Native Americans & The New Confusion in US Politics

Click here to access article by Caleb Maupin from New Eastern Outlook. 

He clears up most of the confusion about the genocide that has been practiced on Native Americans throughout the history of the European conquest of the North American continent. Because I was running out of time and energy, I mostly scanned this piece which I found to be excellent. I only had one objection which was in reference to President Trump when the author wrote the following:

... in the age of Trump, the terms of discourse have shifted once again.

This is not "the age of Trump". Such a designation puts far too much significance of the Trump presidency. Trump was only elected because Americans did not trust Hillary Clinton. Our masters selected Trump to run against her because they surely thought that Americans would vote for her as the lesser evil. Well, I guess they thought Trump was the "lesser evil", and maybe they were right.

Instead, I would put it as "the Age of Post 9/11" which injects far more meaning to our age. So much has changed in the USA, and I am only beginning to be aware of it. Certainly we lost the anti-war movement, but also there has been a change in the personalities of most Americans. It seems to me that they, for the most part, have become more cruel and intolerant of others, more militaristic, and resist and resent any questioning of authority; and all of this is covered over by a veneer of politeness and a Pollyanna attitude.

Video: A Closing Prayer for Standing Rock’s Oceti Sakowin

Click here to access article by Jihan Hafiz from The Intercept.

“To me, it looks like 1890, Wounded Knee,” said an elder. “They were all probably standing there [police and military units]  like that before they started slaughtering our people.”

Now dispersed, the water protectors removed from Oceti Sakowin are regrouping in other protest camps near the pipeline. Meanwhile, court documents just filed by Energy Transfer Partners indicate that oil could be flowing in less than two weeks.

See also Unicorn Riot's coverage of the military assault on the Oceti protest encampment.

And the latest I could find on this assault is from the following RT video:

 

Some urgent posts regarding DAPL from Dave Ratcliffe of Ratical.org

I received some very informative and urgent articles on the Dakota Access Pipeline crisis which his organization rat haus reality, based in Boston, is supporting, and I thought I would share them with the readers of this website.

U.S. veterans vow to block construction of Dakota Access Pipeline
by Jasmin Malik Chua, inhabitat
February 3, 2017
http://inhabitat.com/u-s-veterans-vow-to-block-construction-of-dakota-access-pipeline/?

Energy Transfer Partners may complete the Dakota Access Pipeline yet: they just have to get past thousands of U.S. military veterans first. Returning to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota days after President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order reinstating the contentious $3.8 billion project, Veterans Stand has vowed to stonewall the pipeline’s completion. “We are committed to the people of Standing Rock, we are committed to nonviolence, and we will do everything within our power to ensure that the environment and human life are respected,” Anthony Diggs, a spokesman for the group, told CNBC. “That pipeline will not get completed. Not on our watch.”

The group, which served as “human shields” for protestors at Oceti Sakowin camp, just south of Bismarck, in December, have raised over $75,000 since launching a GoFundMe campaign last week. Veterans Stand is looking to raise $500,000 to purchase supplies such as food, firewood, propane, and first-aid kits, as well as arrange car rides for volunteers to and from the camp.

We Need You Now: Final Easement for DAPL Appears Imminent
Camp of the Sacred Stones
International Indigenous Youth Council
Indigenous Environmental Network
January 31, 2017
http://sacredstonecamp.org/blog/2017/1/31/we-need-you-now-final-easement-for-dapl-appears-imminent

The Standing Rock Sioux will soon march on Washington.
by Sabrina Imbler, grist
February 3, 2017
http://grist.org/briefly/the-standing-rock-sioux-will-soon-march-on-washington/?
On Wednesday, the tribe announced that the Rise With Standing Rock Native Nations March will happen in D.C. on March 10. That’s more than a month before the March for Science and the People’s Climate March.

#NODAPL 2017 ACTION HUB
Help us fill every single day of this calendar with a #NoDAPL action! Wherever you are, take action to kill the black snake.
http://tinyurl.com/jg35nky

Between Standing Rock and a hard place

by cartoonist Steve Greenberg.

The Passion Behind Standing Rock Protest

Click here to access the introduction followed by a transcript of an interview with Bill Means, a longtime Native American activist, by Flashpoints program moderator Dennis Bernstein of KPFA, a listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, California. You can listen to the 10/18/2016 broadcast of this interview which starts at 26:40m into the nearly 56 minute Flashpoints program.

The months-long struggle to stop the Dakota Pipeline near the territory of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota has raised passions among Native American activists and environmentalists who have clashed with police trying to sweep the protesters aside.

To explain the intensity of the resistance, I interviewed Bill Means, co-founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and chairman of the International Indian Treaty Council, which has supported the North Dakota pipeline protests.

The most critical reason of all for the militant protests is the relatively high probability for a pipeline burst under or near the Missouri river adjacent to their reservation. If you think this possibility is remote, see this, this, this, and this.

Solidarity from the Amazon to Standing Rock

Click here to access article from Amazon Watch.

Indigenous people all over the Americas are increasingly feeling the threats of capitalist development on lands which they have lived on for thousands of years. This article especially drew my attention because I grew up very near the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, but had limited contact with indigenous people. I mostly saw a few of them on local baseball teams, however one incident left a very strong impression upon me as a 11 year old child. I lost my wallet which contained five dollars (a very large sum in the late 1940s) and it was returned to me via a third party completely intact. Somehow I learned that the original finders were very poor Native Americans who I was unable to find to give them a reward.

The website contains a lot of information about similar issues that indigenous people are facing all over the Americas, especially in South America. It also contains some excellent videos to educate us about environmental destruction and the fight to save our habitat. Here are two:



And especially one that you can find at this link.

Silence of Complacency: The Moral Universe of Progressive Gatekeepers

Click here to access article by Jay Taber from Public Good Project. 

I was thinking about my new piece, which I sent to the usual progressive gatekeepers in Seattle media, and was pondering the reluctance of all of them to ever use the word ‘racism’ in any of their coverage of the fossil fuel export war between Coast Salish Nation and Wall Street.

So far as I can tell, no media source has published his article.

Yes, the Native Americans and others have, to my surprise, won a major battle against major capitalist supporters, like Warren Buffet, to stop the construction of a coal terminal near their territory just below the Canadian border and north of Seattle (near where I live). 

Straight Talk Hate Talk

Click here to access article from Public Good Project.

This website follows up on a recent article, which exposed the use of non-profit organizations as front groups to attack tribal rights under long standing agreements with the federal government in order to pave the way for a coal terminal (in my county), with this article that gives more background information (mostly via links) on these attacks. 

As I remarked in the previous post, major economic interests are supporting this effort: Goldman-Sachs and Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett). Another non-profit front group that is playing a major role in this attack through the use of lawsuits and propaganda is mentioned in the article: the deceptively named "Northwest Jobs Alliance".

One link takes you to IC Magazine's (a Native American website) post entitled "Wise Use Terrorism: Craig Cole's Anti-Indian Campaign" which argues the following:

The Wall Street/Tea Party Convergence in the fossil fuel export war on the Salish Sea, using counterfeit front groups and political action committees, is a textbook example of Wise Use netwar (networked psychological warfare) exploiting organized racism. Gray ops (misleading propaganda) and black ops (counterfeit front groups) make it possible for Wise Use fossil fuel export developers to confuse mainstream media, and in conjunction with bribery through advertising, ensure that only the industrial point of view is represented in the corporate mainstream news. [my link]

Black Slaves, Indians, and the US Colonial Project

Click here to access the 55 minute interview conducted by KPFA's C. S. Soong with Barbara Krauthamer, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

Notions of racial hierarchy abounded in the early nineteenth century as missionaries tried to convert Native Americans, federal officials sought to seize Indian lands, and Indians in the southern US bought, sold, and owned black slaves. Barbara Krauthamer relates what happened when people of different races, agendas, and social status encountered one another in the shadow of the US colonial project.

Zapatistas: Truth and Justice Will Never, Ever, Come from Above

Click here to access article by the Zapatistas from the region of Chiapas, Mexico.

We in the more "advanced" Western countries have much to learn from the Zapatistas--first, and foremost, are the insights contained in this article:

We as Zapatistas, women and men, did not trust those above before, nor do we now, nor will we ever, regardless of the color of their flag, regardless of their style of speech, regardless of their race. If one is above, it is because s/he is oppressing those below.

Those above have no trustworthy word, no honor, no shame, no dignity.
Truth and justice will never, ever, come from above.

We will have to construct them from below.

It's clear to me that many of us living in the "advanced" Western countries have, through many years of indoctrination and propaganda, come to accept as normal total obedience to, and trust in, the authorities who rule over us and control our lives. Their power is based on their private "ownership", under the rules of capitalism, of economies which in reality is a social legacy created by many generations of humans from the advent of human existence over 150,000 years ago. 

How Extreme Energy Leads to Extreme Politics

Click here to access article by Aldo Orellana López and Sian Cowman from Foreign Policy in Focus via Uncommon Thought Journal. (I am posting the article this way because I encountered problems with FPIF's website.)

As corporations and governments around the world scramble to access harder-to-reach fossil fuels in fracking wells and tar sands, the struggles of communities on the front lines of this expansion of extractivism are becoming more extreme — and more visible.

And so is the backlash against any who resist.

Indigenous peoples who find themselves “in the way” of extractivist projects are increasingly finding their territorial rights, among others, violated.

A particularly salient example is playing out in Argentina.

This is also happening in Bolivia and Ecuador regarding fossil fuels, and in Honduras and Guatemala (see the latest example here) with metal mining.

Native Americans and US Scorched Earth Continuum

Click here to access article by Finian Cunningham from LIBYA 360°.

This independent Irish journalist provides an historical perspective on mainstream media reports of an accidental toxic spill of waste water from a disused gold mine in Colorado. Could this have been a deliberate ploy to take over more land that appears to have valuable minerals?

Earlier this month, on August 5, a huge toxic spill of waste water from a disused gold mine in Colorado made international headlines when it flowed into several major rivers. Less publicised is that the contaminated waterways are vital for irrigation and drinking water in the Four Corners territory, upon which the Navajo people depend for their livelihoods.

Considering the history of the ruling capitalist class in America in taking by various means the lands from Native Americans, this contention seems plausible.

The historical precedent is also strongly indicative of a nefarious purpose. The history of Washington’s dealings with Native American nations is one of treachery, chicanery and genocide on the altar of capitalist exploitation orchestrated from corporate-controlled politicians sitting in Washington.

This summary statement hides such 19th century crimes as deliberately distributing blankets that were inflected with smallpox and other diseases to Native Americans in order to kill them.

Nowadays, according to the almost daily reports I receive, US, Canadian, and British mining corporations backed by their governments are engaged in many acts of genocide against native peoples in Central America for the same purposes.

Until the Rulers Obey: Learning from Latin America’s Social Movements

Click here to access an excerpt from the introduction to Until the Rulers Obey: Voices of from Latin American Social Movements, edited by Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein and posted at Upside Down World.

This article appears to give an excellent, up-to-date summary of the political conditions throughout Latin America with emphasis on "progressive states" in South America (Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil) and the problems encountered by radical movements who aligned themselves with these states. 

It seems that after the brutal overthrow of the Chilean socialist government in 1973 and the Nicaraguan government ultimately in 1989 by subversive forces of the Empire, the Empire favored the implementation of soft power to continue their neoliberal policies especially in states that harbored revolutionary movements.

The Conquest of the Americas continues as an ongoing process of “primitive accumulation,” that is, through brutal dispossession, only changed in detail. The looting, once only of gold and silver picked or shoveled from mines by slaves to satisfy the greed of Conquistadores, has increased exponentially in recent decades to feed transnational Capital. This behemoth has left behind the sword to devastate the region with an arsenal of new tools for plunder: strip-mining “megaprojects” with giant machines that dig for lithium, copper and gold, laying waste to landscapes; countless drills for oil, poisoning rivers; dams for hydroelectric power that flood indigenous lands; battalions of tractors sowing industrial soy for cattle and biofuel, or cane for sugar and biofuel, or eucalyptus for paper mills, or other monocultures that raze entire ecosystems and steal peoples’ ways of life….

Still, there is hope given the unique cultural fact of strong communitarian values of the indigenous people in this area. They have achieved some successes, and more promising is that they are learning a lot of lessons which may serve them in overcoming these powerful neoliberal forces. We activists in North America can learn much from their experience.

Some form of socialism or communitarianism is embedded in the cultural matrix of the entire southern continent, in the indigenous concept of the “minga,” “minka,” or “cayapa,” meaning “community work for the collective good without self-interest.” The Roman Catholic Church—especially Liberation Theology— posed community as the way to redemption, unlike Protestantism in which salvation has generally been considered an individual matter. When left to their own devices, Latin Americans have often chosen communal forms of mutual aid and populist, corporatist or even socialist governments that advocated for the interests of the working majority.  In any case, in the neoliberal globalizing world of TINA, Latin America seemed not to have gotten the memo that socialism was dead and Capital was writing history’s final chapter. 

Streams Of Profit And Rivers Of Poison: Big Agritech’s Lasting Legacy

Click here to access article by Colin Todhunter from East by Northwest.

Britisher Todhunter, who has lived in India for a number of years, has learned a lot about the way global corporations function in developing countries. He explains how the agricultural corporations' exclusive dedication to profits adversely affects the health and well-being of ordinary people.

With each new ‘fix’, with each technology, with each new pesticide, herbicide, GM innovation, we become further removed from with nature as powerful corporate entities attempt to dominate it with some or other biotechnology that further damages both ourselves and the environment. But, it’s all good business. And once peasant economies are destroyed and remaining farmers are forced onto the treadmill of chemical inputs and GMOs, it can be difficult to get off. There’s always money to be made from a continuous state of crisis management (aka ‘innovation’ and bombarding farmers with a never-ending stream of new technologies).

Canadian natives resist: ‘What the frack?’

Click here to access article by Eric Walberg from Intrepid Report. 

The indigenous people of North America were living in harmony with the environment when Europeans invaded and took possession of their lands. These people viewed themselves as being a part of the vast web of life. The Europeans lead by the new capitalist class viewed nature as merely a thing that we humans should dominate and exploit. 

Since then corporations and their financial backers have continued to rape and pillage these lands to satisfy their addictions to wealth and power. Oil shale fracking operations are now poisoning the ground waters on which all people depend for their survival. The indigenous, or First Nations people as they are referred to in Canada, are now leading the fight to save this vital gift of nature for all of us. In recent weeks...

...demonstrations broke out in cities across Canada, including Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa and Thunder Bay, as well as in New York and at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC.

This principled action by New Brunswick natives is being echoed in dozens of other campaigns by native communities across Canada, where natives are stubbornly refusing to be swallowed up by corporate Canada.

Seize the moment, stand with Elsipogtog

Click here to access article by Derrick O’Keefe from straight.com (Georgia Straight weekly newspaper, Vancouver BC)

The Idle No More movement gets almost no coverage in US media. This posting is an effort to fill that gap in a little. The movement has been initiated by indigenous people in Canada and the US to fight back against shale fracking which is contaminating ground water, but it appears that the most active efforts have been all across Canada. Currently, actions in New Brunswick and Ontario are being met with overwhelming violence from the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police). 





See also this, this, this, and this. 

Because the Land Is Ours – The Rights of Mother Earth v. Carbon Trading

Click here to access article from sustainablog.

The anonymous author explains the flaws behind REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), a program promoted by international capitalists to continue their exploitation of resources anywhere in the world under the guise of protecting the environment. The writer introduces his essay with the recent experience of an indigenous group in Panama.

In October 2011, the US-based Wildlife Works Carbon presented a REDD proposal to the Kuna Yala. The fifty-one communities spent a year and a half in consultation. In June 2013, the Kuna Yala general congress voted to reject the corporate proposal. They declared, further, their complete withdrawal “from all discussions at the national and international level on the REDD issue” and a prohibition on “organizing events, conferences, workshops and other activities on the issue.”

Ecuador: The Rights of Nature Threatened in Yasuní National Park

Click here to access article by Marc Becker from Upside Down World. 

Global capitalist's insatiable desire for energy and other resources to produce objects for first world consumers and thereby extract profits is destroying indigenous communities all over the world. While Ecuador's president has been hailed as a hero by liberal environmentalists, his version of "green capitalism" is a sham like all the others. This, and many other similar stories, demonstrate that once you buy into the logic of capitalism, you cannot have unconditional human rights or a sustainable environment.

Leftist opponents repeatedly charged that Correa had failed to make a fundamental break from a capitalist logic of resource extraction. Sociologist Jorge León Trujillo states that he never understood how the commodification of the environment, as would happen with the Yasuní initiative, could be considered a revolutionary proposal.

The economic proposals that Correa pursues are not unlike those that the conservative economist Hernando de Soto in neighboring Peru has long advocated. At best, for leftists Correa’s approach appeared to be one of green capitalism that was quickly discarded when it no longer provided the expected economic returns.

See similar examples of neoliberal attacks on indigenous people going on now in Africa and Indonesia here and here. 

“My generation has stood up and said, 'No more'”

Click here to access article by Aaron Lakoff from Vancouver Media Co-op (Canada).

Indigenous peoples in British Columbia are organizing actions against the proposed Northern Gateway pipelines through their territories. 

...major oil companies such as Chevron and Exxon are seeking to connect the Alberta tar sands to the Pacific coast for export. The Unis'tot'en claim that these pipelines, requiring clear cutting and prone to leaks and spills, would threaten watersheds, forests, rivers, and salmon spawning channels—source of their primary staple food.

(Also, listen to this 6:29m audio report.) 

Idle No More: This Is About the Future

Click here to access article by Cathy Gerrior from Halifax Media Co-op. 

(This article is provided by ordinary Canadians who insist upon taking back media to serve the 99 Percent. To do this they have organized a network of media co-ops across their country. This is radical activism at its best.

In this time of destruction of the Earth's ecosystem, we Euro-Americans and others have much to learn from indigenous people who have had an intimate connection with the Earth and all living creatures.

Speakers and performers at Montréal's Idle No More protest

We are a proud people who know through many centuries of teachings that the Earth is our Mother, the Sky is our Father, the Moon is our Grandmother, and the Sun is our Grandfather. We know that all life, from the smallest grains of sand to the Eagles that fly high above us, to those that dwell under the earth as well as in the rivers and oceans, they are our Sisters and Brothers. We know that we are neither more, nor less important than they. And we know that it has always been, and always will be our responsibility to be caretakers of this land and its many life sources.