How Long Will Bureaucrats Continue To Treat Native Americans Like Children on Their Own Lands

On his way out, Joltin' Joe Biden seems intent on blocking drilling for oil on tribal lands in Alaska, even though old treaties gave the natives the right to make such decisions about their own lands. That right lasted till someone struck oil. First white progressives stole the land and gave the first peoples what they didn't much want and then when that land became valuable, suddenly the white men of the DNC decided they needed to protect the primitives from themselves.

Absolute balderdash if you ask me.

Nagruk Harcharek, the president of Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, an organization that represents the interests of numerous native communities , said, "What we’re hearing from the administration is that (they) are the most tribally-friendly administration in the history of the United States, right?” Harcharek disagrees. “At least from our perspective, that’s not our impression. There was a lack of engagement, meaningful engagement (with the Biden administration over the rights of the tribes to allow drilling on their ancestral lands.) Oftentimes, Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, we heard of policy changes in the news and not from phone calls from folks, even though everybody has our number. We are part of the environment. We utilize it for subsistence hunting, for our culture, and it’s extremely important to us. We don’t need to be protected from our own environment,We can make decisions and help administrations make decisions that are both good for the region and also good for the environment and good for the state, good for the nation. And that just wasn’t the case."

 

As a person of native American ancestry this sounds to me like more of that paternalistic white man talk the Indians got in the 19th century when white men were talking treaties it seemed that at least some of them had no intention of honoring. The attitude was often "Got to take care of the Injuns because they aren't capable of caring for themselves. Great White Father in Washington my fuzzy muscular buttocks! It's just one more example of progressive white folk lying to the tribes.

Sheila and I have waay more native American ancestry than Pocahontas Warren sitting up there in DC on her high horse. My great++++++ grandfather, Nemacolin, was a scout for George Washington (who is my 7th cousin 8 times removed) and together they cut the Cumberland Trail. Sheila's Great +++++ Grandfather, War Chief Hopothle Mica Bowie traveled to New York to negotiate a peace treaty with the new United States President, George Washington. Papa George gave the Indians a much better deal than Biden even though noted Democrat President Andrew Jackson and others later reneged on the deals. Lincoln and Grant negotiated some fair deals with the tribes only to have later members of a certain party come along later and screw the Indians over. 

To this day Indians can't even get home mortgages for homes on the reservation because the Bureau of Indian Affairs won't allow it in case the bank were to foreclose. If the feds would let the tribes truly manage their own affairs they might have better economies that don't have to rely on casinos and cigarette and firework sales. In the past, Indian tribes in Oklahoma that were allowed to contract with oil companies to drill on their lands have been able to seriously improve conditions among their people.

Among the Sea Peoples the states and the feds do give our native brothers a break on fishing rights that commercial companies don't get up here in the Pacific Northwest. Even so, there are still too many politicians who suffer from the "Great White Father" syndrome.

If you want to support Native American rights, make Washington stick to the treaties, give control of the reservations to the tribes, and stop treating Native Americans like children. That's way more demeaning than anything done by conservative Christian Americans.

© 2024 by Tom King

Rejecting First Victimhood

First victims as envisioned by horny environmentalist painters.

Just to touch on this one last time, I had someone describe my native American ancestors as the "first victims", a clever word play on the term "first peoples" which is increasingly being used in environmentalist propaganda to take the "American" out of the term "Native Americans".  Now I think old Amerigo Vespucci was a no-good con-artist for how he got the New World named after himself, but we're stuck with the name and nobody really remembers Vespucci anymore anyway, so I have no trouble with the other terms. Truth be told the Cherokees on my side and the Choctaw on my wife's side probably thought of themselves as the Sioux did - as the human beings.

I'm as sanguine about what was done to the natives in the conquest of the Americas as anybody (and it was a conquest make no mistake). Some of my ancestors were first peoples It could have gone much more smoothly save for the troublemakers. Most of us were farmers and only wanted to use the land to grow food and raise livestock. There was plenty of space after all. As farmers, builders and manufacturers, we brought civilization's tools with us which could have been used by native populations to improve the quality of their own lives. Some of the tribes developed working relationships with the more technologically advanced invaders developed alliances. What spoiled it was the thugs and hooligans on both sides that preyed upon the innocent. There was much unnecessary killing that happened with plenty of guilt on both sides.

Some groups of Native Americans were little more than bands of thugs, stealing from other tribes and murdering Native Americans and settlers alike.

Some groups of settlers were every bit as bad. It was, after all, the French and English who invented scalping. Had the good folk on both sides managed to get together and shut down the thugs and bullies that were starting all these brush fire wars between groups of good people, America's story might have been much different, especially for the natives.

The trouble is that too many good people are so focused on making a living and caring for their families that they don't have a lot of time and energy left for forcing all those bad people to behave themselves. It's always that way with good people - too busy doing good to waste energy on dealing with bad people especially when they are trying to survive in a wilderness. And there are so many rotten people and it takes so few of them to commit enough atrocities to set off a war.  Police have discovered that if you can remove just a handful of career crooks from a community, the crime rate drops precipitously. Perhaps if we could have eliminated some of our more thuggish forefathers from the gene pool at the time, things could have gone much more peacefully.

Now that civilization is plugging along, however, we need to take a closer, reasoned and less emotional response to the issues we face and to reason together to find solutions. As a community organizer, my job was to found ways to help people who thought they were liberals and people who thought they were conservatives discover that they were really all just people and that the issues were the same for all of us. We only disagreed on how to solve the problems. When we focused on the problems instead of trying to ram the square pegs into the ideological round holes, we could figure out some amazingly effective ways to fix things that were wrong.

The problem long term is that in this world there will always be evil people who are in it for their own benefit and no one else's. These trouble-makers are hard to see because they walk about amongst us disguised as politicians, lawyers, businessmen, union leaders, socialites, philanthropists and community "leaders". When I was doing nonprofit work in Tyler, Texas, I was shocked to discover that on those big marble donor walls they put on college buildings and hospitals, the list of "benefactors" contained both would-be saints and hard-core sinners. There were racial bigots who donated to "black" charities. One excused himself by saying black people "need" their own churches and institutions separate from whites. We had pedophiles organizing benefits and donating to children's charities. I had one lady tell me she gave money to charities because she couldn't bear to look at anything "ugly" and by giving her husband's money to these charities, she could avoid having to see ugly people and unhappy situations without any guilt. She'd bought emotional absolution so she wouldn't have to feel guilty about being wealthy.

Before we choose sides on issues, perhaps we should examine our own hearts first. If you want to be a card-carrying good guy, you should determine whether you are truly on the side of the angels or you are merely looking for an excuse to push aside our own guilt with bribes and posturing, so that you may live comfortably on the side of the damned and bask in your unearned moral superiority.

© 2016 by Tom King

Exploiting the Injuns - Again!

Liberal environmentalists hijack Native American issue.
That's them back there in the crowd..

Well, once again, the white man is exploiting the first peoples.  And where better to do so than in the hills of South Dakota where we're seeing video after video of poor downtrodden native Americans, often in colorful Injun dress, weeping over the evil being done to them by the terrible white Republicans who want to poison their water and take their land?

Okay, before you start in on me, I can use the word "Injun" - it's allowed. If black people can use the n-word to refer to themselves, then I can use the "i" word. I have way more Cherokee blood in me than Elizabeth Warren has in her pasty white self. One of my great grandmother was half or a quarter native American and she wasn't the only one. I know this because the racist side of my family didn't allow you to talk about it. They would marry Injun women; they just didn't like to talk about it. 

I use the word "Injun" because it was often used to refer to my ancestors by the sorts of white supremacist racists that created the KKK, Jim Crow laws, hosed Dr. Martin Luther King, and fought a bloody civil war to preserve their right to oppress black people. Instead of Injuns, however, or "redskins", today's racists refer to them in a paternalistic effort to protect their delicate feelings as "native Americans" or "first peoples". Today's racists have a much better public relations/propaganda department than the pre-1960s Democrats did.

Honestly, you should be very wary of stories like the one about the oppression of first Americans in the Dakotas. Environmentalist groups jumped on the Native American connection to the pipeline story because it was great propaganda for the progressive/socialist/environmentalist cause. Slate inadvertently lifted the lid on the environmentalist agenda in a recent article. The environmental lobby is on the case. Busloads of outside agitators have been brought in specifically to initiate a confrontation with police and generate footage for the media. The actual "peaceful" protestors have been caught up in violence initiated by white racist outside agitators from the radical environmentalist movement who view native Americans as a simple, therefore easy to manipulate, people and useful for propaganda purposes.

It's not that the tribes don't have a complaint. They clearly do and as in past cases the native Americans have a legal remedy and have won their cases where they were in the right. Let's face it, Americans really feel guilty about how some (not all) of our ancestors treated the first peoples (see I too can be politically correct). But there are better ways to solve this problem than to turn it into a referendum on whether or not we should use fossil fuels. That's not a native American issue. It's the issue du jour for liberal white progressives seeking to push a complex socialist agenda of their own. Given the history of socialism's treatment of native peoples, the native American community might want to choose their allies a little more carefully.

Some facts you should know.

1. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved this pipeline project after doing an environmental impact study as well as an archaeological study, but, due to objections from the native American community have initiated a review of the both impact studies before the pipeline crosses the river. This was worked out after the tribes filed complaints and made requests to halt the project till further studies could be done. General Custer did not ride in and lead the bulldozers at sword point through Indian villages and burial grounds as some of the more hysterical headlines would lead you to believe. Even Slate admitted that there were better ways for the tribes to negotiate this issue. 
2. The pipeline is not on reservation land, but crosses the river above the reservation. Pictures of bulldozers ripping up Indian burial grounds are largely fake. They are pictures of bulldozers gleaned from the web of construction projects hundreds and even thousands of miles away or along other areas of the pipeline project not disputed.
3. The pipeline is a safer alternative for transporting oil (fracked or otherwise) than transporting it on trains. Trains derail with alarming frequency as our transportation infrastructure has deteriorated under a Democrat administration obsessed with social programs designed to attract new Democrat voters. And derailed oil cars make a frightful environmental mess.
4. Fracking gets brought up because it's the latest environmentalist buzz word for generating nameless horror out of nothing. The oil being pumped out of the ground is by no means largely fracked.
5. The violent agitators who have triggered the government response are largely white outside agitators shipped in for just that purpose. It's an old communist revolutionary's trick.
6. The complaints about violent government and police thuggery are coming from the same people who want to disarm the entire populace leaving only those same government "thugs" they are complaining about to be the only ones with weapons against an unarmed and helpless "proletariat". This is not about government bullying. It's about furthering an agenda in which the political elites have enough power to bully everyone without fear of pushback. They just need us to vote the right way and images of oppressed peaceful native Americans is a handy tool to get us to do that.

White liberal environmentalists provide paternalistic
support for poor helpless native Americans.
At least that's what they want you to believe.

I use the term proletariat because progressive socialist elitists see people as a big old stupid herd to be controlled for their own good. This generation of collectivists is a little more subtle than their racist forebears, the eugenicists and Democrats. They are still intent on separating us by race, but they are calling it multiculturalism and asking us to herd ourselves into separate racial pens. It's a sort of political breeding program designed to weed out the troublesome.

The collectivist left and their environmentalist toadies are pressing for a society in which only the self-styled smart leaders have guns and troops while we give up our own means of self-defense should our leaders dare to impinge upon our liberties. What a wonderful world that will be!  The progressive dream is a world in which the ignorant masses are herded into cities where they can be watched by an armed government, onto public transportation where their movements can be tracked, into government healthcare monitored by the IRS in order to better decide who is worth spending healthcare dollars on, and into government jobs (all jobs are to eventually become government jobs).  The idea is that we will all be generally treated as nearly the same as possible, much like your mother tried to do when you were a toddler. 

Our elite smart people leaders believe that equality and fairness is the equivalent of sameness. It's the best they can do in order to be able to manage something as complex as a nation's people and economy. It's an old plan that dates back to ancient times. You have a noble special class that runs things and a vast peasantry to do the work. Unfortunately for the peasants, what this ancient scheme always winds up doing is creating a vast shared misery for the peons who serving the lords and ladies of the elite classes in their shiny castles.

The left is using our emotions and propaganda stunts like this one and the black lives matter riots to gradually nudge us into the corrals and sheep pens they are building for us. Even more ironic, they are using our own money to do it. Our taxes are building the social slaughterhouses they will use against us to make us less troublesome. The self-styled intelligent environmentalist elite wish to vastly reduce the number of people on the earth. Ideally, there would be enough left in the collectives to serve the needs of the leader class and leave vast stretches of the planet to return to "nature", the new god that they claim to worship.

In reality, in the narcissistic world of the "progressive", the only gods they worship are themselves. It dates back to Eden and the first lie. "Eat of this fruit and you will be like gods," said Satan, who was, by the way, the first "progressive" and the first socialist. He has always disagreed with God on the issue of free will. Throughout history, the dark one has shown that he believes that external control of the human race is essential to peace and safety and his own twisted idea of perfection.

In concert with Lucifer's original population management theories, the progressive movement seeks to create a heaven on Earth without the bother of, as Donald Trump memorably put it, "....having to bring God into it." The model embraces Darwin's survival of the fittest evolutionary model, BF Skinner's idea that external rewards and punishment, properly applied, can make people into whatever we want, and Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Basically the Marxist theory is this:

• Some people are genetically better than others and should rightfully rise to a position of leadership over the masses. (Darwin) These persons should work to eliminate genetic types that are proven to be undesirable through abortion, population control, and in extreme cases, genocide.
• It is possible to make people better through the application of law and by other external means. (Skinner). That's why socialism is always big on re-education camps, for if you disagree with the collective, you by definition, don't understand the goodness and wisdom of the collective (i.e. government).
• If you provide people's basic needs in an orderly way, they will naturally be happy and seek to be productive for the good of the collective. (Maslow) This belief explains why it's always a mystery to socialists when the worker class quits doing any sort of quality work and the economy collapses. The basic food, housing and crappy medical care was, according to the ideology, supposed to make the masses happy, productive and content.

We face a looming future in which for the next four years we are likely to be led by either an open socialist or a closet socialist, both of whom are anxious to test the power of government to do what they believe God has failed to do - create an Earthly Utopia. Either way the power of the government will grow stronger. The power of the people to exercise self-determination will fade away.

I believe we are in the final days of Earth's history. I am not afraid. Even so, come Lord Jesus is my prayer. I am ready to become a citizen of a New Earth in which freedom, love, joy, peace and plenty reign and death is no more - a land without governors, presidents, senators, congressmen, regulators and tax collectors. For eternity, no more filing 1040s. How cool is that?

God bless you all.

© 2016 by Tom King

Embrace Your Inner Redskin

Embrace your inner cowboy.....
or Redskin for that matter.

The Power of Language to Change Perception - The Washington Redskins Conundrum

As the NFL football season approaches, everybody's all up in the air about whether or not the Washington Redskins should change their name in order to avoid offending Native American people. Some sportscasters have vowed not to use the R-word during broadcasts. Some tribes have sued the NFL. Others have taken the side of the team and call out the PC police for creating what they call a phony issue designed to make another whole race of people into victims.


The authors of the controversy say that changing the team's name will unite Americans in peaceful coexistence and harmony. How's that worked out for them?  Really, all they've managed to do is to divide the country and cast aspersions on people whose politics they don't like.

So, how about letting the people who are being slurred determine whether or not "Redskins" is a slur or not. Let's get the guys out of it who are third parties with no skin in the game other than to make themselves feel better about their own moral superiority over the stupid rednecks who call their football team the Redskins? And don't forget the would-be law-suit millionaires; they'll be suing for "damages" next. They have a vested interest in keeping the issue stirred up.

Not all Indians/Redskins/Native Americans are offended by the name of the Washington Team. Some of us find the name Redskins applied to a sports team, to be a tribute to our warrior ancestors, worthy adversaries who stood bravely against an unjust genocidal war waged against us by the racists and greedy bloodsuckers of the time (You know who you are). We know that the depredations against the red man by whites in the 19th century were by no means approved of by the American public in general. The country was sharply divided. Many people were sympathetic with the plight of Indians and found some of the government's "military" actions to be quite appalling. For the past century or so, Congress has hardly ever passed an appropriations bill or funding package that doesn't include money for the tribes in it. We feel bad about how some of our people treated the noble Red Man (that was the language the whites who sympathized with the tribes used at the time). There were powerful voices raised against our mistreatment of the Indian nations In Congress too (mostly Republicans by the way - just a little historical note).

Every race has its predators. Some of my own Native American ancestors could have handled their relations with whites a whole lot better. The truth is some of the tribes were more like roving gangs of thugs than they were like civilized people. This behavior reflected badly on all the majority of the rest of us who were peaceful. Some of the "warriors" who made themselves famous - were, quite frankly the terrorists of the Old West.

My ancestors lived in tents. Others were abused by the British and hunted across the peat bogs of Ireland. Others stood firm on the bridge at Culloden. My grandparents proudly chopped cotton. Some slept most of their lives under the stars and lived in the saddle. We farmed, we hunted, we preached and we made brooms for a living. One of my kin (to our eternal shame) was an English country squire.

I have enough native American blood that if I had the same amount of black blood in me, I'd be considered an African American by the Social Security Administration. My Indian ancestors have this wonderful belief that if you have even a relatively small amount of tribal blood in your veins, you're one of the tribe. Only white racists believe that a drop of some "other" blood makes you tainted. That's why I dislike being sensitive to the use of Native American symbolism. It smacks of paternalism - the idea that the tribes are so weak and pathetic that we must protect them by making it wrong to use their names and symbols if they're not part of some officially sanctioned Indian organization, group or activity.

What's ironic is that the same group winding up about offending Indians is the same group that calls dumping a cross into a jar of urine "Art" and says we Christians have no right to be offended.

I wouldn't complain much if the team changed its name to something else just to make the whiners stop whining. Let's make it the Washington Rednecks. That tactic would role model how to deal with racial slurs. Instead of whining like little girls, embrace the name and make it your own. Be proud of it. Black people almost did that with the n-word up until whiny white liberals got into the act and made the word unspeakable.

Of course, if we did change the name to "Rednecks", then some ambulance chaser would file suit on behalf of offended "indigenous southern peoples" and there would go a perfectly good word and with it Jeff Foxworthy's career. The PC police are already calling Robin Williams a racist for his "Welcome to Iraq. Help me" joke that Billy Crystal showed at the Emmys.

How about let's take a vote among the tribes? Not the tribal politicians, the ones making their living off of lawsuits and white guilt, but the rank and file members of the Nations. Ask them if they want the image of the Native American forcibly removed from the sides of football helmets. Then shall we get to work on with the logos of the Atlanta Braves, The Kansas City Chiefs, The Cleveland Indians, The Florida State Seminoles and the Chicago Blackhawks? The Golden State Warriors have preemptively removed any Native American symbolism from their logo, so unless bridge-builders or superheroes who dress all in black get offended they should be okay.

83% of American Indian respondents to a Sports Illustrated poll said that professional teams should not stop using Indian nicknames, mascots or symbols. But what do they know? They aren't wealthy white liberals.

I feel the same way about the use of Scots-Irish symbols - The Fighting Irish, The Boston Celtics, The UP Edinboro Fighting Scots and my personal favorite the University of Northern Colorado Fighting Whites!  That last one would probably have to be changed because some moral cop would see it as promoting the idea that whites are racially superior, just like using an Indian team name promotes the idea that Indians are racially inferior.......................................uh, what?.

You see what I'm talking about. It's a descent into madness. I say, we all get us some "I am a Redskin - Hear me whoop!" T-shirts and make some noise. The more our tribes symbols get out there, the more likely we will not fade into historical obscurity.  Who in the world would remember the Illini tribe if it weren't for the Univ. of Illinois "Fighting Illini"?  I say plaster Indian symbols everywhere. Let's remember them and never allow thugs and bullies to ever do harm to any other group of people again.

Look, the other side of my ancestral gene pool managed to turn the classist slur "Redneck" into a badge of pride (and THAT was a word created by nose-in-the-air white liberals specifically to disparage poor Southern working white folk - the same morally self-important folks by the way, who are now having heart palpitations over white people using Indian symbols for sports teams).

To me, Indian-named sports teams are a tribute to a brave people who have been done wrong. The use of the name keeps their memory alive. We have always named sports teams after things we hoped would capture the bravery, physical prowess and skill of the people or animals symbolized and imbue that spirit into the team. The Steelers weren't trying to offend union iron-workers by their choice of names. They were trying to say they admired and wanted to emulate the toughness of the iron-worker.

I don't think the Redskins management was trying to insult Indians. I think they enjoyed the idea that every Thanksgiving, the Redskins would take a shot at defeating the Cowboys. How much fun is that?

I embrace the name "redskin" in the same way I embrace "redneck". Yeah, buddy, I am one and if you don't want me going all warpath (or redneck) on you, you'll treat me with some respect.

If I had a sports team I'd name them "The Nerds" and make them the trickiest, most deviously intelligent team in the league. I'd have a guy with black glasses with tape on the bridge as our symbol. It's a kind of defiance. I wish more people could see it that way. The English Language is one of the best languages in the world for taking words and making them mean what we want them to mean. The best way to neutralize a slur is by making it a source of pride.
The sports world is in an uproar over the name of the Washington Redskins. NFL announcers promise not to use the R-word this season. Some of the tribal leaders have filed suit hoping to collect big on the controversy.

So is "Redskins" a slur? Yep. It was. For some it still is. The jury, as we say, is still out. But if the PC police want to eliminate the name as a racial slur, there is a much better way. Do what Rednecks did. Embrace the slur!

Embracing a slur is the best way I know to silence bigots and racists.

"You stupid redneck!"

"Yeah, and....."

Call me a couch potato and I go out and get a couch potato t-shirt and wear it with pride. You can't use the word "Texan" as a slur (and plenty of people, mostly liberals, have tried). We Texans are proud of who we are. We even named our entire state after a tribe of friendly Native Americans that we admired. They called us Texicans for a while to try and insult us by inferring we were part "Mexican". It did not work. We like our Tex-Mex culture so we didn't mind. Hey, we ARE Texicans. Get over it.

We're also "a bunch of cowboys." The media pundits and diplomatic corps tried to make that word offensive by calling President Reagan a cowboy. Reagan just put on a white hat for the cameras and grinned.

I recognize that some slurs are beyond the pale, but let's save our energies for eliminating those. Personally, I'd like someone to get outraged by musicians calling women b's and h's. People who use those kinds of slurs should lose their record contracts and be shamed out of the public eye. Now that's a political correctness I could get behind.

- Tom