Clay Jenkinson

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You are here: Home / Clay's Notebook / The Lakota Protest – Head and Heart

The Lakota Protest – Head and Heart

September 27, 2016 by Clay Jenkinson 24 Comments

This is just going to be a personal meditation, and I apologize to anyone who would rather have more analytics and argumentation. When I was still a teenager my best friend gave me a copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. I read it hard and fast, cover to cover, and it changed my life. It’s basically a 20th century version of Helen Hunt Jackson’s classic A Century of Dishonor.

honordud
Most white people don’t really understand cultural appropriation.

For me it’s this simple really. Europeans began coming to the New World (“tis new to thee!”) in 1492. Almost the first thing Columbus wrote was (literally), “It would be easy to enslave them all.” It was clear from that moment, and indeed perhaps inevitable, that white Europeans were going to take the continent away from the several hundred nations and many millions of aboriginal owners of America.  And they did. Even the expansionist Thomas Jefferson had the decency to admit, in his Second Inaugural Address, “The aboriginal inhabitants of these countries I have regarded with the commiseration their history inspires. Endowed with the faculties and the rights of men, breathing an ardent love of liberty and independence, and occupying a country which left them no desire but to be undisturbed….”

four-bears
Four Bears by George Catlin, 1832

You cannot read even the least impassioned history of the Conquest of the Americas without feeling almost unbearably sad: smallpox, measles, and influenza killed millions, probably tens of millions. When the steamboat St. Peter was venturing up the Missouri River in 1837, the boat’s officials discovered that there were personnel on board infected with smallpox. But instead of just turning back, they ventured on hoping they could somehow still trade with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara without spreading the infection. This of course failed–because only a racist or a moron would believe that smallpox could be contained–and the population of the Mandan people collapsed from around 1,250 to something between 125-150. But there’s more to the story. When Lewis & Clark appeared in October 1804, the population of the Mandan was 1,250, down from approximately 20,000 just a generation previously. The white man’s smallpox had reached the Mandan homeland around today’s Bismarck, ND, well before the American emissaries, and it had shattered the heart of a once-mighty people. Imagine for a moment a plague, whose origins you cannot fathom, sweeping 18 out of every 20 people off the face of the earth in a matter of a few months. Remember the national panic a few years ago when the Ebola virus arrived in America. And how many were killed: 2. That’s one for every 115 million Americans.

How can anyone read these words without just wanting to sit down on the ground, hang your head, and weep for humanity? It would be foolish to blame white Europeans for the macro problem of accidentally introducing diseases for which American Indians had little or no resistance. But how can anyone justify the commercial decision of the captain of the St. Peter in 1837? If you have never read the dying speech of the Mandan leader Four Bears, now would be the time.

Treaties fraudulently undertaken. Treaties whose fine print was never explained. Treaty provisions translated by incompetent or drunken or corrupt interpreters. Treaties that were cynically undertaken as temporary stopgaps before a more ruthless conquest could occur a few months or a few years later. Treaties broken. Treaties simply ignored. Treaties undertaken with a handful of tribal “leaders” who had been liquored up for the occasion. Treaties solemnly sworn, but then implemented by way of corrupt agents, corrupt purveyors, cronies, hucksters, younger brothers of failed politicians, incompetents, all of whom, certainly almost all of whom were openly racist. That is, they cheerfully believed they were superior to the Native Peoples they were paid to supervise. William Clark, the better of the two great explorers, a “friend to the Indian,” said late in his life that if he went to hell it would be for the Osage Treaty he negotiated in 1808, a treaty so appallingly unfair, a grotesque land grab for fractions of a penny per acre, that even a white expansionist quavered to think of its karmic implications.

Treaties as a sham, pretending to have Constitutional validity and status, but treated as temporary cynical fictions by the white governments of the United States. And, if you read old the Yankton, SD, newspapers, or the Bismarck Tribune, or other frontier newspapers, the actual settlers of the frontier were virulently more racist than such national figures as William Sherman or Philip Sheridan or even George Armstrong Custer could ever be. Those newspapers called for actual extermination, and the terms they used to describe the Native Americans were more horrific than terms the Nazis used in the 1930s, worse than the terms U.S. soldiers sometimes used in Vietnam. If you don’t believe me, read Thieves Road by Terry Mort.

Ah, but there is so much more.

Laws prohibiting expressions of Native American religion, like the sun dance. Laws forcing Indians to jettison their concept of property overnight and adopt an alien one that, coincidentally, would “open up” millions of surplus Indian reservation acres to white landlusters. That was called the Dawes Act, 1887.

Executive orders that unilaterally reduced the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara homeland from approximately 12 million acres, solemnly guaranteed forever in the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, to around a million. Those who wrote the executive order engaged in no consultation of any sort with those tribes. Decimation of a people’s homeland by way of an executive order signed by the president, a man who never visited the Indians of North Dakota. And then in the late 1940s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took 155,000 of the best acres of the little fragment that remained, the acreage on which the three tribes farmed in the bottomlands of the Missouri River, without consulting the peoples whose lives they shattered. Nine towns flooded out, nevermore to return.  And when an individual, Thomas Spotted Wolf, challenged Lewis Pick in the town of Independence, he flew into a rage and swept away from the reservation in his government car, and vowed to punish the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara for the effrontery of standing up to protest the theft of their best lands, the desecration of their cemeteries and sacred sites, the flooding of their homesteads, the fracturing of their reservation, and of course the violation not only of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, but even the executive orders that shrank the reservation in the decades that followed.

The overt racism of popular culture. The structural racism of the courts, law enforcement agencies, schools, prisons, businesses, malls, ball games, and coffee klatches throughout America. A young Lakota friend of mine was working as a clerk in a convenience store in Washburn. A man from Montana came in with his three children, saw my friend, and said to his children, “I didn’t know they let prairie n…..s work in these places.” And left. I have seen unintended racism perpetuated by school teachers trying to teach Native American studies in our schools; and overt racism practiced (to perfection) by those who turn every moment of Indian assertiveness into a plebiscite on littering at pow wows or alcoholism in Indian communities. And of course willful refusal to shut the hell up and just listen for once.

You cannot read about checker-boarding on the reservations, or white government regulation of gambling on the sovereign ground of the reservations, or the ways in which security guards follow Native American people around the malls and grocery stores, or the insensitive cultural appropriation and racist stereotyping practiced by the Washington Redskins or Cleveland Indians. When people defend the Redskins, I always say, “Great, next time the Governor of Wyoming addresses a group of Native Americans, I hope he will say, ‘Hey you Redskins, I’m so glad to speak to you today.'”

I have heard more racism from white people towards Native Americans in the past six weeks than in the past sixteen years. Some of it is purposeful. Most of it is seemingly unintentional. We all need our consciousness raised.

You may wonder why the pipeline crisis–which is not without some very important perplexities and ambiguities, some of which undermine some elements of the Sioux protest–has grown into this national and international pan-Indian renaissance and solidarity movement. The answer seems to me to be pretty simple. Non-Indians have kicked the living Jesus out of American Indians and other colonial people for centuries, often with glee, with a Eurocentric arrogance that is staggering in its dimensions. Some think “the Indian Wars” ended at Wounded Knee on the last day of December 1890, but that is not so. There has merely been a Clauswitzean morphing from Gatling Guns to bureaucratic findings or bribes or corruption in the BIA or high pressure industrial emplacements, like the Dakota Access Pipeline.

When will it end?

My head finds ways to understand the tragic history of white-Indian relations in America, and I never think that all of the justice is on one side of virtually any crisis. But my heart just aches. I want to heal. But I know we cannot heal until we open our hearts and minds to the nightmare of the white conquest of the Americas. That does not necessarily mean there will be no pipeline. It doesn’t even mean the pipeline must be moved. But it all does make me almost unbearably sad. And I’m not directly involved in this, except that I am a citizen of the state of North Dakota and the United States. And I’m with those who say that America cannot be truly good for anyone unless and until it is good for everyone.

clay jenkinson

 

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Filed Under: Clay's Notebook

Comments

  1. Tom Haslebacher says

    September 27, 2016 at 11:01 pm

    Well written. Unfortunately, the people that need to read this, either can’t or won’t read it. As we move into this election season, I fear for all “minorities”, especially the First People. They will be forgotten and pushed further into the corner depending on the outcome.

    Reply
    • G. Lee Aikin says

      December 20, 2016 at 5:49 pm

      So well written I have now added this as a link in my blog post on the Keystone XL Pipeline with related updates, including covering the Dakota Access Pipeline protest. See: http://gleeaikin.blogspot.com/2013/12/keystone-xl-pipeline-prevent-future.html
      As a resident of Washington, DC, I have a suggestion regarding the “Redskins” football name. Keep the name, but change the logo. Instead of an Indian chief’s head use a “redskin” potato. Potatoes, an import Native American contribution to the world hunger situation and well worthy of respect, even by a football team.

      Reply
  2. Judge Thomas A. Davies (retired) says

    September 27, 2016 at 11:42 pm

    This is a must read for everyone in the State and any states where Tribes are located. What a wonderful read Clay.

    Reply
  3. Roland Olson says

    September 28, 2016 at 12:16 am

    Do the math. Don’t just post pictures and slogans. Show us in black and white how wind and solar can supply the energy needs, affordable and efficiently, to the rez and JUST the five states evolved. Cost and viability. Without oil or gas or plastics
    How?

    Reply
    • Jackie Yellow says

      September 28, 2016 at 3:39 pm

      What a downer! You know those industries have not been developed sufficiently in the US for us five states! Hopefully it will come someday. Inbetween times enjoy the oil industry you seem to support and I hope you always have clean, impolite for water. PS- the pipeline protest is not about oil, it is about clean water & protecting the Missouri River system.

      Reply
      • Jackie Yellow says

        September 28, 2016 at 3:42 pm

        Dang auto correct: unpoluted water

        Reply
    • Rob L: says

      September 29, 2016 at 4:34 pm

      Wind and Storage Demonstration in a First Nations Community, Cowessess First Nation
      http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy/funding/current-funding-programs/cef/4983

      First Nation (Native Americans) partners on wind farm

      http://www.northernontariobusiness.com/Industry-News/aboriginal-businesses/2015/07/First-Nation-partners-on-wind-farm.aspx

      Reply
    • Rob L: says

      September 29, 2016 at 4:35 pm

      Mi’kmaq energy summit gives update on wind farm projects
      Renewable energy plans near completion as turbines rise in Amherst
      http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/mi-kmaq-energy-and-innovation-summit-wind-farm-turbine-1.3781065

      Reply
  4. Linda says

    September 28, 2016 at 3:18 am

    Thank you from family experience, Linda

    Reply
  5. Bob says

    September 28, 2016 at 3:50 pm

    Sorry Linda but the amount of solar to generate the world’s needs make a very small footprint on one of our many deserts. Nothing in life is fair but this pipeline should go around the reservation. It is a small price to pay for what has been done to the indians.

    Reply
    • Brent says

      September 28, 2016 at 4:34 pm

      Bob – That is the biggest fallacy quoted so far. It goes around the reservation. It goes North of the Cannonball River which is the Northern boundary of the reservation.

      Reply
  6. Dan says

    September 28, 2016 at 9:51 pm

    So….What’s your solution? It seems to me that if you’re white, you are now the target of the BLM, a victim of the knock out game, ridiculed and called a domestic terrorist.
    Unfortunately, people have fought and killed for land and resources since the beginning of recorded history. It is a brutal world. It is happening in Syria right now.
    I am a proud White, European, Cherokee Indian mixed man. I owned no slaves and never shot an Indian. But, people like you want to place false blame on white America. Why not blame the entire human race? We’ve killed each other since the beginning of time.

    Reply
    • Gorgeous Ferdinand says

      September 29, 2016 at 4:16 am

      Best comment by far! Nail meets head!
      But nope, you’re racist to speak of equality in 2016.

      Reply
    • Rob L: says

      September 29, 2016 at 5:06 pm

      If these pipelines are so important, than please, let’s route them through the neighborhoods of the pipeline owners.

      When one knows better, one does better. What a silly notion that just because something was done, it’s excused in order to do more. It’s time to raise one’s consciousnesses, sometimes referred to as growing up. We have never ‘needed’ to trample on humanity except for the sake of greed.

      Oh, btw, since when does oil produced only for China trump water needs for the U.S.?

      Reply
    • Rosalie S. says

      October 28, 2016 at 10:44 pm

      I do blame the entire human race…..but mostly men who seem
      to be driven by a need for violent solutions to their wants and
      needs.

      THE TIME TO STOP IS NOW: while there still is a human race.

      Reply
  7. Theresa says

    September 29, 2016 at 1:53 am

    Bismark protested it, it got moved. Unfortunately it is not just injuns water… that missouri aquifer.. supplies more than them injuns… sad when them pipelines leak.. rivers n lakes can’t clean themselves.

    Reply
  8. Ted Fogarty, MD says

    October 12, 2016 at 4:26 pm

    Thank you Clay for your cultural and historical leadership, understanding and blessed writing skills.

    Reply
  9. Karen Kjensrud says

    November 5, 2016 at 9:11 pm

    I would love to receive new posts by email.
    Thank you.

    Reply

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