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Monday, September 27, 2004 |
FEATURED ARTICLES
SPECIAL ISSUE OF INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY: The American Pathology
Understanding The Roots of Oppression, Indian Country Today, Editorial, September 10, 2004
QUOTE OF THE DAY
The American pathology finds its roots in a myth-centered nationalism which entertains a claim that God intended his chosen people to have whatever they want. The majority of Americans do not believe this, and those who do believe it carry on their discourse somewhat hidden from the mainstream, but the mainstream is dangerously tolerant of it. Here you find the roots of America's go-it-alone, treaty breaking, empire building, xenophobic us-against-them psychology. At the end of that road are dangerous enterprises involving over-reaching for the fruits of empire.
- - John Mohawk
( From the column linked below entitled, "Mythological America Is An Unjust Society")
KNOW YOUR HISTORY - September 27th
1944 -- US: First large-scale plutonium producing reactor begins operation on land seized from the Yakima Indian Nation, Hanford, Washington. In the decades to follow & into the new millennium the water table & surrounding rivers are polluted from leaky storage.
RHINO HERE:
Last week's opening of the new National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C. may be putting a bitter taste in some peoples mouths. No there weren't any slot machines being displayed. There's the aspect of, "The first will be last," as in the first Americans, get the last possible real estate available on The Mall to put their museum. And there's the P.C. factor, meaning museums are a nice tribute, but if you really want to be politically correct, why not give the land back, along with all the billions in Indian peoples' bank accounts which the Department of the Interior says they have misplaced & can't find. But Rhino thinks, the real opportunity the museum presents is the ability to educate the American people on their history, but through Native perspectives. This is work that is near & dear to The Rhino's heart, having made several contributions to the effort through my documentaries including:
Wiping The Tears Of Seven Generations (Kifaru Productions, 1992)
http://www.kifaru.com/tears4.html
The week before the museum opening, the Nation's most circulated Native weekly newspaper, Indian Country Today, published a special issue containing 4 well researched & eloquently written columns addressing the roots of the oppression of Indigenous peoples, in the U.S. as a microcosm, but globally too. So today I call your attention to the opening editorial & the 4 essays which comprise that special issue entitled, "The American Pathology". The whole of these writings together offer an important amalgam perspective. I urge you, that if you don't have time to read them soon, save them, and give them a read when you get your feet kicked up. A wise person once said, those who don't know their history, are bound to repeat it.
SPECIAL ISSUE: The American Pathology
Understanding The Roots of Oppression
Indian Country Today, Editorial, September 10, 2004
Behold in these pages this week an interesting and perhaps uniquely Indian discussion: perspectives on the roots of the American conquest mythology - seeking to understand the origins of the particular American belief that continues to justify the destruction of Native cultures and the taking of Native peoples' assets, particularly lands and political rights to independent cultural and economic self-governance...
...For Native nations who still hold lands and are working to hold onto their sovereign territories and add new parcels of land to their peoples' destinies, this is always a good discussion. Tribal peoples rarely forget any unjust loss of lands or resources that once were properly owned and managed by their own people. The more unjust the theft or taking of the resource, the more it is remembered and often continually claimed throughout history. We highly recommend these pages this week as a good historical foundation to ponder. American policy makers, tribal leaders, legal and historical scholars, high school and college students, Indian opinion leaders, indeed, all of our readers, please take it for the weekend and deepen your historical and cultural understanding of the deeply ingrained and presumably religious justifications of the dispossession of American Indian peoples...
A GREAT OVERVIEW OF THE COLUMN BELOW:
Steven Newcomb is the Indigenous Law research coordinator at Kumeyaay Community College (located on the reservation of the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation), co-founder and co-director of the Indigenous Law Institute, and a columnist for Indian Country Today.
Newcomb: On America's Pathological Behavior Toward Native Peoples
by: Steven Newcomb / Columnist / Indian Country Today, September 10, 2004
According to Steven L. Winter, in his book "A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life, and Mind" (2001), recent findings in cognitive science (study of the human mind) reveal that the mind functions largely by means of metaphors and other cognitive operations. Metaphor is thinking of one thing in terms of something else. As Winter explains, cognitive science has revealed that all thought is innately imaginative, and metaphor is one of the ways that human beings use the imaginative power of human thought. But the question arises, are some metaphors and other mental processes more likely to lead to thoughts and behavior that are dehumanizing and pathological? For example, if one group of people thinks of and dehumanizes another group of people as "beasts," or sub-human, isn't this likely to lead to negative, perhaps even heinous behavior towards the people being labeled? Is it correct to consider such negative thoughts and behavior to be pathological? Take the example of George Washington thinking of and referring to Indians as "savages" and "beasts."...
READ IT ALL AT: http://www.indiancountry.com/?1094830396
John C. Mohawk Ph.D., columnist for Indian Country Today, is an author and professor in the Center for the Americas at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Mohawk: Mythological America Is An Unjust Society
by: John C. Mohawk / Columnist / Indian Country Today, September 10, 2004
The roots of America's persistent injustices to its indigenous peoples, and to other peoples generally, are found in what can best be described as the peculiarly American version of Christianity. You could hear references to this phenomenon in recent political conventions, in references to President Ronald Reagan's allusions to a "city upon a hill," which is a reference to John Winthrop's sermon of 1630. In that work, Winthrop called upon the Puritans to act as though God was living among them and asserted that they were his chosen people, that the eyes of "all people are uponn us," and "... that the Lord our God may blesse us in the land whether wee goe to possess it ..." These Englishmen who were about to land in "New England" were claiming the God of Israel, that they were somehow modern Israelites, a "chosen people," chosen to possess the earth... ... Winthrop believed that God had blessed a small band of English religious misfits and political refugees with the right to all the riches in the world. It is an endless entitlement, not restricted to New England, not, apparently restricted to land or money. When God gives you an entitlement, you cannot do wrong, because everything you do is in pursuit of God's will. And everything leads to paradise or utopia. Reason does not impact this argument. The fact is the ancestors of these Englishmen were barbarians and do not appear in the Bible, their source of holy scriptures. In that source can be found no reference to white people, and no offer of blessings by God to Northern Europeans that they are urged in the name of Christ or Yahweh to aggressively seize the earth. It is a belief system which is not subject to rational discourse or historical reasoning...
READ IT ALL AT: http://www.indiancountry.com/?1094830248
Steven Paul McSloy is co-chair, Native American Practice, at Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP in New York City where he specializes in corporate and finance matters involving Indian nations. He was formerly general counsel of the Oneida Indian Nation of New York and a professor of American Indian law. The views expressed herein are the author's personal views and do not represent in any way official positions of Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP or the Oneida Indian Nation of New York. A longer version of this article appeared in Volume 9 of the St. Thomas Law Review.
McSloy: 'Because the Bible Tells Me So'
Manifest Destiny and American Indians
by: Steven Paul McSloy / Co-chair / Native American Practice / Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP
Indian Country Today, September 10, 2004
Why were American Indian lands taken? The easy answer, of course, is that the Europeans wanted land and the Indians had it. But why did the Europeans think they could take it? We are told that the first settlers of America were moral and religious people. Why then did even the first poor and hungry Pilgrims, pious people with no military power whatsoever, believe that they were entitled to dominion over Indians and their lands? In thinking about the encounter between American Indians and Euro-Americans, the question is one of means: How were American Indian lands taken? The answer is not, as it turns out, by military force. The wars, massacres, Geronimo and Sitting Bull - all that was really just cleanup. The real conquest was on paper, on maps and in laws. .. ...though Johnson v. McIntosh was a judicial decision made by the government of a secular republic committed to the separation of church and state, the Supreme Court's adoption of the Discovery Doctrine was merely the latest invocation of a concept that had been born at the very beginning of the Judeo-Christian tradition, on the first page of the Bible, in the Book of Genesis. This concept had, long before John Marshall, been used by the Jews, the Catholics and the Protestants to justify the dispossession of indigenous peoples..
READ IT ALL AT: http://www.indiancountry.com/?1094830044
Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee, is president of the Morning Star Institute in Washington, D.C., and a columnist for Indian Country Today.
9:06:30 AM 
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Harjo: The Whiteman and the Disease
by: Suzan Shown Harjo / Columnist / Indian Country Today, September 10, 2004
Things used to be simpler in the old-timey days, or maybe they were just more high contrast. We were the Peoples. They were the Whiteman. They came; they misnamed; they killed. And that was the first Whiteman Indian policy (a.k.a., the Invasion). The second was: They stayed; they stole; they killed. That one lasted a really long time, from genocide to slow genocide. We move into the modern era through international treaty pledges of peace and friendship to the courtrooms where we have to duke it out for inches of land, buckets of water, scraps of dignity and even chards of people. Now, we can begin to see our own time, which is luxuriant, in contrast to our generations all the way back to 1491. Despite our current socio-economic problems and continuing injustices, we have time to understand what happened to us, who did it and how to stop it. And, more and more of us are able to live in peace with our neighbors, especially those who are not benefiting from heinous acts committed against our ancestors and who are not opposing our right to seek redress for them. As we think about the present, we need to keep a few things in mind. First, the Whiteman is no longer solely white or a man or a descendant of someone who killed our grandpas or stole our grandmas' lands. Second, the craziness and greed of the Whiteman that made him hate us because he did bad things to us is now a disease that blankets much of the legal system and popular culture, and infects many who never met us, historically or today. Third, a manifestation of this pathology is that the new whiteman (a.k.a., the Disease) must keep us in our place...
READ IT ALL AT: The Whiteman and the Disease
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8:15:06 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.
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