A pick and shovel day related to forming a footer, started with the sun, formed it up, mixed and poured the concrete after adding lime to accelerate the drying time and it should be ready to go tomorrow, leaving nothing else to do but head home.
While working I thought a great deal about the previous blog All Should Have Equal Rights and thought to expand on it as follows – so a quick cup and a biscuit as I blog this and then on to chores.
“If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian he can live in peace.”
Obviously the approach wasn’t about living in peace, it was about acquisition and whatever it took to achieve that.
“Peace” was a secondary consideration when it became apparent acquisition and conquest wasn’t going to be a cake walk – a peace cobbled together in such a fashion as to insure the end game of acquisition.
The mere language of treaties is a defacto admission that if anyone owned the land we did – you cannot cede land or resources unless you have a proprietary claim.
In the mind of the boat people might made right – but theirs was a selective interpretation – had they of actually believed that they would have accepted the status quo in their own country and stayed there.
Some fled religious persecution and yet having done so brought it with them and actively engaged in it.
Some fled excessive taxation and an oppressive government and then went about establishing the same system.
Some spoke of the inherent equality of all people and never observed it.
Some spoke of the love of Jesus for all people and yet withheld it inspite of being the “God fearing Christians” they claimed.
Native American, if ever there was a nisnomer applied to any people it has been the indigenous people of this country, for any born here are Native American, and we never called this land America.
We are indigenous, the first people, sub divided by our tribal names.
The first people, whether the belief is we originated here or migrated across the Bering land bridge to settle in a continent devoid of people and usurping no one.
No argument can be made that this land wasn’t ours, or that if theft and robbery doesn’t translate to ownership it remains ours.
Yeah, I know, “get over it”…..those expressing such words of wisdom must likewise feel their ancestors should have just gotten over it and made the best of where they were instead of leaving.
More appropriately such sages should try getting over that sense of privilege and entitlement they have.
The thing about laws and treaties are their ability to make right look wrong and wrong like right. Something governments, legislation, and politicians are noted for.
A land of opportunity – the question is opportunity for who? Corporations, banks, Wall Street, and the one percenters? Opportunities in the form of perks and lobbyist money for politicians?
Where are the opportunities for our people, for minorities?
Is it those “service oriented” jobs like flipping burgers, working as a maid, or some other menial task?
Working for a poverty minimum wage, being warehoused in the gulags known as the rez, the projects, being homeless, racially profiled, or dependent on food stamps and the like?
Misery and poverty aren’t specific to any one group of people – they are universal in character-white, black, red, yellow, brown, doesn’t make a bit of difference, and the indifference to that reality by the “haves” is why I say there should be a unified poor peoples political party composed of all the disenfranchised selecting, advancing, and voting for their candidate chosen from within their ranks – a thought no doubt that scares the crap out of the entrenched and their corporate handlers.
I don’t begrudge anyone whatever measure of success and security they have if they earned it with honesty and integrity, a standard that finds a great many to be lacking, but what I say is don’t turn a blind eye to the inequities that exist, don’t turn a blind eye to where you may have came from or what you may have overcome, don’t engage in the consent of silence, and don’t bow down to anyone – don’t accept it as just the way it is, your lot in life.
Estimates are that something like seventy five percent of our people live off rez, there are obvious reasons for that, reasons that shouldn’t exist, shouldn’t separate families.
The rez is the nucleus – the epicenter of culture, a sort of seed bank like the one in Norway serving to protect the future.
Norway saving uncorrupted “heritage” plant seeds, and one could say the rez is tasked with saving the heritage of culture and traditions.
The more that leave and the more corrupted the seeds on the rez become the more difficult the task.
The relocation act was an attempt to disperse and absorb our people with promises of job training, employment, and an economically better life – one has to wonder if an effort is made to maintain the poverty and lack of opportunity on the rez as an incentive for others to leave.
For the population to dwindle to such a size that those who remain will be easier to manipulate, easier to appropriate resources from.
The rez faces multiple challenges, none more immediate than the internal corruption that is taking place within our very own backyard – among the priorities to deal with that must become one that is high on the list.