by b real
At counterpunch on wednesday is a piece that fits in w/ what our compañero r’giap reminds us is one of the primary functions of this site – remembering.
the article is a remembrance of & rumination on the recent passing over of the seneca activist scholar john mohawk, John Mohawk and the Power to Make Peace. mohawk was an editor & reporter at akwesasne notes, the largest native american newspaper at the time & which was right there to capture & contribute to much of the revived american indian activism in the late-60’s thru the 1970’s. he was later a columnist at indian country today. he also contributed a lot to the seminal volume basic call to consciousness, a classic work, part of which can be read here. (indian country today’s obit)
the counterpunch article brings up the role of the peacemaker & the parallel to today’s sitch, which is a connection i made in the autumn whispers thread. and it also reaffirms one of the themes of the text that i laid out there.
At his 60th birthday party we were talking about what it was like to look back. I mentioned that I had seen his name that day in an encyclopedia article as an ideologue of the American Indian Movement. He talked about changes he had seen in radicalism. ‘What,’ I asked him, ‘is an aspiring radical to do today?’ ‘Change their stories,’ he told me."
tuesday’s democracynow played
a brief excerpt from a talk that mohawk gave in november at the teach-in ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Economic Globalization: a Celebration of Victories, Rights and Cultures." it’s short, so i’ll quote it in full so you don’t need to follow the link.
Racism has historically been a thing experienced by non-white people, but let’s be clear about this, two things about this. One is that ideology that it’s proposing is an ideology. It’s basically saying essentially that all the non-white peoples in the world are not entitled to own whatever it is they have. And it also is making the corollary kind of proposition that the group that’s in the aggressive position has a right and that this right is undeniable. Notice that the right also has an implementation form to it, that the right has the requiremento: we’re going to use military force to enforce this right.
And that when we think of as racism, which has always been the sort of scornful denigration of people of a different race, has its roots in but is distinct from white supremacy. I point that out because white supremacy is an ideology that can be embraced by people of color. People of color — I think we already know there are people of color in the world who agree with it. Some of them are pretty big important Americans, as a matter of fact.
OK, so a lot of things are going to happen after this. I mean, we’re going to have — when we get to the United States, we’re going to have a claim of something which is called American civilization, and American civilization is going to claim to have a right to all the lands of the Indians in the United States. And, of course, the American civilization has a rationalization for a lot of bad things, things like the removal policy and things like the Indian war thing, and things like the forced assimilation policy.
All of those flow from an ideology of white supremacy, which was the dominant ideology of race theory in the United States in the 19th century. I point this out, because it seems to me that the moment we’re looking at is a proposal that peoples of the world, distinct peoples of the world have a right to a continued existence as distinct peoples. And I point to you that the white supremacy argument offers no such rights. It doesn’t offer any rights to a distinct existence — a continued existence of other species, of birds, animals, plants and whatever, fishes. It is a theory that says that one group has the absolute unhindered right to do what they need to do to get what they want.
What do they want? They want the wealth of the world. The other thing is that the requiremento is still there. In fact, the requiremento is embodied in the rules and thinking that gave rise to the World Trade Organization. It’s not that there’s simply an ideology. There’s an enforcement mechanism for the ideology. This is a compulsive ideology. It says that you must comply. You have to belong to this
thing. Everything that you have has to come into our purvey. You have to join our system of domination and actually extinction.
requiremento = "The conquistadores approached many of the indigenous communities with a priest who read a document called the Requiremento, a demand that the people come forth with their bodies and souls and all their property and offer these to the service of the Spanish crown or the Spanish would attack. It was read in Latin as prelude to an orgy of rape, plunder, and genocide. source
and a good many of those who did submit were still wiped out. it may just as well have been read in kiswahili … the presuppositions of cultural & racial superiority have hardly changed though.
peering into the past – going back to the original anti-americans! – i recently spent some time reading on events in late 18th century north america in which i more than once stopped to say "man, does that ever sound familiar" and which i’d like to share, as they fit in very well w/ the stories we tell ourselves about globalization & imperialism, and, perhaps, events in iraq. here’s the context – the
book: a spirited resistance: the north american indian struggle for unity, 1745-1815, by gregory evans dowd.
the setting: the trans-appalachian borderlands circa the 1790s up to the war of 1812, beginning in the immediate period after the defeat of an earlier wave of pan-indianism, as north american influence was gaining strength, in part due to the diminishing presence of the british & spanish, being pulled away by wars back home. w/i the indian communities, divisions between militant and accomodationist factions ebbed back toward those neutralists who sought ways to appease the encroaching americans following the devestating loss by the nativist pan-indian forces at fallen timbers.
As European power in Indian country ebbed through diplomatic channels, American power flowed aggressively to replace it. It flowed directly into Indian councils, where it found considerable Native American tolerance, if not support.
Indians believing in the need for the conscious adaptation of European ways, many of whom had once, when armed from Europe, willing to league with nativists against the United States, now sought to come to terms with the republic. American agents, paid by the federal government, worked closely with these Indian leaders. Their combined efforts promoted a mission of "civilization." Rapidly among the Cherokees
but with less success among Creeks, Shawnees, and Delawares, the "plan of civilization," supported by the federal government and by several churches, became
rooted in tribal government.Among all the involved peoples, however, including the republic’s citizens, the civilizing mission met a thicket of difficulties. … An essential motivation of the mission, the assumed superiority of Anglo-American culture, entangled it from the start, for the missionaries’ conviction of their religious and cultural superiority alienated the targeted peoples. This was as true of non-religious agents as it was of the religious missionaries.
…
Once they undertook the mission, they never adequately reconciled their aims with their methods. In what one scholar calls a "lapse in logic," these Americans sought to make good citizens out of the Indians, but employed coercion, cajolery, and deception to do so.
The agents were under great pressure from American governments – territorial, state, and federal – to accomplish their task, with the understanding that it would increase the land available to the republic.
Governments and missionaries alike claimed that if Indian men abandoned hunting and took up they plow, they could live well, and on less land. The surplus lands would then come up for grabs. In practice, the process inverted. Pressured by their land-hungry countryment, American agents among the Indians obtained land cessions from impoverished Indians even before the successful conversion of Indian men into yeomen farmers. To justify the inversion, the mission’s proponents came to argue that by restricting Indian land they restricted Indian hunting and thereby compelled Indian men to farm. The American acquisition of Indian land perversely took on a philanthropic guise: taking became giving.As early a professional historian of the era as Henry Adams noticed the moral contradictions within the civilizing mission. Adams discovered that although President Thomas Jefferson had advocated the establishment of an Indian farming class, he had sought to do so through the manipulation of Indian debt. In Adam’s words, Jefferson "deliberately ordered his Indian agents to tempt the tribal chiefs into debt in order to oblige them to sell the tribal lands, which did not belong to them, but to their tribes."
Jefferson, that indebted foe of debt, attempted to create an independent Indian yeomanry by driving Indian leaders into the red. This contradiction, between Federal efforts to "improve" Indian economies on the one hand, while both increasing Indian indebtedness and decreasing Indian landholding on the other, placed the civilizing mission precariously upon a badly fissured foundation. The contradiction, with the others, had to be sustained; the federal government had to meet world opinion with a policy of benevolence while also meeting its citizens’ desire for land.
in jefferson’s own words, here’s an excerpt from a letter he wrote to william henry harrison, governor of indiana territory at the time (taken from allan w. eckert’s that dark and bloody river: chronicles of the ohio river valley)
When they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are the extensive forests and will be willing to pare them off in exchange for the necessaries for their farms and families. To promote this, we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them in debt, because we observe when these debts go beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands. But should any tribe refuse the proffered hand and take up the hatchet, it will be driven across the Mississippi and the whole of its lands confiscated.
well, the indians could see exactly what was going on – the long knives wanted their lands – so the power struggle between indian factions started to build again, kindled by a new wave of prophetic nativism. again, dowd:
Between 1795 and 1835, individual prophets and groups of Indians claiming supernatural inspiration posed direct challenges to those leaders who advocated political and even cultural accomdations to the power of the United States. Insurgent nativists drew upon their histories of intertribal cooperation. They looked to shared beliefs in the ritual demands of power. Turning to the spirits as well as to their intertribal comrades, they attempted to rally support against those tribal leaders who ceded land to the Americans. Prophetic parties of Shawness, Delawares, Creeks, and many others actually broke with their accomodating countryment to prepare an intertribal, Indian union against the expansion of the United States, an effort that eventually merged with the War of 1812.
The federal agents and their fellow citizens were loath to recognize the power of prophetic nativism. They had a different explanation for Indian activity in these decades. They explained the nativists’ successes by asserting, on slender evidence, that the British manipulated the prophets. So pervasive was this thesis that one ex-president and two future presidents held to it during the decade that ended in 1815. Viewed against the background of the civilizing mission, the thesis has curious ramifications.
Thomas Jefferson, writing John Adams from Monticello on the eve of the War of 1812, described the Shawnee Prophet, Tenskwatawa, as "more rogue than fool, if to be a rogue is not the greatest folly of all follies." Jefferson did not reveal to Adams that in 1807 he had ordered Indiana’s territorial governor, William Henry Harrison, to "gain over the prophet, who no doubt is a scoundrel and only needs his price." Instead, and inexactly, Jefferson recalled to Adams that his administration left the Shawnee alone, "till the English though him worth corruption, and found him corruptible."
In Jefferson’s view, which was not uncommon, Indians could be bought. Among some of Jefferson’s contemporaries the belief stemmed from the notion that "savages," residing outside of civil society, could not be expected to possess public spirit, or civic virtue; among others, it was a more general understanding of human fraility in the face of monarchical power. Indian nations, in either case, without the requisite virtue, were thus subject to bribery by greater powers like Britian. The notion litters the correspondence of two prominent young republicans, soon to emerge as national heroes and later as presidents from opposing parties. William Henry Harrison and Andrew Jackson.
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The origins of the prophetic movement that would later complicate the War of 1812 lay not, despite contemporary republican declarations, in British conspiracy. They lay instead in the history of eighteenth-century militant nativism, in the intratribal conflicts that followed the collapse of general militancy in 1794, and in the continued American pressure for Native American land. The prophetic movement grew out of a religious tradition, a tradition fertilized by the Indians’ discontent over their dependence upon an encroaching power. The movement grew around an established lattice of intertribal relations, and though it never achieved the breadth or complexity of earlier militancy, it raised estatic hopes during the last, broadly intertribal armed struggle in the Eastern Woodlands.
meanwhile
As Indian indebtedness to traders and federal agencies grew, official urged tribal leaders to sell their lands, both to remove the debt and to purchase the stock and the agricultural implements necessary for a transition to civility.
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[Harrison] linked land cessions to the civilizing mission, but with less benevolent intent. He reported to the secretary of war that, with Jefferson, he though intensified American colonization north of the Ohio was the "best and cheapest mode of controuling the tribes, who were most exposed to the intrigues of the British." To achieve that end, "the extinguishment of the Indian Title was pushed to the extent it has been, … so to curtail their hunting grounds, as to force them to change their mode of life, and thereby to render them less warlike, and entirely dependent upon us." So much, then, for the development of an independent Indian yeomanry.Indian dependency – the American control of the Indian tribes through conscious economic manipulation – had become the manifest goal of the government’s civilizing mission, a goal Americans justified in view of the threat posed by the Indians’ dependence upon Britain. Unfortunately for the orderly vision of management conceived by the likes of Jefferson, Harrison, [agent Benjamain] Hawkins, and a host of others, the Indians did not conform to the republican vision. Instead, they discovered American intentions to deprive them of land and libery; so Harrison, at any rate, believed as he regretted that American goals has not "been so secretly kept as to escape their own or the sagacity of their British friends."