Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 8599 Location: Fingerlakes - NY usa
Our Founding Fathers - A Tribute
The Native Americans
Instead of factory farming: they hunted for meat. Instead of killing animals just for their skin: they used all of the animal. They didn't use chemicals to fertilize. They took care of their elders without need of Social Security. They had superior medicine that cured Scurvy and could alleviate pain among other things. They lived in harmony with nature and kept the land as if it were virgin territory. They didn't illegalize drugs. Women weren't oppressed and often played an important role in their society including being head of the tribe. There were no 40 hour work weeks or oppressive religions, but there were frequent parties and festivals.
The Illegal Immigrants
They brought oppressive religion which was racist, slavery endorsing, and genocidal. They brought and fabricated disease and destruction of culture. Some will have us believe that the Natives were savages, yet when Columbus set off with ~1/2 the food needed for the trip, and made it back ok: they must not have been that savage! If they were: The land grabbing genocidal colonialism wouldn't have happened at that time. They brought drugs as a product that was sold instead of given. Their medicine masked symptoms and caused disease rather than cure. They denied the cure for Scurvy for years contending that "Savages" couldn't possibly know better than them. Was it religious oppression that drove people here, or the lure of free land, gold, legal slavery, etc?
Reparations
While USA (the corporation) is sending Israel aid for historic lies and to serve a racist religion that was used to justify the genocide, and enslavement of Africans and Native Americans; Native American remnants are tucked away on reservations where toxic waste is dumped on land no one wanted. The surviving remnant of Native Americans have ancestors that were stripped from their families as youths and forced into boarding schools to learn our culture and be brainwashed with Christianity that would have them serve the so called "Chosen People" with blind obedience and self sacrifice.
The Injustice Continues
As we're taught how great our country is, and how great our founding colonialist genocidal maniacs were, we're systematically blinded to the continuing injustice toward the people with the most right to this land. Reparations towards Native Americans tends to be selective and only benefit a small portion that turn around and benefit the occupiers. People who would likely be more responsible with reparations are rather framed and incarcerated. If you thought about those colonial times, and times of legal slavery and how you would have responded; consider responding now. Leonard Peltier - a hero to the Native American cause sits on Death Row. The product of the Slave trade are still victims of White Nationalist propaganda, even in it's subtle forms.
Real Patriots
Quote:
Patriot
Patriot \Pa"tri*ot\ (p[=a]"tr[i^]*[o^]t; 277), n. [F. patriote;
cf. Sp. patriota, It. patriotto; all fr. Gr. patriw`ths a
fellow-countryman, fr. pa`trios established by forefathers,
fr. path`r father. See {Father}.]
One who loves his country, and zealously supports its
authority and interests. --Bp. Hall.
[1913 Webster]
Can you be a patriot of an occupied land? Do occupiers have authority? -How and by who's authority? Are the occupiers working in the interests of America since it was colonized, or were the Natives? When white nationalists want people of African descent to go back to Africa, why don't they go back to where they came from first? I never thought myself as a patriot until pondering this. If the world can believe that Palestine belongs to Jews (not even Israelites), then I can believe that America belongs to the Natives. I love their country, what they did with it, and I zealously support their authority and interests! My wish is that we could all live as they appear to have lived before the occupation.
*Note about the author: No known African, or Native American descent.
Last edited by madthumbs on Mon Jul 02, 2007 2:43 pm; edited 1 time in total
Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 8599 Location: Fingerlakes - NY usa
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Sorry pal, being a patriot is basically being a nationalist.
If your a nationalist, your endorsing the idea of nation-states.
Nation-states sexual intercourse our co-existence with nature and eventually forced us into wage slavery.
Therefore, being a patriot is nothing one should be proud of and is definitely not something that's "not so bad after all!".
I've known since I was a kid that the Native Americans were always the first in America, and that Christopher Columbus could never have "discovered" it if the land was already inhabited. Why the schools never taught us this history always got to me; I could never figure out why they would not want us to know about this. Now, of course, it all makes sense.
If America and our genocidal, racist, awful ways are so bad then leave. Move somewhere where you agree with their politics.
This is an option, and some have chosen it. Buy land from a country and arrange for independant sovereignty, become your own country. However, I think we should try to fix this country if possible. Waking everyone up is very important to that cause.
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I've known since I was a kid that the Native Americans were always the first in America
After thinking about this, I'm not sure it really matters who was here first. Doesn't that seem kind of silly, assigning land ownership by waiting in a line? The history of the world could be very long, with peoples moving about inhabiting different parts of the earth through time. Sure, the Native Americans deserve some credit for being here before the Europeans, but who knows if some other people were here before the Native Amerians? Therefore, maybe that point isn't such a good one to use.
Let's think about it another way...what was truly important about the Native Americans was that they were inhabiting the land properly--peacefully, in harmony, without destroying it. I think we should give them credit for that above "their place in line on an area of land". We came in, started screwing around with them and messing their system up, and started harvesting the resources of the land in ways that damage it. It is because of their proper ways of living on the land without destroying it, that the land should be theirs and the Europeans had no right to it.
Thought for consideration: The people that take care of the land better than others should be the rightful owners of it? Your land is your investment that you pass along to future generations of your family. If you take care of it, and it stays fruitful and healty, your children and their children will be able to live on it the same as you, in harmony. If you take from the land without giving back, if you destroy it, then you are destroying your investment and passing nothing to your children. This is foolishness.
Fri Jun 08, 2007 6:37 am
madthumbs
Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 8599 Location: Fingerlakes - NY usa
Ward Churchill- Perpetual War: State Sponsored Terrorism & the Limites of Academic Dissent.
Churchill is a Professor of American Indian Studies and former Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he was worked since 1978, and is on the leadership council of the American Indian Movement of Colorado. He has authored, co-authored or edited more than 20 books, including A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present; Acts of Rebellion: The Ward Churchill Reader; and Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Pary and the American Indian Movement. He has received numerous writing and teaching awards and, as of 2001, was the most cited scholar in his field. In 2004 Professor Churchill was named runner-up for the Gustavus Myers Award of Best Writing on Human Rights for On the Justice of Roosting of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality and was inducted into the Martin Luther King Collegium of Scholars.
Lecture recorded on Monday May 2, 2005 at California State University Monterey Bay.
After thinking about this, I'm not sure it really matters who was here first. Doesn't that seem kind of silly, assigning land ownership by waiting in a line?
Yes it does seem silly, though I wasn't proposing that.
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Therefore, maybe that point isn't such a good one to use.
I wasn't trying to assign land, place in line or what not, I was just stating that I had a feeling the schools were lieing to us is all. And I agree, right now it doesn't really matter who was here first, what matters now is that we don't destroy the land.
Quote:
Let's think about it another way...what was truly important about the Native Americans was that they were inhabiting the land properly--peacefully, in harmony, without destroying it. I think we should give them credit for that above "their place in line on an area of land". We came in, started screwing around with them and messing their system up, and started harvesting the resources of the land in ways that damage it. It is because of their proper ways of living on the land without destroying it, that the land should be theirs and the Europeans had no right to it.
I couldn't agree more. And now that pesticides and GM crops are the choice for companies, it is only destroying it more than ever. Well, there are a few more things that destroy the land like nuclear waste, they still do that, right?
Sun Jun 17, 2007 3:54 pm
madthumbs
Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 8599 Location: Fingerlakes - NY usa
Mercury144 wrote:
I couldn't agree more. And now that pesticides and GM crops are the choice for companies, it is only destroying it more than ever. Well, there are a few more things that destroy the land like nuclear waste, they still do that, right?
Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 8599 Location: Fingerlakes - NY usa
Later Native Conflicts
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Since the very beginning, we as a people have slaughtered those before us if we required the land they were settled upon...this is just more of the same...today the mid-east...yesterday, the Americas...if THEY want it, THEY will take it!!
Wed Jul 04, 2007 9:41 am
madthumbs
Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 8599 Location: Fingerlakes - NY usa
Did The Founding Fathers Really Get Many of Their Ideas of L
Did The Founding Fathers Really Get Many of Their Ideas of Liberty From The Iroquois?
By Jack Rakove
Mr. Rakove is Coe Professor of History and American Studies, Professor of Political Science, at Stanford University.
Editor's Note: On Monday July 4th the New York Times published an op ed by journalist James Mann that made broad claims about the influence of the Iroquois on American constitutional history. Specifically, he argued that the Founding Fathers were deeply influenced by Indian ideas of liberty and that our very form of government was shaped in decisive ways by Indian influences at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. True? Others have advanced this argument in the past and even convinced NY State a few years ago to adopt this view in teaching assignments. We asked Stanford historian Jack Rakove to assess the legitimacy of Mann's argument.
_______________________________________
So vivid were these examples of democratic self-government [from colonial Indian history] that some historians and activists have argued that the [Indians'] Great Law of Peace directly inspired the American Constitution. Taken literally, this assertion seems implausible. With its grant of authority to the federal government to supersede state law, its dependence on rule by the majority rather than consensus and its denial of suffrage to women, the Constitution as originally enacted was not at all like the Great Law. But in a larger sense the claim is correct. The framers of the Constitution, like most colonists in what would become the United States, were pervaded by Indian images of liberty. -- James Mann, in the NYT (7-4-05)
The English colonists did not need the Indians to tell them about federalism or self-government. The New England Confederation was organized as early as 1643. The claim of influence is based on a very strange idea of causality: Franklin at the Albany Conference in 1754 learned about federalism and self-government from the Iroquois and then 33 years later at Philadelphia passed on these ideas to his fellow delegates at the Convention. Never mind that Franklin was very elderly and scarcely spoke at the Convention. For discussion of the issue see articles by Elisabeth Tooker in Ethnohistory vols 35 (1988) and 37 (1990).--Gordon Wood
When I studied for my oral exams back in 1970-1971, I did not read a single work relating in any sustained way to the history of Native Americans. There were not that many then worth reading, and even in my special field of early American history, where the hottest and most innovative historical writing was taking place, the subject commanded little apparent interest.
That has all changed since, of course. One cannot imagine preparing the early American field without reading the works of James Merrell, Dan Richter, Richard White, and others. Equally noteworthy is the way in which the very conceptualization of the field, the perspective from which it is viewed and reconstructed, has changed.
It therefore seems appropriate that the New York Times has just marked the 229th anniversary of American independence by allowing Charles Mann, author of the soon-to-be-published Before 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus to preview his book on its op-ed page. (By the way, am I wrong to think that the NYT has been doing more of this recently? Call your publicist!) Mann is a journalist, so we can expect the work to be something of a synthesis that won't tell historians much that they do not already know. But what disappointed me about this piece is that it recapitulates the tired and dubious argument about the purported Iroquois influence on the Constitution, and the more general proposition that important elements of Euro-American democratic culture have origins in "the democratic, informal brashness of American Indian culture."
What's wrong with the Iroquois influence hypothesis? There are two principal and, I think, fatal objections to the idea that anything in the Constitution can be explained with reference to the precedents of the Haudenosaunee confederation.
The first is a simple evidentiary matter. The voluminous records we have for the constitutional debates of the late 1780s contain no significant references to the Iroquois. It is of course possible that the framers and ratifiers went out of their way to suppress the evidence, out of embarrassment that they were so intellectually dependent on the indigenous sources of their political ideas. But these kinds of arguments from silence or conspiratorial suppression are difficult for historians to credit.
But, it is objected, there were no real European antecedents and sources for the institutions that Americans created, or for the democratic mores by which they came to live. Again, this is a claim that cannot escape serious scrutiny. All the key political concepts that were the stuff of American political discourse before the Revolution and after, had obvious European antecedents and referents: bicameralism, separation of powers, confederations, and the like. Even on the egalitarian side of the political ledger, 17th-century English society did give rise, after all, to the radical sentiments and practices we associate particularly with the period of the Civil War and Commonwealth, the Levellers and the Putney debates, and the abolition of the House of Lords and the monatchy. And on this side of the water, New England colonists managed to set up town meetings before they had made much progress creating vocabularies of Indian words. The same can of course be said for the famous meeting of the Virginia assembly in 1619.
None of this is to deny that prolonged contact between the aboriginal and colonizing populations were important elements in the shaping of colonial society and culture. Whether those contacts left a significant political legacy, however, is a very different question.
Response by Charles C. Mann 7-21-05
Prof Rakove says that what "disappointed" him about my article "is that it recapitulates the tired and dubious argument about the purported Iroquois influence on the Constitution." Had he actually read the piece, he would not have been so disappointed. My article specifically criticized that argument as follows:
"...some historians and activists have argued that the Great Law of Peace directly inspired the American Constitution. Taken literally, this assertion seems implausible. With its grant of authority to the federal government to supersede state law, its dependence on rule by the majority rather than consensus and its denial of suffrage to women, the Constitution as originally enacted was not at all like the Great Law." **Not at all like** -- I don't know how to be clearer than that.
Instead of the straw man that Prof Rakove does battle with, I proposed a cultural argument -- that the well-known democratic spirit had much to do with colonial contact with the Indians of the eastern seaboard, including and especially the Iroquois. In other words, I was saying (as Prof. Rakove puts it in his piece) "that prolonged contact between the aboriginal and colonizing populations were important elements [sic] in the shaping of colonial society and culture." Why he seems to think I was saying something else is mystifying to me.
Sat Jul 14, 2007 8:56 am
madthumbs
Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 8599 Location: Fingerlakes - NY usa
Indian Boarding School Trailer
Not sure if this video is going to expose how Christianity was used in these schools as a tool for mind control like The Canary Effect indicates.
The Canary Effect (trailer):
Tue Aug 21, 2007 8:55 am
madthumbs
Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 8599 Location: Fingerlakes - NY usa
The Sand Creek Massacre" is an examination of an open wound in the souls of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people as told from their perspective. On November 29, 1864, Colorado troops savagely slaughtered over 400 peace-seeking Cheyenne and Arapaho babies, children, persons with disabilities, women and elders under its protection. This act became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. This film chronicles that horrific 19th century event and its affect on the 21st century struggle for respectful coexistence between white and Native American plains cultures.
