cultural genocide? One word - relationships.
It seems like someone ought to let the president know that an American Indian man fasted in front of the White House for one week. Someone ought to say this man sat on a bench in Lafayette Park, starving in a silent protest, not taking even water.
Except to briefly say -
Someone should tell the White House there was a Native American man starving for the freedom of Leonard Peltier on their front lawn.
Mr. President, Ben Carnes was fasting on the White House Lawn for Peltier's freedom.
The Indian removals which destroyed one quarter of the Cherokee tribe, were actually conceptualized by Jefferson and then extended and carried out by Jackson. There were great debates about whether the "redskins" were human and whether they had souls.
Since Obama was willing to have a beer with a professor and an officer of the law over racial issues, why then shouldn't he meet with Ben Carnes to discuss freeing Leonard Peltier?
After releasing an original and continuing disciple of death cult leader Charles Manson who attempted to shoot President Gerald Ford, an admitted Croatian terrorist, and another attempted assassin of President Ford under the mandatory 30-year parole law, the U.S. Parole Commission deemed that my release would "promote disrespect for the law."
Ben Carnes is fasting in Lafayette Park across from the White House in solidarity with freedom for Leonard Peltier. Peltier is a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians who has been held as a political prisoner of the Government of the United States of America for over 33 years.
Since Obama was willing to have a beer with a professor and an officer of the law over racial issues, why then shouldn't he meet with Ben Carnes to discuss freeing Leonard Peltier?
As a result of Leonard Peltier's recent PAROLE DENIAL, Sundance Chief Ben Carnes, a member of the Choctaw Nation, will go to Washington, D.C.to stand & Fast in front of the White House between September 5 - 12, 2009, in hopes of securing a meeting with President Obama.
I've been thinking about how and when Obama could pull it off, and use it as a distraction to pass the Public Option in Health Care.
Indian genocide is a controversial subject on the internet and on this site. Genocide and Holocaust are words that are easy to throw around, often to grab a reader's attention, but proving them is something else. What one group calls genocide, another group may call progress. This statement is used in the same context as the saying...one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
The argument for Indian genocide is based primarily on letters written by General Jeffery Amherst during the French and Indian War.Letters by General Amherst and Colonel Bouquet mentioning spreading smallpox to Indians does not mean that this was ever carried out. Assumptions derived from letters and oral traditions are not proof of anything.
I apologize for the deceptive title. My main objective in having written this last year was not to create a new blog (Native American Netroots serves as that function). My main objective was and is to encourage people to blog about the issues that are outlined in this essay, and for the reasons stated herein.
I finished this in approximately May of 2008 and wanted to wait till the issue came up again and after I was able to let it go to discuss it. Poignantly, I wish to discuss the issue of "many simply feel they do not belong."
Thousands of Native Americans are not enrolled in their tribes because their bloodlines have become diluted over the years, as is happening with the Comes Last family. Even some full-blooded Native Americans lack enough of any one tribe's heritage to qualify for enrollment. .. And, on a more intangible note, many simply feel they do not belong.
Another way of saying "many simply feel they do not belong" is to say that many feel isolated. I'll offer some thoughts on that and then share the essay I wrote in 2008.
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