Our 7 Ojibway Teachings

Manitoba First Nation Elder Dave Courchene explains the origins and lessons of the First Nation Seven Teachings. 

The lessons of the Bear Spirit (Courage), the Beaver Spirit (Wisdom), the Eagle Spirit (Love), the Buffalo Spirit (Respect), the Sasquatch Spirit (Honesty), the Wolf Spirit (Humility) and the Turtle Spirit (Truth).

At Sagkeeng Child and Family Services (in Sagkeeng First Nation and Winnipeg, Manitoba) we support and empower our families and community. 

Services we provide include workshops in parenting, traditional skills like making star blankets, moccasins, hand drums, ribbon shirts and harvesting wild rice. 

Learn more at: sagkeengcfs.org

Marlon Brando Speaks Truth On The Treatment of American Indians

Legendary Marlon Brando was interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show 6/12/1973 after he refused to accept the Oscar at 45th Academy Awards, 1973 to protest the treatment of American Indians.

Three months after not accepting the best actor award at the Academy Awards, Marlon Brando appeared on The Dick Cavett Show with members of the Pauite, Cheyenne and Lummi tribes. Brando had refused his Oscar for The Godfather in protest of Hollywood’s depiction of Native Americans on film.

At the 1973 Academy Awards ceremony, Brando refused to accept the Oscar for his performance in The Godfather. Sacheen Littlefeather represented him at the ceremony. She appeared in full Apache attire and stated that owing to the "poor treatment of Native Americans in the film industry", Brando would not accept the award.

At this time, the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee occurred, causing rising tensions between the government and Native American activists. The event grabbed the attention of the US and the world media. This was considered a major event and victory for the movement by its supporters and participants.

Brando is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential actors of the 20th century. He has earned great respect among critics and theater experts for his memorable performances and charismatic screen presence.

Video and summary via White Wolf Pack.

The Great Lie

Posted by "Sayf Maslul"


By "Trudell"



At its most basic level, Trudell is an eye-opening documentary that challenges belief systems. At its loftiest, Trudell will inspire you to reawaken your spirit.

"The great lie is that it is civilization. It's not civilized. It has been literally the most blood thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That's the great lie, is that it represents civilization." -John Trudell

John Trudell is an American author, poet, actor, musician, and former political activist. He was the spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes' takeover of Alcatraz beginning in 1969, broadcasting as Radio Free Alcatraz

http://www.johntrudell.us/

http://www.appaloosapictures.org/
http://www.mothersworldmarket.com
http://www.dickshovel.com/JTT.html

Support for John Trudell and for Those who help in a great understanding .

Just a Powerful story of one native looking for some Respect for his People and Getting None .

Peace Love =)

Bonded Slaves

Slavery: A 21st Century Evil


It Is A Form Of Slavery That Is Passed Down From One Generation To The Next, Enslaving Millions.

Last Modified: 26 Oct 2011 10:23
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"


In this episode of Slavery: A 21st Century Evil, Al Jazeera's Rageh Omaar investigates slavery that is passed down from father to son, mother to daughter.

"There is no way out. How do I get out? I have no way out of this. My grandfather died here, my father has grown old here, and I am growing old too. We are slaves, we are not free." Ashraf, a bonded labourer

Although the practice of bonded labour is common in several parts of the world, in Pakistan and India, the systematic enslavement of generations of workers is widespread as governments fail to enforce their own laws against bonded labour.

Rageh meets men, women and children labouring in quarries and brick kilns, in dangerous conditions and for effectively no pay.

Most of these slaves have been held for generations, paying off a supposed 'loan' taken out by their grandparents.

Some have been lucky enough to escape but others have had to buy their way out of it by selling their organs to help pay off the 'debt'.

America: No Stranger To Genocidal War Crimes

"The Islamophobic rhetoric from the Christian Zionist right wing is no different than the eliminationist hysteria which scarcely blinked as millions of native Americans were humiliated and then snuffed out. The Indians, Africans, Chinese, and Japanese of the past are today’s Muslims of all stripes and colors, be they Palestinians, Afghanis, Iranians, Pakistanis, Turks, Iraqis, or Arabs. No human rights do they deserve because they are not considered to be human beings, and thus anything under the Sun can be done to them from genocide to kidnapping to torture to dislocation."

By Afeef Khan
(Thursday, October 21, 2010)
Courtesy Of "Media Monitors"

“To fight and kill is worth three months without sex. Maybe it sounds idiotic but it is better than sex… When you are on the field it is you or the enemy. And when you see the ‘red mist’ [blood spurt from the sniper victim]… it is indescribable. It’s why we are here. Sometimes we get lucky, I hit a Taliban in the neck from 2,770 meters on February 2. That was really great.”

This statement and others like it by NATO snipers will come out this week in an interview in the Norwegian magazine Alfa, a publication directed at the hyper testosterone world of career soldiers, mercenaries, and the kind of assorted white trash that is recruited by the private armies of Blackwater and CACI. After all making the country safe for democracy is a tough job, and the soldiers need to relax and have fun after a hard day’s work. Video games, television, sports, and even sex are just not enough to satisfy; but getting a high from randomly killing innocent Afghans, which the soldiers say is better than having sex, is just what the doctor ordered. Quite an admission from the otherwise sex-obsessed culture of European and American hedonism within the “free” world of Western secular fundamentalism.

These fresh revelations come on the heels of confessions by US soldiers who formed “kill teams” that murdered Afghan civilians for kicks and then collected body parts of the victims as souvenirs. Corporal Jeremy N. Morlock is one of five US enlisted men charged with pre-meditated murder in a case that includes allegations of widespread drug use, the collection of body parts, and photos of the US soldiers holding the Afghan bodies like hunter’s trophies. “He just really doesn’t have any problems with f---ing killing these people,” Morlock said on tape as he laid out the scenario he said the sergeant used to make it seem the civilians were killed in action. “And so we identify a guy. Gibbs [Morlock’s ‘crazy’ sargeant-commander] makes a comment, like, you know, you guys wanna wax this guy or what?” Morlock told military investigators during an interview. The corporal said Gibbs gave orders to open fire on the civilian at the same time Gibbs threw a hand grenade at the victim. Morlock said Sergeant Gibbs carried a Russian grenade to throw next to the body of the dead Afghan, to make it seem he was about to attack the American soldiers. That young soldiers can use deadly weapons against unarmed civilians without receiving any training about having respect for human life, is repugnant enough; but what can be said about “civilized” family members and attorneys for the accused who intend to fight all the charges?!

As the steady stream of public disclosures of American and coalition war crimes over the last ten years (Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, WikiLeaks, etc.) continues to filter through the media obfuscations of the conservative Christian Islamophobes and their Zionist manipulators, what is becoming more and more obvious is that American hegemonic power is waning not because Muslims hate Western liberties and freedoms, but because the American penchant for unscrupulous alliances, insatiable greed, and ravenous bloodlust cannot be curtailed. These are not isolated events and they are certainly nothing new; they are the very threads of an evolving tapestry that chronicles the history of an empire built on the degradations, dislocations, and extinctions of non-European peoples, considered by their occupiers to be little more than beasts or insects.

The CIA has financed kill teams and death squads for decades, in South America, Southeast Asia, and the Islamic East. The US Department of Defense got in on the racket with its own special forces operations (JSOC). Private contractors working for Blackwater and its NATO analogs are doing the same with the blessing of the DoD and CIA, as well as the US Congress, which has in recent years, under pressure from the White House, approved funding for extrajudicial assassinations of terrorists and their supporters. The CIA now has a private army of 3,000 US-trained assassins/snipers, carrying out attacks on civilians not only in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan.

Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired USAF lieutenant colonel of conscience and a writer for lewrockwell.com, writes,

This news-blip regarding murder and the collection of Afghan body parts leaves most Americans who see it with mild concern about our offensive policy around the world, and perhaps a vague sense of anxiety about what we will face as these soldiers come home to live in our neighborhood, to serve as our police forces and city inspectors, to marry our daughters and father our grandchildren. We will forget. This happened far away, and we have other problems, both local and national. The Afghans, on the other hand, will not. They are way ahead of us in terms of suffering at the hands of the Washington ruling elite. They are way ahead of us in terms of figuring out how to survive and deal with a brutal military and political occupation for the sake not of democracy or women’s rights or ‘the children’ but for the sustainment of the US military industrial complex, and expansion and stability of the US-centered commodities/currency dynamic, and as leverage for coming national defaults. We are murdering and warring for a Middle East that is safe for the complementary goals of Israel’s economic expansion into and US military domination of the region.

She goes on to say, “United States foreign policy is brutal. Just ask (if you can find any) native Americans who trace ancestry back to the geography of the Appalachians or the Great Plains. The great mass murderers on both sides of the War between the States in the 1860s had practiced their craft on Native Americans for years, and Mexicans too, for good measure. During and after Reconstruction, these senior officers and their lieutenants continued their era of extermination of those we held in contempt, those who lived on land we wanted, and those who would not conform to our religious, economic and social world order.” A quick look back at the history of a formative America, even the sanitized versions we became acquainted with in US elementary and high schools, will show that violence now has always been predicated on fear of future threats, usually nonexistent, to national security and dominance by non-white peoples — native indians, Africans, Chinese, Japanese, and now Muslims. Coldblooded, just for fun, gangland-style, trophy-hunting, punch drunk, hilarious murder is as American as baseball, apple pie, and Hollywood.

Extermination of Native Americans

All right-wing conservative tendencies, programs, and policies to eliminate and exterminate the enemy or the “other”, usually non-white peoples, is bound up with the idea of Manifest Destiny, the belief that white Europeans were fated by the hand of God to bring enlightenment and civilization to the rest of the world. All this of course preceded America by hundreds of years, however, the idea is at the root of American territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous residents of the continent, leading to the formation and perpetuation of the American empire and nation-state. America’s current wars of occupation and its continued support for the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians suggest that the US identity is not unique at all, having never outgrown its original European legacy.

For those infected with their own manifest destiny, the chief question about other peoples has always been, “Are they really human; or are they subhuman savages or just beasts?” For the Spanish colonizers of the “new” world, informed by centuries of Hellenistic Christian doctrine portraying Europe as the center of enlightenment and civilization while representing the rest of the world in oriental terms as those others who were created for the sole purpose of facilitating the fulfillment of European destiny, the matter was pretty simple as they were not convinced that the native populations of the Americas actually had a soul. According to Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the official historian of the Spanish crown,

On the other hand, those who are dim-witted and mentally lazy, although they may be physically strong enough to fulfill all the necessary tasks, are by nature slaves. It is just and useful that it be this way. We even see it sanctioned in divine law itself, for it is written in the Book of Proverbs, “He who is stupid will serve the wise man.” And so it is with the barbarous and inhumane peoples [the Indians] who have no civil life and peaceful customs. It will always be just and in conformity with natural law that such people submit to the rule of more cultured and humane princes and nations. Thanks to their virtues and the practical wisdom of their laws, the latter can destroy barbarism and educate these [inferior] people to a more humane and virtuous life. And if the latter reject such rule, it can be imposed upon them by force of arms. Such a war will be just according to natural law…

Now compare these natural qualities of judgment, talent, magnanimity, temperance, humanity, and religion [of the Spanish] with those of these pitiful men [the Indians], in whom you will scarcely find any vestiges of humanness. These people possess neither science nor even an alphabet, nor do they preserve any monuments of their history except for some obscure and vague reminiscences depicted in certain paintings, nor do they have written laws, but barbarous institutions and customs. In regard to their virtues, how much restraint or gentleness are you to expect of men who are devoted to all kinds of intemperate acts and abominable lewdness, including the eating of human flesh? And you must realize that prior to the arrival of the Christians, they did not live in that peaceful kingdom of Saturn [the Golden Age] that the poets imagine, but on the contrary they made war against one another continually and fiercely, with such fury that victory was of no meaning if they did not satiate their monstrous hunger with the flesh of their enemies.

…what is more appropriate and beneficial for these barbarians than to become subject to the rule of those whose wisdom, virtue, and religion have converted them from barbarians into civilized men (insofar as they are capable of becoming so), from being torpid and licentious to becoming upright and moral, from being impious servants of the Devil to becoming believers in the true God?

It was this attitude — aided by the deliberate contamination of local water supplies and blankets with the small pox, bubonic plague, and tuberculosis pathogens, and abetted by macabre atrocities committed by European “explorers” — that was responsible for the liquidation of somewhere between 40 and 100 million native lives in South, Central, and North America. In addition to cutting off women’s breasts, castrating mature men, leaving disemboweled babies as roadside markers, and sending “stray” natives back to their villages with their dismembered hands and noses tied around their necks, these Spanish conquistadors enjoyed “dogging.” Accompanying them on their drunken orgies of massacre were wolfhounds and mastiffs raised on a steady diet of human flesh. These dogs would entertain the troops by pursuing natives like game animals and then ripping them apart when they caught up to them; the dogs found the soft bodies of infants particularly tasty, and for this reason, native children were routinely “fed” to the hungry predators (in this instance, recall the outcry from white America when African American football player Michael Vick was publicly pilloried and then imprisoned for 18 months on being cruel to dogs).

The Spanish view of the native as subhuman only set the tone for the more callous English colonization of North America, where in addition to the above, the British also rationalized that the disease plague visited on the natives was divinely ordained as part of “God’s plan for the New World.” And so to increase the tenor of punishment meted out upon the natives, these new colonizers did not hesitate to immolate scores of Indians every chance they got. In describing one such massacre, Puritan leader Cotton Mather said, “In a little more than one hour, five or six hundred of these barbarians were dismissed from a world that was burdened with them.” He also described a similar massacre, against the Wampanoags in 1676, as a “barbeque.”

A hundred years later, the independent Americans who took over from British colonial rule, pursued the same ethnic cleansing policies in their inexorable westward territorial expansion. First American president, George Washington, who waged a war of extermination against the Iroquois Indians in 1779, observed that “the Indians were little different than wolves, both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape.” Thomas Jefferson, third American president, pursued a policy of relocation (think Palestine today) of Indians living in the east, where they were being pushed out by European settlers and squatters, to other properties west of the Mississippi River, where they would impinge on the properties of Indians living there (think of the Palestinians since 1948). This policy of relocation and creating a “permanent” Indian frontier where the savages (read terrorists) could live without interference from the white man eventually culminated in the Trail of Tears in 1838, in which the Cherokee Nation was forcibly relocated to former Osage lands in Oklahoma.

The permanent Indian frontier envisoned by Jefferson turned out to be a very flexible concept; indeed it was all but gone in 30 years. The so-called frontier continued to shift ever westward — until it was ultimately driven into the Pacific — as the Americans’ greed for land and for gold grew (remind them of this the next time they have a fit when the Muslims talk about pushing Israel into the sea). The entire program of relocation was fraught with bad faith, double dealing, hypocrisy, and outright treachery. No promise, either in words or writing, made to an Indian was binding, and the murder of multitudes of Indians was considered to be a cause for celebration. On the other hand, the retaliatory murder of white settlers and treaty breakers provoked the genocidal impulse of the European occupiers, leading to indiscriminate slaughter of the natives. After disarming the natives with their promises and treaties of good faith, the Americans proceeded to abrogate every agreement they signed, in many cases the authors of the treaties secretly encouraged would-be settlers to instigate murders to be blamed on the Indians so that the treaties could be broken. And the government, which was supposed to be fairly representing everyone, spared no opportunity to accommodate the settler/squatter/colonizers, turning a blind eye to their excesses, and facilitating by force of law backed up by the military their land grabs and forced expulsion of the natives.

In chronicling this heavy-handed betrayal Isaac Gibson, an advocate for the rights of the Osage Indians, wrote,

It is almost without precedent, yet strictly true, one great cause of their decline has been fidelity to their pledges. More than sixty years [ago] they pledged themselves by treaty to perpetuate peace with the white man. That promise has been nobly kept — kept in spite of great and continual provocation. Individual white men have committed upon them almost every form of outrage and wrong, unchecked by the Government, and unpunished. Every aggressive movement of the whites tending to the absorption of their territory has ultimately been legalized. Thus, a kind of premium has been offered by the Government to enterprising scoundrels to ply their vocation at the expense of the Osages. The Government itself has been careless of its obligations, indifferent, it would seem, alike to its own honor and the security of the Indians. It has failed or neglected to afford them protection, and yet has allowed the Osages’ persistent fidelity to truth to tie their arms and render them powerless to protect themselves.

The further west the Americans went, the more severe their depredations became. Rather than forcing themselves to have to endure contact with the “savages” (terrorists), they preferred to preemptively slaughter them wherever they found them, the more so whenever gold was to be discovered in a particular area. The following is one army lieutenant’s testimony about the Sand Creek Massacre of the Cheyenne Indians,

In going over the battleground the next day, I did not see a body of a man, women, or child but was scalped, and in many instances their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner… I heard one man say that he had cut out a woman's private parts and had them for exhibition on a stick; I heard another say that he had cut the fingers off an Indian to get the rings on his hand; according to the best of my knowledge and belief these atrocities that were committed were with the knowledge of J.M. Chivington [commander of the battalion and Methodist preacher], and I do not know of his taking any measures to prevent them; I heard of one instance of a child a few months old being thrown in a feedbox of a wagon, and after being carried some distance left on the ground to perish; I also heard numerous instances in which white men had cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over the saddle-bows and wore them over their hats while riding in ranks.”

Chivington was never brought to justice for these crimes, and even exploited the mass murder on speaking tours to build up his fame. Later on, President Theodore Roosevelt lauded the Sand Creek Massacre “as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.”

This pattern repeated itself with remarkable regularity, as the white colonizers/occupiers justified their mass slaughter campaigns with rhetoric about how they were dealing with savages (terrorists) in the only way they deserved. So inhuman and beastly were the Indians considered that they were not even officially counted until the 1890 census, when their numbers were represented at around 325,000. By the midpoint of the 17th century, it is estimated that more than 50 to 80 million of the indigenous people in the Americas had perished, some 80% of the population. In many instances the devastation was catastrophically fatal; between 1770 and 1850, nearly 95% of the Pueblo population in the Southwest was eradicated. Refer to the figure on the facing page, which shows the progressive genocide of the native peoples in the United States from 1850 to 1990.

By the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the final solution had already been delivered to the native population of the United States, and those responsible for the wholesale extinctions were now setting their sights on a new dark-skinned enemy: the freed African American slaves. The emergence of black America from slavery will be the subject of a future article, but suffice it to say that before reconstruction period following the American Civil War, the vast majority of recorded lynchings in the United States were white criminals; however after the black man was “freed” the number of lynchings of African Americans multiplied dramatically and did not completely abate until the 1960s.

“Civilizing” Oppression Gives Birth To Terrorism

Such is the soil in which American democracy, human rights, liberty, ideals, and justice for all, have been fertilized. The 21st-century fruit, like all previous harvests, has not fallen far from the tree. And why should it, when the poison feeding the roots is still as lethal as ever.

The Islamophobic rhetoric from the Christian Zionist right wing is no different than the eliminationist hysteria which scarcely blinked as millions of native Americans were humiliated and then snuffed out. The Indians, Africans, Chinese, and Japanese of the past are today’s Muslims of all stripes and colors, be they Palestinians, Afghanis, Iranians, Pakistanis, Turks, Iraqis, or Arabs. No human rights do they deserve because they are not considered to be human beings, and thus anything under the Sun can be done to them from genocide to kidnapping to torture to dislocation. They can be caged and hunted down like animals; they can be the guinea pigs for new and ever more painful chemical and biological weapons; their future generations can be destroyed by the lingering effects of depleted uranium bombs; and their lands can be totally defoliated so that they produce nothing for decades to come. A combined 2.7 million dead in Iraq and Afghanistan does not even come close to pricking any sort of moral conscience, which has been deadened by the silent desperation of the tens of millions who have already perished at the altar of a fanatically malevolent nationalism cum racism.

In addition, the histories written by the occupiers and oppressors will record all resistance efforts as terrorism, extremism, savagery, and barbarism; while simultaneously vindicating the aggressors as enlightened builders of civilization. They will characterize any victories by their victims as a “clash of civilizations” as if to suggest that their own militaristic civil society is on par with other civil societies. As they momentarily lose ground, they will use treaties and international agreements to buy time in order to facilitate future land grabs and resource thefts. The NPT, the desire to engage the “good” Taliban, and the “Peace Talks” in the Holy Land are all disingenuous. So long as the Muslims have no power, we can expect them to come to the bargaining table with a wink, a nod, and a knife hidden in the sock.

“Terrorism” is the response to this kind of world “order.” But today, it is not only Muslims who are its foot soldiers: listen once again to the words of Karen Kwiatkowski,

Indeed, can anyone swear — given six degrees of separation — that these recent Afghan victims (and those of the authorized murders conducted by CIA, DoD and contracted teams) were not in some way related to terrorism against the United States? I myself heartily disapprove of the criminally insane US foreign policy, and I hate our modern government, with its unlimited separated powers of bankster, shyster, and huckster. I would applaud loudly the bringing down of such a state. I count myself as a spiritual sister to those the US government has murdered, and I am angry at my powerlessness. I have the budding heart of a terrorist. Thank goodness, I’m part of a much larger group of Americans, young and old, who generally feel the same way.

Columbus & The Genocide Of The Taino Nation

By Auron Renius
June 14, 2009
Courtesy Of "SocyBerty"

Christopher Columbus is well known for discovering the New World and is seen as a hero of medieval exploration by many scholars today. However, what many text books fail to mention is the fact that he was a genocidal maniac who set in motion what would become probably the worst case of genocide imposed on one nation of human beings by another.

Obsessed with finding a sea rout to Asia and the Far East, Columbus set out on his ‘Enterprise of the Indies’ in 1492, backed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain.  However, instead of finding a rout to the rich trade in the East, Columbus and his crew discovered the New World, and soon set about subjugating and murdering the local population and removing the vast wealth from the land.

Columbus discovering the New World.  Image Source

A small colony was established in Hispaniola consisting of thirty-nine of his crew, the rest returned to Spain with Columbus along with gold, spices and natives taken as slaves to be given as gifts for his royal patrons.

The following year, he led a second expedition comprising of seventeen large ships and one and half thousand new colonists, arriving in the Americas a month later.  By the time he got back to Hispaniola, his men there had been slaughtered by the locals and a second colony was founded. 

Columbus punished the local tribe, known as the Taino, severely.  He enslaved many and executed many more; according to Ward Churchill, former professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, by 1496, the population had been reduced from as many as eight million to around three million.

On his third expedition, he explored the region before returning to Hispaniola in 1498 where he had left his brothers in charge, Diego and Bartholomew.  Conditions there were in decline so he stepped up the terror campaign against the Taino, ruling with an iron hand causing resentment from the colonists and local chiefs alike.  Complaints of his brutality got back to the Spanish monarchs and in 1500 they sent a Chief Justice to bring him and his brothers back to Spain in chains.

Read more in History

« The Bloodiest Battle of World War I

Richard Hughes and Dylan Thomas »

Columbus in chains.  Image Source

However he was released on his arrival and allowed a fourth and final expedition, which he conducted with the same brutality as previous ones.  By the time he finally left in 1504, the Taino had been reduced to around 100,000 people arguably making Columbus a war criminal by today’s standards and  guilty of committing some of the worst atrocities against another race in history.

Some were killed directly as punishments for ‘crimes’ such as not paying tribute to the invaders.  Many who could not or would not pay had their hands cut off and were left to bleed to death.  Columbus and his men are documented by the chronicles of Las Casas, know as Brev’sima relaci-n,  to have partaken in mass hangings, roasting people on spits, burnings at the stake and even hacking young children to death and feeding them to dogs as punishment for the most minor of crimes. The Spanish masters massacred the natives, sometimes hundreds at a time for sport, making bets on who could split a man in two, or cut a head off in one blow.

Taino people being tortured by the Spanish.   Image Source

Defenders of Columbus argue that a large amount of the victims were killed by disease however they fail to recognize that most of these diseases were caused by poor living conditions in forced labour camps.  Deprived of their crops and fields, many fell prey to dysentery and typhus, were worked to death or were left to starve to death.

After his death his terrible legacy would live on, by 1514, a census showed only 22,000 Taino remained alive.  By 1542 there were only 200 remaining and after they were considered extinct, as was becoming more and more the case throughout the Caribbean basin. 

In around fifty years Columbus and those that followed him had all but eliminated a population of around fifteen million people.  This process was just the start and an estimated 100 million people were wiped out by Europeans in the so called ‘civilisation’ of the Western Hemisphere making the discovery of the New World the start of what was arguably the worst case of mass genocide in history.

Exposing The GOP's Role In The Native American Genocide

How the Native American extermination campaigns merged the dangerous forces of a standing army with the business/political interests of the Republican Party.

By Thomas DeLorenzo
October 11, 2010
Courtesy Of "Alter Net"

Editor's Note: The genocide against Native Americans remains one of the most shameful chapters of U.S. history (and indeed one that continued through Ronald Reagan’s presidency with U.S.-backed slaughters in Central America).

However, from the Civil War through the end of the 19th Century, the extermination campaigns also merged the dangerous forces of a standing army with the business/political interests of the Republican Party, as the Independent Institute’s Thomas J. DiLorenzo writes in the following excerpted guest essay:

The real culture of violence in the American West of the latter half of the 19th Century sprang from the U.S. government’s policies toward the Plains Indians. It is untrue that white European settlers were always at war with Indians, as popular folklore contends.

Trade and cooperation with the Indians were much more common than conflict and violence through the first half of the 19th Century.

Terry Anderson and Fred McChesney relate how Thomas Jefferson found that during his time negotiation was the Europeans’ predominant means of acquiring land from Indians. By the 20th Century, some $800 million had been paid for Indian lands.

These authors also argue that various factors can alter the incentives for trade, as opposed to waging a war of conquest as a means of acquiring land. One of the most important factors is the existence of a standing army, as opposed to militias, which were used in the American West prior to the War Between the States.

A standing army, according to Anderson and McChesney, “creates a class of professional soldiers whose personal welfare increases with warfare, even if fighting is a negative-sum act for the population as a whole.”

The change from militia to a standing army took place in the American West immediately upon the conclusion of the War Between the States. The result, write Anderson and McChesney, was that white settlers and railroad corporations were able to socialize the costs of stealing Indian lands by using violence supplied by the U.S. Army.

On their own, they were much more likely to negotiate peacefully. Thus, “raid” replaced “trade” in white–Indian relations. Congress even voted in 1871 not to ratify any more Indian treaties, effectively announcing that it no longer sought peaceful relations with the Plains Indians.

Anderson and McChesney do not consider why a standing army replaced militias in 1865, but the reason is not difficult to discern. One has only to read the official pronouncements of the soldiers and political figures who launched a campaign of extermination against the Plains Indians.

On June 27, 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman was given command of the Military District of the Missouri, which was one of the five military divisions into which the U.S. government had divided the country.

Sherman received this command for the purpose of commencing the 25-year war against the Plains Indians, primarily as a form of veiled subsidy to the government-subsidized railroad corporations and other politically connected corporations involved in building the transcontinental railroads.

These corporations were the financial backbone of the Republican Party. Indeed, in June 1861, Abraham Lincoln, former legal counsel of the Illinois Central Railroad, called a special emergency session of Congress not to deal with the two-month-old Civil War, but to commence work on the Pacific Railway Act.

Subsidizing the transcontinental railroads was a primary (if not the primary) objective of the new Republican Party.

As Dee Brown writes in Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, a history of the building of the transcontinental railroads, Lincoln’s 1862 Pacific Railway Act “assured the fortunes of a dynasty of American families . . . the Brewsters, Bushnells, Olcotts, Harkers, Harrisons, Trowbridges, Lanworthys, Reids, Ogdens, Bradfords, Noyeses, Brooks, Cornells, and dozens of others,” all of whom were tied to the Republican Party.

The federal railroad subsidies enriched many Republican members of Congress. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania “received a block of [Union Pacific] stock in exchange for his vote” on the Pacific Railroad bill, writes Brown.

Republican Congressman Oakes Ames of Massachusetts was a shovel manufacturer who became “a loyal ally” of the legislation after he was promised shovel contracts. A great many shovels must have been required to dig railroad beds from Iowa to California.

Sherman wrote in his memoirs that as soon as the war ended, “My thoughts and feelings at once reverted to the construction of the great Pacific Railway. … I put myself in communication with the parties engaged in the work, visiting them in person, and assured them that I would afford them all possible assistance and encouragement.”

“We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress [of the railroads],” Sherman wrote to Ulysses S. Grant in 1867.  [See Michael Fellman’s Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman.]

The chief engineer of the government-subsidized transcontinental railroads was Grenville Dodge, another of Lincoln’s generals during the war with whom Sherman worked closely afterward.

As Murray Rothbard points out, Dodge “helped swing the Iowa delegation to Lincoln” at the 1860 Republican National Convention, and “[i]n return, early in the Civil War, Lincoln appointed Dodge to army general. Dodge’s task was to clear the Indians from the designated path of the country’s first heavily subsidized federally chartered trans-continental railroad, the Union Pacific.”

In this way, Rothbard concludes, “conscripted Union troops and hapless taxpayers were coerced into socializing the costs of constructing and operating the Union Pacific.”

Immediately after the war, Dodge proposed enslaving the Plains Indians and forcing them “to do the grading” on the railroad beds, “with the Army furnishing a guard to make the Indians work, and keep them from running away.”

Union army veterans were to be the “overseers” of this new class of slaves. Dodge’s proposal was rejected; the U.S. government decided instead to try to kill as many Indians as possible.

In his memoirs, Sherman has high praise for Thomas Clark Durant, the vice president of the Union Pacific Railroad, as “a person of ardent nature, of great ability and energy, enthusiastic in his undertaking.” Durant was also the chief instigator of the infamous Credit Mobilier scandal, one of the most shocking examples of political corruption in U.S. history.

Sherman himself had invested in railroads before the war, and he was a consummate political insider, along with Durant, Dodge, and his brother, Senator John Sherman.

President Grant made his old friend Sherman the army’s commanding general, and another Civil War luminary, General Phillip Sheridan, assumed command on the ground in the West.

“Thus the great triumvirate of the Union Civil War effort,” writes Sherman biographer Michael Fellman, “formulated and enacted military Indian policy until reaching, by the 1880s, what Sherman sometimes referred to as ‘the final solution of the Indian problem.’”

What Sherman called the “final solution of the Indian problem” involved “killing hostile Indians and segregating their pauperized survivors in remote places.”
“These men,” writes Fellman, “applied their shared ruthlessness, born of their Civil War experiences, against a people all three [men] despised. … Sherman’s overall policy was never accommodation and compromise, but vigorous war against the Indians,” whom he regarded as “a less-than-human and savage race.”

All of the other generals who took part in the Indian Wars were “like Sherman [and Sheridan], Civil War luminaries,” writes Sherman biographer John Marszalek. “Their names were familiar from Civil War battles: John Pope, O. O. Howard, Nelson A. Miles, Alfred H. Terry, E. O. C. Ord, C. C. Augur . . . Edward Canby . . . George Armstrong Custer and Benjamin Garrison.” General Winfield Scott Hancock also belongs on this list.

Sherman and Sheridan’s biographers frequently point out that these men apparently viewed the Indian Wars as a continuation of the job they had performed during the Civil War.

“Sherman viewed Indians as he viewed recalcitrant Southerners during the war and newly freed people after: resisters to the legitimate forces of an ordered society,” according to Marszalek. “During the Civil War, Sherman and Sheridan had practiced a total war of destruction of property. … Now the army, in its Indian warfare, often wiped out entire villages.”

Fellman writes that Sherman charged Sheridan “to act with all the vigor he had shown in the Shenandoah Valley during the final months of the Civil War.” Sheridan’s troops had burned and plundered the Shenandoah Valley after the Confederate army had evacuated the area and only women, children, and elderly men remained there.

Even Prussian army officers are said to have been shocked when after the war Sheridan boasted to them of his exploits in the Shenandoah Valley.

“[Sherman] insisted that the only answer to the Indian problem was all-out war — of the kind he had utilized against the Confederacy,” writes Marszalek. “Since the inferior Indians refused to step aside so superior American culture could create success and progress, they had to be driven out of the way as the Confederates had been driven back into the Union.”

Sherman’s compulsion for the “extermination” of anyone opposed to turning the U.S. state into an empire expressed the same reasoning he had expressed earlier with regard to his role in the War Between the States.

In a letter to his wife early in the war, he declared that his ultimate purpose was “extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people.”

Mrs. Sherman responded by expressing her similar wish that the conflict would be a “war of extermination, and that all [Southerners] would be driven like the swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing.” [See John Bennett Walters’s Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and Total War.]

Sherman did his best to take his wife’s advice, especially during his famous “march to the sea.” It is little wonder that Indian Wars historian S. L. A. Marshall observes, “[M]ost of the Plains Indian bands were in sympathy with the Southern cause” during the war.

One theme among all of these Union Civil War veterans is that they considered Indians to be subhuman and racially inferior to whites and therefore deserving of extermination if they could not be “controlled” by the white population.

Sherman himself thought of the former slaves in exactly the same way. “The Indians give a fair illustration of the fate of the negroes if they are released from the control of the whites,” he once said. He believed that intermarriage of whites and Indians would be disastrous, as he claimed it was in New Mexico, where “the blending of races had produced general equality, which led inevitably to Mexican anarchy.” [See Lee B. Kennett’s Sherman: A Soldier’s Life.]

Sherman’s goal was to eliminate the possibility that such racial amalgamation might occur elsewhere in the United States, by undertaking to effect what Michael Fellman called a “racial cleansing of the land,” beginning with extermination of the Indians.

Sherman, Sheridan, and the other top military commanders were not shy about announcing that their objective was extermination, a term that Sherman used literally on a number of occasions, as he had in reference to Southerners only a few years earlier. He and Sheridan are forever associated with the slogan “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

Sherman announced his objective as being “to prosecute the war with vindictive earnestness . . . till [the Indians] are obliterated or beg for mercy.” According to Fellman, Sherman gave “Sheridan prior authorization to slaughter as many women and children as well as men Sheridan or his subordinates felt was necessary when they attacked Indian villages.”

In case the media back East got wind of such atrocities, Sherman promised Sheridan that he would run interference against any complaints: “I will back you with my whole authority, and stand between you and any efforts that may be attempted in your rear to restrain your purpose or check your troops.” [Fellman’sCitizen Sherman]

Sherman and Sheridan’s troops conducted more than one thousand attacks on Indian villages, mostly in the winter months, when families were together. The U.S. army’s actions matched its leaders’ rhetoric of extermination.

As mentioned earlier, Sherman gave orders to kill everyone and everything, including dogs, and to burn everything that would burn so as to increase the likelihood that any survivors would starve or freeze to death.

The soldiers also waged a war of extermination on the buffalo, which was the Indians’ chief source of food, winter clothing, and other goods (the Indians even made fish hooks out of dried buffalo bones and bow strings out of sinews).

The escalation of violence against the Plains Indians actually began in earnestduring the War Between the States. Sherman and Sheridan’s Indian policy was acontinuation and escalation of a policy that General Grenville Dodge, among others, had already commenced.

In 1851, the Santee Sioux Indians in Minnesota sold 24 million acres of land to the U.S. government for $1,410,000 in a typical “trade” (as opposed to raid) scenario. The federal government once again did not keep its side of the bargain, though, reneging on its payment to the Indians. [See David Nichols’s Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Policy and Politics.]

By 1862, thousands of white settlers were moving onto the Indians’ land, and a crop failure in that year caused the Santee Sioux to become desperate for food. They attempted to take back their land by force with a short “war” in which President Lincoln placed General John Pope in charge.

Pope announced, “It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux. . . . They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made.”

At the end of the month-long conflict, hundreds of Indians who had been taken prisoner were subjected to military “trials” lasting about ten minutes each, according to David Nichols. Most of the adult male prisoners were found guilty and sentenced to death — not based on evidence of the commission of a crime, but on their mere presence at the end of the fighting.

Minnesota authorities wanted to execute all 303 who were convicted, but the Lincoln administration feared that the European powers would not view such an act favorably and did not want to give them an excuse to assist the Confederacy in any way. Therefore, “only” 38 of the Indians were hanged, making this travesty of justice still the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

To appease the Minnesotans who wanted to execute all 303, Lincoln promised them $2 million and pledged that the U.S. Army would remove all Indians from the state at some future date.

One of the most famous incidents of Indian extermination, known as the Sand Creek Massacre, took place on Nov. 29, 1864. There was a Cheyenne and Arapaho village located on Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado.

These Indians had been assured by the U.S. government that they would be safe in Colorado. The government instructed them to fly a U.S. flag over their village, which they did, to assure their safety.

However, another Civil War “luminary,” Colonel John Chivington, had other plans for them as he raided the village with 750 heavily armed soldiers. One account of what happened appears in the book Crimsoned Prairie: The Indian Wars (1972) by the renowned military historian S. L. A. Marshall, who held the title of chief historian of the European Theater in World War II and authored thirty books on American military history.

Chivington’s orders were: “I want you to kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.” Then, despite the display of the U.S. flag and white surrender flags by these peaceful Indians, Chivington’s troops “began a full day given over to blood-lust, orgiastic mutilation, rapine, and destruction — with Chivington . . . looking on and approving,” according to Marshall, who writes that the most reliable estimate of the number of Indians killed is “163, of which 110 were women and children.”

Upon returning to his fort, Chivington “and his raiders demonstrated around Denver, waving their trophies, more than one hundred drying scalps. They were acclaimed as conquering heroes, which was what they had sought mainly.” One Republican Party newspaper announced, “Colorado soldiers have once again covered themselves with glory.”

An even more detailed account of the Sand Creek Massacre, based on U.S. Army records, biographies, and firsthand accounts, appears in Dee Brown’s classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West:

“When the troops came up to [the squaws,] they ran out and showed their persons to let the soldiers know they were squaws and begged for mercy, but the soldiers shot them all. . . . There seemed to be indiscriminate slaughter of men, women and children. . . . The squaws offered no resistance. Every one . . . was scalped.”

The effect of such behavior was to eliminate forever the possibility of peaceful relations with these Indian tribes. They understood that they had become the objects of a campaign of extermination.

As Brown writes, “In a few hours of madness at Sand Creek, Chivington and his soldiers destroyed the lives or the power of every Cheyenne and Arapaho chief who had held out for peace with the white men.” For the next two decades, the Plains Indians would do their best to return the barbarism in kind.

The books by Brown and Marshall show that the kind of barbarism that occurred at Sand Creek, Colorado, was repeated many times during the next two decades. For example, in 1868 General Winfield Scott Hancock ordered Custer to attack a Cheyenne camp with infantry, which Custer did.

The attack led Superintendent of Indian Affairs Thomas Murphy to report to Washington that “General Hancock’s expedition . . . has resulted in no good, but, on the contrary, has been productive of much evil,” according to Brown.

A report of the attack prepared for the U.S. secretary of the interior concluded: “For a mighty nation like us to be carrying on a war with a few straggling nomads, under such circumstances, is a spectacle most humiliating, and injustice unparalleled, a national crime most revolting, that must, sooner or later, bring down upon us or our posterity the judgment of Heaven.”

As the war on the Cheyenne continued, Custer and his troops apparently decided that to “kill or hang all the warriors,” as General Sheridan had ordered, “meant separating them from the old men, women, and children. This work was too slow and dangerous for the cavalrymen; they found it much more efficient and safe to kill indiscriminately. They killed 103 Cheyenne, but only eleven of them were warriors,” Brown writes.

Marshall calls Sheridan’s orders to Custer “the most brutal orders ever published to American troops.” This is a powerful statement coming from a man who wrote 30 books on American military history.

In addition to ordering Custer to shoot or hang all warriors, even those that surrendered, Sheridan commanded him to slaughter all ponies and to burn all tepees and their contents. “Sheridan held with but one solution to the Indian problem — extermination — and Custer was his quite pliable instrument,” writes Marshall.

One of the oddest facts about the Indian Wars is that Custer famously instructed a band to play an Irish jig called “Garry Owens” during the attacks on Indian villages. “This was Custer’s way of gentling war. It made killing more rhythmic,” writes Marshall.

During an attack on a Kiowa village on Sept. 26, 1874, soldiers killed more than one thousand horses and forced 252 Kiowas to surrender. They were thrown into prison cells, where “each day their captors threw chunks of raw meat to them as if they were animals in a cage,” Brown writes.

On numerous occasions, fleeing Indians sought refuge in Canada, where they knew they would be unmolested. Canadians built their own transcontinental railroad in the late nineteenth century, but they did not commence a campaign of extermination against the Indians living in that country as the government did in the United States.

No one denies that the U.S. government killed tens of thousands of Indians, including women and children, during the years from 1862 to 1890. There are various estimates of the number of Indians killed, the highest being that of historian Russell Thornton, who used mostly military records to estimate that about 45,000 Indians, including women and children, were killed during the wars on the Plains Indians.

It is reasonable to assume that thousands more were maimed and disabled for life and received little or no medical assistance. The thousands of soldiers who participated in the Indian Wars lived in a culture of violence and death that was cultivated by the U.S. government for a quarter of a century.

The culture of violence in the American West of the late nineteenth century was created almost entirely by the U.S. government’s military interventions, which were primarily a veiled subsidy to the government-subsidized transcontinental railroad corporations. As scandals go, the war on the Plains Indians makes the Credit Mobilier affair seem inconsequential.

There is such a thing as a culture of war, especially in connection with a war as gruesome and bloody as the war on the Plains Indians.

On this topic, World War II combat veteran Paul Fussell has written: “The culture of war . . . is not like the culture of ordinary peace-time life. It is a culture dominated by fear, blood, and sadism, by irrational actions and preposterous . . . results. It has more relation to science fiction or to absurdist theater than to actual life.”

Such was the “culture” the U.S. Army created throughout much of the American West for the quarter century after the War Between the States. It is the “culture” that all military interventions at all times have created, and it contrasts sharply with the predominantly peaceful culture of the stateless civil society on the American frontier during much of the 19th Century.

It is not true that all whites waged a war of extermination against the Plains Indians. As noted earlier and as noted throughout the literature of the Indian Wars, many whites preferred the continuation of the peaceful trade and relations with Indians that had been the norm during the first half of the 19th Century. (Conflicts sometimes occurred, of course, but “trade” dominated “raid” during that era.)

Canadians built a transcontinental railroad without a Shermanesque campaign of “extermination” against the Indians in Canada. It is telling that the Plains Indians often sought refuge in Canada when the U.S. Army had them on the run.

The U.S. government dehumanized the Plains Indians, describing them as “wild beasts,” in order to justify slaughtering them, just as Sherman and his wife, among many others, dehumanized Southerners during and after the War Between the States.

The same dehumanization by the government’s propaganda machine would eventually target Filipinos, who were killed by the hundreds of thousands at the hands of the U.S. Army during their 1899–1902 revolt against the U.S. conquest of their country barely a decade after the Indian Wars had finally ended.

President Theodore Roosevelt “justified” the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos by calling them “savages, half-breeds, a wild and ignorant people.” [See Jim Powell’s Bully Boy: The Truth about Theodore Roosevelt’s Legacy.]

Dehumanization of certain groups of “resisters” at the hands of the state’s propaganda apparatus is a prerequisite for the culture of war and violence that has long been the main preoccupation of the U.S. state.

It was not necessary to kill tens of thousands of Indians and imprison thousands more in concentration camps (“reservations”) for generations in order to build a transcontinental railroad. Nor were the wars on the Plains Indians a matter of “the white population’s” waging a war of extermination.

This war stemmed from the policy of the relatively small group of white men who ran the Republican Party (with assistance from some Democrats), which effectively monopolized national politics for most of that time.

These men utilized the state’s latest technologies of mass killing developed during the Civil War and its mercenary soldiers (including the former slaves known as “buffalo soldiers”) to wage their war because they were in a hurry to shovel subsidies to the railroad corporations and other related business enterprises.

Many of them profited handsomely, as the Credit Mobilier scandal revealed. The railroad corporations were the Microsofts and IBMs of their day, and the doctrines of neomercantilism defined the Republican Party’s reason for existing. [See Thomas DiLorenzo’s Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know about Dishonest Abe.]

The Republican Party was, after all, the “Party of Lincoln,” the great railroad lawyer and a lobbyist for the Illinois Central and other Midwestern railroads during his day.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo is a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute, and Professor of Economics at Loyola College in Maryland.

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Thomas J. DiLorenzo is a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute, and Professor of Economics at Loyola College in Maryland.