I Have an Open Mind
Posted by Ted Bronson | Filed under Non-Freedoms, The Bad Old Days
But not so open that the wind can just blow right through.
I read this “article” (which could have been written by just about any seventh-grader, really) that I saw in relation to the Sioux Nation “declaring their independence.” Naturally I had to investigate and find out what’s all the hub-bub, Bub. If there is a liberty issue to be addressed, I owe it to myself as a conscientious member of a newly awakened populace to educate myself.
Quite a little group of radicals involved:
The following people have identified themselves as members of the provisional government of Lakotah, or been so identified by other members of the movement:
- Russell Means, chief facilitator
- Jerry Collette , interim attorney general
- Robert Robideau, facilitator
- Tegheya Kte, aka Garry Rowland, (fully Clarence Gary Anthony Rowland), facilitator
- Phyllis Young, provisional government member
So I found out that this guy is a terrorist actor who has been stirring the pot with violent acts since the Seventies and has failed to even reach his own people with his message as evidenced by failure to be elected to tribal office…each time he ran.
That guy is a big Libertarian activist who has backed such revolutionary causes like Ron Paul’s blimp.
This other guy is lucky to be alive since his apparent terrorist act in 1975 went awry in Kansas.
That other guy is still an active member of AIM, you know the terrorists who took over a small town called Wounded Knee in, what, ’73?
And of course, this lady, who thinks that pretty much everyone living in her little corner of the world is a criminal because “parts of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana have been illegally homesteaded” for years.
But since the message itself seemed important, despite the many and varied ‘issues’ one might have with the messengers, I decided to delve deeper.
And deeper.
And deeper still. (.pdf warning for that last one)
So a weekend of research on this issue, (which ranged from Jefferson making the Louisiana Purchase through some really convoluted stretching of the power of the president, to the Fort Laramie Treaties and how factions on both sides really screwed the pooch while trying to screw over the other guy, to international treaties to which the United States isn’t actually a signatory, all the way to the the United States Supreme Court ruling in 1980…with some interesting side roads and twisty paths along the way concerning radical movements of the last century, Indian Tribal politics, and even the constitutions of several states) has led me to one overriding conclusion:
The Sioux have not actually declared independence from the US, nor have they pulled out of any treaties with the federal government. As far as I have been able to find out, what we have here is a bunch of old hippie anarchists (possibly only the five mentioned above) who have absolutely no connection to the legally established government of the Sioux Nation.
Even the Sioux say so. When your own tribe tells you jump in a lake, perhaps you should go try on swimsuits.
What Means and his band have failed to take into account is about a hundred plus more years of legislation, accords, government and Sioux approved Acts, and even a lawsuit that created a bank account worth about one billion clams. (Geeze, you’d think that someone who brought a lawsuit like that against the Fed might be willing to use the accumulated interest to help improve the lot of their fellows. You know, if the plaintiffs were actually trying to help.)
Means has fallen for one of the classic blunders: hubris. He quotes Ghandi on his site, but has preached and partaken in violence– in opposition to Ghandi’s teachings. He has spent so much of his life preaching about how bad things are from outside the system, that he can’t even get inside anymore because his own people disavow his aims.
Five people and a web page do not a revolution make.
Now before you start calling me names and getting all up in my grill, let me finish.
There are many, MANY things wrong with how the Federal government treats with Indians. There is a five hundred plus year history of Europeans lying and cheating, killing and stealing. Displacing cultures, or even wiping them out. I personally didn’t do it. No, really, I didn’t. Just like I didn’t condone slavery or own any slaves myself. Just like I didn’t take shiploads of gold back to Spain or wipe out the buffalo or hand out pox infected blankets. It wasn’t me. It doesn’t mean that I don’t care. It just means that I cannot be attacked for the acts of my ancestors.
But I do understand that the current living conditions in Sioux Country are deplorable. The answer to the problems of the Nations seem pretty obvious to me: get off the Res and get an education, we are freaking GIVING it away. Get a job, don’t wait for the check in the mail. In other words, get off welfare. Speak to your grandpa and grandma, ask them to help preserve your language and culture by teaching your own kids, no one will stop you- but you have to do something to help yourself. Stop drinking. Stop eating food that will kill you. The answer is the same answer I think will solve most of the problems we have in life: stand up and do it yourself, dammit.
When someone (and I mean Means, yes, but others like him as well) decides they want notoriety and press coverage and fame that’s fine with me. (C’mon, the Spears is still making 400k a month and all she has to do anymore is get seen in the paper occasionally.) But at this point all Means is doing is throwing a temper tantrum because no one wants to hear his buffalo-crap anymore. He is distorting the message with static on the channel. If the public sees him as a spokesman, and he wants to claim that 70,000 Sioux are now the sole proprietors of five of the United States and everything and everybody that has done business or raised a family inside a border that is truly arbitrary (since your own tribe threw out the previous occupants less than a hundred years before white men arrived) has been a criminal, all the public will see is a nutjob and they can conveniently look the other way while he and his merry band are carted off and the problems still don’t get solved.
Liberty is worth fighting for, yes. It is worth your honor. It is even worth dying or killing for. I can understand how a person can feel that their voice is not being heard and how ‘something must be done’ can be transformed into ‘I am going to do something, ‘ and I applaud it. Losing sight of the goal is a danger we all face in this struggle. A revolution needs three things to go forth: at least one third of the population to agree that revolution is a worthwhile objective; at least one tenth of whom actually must agree to fight. –Second you need to have at least half the population who don’t care or won’t actively oppose your little revolution; sorry, but I think that the open carry gun guys in Montana alone would like as not have a little chat with you over the entire situation. –Finally, you need some kind of catalyst, something you can use as propaganda or agit-prop to get folks outside of your population to even care. So far, Mr. Means, in your entire career you have done nothing really but piss off the very people who may be tempted to agree with you. You, sir, are static on the wire, bad signal, your squelch is off. Maybe it’s time for you to just go off on a spirit quest and forget to come back.
(An aside..In 1877, there were only 20,000 Sioux. Something, and I don’t know what, seems to have improved for them since then.)
Tags: Indian affairs
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March 10th, 2008
The American Indians found out what happens when you don’t control immigration.
{/One-eighth Onandaga Indian (maternal grandmother’s mom)}
March 10th, 2008
Hey there DW, Hazel and her parents are actually tribal members, card carrying. My great gramma, the witch, was a medicine woman in Belize. Just thought I should get that out there so that you know I wasn’t trying to start a fight with the Nations or anything.
March 10th, 2008
Oh, I consider myself an American first, a freestanding citizen second, and only then does ethnicity play into it. (I can control the first two; the third, not so much.)
And it was my first wife that was the witch. (Actually, they prefer ‘Wiccan’, but whatever…)
March 11th, 2008
“We did not ask you white men to come here. The Great Spirit gave us this country as a home. You had yours. We did not interfere with you. The Great Spirit gave us plenty of land to live on, and buffalo, deer, antelope and other game. But you have come here; you are taking my land from me; you are killing off our game, so it is hard for us to live. Now, you tell us to work for a living, but the Great Spirit did not make us to work, but to live by hunting. You white men can work if you want to. We do not interfere with you, and again you say, why do you not become civilized? We do not want your civilization! We would live as our fathers did, and their fathers before them.” -Crazy Horse, Oglala Sioux Chief, 1877
March 11th, 2008
“Evolve or die.” ~ The Universe
March 11th, 2008
When will the United States evolve? The universe wants them to be honest and keep their treaties. Treaties are the Supreme Law of the Land and that includes treaties made with Indians. Quote: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” Article Six – Constitution of the United States of America
March 11th, 2008
When will the United States evolve?
March 11th, 2008
Hold on there CH, (I won’t call you by your nome de tubes since I find it insulting, esp from someone living in CO rather than actually on the Res) you seem to have evolved into society just fine. Just like my wife’s family. Just like my family. Trail of Tears ring any bells, hoss? Where would we be if we were still wailing about something that happened to our great grandparents?
It is a natural fact, undeniable and sometimes sad, that ours is a world governed by the application of force. The Nations were beaten over and over again, yes. Forced to sign treaties at gunpoint sometimes, yes. Afforded chances again and again to better themselves by the only standard that counts only to yet again decide that a farm family rather than a fort is a suitable target, also yes. (more in a minute about the only standard that counts)
The People tried to make peace, the Federals tried to bargain for the best possible gain for their side. But the part that everyone leaves out is that there were malcontents on BOTH sides of the bargaining. The chiefs of those days didn’t have power in the same sense we view politics: they were not the bosses of their nations. They had no authority other than what the elders chose to give them. A chief could sign a treaty or even just make a verbal deal with a white and if another tribal chief, or even just a member of the tribe disagreed, the white could indeed find out that the deal, or even his life, were worthless. So when faced with the political reality of literally too many chiefs, the whites fought in the way that three thousand years of fighting in Europe and Asia had taught them.
For their part, the Indians were facing a people who didn’t do warfare in the same way they were accustomed to doing it. Whites actually killed rather than postured; they didn’t count coup. They defended what they viewed as “theirs” rather than moved on to the next meadow; population pressures kept pushing them ever further out. The Indians had such a small population that it was fine for them to quite literally kill a thousand buffalo at a time by driving them off a cliff. The fact that the meat and skin would be rotten before they could be properly harvested was fine since the predation was only done by small band of people who roamed huge tracts of land and only preyed on the buffalo in small herds.. The myth of living in harmony in nature is pure bunkum– for the most part, the Tribes would use every available resource in an area then move on, knowing that the area would have replenished itself when they came back in a few years or even in a generation. The Indian wasn’t a nomad out of some sense of nobility, he was a nomad because he was following the food. He claimed so much land because his small population needed a very large area to roam so he could take his people away from their own filth before disease or winter or other environmental factors killed too many of his children.
The book ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’ discussed at length what was inevitable when these two world views collided. Never mind the pretty political science and fancy high moral ground arguments, it boils down to this: The Nations knew they could not defeat the Europeans and Americans so they treated to get the best results out of their defeat. They surrendered.
The vanquished do not set the rules or dictate terms. Harsh rule of life. Sorry. The Department of the Interior is in charge of the Indian population in this country NOW, in this century, regardless of what happened in the 19th century: the many and varied Treaties in place with the Nations and Tribes are now subject to updated and (yes, agreed) sometimes different, law…as enacted by later and supplanting legislation. Honorable people are in place, people without prejudice or hatred for the Nations, who really believe that coming into the 21st century is possible, and preferable to hunting buffaloes like their ancestors. They think that medicine from a pharmacy may just be healthier for them. They believe that traditions can be preserved, and really wish someone INSIDE the community would even care to try to learn.
The ONLY standard that counts isn’t one of politics. (told you I’d get back to it) It is biology. Who survived? Who made sure that their children were better equipped to handle the world around them? Who was better at adapting to changes in their environment? The tribes who adapted are somehow still around, and educating their kids, and prospering. They are the ones who are indeed enjoying the fruits of liberty…the chance to make a better world for their kids.
I don’t do politically correct. I don’t believe that insincere platitudes do anyone any good. I do believe that if what you want to do is hunt and fish and make believe there is an invisible man in the sky who tells you it’s ok to do that and nothing more, fine. Self reliance to the n-th degree. Go for it. The rest of the world will go right past you and leave you on the dustbin of history. But if you care to join us, realizing that you are always an Indian in your heart, that you can still have traditions and sing the songs of your fathers, and give your kids a chance to actually be a better person in their dual spirits, you will always be welcome.
March 12th, 2008
When will Ted Bronson evolve? When will the United States evolve? Repeating the “vanishing race theory” is not evolving! As Hazel Stone says “Evolve or die.” ~ The Universe”
March 12th, 2008
When will Ted Bronson evolve?
March 12th, 2008
I think our little fren is off his meds, Ted. Ignore ON.
March 12th, 2008
One evolves under the impetus of new events. Repeated iterations of “poor, poor pitiful me” isn’t a new impetus, just old C&W songs. There is no need to come up with a new solution until you can say (from personal experience) that his solution won’t work, and come up with something new from your end.
Your so-called “people” failed to meet the test of being able to adapt to new realities, and if they moan about the past and wallow in their own self-pity to the point where they die off, then I shall mourn and remember that Nature, “red of tooth and claw”, will find something else to fill that particular niche. But I will not feel pity.
If your nation cannot adapt, you will end up on the dustbin of history. Like the Soviet Union. Like the Third Reich. Like the Hittites. Like the Palestinians will soon be. (Paging Ozymandias.)
And I say that as one who reveres the past but not as one who wants time to reverse its course and start living in days when one in five died of disease and one in ten of starvation; a time when people in their 30s were considered “old ones”, because almost no one lived to what we now call “middle age”.
“Evolve or die” isn’t just a cliche. It’s a fact of life. And events so far beyond your personal sphere of responsibility as to seem entirely unrelated can force that change on you whether you like it or not. (Did you ever wonder how the invention of the automobile had affected the people who made buggy whips?)
Grow up and live in this world, or get the f*ck out of the way of the rest of us. Your call. Your responsibility. Your problem.