winter rabbit's blog

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The justification for Public Law 93-531 passed by Congress in 1974 was that the Navajo-Hopi land dispute is so serious that 10,000 Navajos near Big Mountain, Arizona, must be relocated, forcibly if necessary. It would be the largest forced relocation of U.S. citizens since the relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

But tradition-minded Navajo and Hopi claim there never was a land dispute. They say the dispute was invented to get the Navajos and their livestock off mineral-rich land in the Hopi reservation so it could be developed by mining companies such as Peabody Coal and Kerr-McGee.

Crossposted at Native American Netroots

This should cost McCain any possibility of him ever being the next president of the United States, period.

The ACSA challenges Senator McCain on his legislative history of Human Rights Violations: "a Skeleton in his closet: UNFIT to hold public office!"

Consolidated Indigenous Shadow Report. p. 34.

…the continuation and preservation of traditional Native American Religion is ensured only through the performance of ceremonies and rites by tribal members. These ceremonies and rites are often performed on specific sites…These sites may also be based on special geographic features…For most Native American religions, there may be no alternative places of worship since these ceremonies must be performed at certain places and times to be effective.

Such is the case at Pe Sla, “one of the five primary sacred sites in the Black Hills to the Lakota nation.”

Crossposted at Native American Netroots

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The Pe Sla is one of the five primary sacred sites in the Black Hills to the Lakota nation because of its position on their annual pilgrimage/journey of prayers and ceremonies. It is also the only one held mostly in private hands as others are within state or federal property. This prairie has only known cattle grazing by a handful of ranchers since the Homestead Act. Now subdivisions are encroaching upon this one pristine open space left in the Black Hills.

…but the Arctic is the scene for a new kind of international gold rush…

Arctic a potential conflict zone, Europe warned

BRUSSELS, Belgium - European Union leaders will receive a stark warning next week of potential conflict with Russia over energy resources at the North Pole as global warning melts the ice cap and aggravates international security threats.

See video

The first question asked in “The Dawes Commission: And the Allotment of the Five Civilized Tribes” by Kent Carter is, “What can you do when you discover a continent but there are already people living on it?”

People, what people?

The Ice People By Alberto Leoncini

The ambient devastation and the climatic changes have become an actual debate on the polar areas and its destiny; they are also well known as geopolitical and energy areas.

…human rights violations and an institutionalized racism against indigenous peoples is alive and thriving in the United States...

Consolidated Indigenous Shadow Report

III. Indian Reservation Apartheid

“Apartheid” is certainly a strong word. And certainly, there are recognized tribes in the U.S. that are now achieving certain levels of relative prosperity primarily due to federal law allowing them to operate casinos, But the data contained in this section as well as others in this report (see, e.g., Violence Against Women, The Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health) reflect what only can be described as a system of Apartheid on many Indian Reservations, where Indigenous people are warehoused in poverty and neglect. By purpose or effect, their only option is forced assimilation, the abandonment of their land, families, language and cultures in search of a better life.

The Shadow Report Outlines the following: critical things the U.S. Periodic Report omitted that were supposed to have been reported to the Human Rights Committee; Un – recognized Indigenous Peoples of which “many have waited decades” for recognition; the “Indian Reservation Apartheid;” the “Life Expectancy on the Indian Reservation” with its “high rate of infant mortality, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease;” poverty and unemployment, overall problems with justice; “Racially Discriminatory Constitutional Foundations;” religious freedom as it relates to access to sacred lands; “Environmental Racism and its effects on Indigenous Human Rights,” that “you cannot damage the land without damaging those who live upon it;” “The Denial of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in the Political, Economic, Social, Cultural, or any Other Field of Public Life;” “Racist Science and the Collective Right of Free, Prior and Informed Consent;” “Articles 6 and 7,” which mention the devastation of Indian Boarding Schools and “Racist Sports Mascots and Logos;” and finally, “The United States and its Transnational Companies and Violations of the Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples Abroad.”

I wrote The Genocide of Matriarchal Societies in April of last year (2007), and there is some additional information I want to share along those general lines now. We’ll pick up where we left off and the answer to “Where Are All Your Women” will be made chillingly clear as to why they are “Missing In Action” after we recognize that a woman is set to be beheaded for “practicing witchcraft.” First however, we will reread the words of Archie Fire Lame Deer and relish in the scholarship of Barbara Alice Mann.

Archie Fire Lame Deer had discovered enormous commonalties in terms of visual imagery between those in his father's Yuwipi ceremonies and the visual imagery of the Black Madonna. Next, he learned that medicine men and Black Madonnas shared the same tragic fate.

..one last example of synchronicity is between the Lakota and a prehistoric cave in France. Archie Fire Lame tells briefly of his travels there with his daughter, while talking to a guide he described as a “spiritual man.”

Archie

Fire Lame Deer & Richard Erdoes. “Gift Of Power.” pp. 277-278.

I found the image of a buffalo carved out of the living rock with water from a sacred spring flowing from its mouth. While I was contemplating this, I heard (his daughter) holler, “Daddy, quick, come here!” – There revealed a face exactly like the one my father always used during his Yuwipi ceremonies –

Then our guide said, “All this goes back thousands of years before Christianity.” - (He) kept the image of a dark-skinned prophetess that nowadays is called the “Black Madonna.” He told me, “They called her and her sisters witches and burned them at the stake.”

“I know all about this,” I said. “They called our medicine men witch doctors and shot them dead for the same reasons.” He went on, “This here has survived. Few have been inside this cave. You have been chosen.”

Next, Barbara Alice Mann has made such valuable contributions in terms of outlining and defining the “Western obliteration of women from the record, (p. 129)” that I don’t think it can be retold too many times.

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A British mining company is about to begin exploratory drilling for toxic, radioactive uranium in Kaibab National Forest just outside the eco-fragile boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park.

Of course, the idea of uranium is being sold as if it were an absolute necessity.

Do these companies really care about the beauty of the Earth Mother,

they’re altering for the worst?

(only photo of a uranium mine I could find)

No.

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This ill-conceived drilling is powerful evidence that tighter restrictions must be enacted to protect the Canyon. It further indicates the critical need to modernize the General Mining Act of 1872, which authorizes mining for economic minerals on federal public lands.

However, nowhere does the insensitive misuse of American Indian images, icons, and stereotypical elements appear more brashly than in athletic contests at the public high school level in Oklahoma.

Savage Country: American Indian Sports Mascots Part One

The tomahawk chop motion, we see that all the time…they get thousands of people to get going through the motion for the spirit of the game or whatever…not knowing that it’s degrading…it implies something bad that our ancestors were, people that did this. Therefore their team is going to be just like that, chop them up, do battle, or whatever…

Tomahawk.

Chop.

Who are the sports fans engaging in that racist behavior imitating? They surely do not think that they are imitating the American Indians who resisted nonviolently, they obviously think they are imitating the American Indians who resisted forced relocation and genocide self defensively; except, for the element of genocide denial that they exhibit in their racial exhibitions. Racism being based on ignorance, among other things, can and should be combated with education and historical facts. The sports fans engaging in the racist behavior of “tomahawk chopping” seem to be imitating, while being wholly ignorant of them, Warrior Societies which had a key beginning and a key ending in 1825 and 1878 in accordance with the “stereotypical elements (that) appear… in athletic contests” that they racially exhibit.

These facts in my opinion: that the U.S. traded weapons to the American Indians which naturally increased violence, and that the U.S. did not keep its treaties and created desperate conditions wherein American Indians would either have to starve or fight; may possibly provide a foundation for historically understanding and doing away with “stereotypical elements (that) appear… in athletic contests.”

The U.S. traded weapons to the American Indians which naturally increased violence.

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And the Chiefs and Warriors, as aforesaid, promise and engage that their tribe will never, by sale, exchange, or as presents, supply any nation or tribe of Indians, not in amity with the United States, with guns, ammunition, or other implements of war.

And trade in general increased violence, as well as how “Europeans and Americans manipulated traditional hostilities.”

Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians
Edited by David J. Wishart. p. 103

Destructive war in the plains intensified after contact because of migration of eastern tribes (the Cheyennes and the Lakotas, for example) into the Plains as settlement moved west, because Europeans and Americans manipulated traditional hostilities, and because tribes competed for access to European and American trade, especially in fur – rich areas of the Northern Plains and Prairie Provinces.

The increased violence caused by weapons trade and “Europeans and Americans manipulated traditional hostilities” affected not only Indian Nation to Indian Nation, but it also spread from Indian Nation to white settlers. This certainly wasn’t the last conflict, but the last Indian Raid was in Kansas in 1878. Within those raids and the brutality therein lie much racial resentment in my personal conversations and readings, and quite understandably so. There were deaths on both sides and it matters not to the surviving family members why their ancestor died, only that they were murdered and how. I don’t pretend to have the answer for that; I just know that this racism we are speaking of is not the solution. Let us continue.

The U.S. did not keep its treaties and created desperate conditions wherein American Indians would starve as part of the extermination policy against them, and that meant making a choice to fight in order to survive or to starve to death.

Custer's Indian Hostages: (One White Woman & 2 White Children, Part 1)

Moxtaveto lost even more respect for signing the Little Arkansas Treaty of 1865 after the Sand Creek Massacre. It gave some land to Black Kettle and others, promised food and other survival necessities, promised that conflicts would be handled by taking Indians into custody rather than being murdered, "and that no white person, except officers, agents, and employees of the Government, shall go upon or settle within the country embraced within said limits, unless formerly admitted and incorporated into some one of the tribes lawfully residing there, according to its laws and usages."

Custer "Stayed The Course" & The Kansas Raids

Confining and binding those Native Nations to land where they could not survive by hunting or agriculture, breaking promises to provide those survival means, and propaganda revolving around the Kansas Raids reset Custer "on the course," as if they were without severe provocation in the first place.

Furthermore, the Sand Creek Massacre descendants were

Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians
Edited by David J. Wishart. p. 49

…promised indemnities under the Treaty of Little Arkansas Treaty in 1865, which had not yet been paid as of 2001, although the Cheyenne Sand Creek Descendants Association continues to make legal efforts to collect the funds.

And at that Massacre at Sand Creek

”Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown. p. 92.

Chivington and his soldiers destroyed the lives or the power of every Cheyenne and Arapaho chief who had held out for peace with the white men.

So: trade in general increased violence, how “Europeans and Americans manipulated traditional hostilities” increased violence, the U.S. not keeping its treaties helped create violence, and the Massacre that started the so called “Indian Wars” that involved “destroy(ing) the lives or the power of every Cheyenne and Arapaho chief who had held out for peace with the white men -” created much, much, more violence.

Those sports fans who condone the tomahawk chop might start to see how offensive it is, if they had been taught at least the following about the Sand Creek Massacre, but of course this wasn’t taught to them via Colonial Education.

143rd Anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre of Nov. 29th, 1864

Kurt Kaltreider, PH.D. "American Indian Prophecies." pp. 58-59:

- The report of witnesses at Sand Creek:

"I saw some Indians that had been scalped, and the ears cut off the body of White Antelope," said Captain L. Wilson of the first Colorado Cavalry. "One Indian who had been scalped had also his skull smashed in, and I heard that the privates of White Antelope had been cut off to make a tobacco bag of. I heard some of the men say that the privates of one of the squaws had been cut out and put on a stick..."

John S. Smith...

All manner of depredations were inflicted on their persons; they were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the heads with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word...worse mutilation that I ever saw before, the women all cut to pieces...children two or three months old; all ages lying there.

(Emphasis mine)

The process of colonization involves one nation or territory taking control of another nation or territory either through the use of force or by acquisition. As a by-product of colonization, the colonizing nation implements its own form of schooling within their colonies.

Nor do they probably ever consider the full implications of their actions. Who and what are they imitating?

Custer's Pipeline & Genocide Denial

Genocide denial is part of the steel that drills the oil in "Custer's Pipeline," is part of what moves the pens making lying papers that are stealing and have stolen the promised sovereignty of American Indians, and what makes the modern day Custers feel joy when they succeed and rage when they fail.

Looks like the modern- day Custers are feeling a little joy lately.

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TransCanada has decided to go ahead with its application for approval of a jumbo 42" gas pipeline cut right through the middle of Lubicon land, without consultation and despite Lubicon objections. They have refused to answer even the most basic safety questions.
The Lubicon Nation needs help now! TransCanada is taking actions that not only open unceded Lubicon territory to even more ruthless and destructive "development", but enable the huge expansion of toxic tarsands operations and so affect all of us.

How does history repeat itself? Let’s count some of the ways.

One.

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The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, authorizing the president to grant unsettled lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders. A few tribes went peacefully, but many resisted the relocation policy. During the fall and winter of 1838 and 1839, the Cherokees were forcibly moved west by the United States government. Approximately 4,000 Cherokees died on this forced march, which became known as the "Trail of Tears."

In 1974 the U.S. Government legally endorsed genocide when Congress passed Public Law 93-531, which enabled Peabody Coal Company to strip mine Black Mesa by ripping the traditional Navajo and Hopi peoples from the land.

Two.

"The Dawes Commission” by Kent Carter. p. 208.

The debate continued and shifted to the controversial subject of what to do with the valuable coal deposits in the Choctaw Nation that had been segregated from allotment. Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin objected to the provision in the bill that authorized selling the deposits because he believed the railroads would gain control.

Why say “Dead Warrior Creek,” when racism fuels cultural hegemony so well?

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The official name now is Dead Warrior Lake, ending for some a controversy over the lake's name that has been going on for almost a decade.

- snip –

The first settlers in the area came up with the name after discovering a Cheyenne burial site. Cottonwoods that lined the creek made for a perfect burial site near the tribe's winter camp.

Crossposted at Progressive Historians &

Native American Netroots

Racism is illogical; however, the way it manifests is alarmingly logical. Past down to generation after generation, the false belief in one’s racial superiority leads to stripping races believed to be inferior of land and liberty. It is my personal opinion that racist thoughts contribute to cultural hegemony, the concept that a diverse culture can be ruled or dominated by one group or class.