Indians Not Happy, But Why?
The Karuks up on the Klamath aren't happy with the investigation into the burning down of their sacred dance house last month. Didn't I read somewhere that this isn't the first time the dance house was burned down, or am I mixing that up with some other incident?
Nonetheless, they're not happy and they want action. State Assemblybabe Patty Berg comes to the rescue, asking the FBI to enter the case. Now why would she go to all that trouble over a simple arson?
The Sacramento Bee's, Dan Walters, offers a clue in this commentary on, not only the growing power of the indian tribes because of their casinos, but the fact that tribes are beginning to enjoy the best of both worlds, something ordinary governments don't: The ability to act as both a government and a business.
As we've already seen, I don't think any of my friends from the Left will be complaining about tribal political donations.
posted by Fred Mangels @ 8:40 AM
62 comments
62 Comments:
First of all the karuks are not a gaming tribe. And contrary to your thinking all indian tribes and people are not the same. Second by your discription you must also think a church burning is a "simple arson".
If someone burned your house down Fred,I don't think you'd call it "simple arson".I wonder if the FBI was called in to investigate the fire on the waterfront.
If they gave Bonnie $25 Grand, how much will they pay for Patty?
It's a well-established principle that governments are barred from using their funds for overtly political purposes, particularly campaign contributions....
Do we want tribes to have all the status and power of local governments, with the added authority to lavish campaign contributions on politicians who please them? We're headed down that slope and picking up speed.
Good points in that SacBee article, Fred.
9:19 wrote, "Second by your discription you must also think a church burning is a "simple arson".".
If you're trying to suggest it was a "hate crime", whatever. I doubt it. Looks like somebody torched it to cover up the theft of those benches. From the sounds of it, those cedar benches must of been pretty hefty. Must have taken some time, muscle and a big truck to haul it off.
9:35 asks if the FBI investigated the waterfront fire.
I don't think so. That usually is under the perview of the county's Arson Task Force. Didn't they arrest someone for that?
If they gave Bonnie $25 Grand, how much will they pay for Patty?
That is a low blow. The Karuk tribe is neither Wiyot or Yurok.
In fact, you may even call that a racist remark.
Tribes in general, 11:26. That's the discussion in the Bee article.
It's funny how our ancesrtry forced them onto the reservations in the name of protecting our freedoms.Now people are bitching about what happens with the government in which we forced them to create.I guess that saying holds true"don't ask for what you want,cause you just might get it."
Don't you thinkg enough time has gone by that we ought to be all one and the same? Instead of separate nations?
Keep your land but integrate. That's what you're really asking for when you ask to be included in this government's decisions.
Can't have it both ways, separate, or not.
Why not have it both ways? The strength of the United States is due to diversity, not uniformity of American culture.
Way back in 1968 I had a vision that America was pregnant with many nations. I forsee a United Nations of America coming in the future, where these internal nations are recognized under a co-dominion sovereignty agreement as part of an upgraded U.S. Constitution that protects minority right currently unprotected by majority rule.
Fred...
So if someone stole benches from a church and then burned it down it would be a simple arson?
And as far as the so called anomaly of a government being combined with a business... Just like the state of California runs a lottery, if Nevada had decided to have all of their casinos be state run when they started that would have been their choice.
11:29
"Tribes in general, 11:26. That's the discussion in the Bee article."
Still sounds like stereotyping.
Last time I checked there were no barbed wire fences around the reservations. They are free to leave and integrate with the rest of society and many have done so successfully. It's the losers who hang around the reservations sucking up the govt welfare and electing corrupt "leaders". 99.99% of the crime commited on the reservations is by these losers and has nothing to do with the "racism" that the leftists are so fond of referring to.
wanna bet the "hate crime" is the work of a rival tribe?
Last time I checked you do not live on the homeland of your ancestors and the basis of your society is not a land based tribal structure... and so you really can't understand.
And this dosen't help the racism the rightists are so fond to ignore.
Lets not forget that all the so called "rights" of tribes are actually contractual obligations signed by our government in exchange for all the land that is not a reservation or rancheria. Just like in the past, every time the Indians get a little advantage someone wants to take it a way.
Just like if you look at the shape of the Hoopa reservation. It is a square, except for a little chunk out of the southwest corner. That was taken out at the last minute of the 1880s treaty because someone thought there might be gold in the creek there. (note: it was added back to the reservation a few years ago).
It's not much different now.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
The recently added area to the Hoopa reservation was on the southeast corner and was added at the behest of the tribe for timber harvest $$$ purposes. That reservation also includes the Yurok portion and runs down the Klamath river to the sea. A large part of it was sold off by the original Indian grantees and their successors to timber interests. No one on the planet lives on "the homeland of their ancestors". If that were the case the world's population would be confined to a small part of the African continent.
4:39 writes, "And as far as the so called anomaly of a government being combined with a business... Just like the state of California runs a lottery.".
The State of California might well run a lottery, but neither the lottery or the state are allowed to contribute to political candidates, as the tribes are.
Aren't we all Americans? At this point, do we really need to be separated?
I admit I am not Indian, but the idea of being confined to one area, not living where I please and making my own way is contrary to everything that is right in the world.
Without a connection with the land, what you do with your life is without meaning to those who are spiritually and ancestrally connected to specific areas.
Through the generations human beings adapt to their local environmental conditions just as all species do in order to survive. This means that our local ndns may well have in their dna specific resistance for example to the spores of local fungi that plague Europeans.
Western Civilization has been so pressed for "progress" in our times that it has forgotten all about the connection to the land that used to paramount in country people's minds. Perhaps without the land connection people tend to be spiritually rudderless and prone to the ills being mass produced in our modern society without consciousness of roots.
Indians should be happy. They are rich beyond their wildest dreams with a monopoly on casinos.
What rot! Ndn still comprise the poorest ethnic segment in America. Most tribes aren't located in high population areas and so most tribes don't have casinos. Ask any Bear River tribal member what he or she's getting from their casino and you'll find out that none are getting paid except those working in casino jobs.
Lot of prejudice shown in these responses and lot of lack of knowledge that would counter the prejudices if people would only do a little research instead of relying on rumor and sound-bite news.
Sorry Steve; The vast majority of indians I know are quite well off.
It is neither prejudice nor lack of knowledge when one has many indian friends and neighbors after having lived 14 years on and near the reservation. The Indians are indeed victimized but it is by a condescending government that encourages victimhood and discourages self reliance and initiative. It is truly criminal what the leftists and bureaucrats have visited on the tribes.
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
Fred, you can't argue with the statistics. Native Americans still comprise the poorest ethnic segment of America.
And none of my ndn friends are rich, btw.
ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ said...
"truly criminal what the leftists and bureaucrats have visited on the tribes"... It's always about the leftists with you. As if rightists had nothing to do with the genocide and current state of American Indians. Give me a break.
"The recently added area to the Hoopa reservation was on the southeast corner and was added at the behest of the tribe for timber harvest $$$ purposes."
You're right about the location but it dosen't remove why it was not in the reservation boundary in the first place.
1:41: Maybe you should look up "genocide" in a dictionary instead of your collectivist lexicon. While there also look up "racism", a term that collectivists/leftists also like throw around.
4:16: I don't know the motives for the reservation boundaries of the 1880s as it was before my time. I DO know the reason Frank Riggs got them changed recently.
BTW I am neither a collectivist or a leftist. So please cool off with all the labeling. Name calling doesn’t legitimize a point of view.
The following are definitions of genocide defined by international law. If this doesn’t describe what happened in northern California and much of the US just a few generations ago I don't know what you call it. This was all of course before Frank Riggs' time. However, the effects still linger. There are a few books I could recommend if you would like to learn more.
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Genocide is defined by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) Article 2 as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
or
Lemkin said about the definition of genocide in its original adoption for international law at the Geneva Conventions:
Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.
The way genocide is still being carried out against Native Americans is by whites denying Native Americans access to their former lands. It is silent genocide these days that one saw for example with the Bear River Band when they went looking for a rancheria site as the old Rohnerville one of some 3.5 acres wasn't about to accomodate the tribe's 250+ members. People wouldn't sell to the indians until finally they found someone who would on Singley Hill.
Again, when Bear River through sponsoring our Heartlands Project that sought to recover Headwaters and 60,000 acres of ancestral lands owned by PL, white-dominated enviros like Darryl Cherney, Ken Miller, Bob Martel, went out of their way to sabotage the Bear River's Headwaters Heartlands Project, so it shows that even Lefties will unite against NAs if they don't see any publicity benefit, i.e., NAs who supported the enviros Headwaters plans were ok and used for publicity but Bear River tribal members weren't ok because they wanted to take away the eviros "Saving Headwaters Forest" icon away and our local enviro leaders couldn's stand that idea.
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Damp! Just lost a long post about the modern form of genocide being carried out against NAs.
The modern form is "silent", i.e., it occurs in back rooms and through pressure on lawmakers and county agencies to block access by Native Americans to regaining their ancestral lands back.
After being reinstated officially as a tribe, Bear River went looking for a rancheria site in 1990 or sometime about then as the old Rohnerville Rancheria site had been reduced to some 3.5 acres, certainly too small for the tribe's some 250 members. People wouldn't sell to the ndns until they finally found someone who would on Singley Hill. Now they have 60 acres but of course need far more to house the tribe in one central location which is the only way to hold a tribe together in spirit and politically. Tribes that can't house their members are weakened by tribal members having to live and work in non-tribal America and all this works towards destruction of the tribe's culture and tribal ways of doing things.
The silent genocide isn't being done by racists rednecks but by "regular" white folks who "don't want to see indian problems and gambling next door to them". Even our local enviro leaders chimed in to block Bear River's attempt to reclaim Headwaters Forest and ancestral land now held by PL.
Darryl Cherney, Ken Miller, Bob Martel, each one went out of their way to torpedo Bear River's Heartlands Project that sought to recover Headwaters Forest, acts of silent genocide that show that racist prejudice against ndns isn't just in redneck white people.
9¨10 ΑΜ: Your insistence on the use of what amounts to argot in defining genocide by citing sources which would include the killing of as few as one person are indeed evidence of your reliance on a lexicon. (lex·i·con n: A stock of terms used in a particular philosophy, profession, subject, or style; a vocabulary.) This is reminiscent of some U.C. Berkeley students (true story) characterizing the enforcement of parking regulations in that city as "genocide". ( gen·o·cide n: The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.
A good example of this nonsense is the California Attorney General designating my Tec 9 semiautomatic hand gun as an "assault weapon". Only in the Orwellian world of government can such bullshit obtain.
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
The killing of almost 90% of the native population is not some "lexicon" issue. It happened here and it was genocide (using your definition). That is what happened here, no matter how many ways you want to ignore it, and the repercussions of that experience can still be felt today.
Perhaps most telling of how deep prejudice ndns is even activists circles can seen in famous Julia Butterfly's rejection of both Donald Brenard (Bear River tribal member and Heartlands plan
architech) and my own outreach letters to her while she was gaining her fame in Luna, the poor victim tree she exploited.
We both asked her to use her publicity to help Bear River's Heartlands Project gain backing so that the tribe could regain Headwaters Forest. She wrote, I still have the letters someplace, in one that she wouldn't help Bear
River because they needed to "move forward and not dwell on past "hurts", her words, i.e., let whites deal with PL lands, white owners and white enviros trying to wrest PL lands away from whites owners and managers. Heartlands was and is the only environmental activist plan that even thinks about the full restoration of all species on forest lands held by Palco, all species that included Native Americans who were the stewards of our forests long before whites got here to claim the forests for themselves.
It is amazing to me that ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ compares the mass killing of native people in our area to a parking ticket.
Put your outrage aside and really l-is-t-e-n to ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ.
He is not making an unreasonable statement.
Killing of local Indians was wrong. Slavery was wrong. No one guilty of these evils is alive today to atone for those crimes. Convincing the decendants of either group to engage in self flagellation or victimhood serves no useful purpose. We all can trace our ancestors to be members of a conquered or oppressed group. The evil today is the exploitation of past victimhood for socio/political purposes by the demagogues among us.
Silent genocide of Native American tribes is still going on. Yes, no one is killing them these days, only making sure they stay stuck on their tiny rancherias in California where it is impossible to keep tribal culture and cohesion intact. I have two Bear River friends who are without homes scrambling in motels and places to crash. Of course it doesn't help that they are on the outs with the current B.R. leadership, one leader's family occupying one of my friend's tribal house that was originally allotted to his father but somehow now in possession of the current Tribal Chairperson's family who recently went out of his way to trash his rival's ancestral land recovery plan, our Heartlands Project. Also, the B.R. Casino manager is rumored to have put money down on a 900,000 home, this same person recently getting our Heartlands program on KMUD canceled due to the gag order he put on us not to talk about Bear River and this same person recently in some Little League scuffle and accused of bashing the umpire. No news reports of this and you can bet no battery charges filed. $13,000 contribution by these Bear River folk to Paul Gallegos getting their money's worth..
Oops, sorry for getting off topic with my pet tribal beef. Regardless of internal tribal politics being befouled by casino profits, Native Americans as a whole are still in last place economically in America.
amen, pogo!
AMEN!
"Silent genocide of Native American tribes is still going on. Yes, no one is killing them..."
Thanks steve for making my point:o)
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
but steve, at what point do you have to say it is a choice?
there are plenty of opportuniites, and plenty of time has gone by. no one is keeping them down that i can see.
Then you just can't see it. As I seem to have to keep reminding people, don't take my word for it, check your U.S. statistics on incomes for ethnic groups.
And what's behind your "choice" concept if not an implied, at least to me, "well, it's just better to join the crowd and be an American and not Wiyot or Bear River or Hoopa or Lakota or whatever.." Tribal identity was something to have. In many ways it was far better than the "American" choice if individual well-being was the criteria and not accumulated wealth.
But, you are right, it is a choice in the sense of ndns forced to make a decision to either resist or go with the flow into loss of tribal positive identity and into American isolation as each competes in greed for wealth and higher social status.
"...into American isolation as each competes in greed for wealth and higher social status."
As opposed to spending the monthly welfare and per capita checks at the local crank dealer.
...and that wasen't a racist statment? (above)
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Anonymous said...
Put your outrage aside and really l-is-t-e-n to ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ.
He is not making an unreasonable statement.
Oh I understand the "let's move forward and forget about the past" discussion... but ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ is still deniying that there was a genocide here.
BTW - I'm not outraged.
Yeah, he is making an unreasonable and racist statement because what he accuses ndns of doing is exactly the same for practically all ethnic groups living in communities experiencing lifelong poverty.
Ndns do have their traditional cultures to return to if they want and I would venture to guess that the great majority of indians would rather retain significant amounts of their former cultures than lose them in absorbtion into the prevailing white European-American society.
no one denies that there was killing.
with our new enlightenment we certainly recognize that as wrong, and none of us would do it, at least we don't think we would.
but that is the past. i didn't do it. no one in my family did it, no one in my ancestry did it. far from it.
we need to move forward, all of us. together, as one people. indivisible. and individual.
steve guess again. ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ has many Indian friends and acquaintances and has yet to find one who wants to return to the pre wheel, firearm, plastic fishnet, outboard motor and pickup truck era. Is that just anecdotal or does steve wish to provide us with data other than that of the tribal "leadership" in the plush offices at Klamath and Hoopa whose mission is to lobby for more "programs" to seduce the rank and file into accepting their patronage? I repeat: what the federal bureaucracy has visited on these unfortunate people is CRIMINAL!
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
No argument that what the federal bureaucracy has done is criminal. I guess I hang out with different ndns. My ndn friends are not about to follow the white culture into consumerism. Yes, none want to return to the old hunting and gathering lifestyle but the spiritual culture behind native life is missed but most what is missed is tribal sovereign identity where a tribal individual knew who he or she was and what was expected of them. None of the old ndns expected people to act the way whites did--it didn't make any sense to them--this need for acquiring more and more and more.
that is a failing of modern day society, an excess of everything. we are fat and lazy in our thinking, and we have let down our defenses, ndn and white alike, squabbling amongst ourselves while the wolves lurk outside the enclosure. we need to act as one. i think the ndns are better off with us, even if they choose to view us as different, than under the islamist who have shown no respect for spiritual identity, culture and heritage, just look what they did to the buddhas.
ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ's ancestors painted themselves blue and fought the Romans. They lost and adapted to and benefited from the new reality. They also fought the Vikings and lost. But they managed to survive and adapt as many of the indigenous people of Humboldt have. Those who have been seduced by the Federal teat are truly and tragically the underclass.
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
Great! Racism and classism. I suppose slavery is next. You know, Aeon, this person on the Federal teat has been a healthcare worker for your "over" class formerly rich industrialist go-getter who found himself and family without means of support after our grand free enterprise medical system took all his hard earned money away. Ends up with us underclass people taking care of him and thankful for that.
Thank God the Federal teat has allowed me freedom to write and organize because when I was in the rat-race I surely didn't have the time or means to do what I do best. Hooray for Social Security!
If the above frothing rant is an example of what you do best it is no wonder you are on the federal teat.
No, it's Stevie Wonder, if you were up to snuff and had checked my frothing blogsite.
Frothing blogsite paid for with yours and others hard-earned monies, btw. Many thanks.
Hey, I guess you liked the handle I gave you?
It's wonderful. Goes good with my theme song: "Everating iss vunderbar in its oy veh.."
:) :)
I like it.
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