Re: Trail of Tears
>There is a need ... to allow ourselves to grow. To relinguish the European, >the Asian, the Middle East from our identity. There is a need to >incorporate what we are - where we are and stand alone on those truth's. >Those who come from those other cultures - as my grandparents did, need to >make the paradigm shift from being half breeds, honouring cultures which we >no longer are part off and owning the cultures we have become and finally >including those who are our brothers - those who were here first - not just >the people, but the animals and the land and the fishes and the prairies and >the oceans and the sky. For this place is different. The vibrations of >this land are different and we collectively need to stop denying them by >holding onto other truths and embrace our own. We are the New World and the >Old World needs our unique contribution. The question is; can we accecpt >our heritage and become what those before us - in their highest achievements >exemplified and then add what we are to that potential? > It would be great if we could, Thomas, but I have my doubts that we can. My own view of people is that they are essentially tribal, but on a much smaller scale than you suggest. Each tribe values its own space and its own traditions and wants to hold onto them as long as it can. There is safety within the tribe, and danger outside of it. Most nation states, Canada included, consist of alliances among tribes. Where these alliances are largely voluntary and the principles along which they operate are essentially egalitarian and democratic, the tribe can look after its own interests and the broader system can function quite well. Where the alliances are not voluntary and the system tends to be authoritarian, as in Russia (one of many examples), you can expect nothing but trouble. When I was in Russia a few years ago, the Chechyn war was going full blast. I was told by Russians that it was just one of several trouble spots. The others were less spectacular and were not making the newspapers. To achieve what you are asking us to may take another step in political and perhaps even biological evolution. I sincerely hope we can make it. Ed Weick
Re: Trail of Tears
Thomas: I have been deeply disturbed over the postings we have been engaged in. I have spent many hours of my walks ruminating on postings by Ed Weike and Ray Harrel and the themes of justice, injustice, governments, denial, cruelty to the Natives, etc. At the basis my unease is my inner sense of myself as a Canadian who has traveled a lot, read a lot and thought a lot about native governance, spirituality, relationships with the land and with the white man. I am not European and the culture of Europe that the school system and the political thought from Western civilization have tried to instil in me has failed. I am North American from the tribe of Canadians. We are a new grouping that has insinuated itself across the land called Canada. I am a hybrid being. The land itself has spoken to me in my lifetime with it's beauty, it's solitude, it's vastness and it's difficult climate and terrain. As I have searched for myself, I have had to include those who came before me in this land, The First Nations People, because we are sharing this experience and it has formed them as it is forming me and my children. We have taken from those before us, not only some of their land, but their understandings of life, governance and spirituality and incorporated these gifts into our tribe. The tribe of Americans have done the same. And yet, in a curious lack, we have failed to honour that which we recieved and found valuable. It is a denial of shame. We have not had the cathrarsis of freeing the repressed guilt of the Western European actions that our forebearers created by their actions against the land and it's original inhabitants. We are in collective denial and individual denial of accepting those gifts freely given by the people we have treated so badly. We also have denied the grandeur of the land and animals and plant life that we collectively share. We fear opening ourselves to the true possibilities that would evolve if we accepted the co-existence of this place with all that exists here. There is a need ... to allow ourselves to grow. To relinguish the European, the Asian, the Middle East from our identity. There is a need to incorporate what we are - where we are and stand alone on those truth's. Those who come from those other cultures - as my grandparents did, need to make the paradigm shift from being half breeds, honouring cultures which we no longer are part off and owning the cultures we have become and finally including those who are our brothers - those who were here first - not just the people, but the animals and the land and the fishes and the prairies and the oceans and the sky. For this place is different. The vibrations of this land are different and we collectively need to stop denying them by holding onto other truths and embrace our own. We are the New World and the Old World needs our unique contribution. The question is; can we accecpt our heritage and become what those before us - in their highest achievements exemplified and then add what we are to that potential? Respectfully, Thomas Lunde -- The Co-Intelligence Institute CII home // Y2K home // CIPolitics home American Indians: The original democrats Many people think that our democratic tradition evolved primarily from the Greeks and the English. But those political cultures, steeped in slavery, aristocracy, and property-power, provided only a counterpoint to the real source of our federal democracy - the American Indians. In the following selections from his book Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (Crown Publishers, NY, 1988), Jack Weatherford looks into the historic record to correct the mythology we have been raised with. -- Tom Atlee The most consistent theme in the descriptions penned about the New World was amazement at the Indians' personal liberty, in particular their freedom from rulers and from social classes based on ownership of property. For the first time the French and the British became aware of the possibility of living in social harmony and prosperity without the rule of a king. As the first reports of this new place filtered into Europe, they provoked much philosophical and political writing. Sir Thomas More incorporated into his 1516 book Utopia those characteristics then being reported by the first travelers to America More's work was translated into all the major European languages Louis Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan, wrote several short books on the Huron Indians of Canada based on his stay with them from 1683 to 1694 [during which he] found an orderly society, but one lacking a formal government that compelled such order Soon thereafter, Lahontan became an international celebrity feted in all the liberal circles. The playwright Delisle de la Drevetiere adapted these ideas to the stage in a play about an American Indian's visit to Paris... Arlequ
Re: Trail of Tears
All true Ed and thank you. There is more to the story that made this such a divisive issue. The issue that the writer and poet William Payne went to write an article about in the Cherokee Nation. He found a community of what now is acknowledged to have contained around 22,000 individuals made up of the same social stratas as the White community around it with three distinct classes. The City of New Echota in Georgia, like the wealthy community of Nichol's Hills in Oklahoma City and the Grammercy area of Manhattan was filled with new beautiful homes and government buildings. These were not burned and are still extant and although tremendously "run down" at one point are now a part of Georgia's push for tourists after the completed renovation. Park Hill, outside of Tahlequah, Oklahoma was the new home equivalent of New Echota but, due to the new Cherokee brick factory, were largely built from the more permanent brick. The Cherokee middle class absorbed the best of the farming methods of the Europeans and added it to their already formidable skills. The one important tool they got from the European farmer was the spinning wheel which made it easier to work with wool and flax which they had begun to use and the cotton which was developed here. The spinning wheel reduced their use of the fine tanning, but difficult to do, processes with leather. The inner skin of the deer is more fine than any cloth except silk and is amazing. It is still done in some places for personal use as well as in Canada. There used to be a huge market for this clothing in trade. The Cherokees were not socially divided in the same way that economic classes were in the Whites but the most wealthy group were the 10% who were Christians. There was extensive trade in farm goods. The Cherokees had huge orchards. Many more than the 22,000 individuals who developed them . The Cherokees developed writing for the Cherokee language which was useful as code for the Cherokee businessmen and since the provinciality of the local non-Indians included the racist belief in their superiority over non-Whites, this inability constituted both a block to learning, since the language is complicated, and the lack of a strategic tool in doing business. Not guaranteed to make "friends." But most of all it was the fact that the Cherokees used a mirror image of the Washington government to stress the independence and sovereignty over their own lives that was the problem. It was for the Southerners their first taste of the issue of State's rights and 22 years later they would go to war using the same arguments against the North that the Cherokees had skillfully used in Congress and the Supreme Court, against them. Also mention is not made that Marshall's dictate was not stopped by Jackson's seditious statement which was probably never said by Jackson, although it was certainly his position. What stopped Marshall was that the local non-Cherokee Christians convinced Worchester and the other missionaries to not push their suit to the next step. The reason given was that it could destroy the Union. So 1. the Cherokees were as divided as the Jews of Germany with three classes. 2. their overall wealth was superior to the states around them. 3. They functioned both culturally and linguistically as the French in Canada who refuse to give up and speak only English. 4. Economically they were the doors to trade between four different states and as such fed the herds of livestock that had to travel through the nation, as well as charging tolls for the use of the nation's roads and ferries. 5. Gold was more of a glamour issue but it constituted the final straw in the minds of the ignorant Georgians. REH Ed Weick wrote: Over the years, I've collected quite a lot of material while working on issues affecting Canadian Indians, Inuit and Metis. I used some of this in a recent posting on Canadian Indian claims. The following excerpt on the eastern US may give you a better idea of what Ray Evans Harrell is talking about in some of his postings to the list. It is based on John Collier's Indians of the Americas, first published in 1947. Collier was US Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945. Ed Weick 1830s-1840s - Trail of Tears and United States (Marshall) concept of Indian Nationhood: Five Civilized Tribes removed beyond the Mississippi. Collier (Mentor edition, 1948) focuses on the Cherokee, an Iroquoian people, and the largest of the "civilized tribes". Prior to the American Revolution, the British had repeatedly prevented incursions into Cherokee lands by "borderers" and the Cherokee allied themselves with the British during the revolution. They continued to fight the Americans until 1794, when the signed a treaty with the US Government. This was breached in the letter and spirit repeatedly by the US Government in the subsequent years. In 18
Trail of Tears
Over the years, I've collected quite a lot of material while working on issues affecting Canadian Indians, Inuit and Metis. I used some of this in a recent posting on Canadian Indian claims. The following excerpt on the eastern US may give you a better idea of what Ray Evans Harrell is talking about in some of his postings to the list. It is based on John Collier's Indians of the Americas, first published in 1947. Collier was US Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945. Ed Weick 1830s-1840s - Trail of Tears and United States (Marshall) concept of Indian Nationhood: Five Civilized Tribes removed beyond the Mississippi. Collier (Mentor edition, 1948) focuses on the Cherokee, an Iroquoian people, and the largest of the "civilized tribes". Prior to the American Revolution, the British had repeatedly prevented incursions into Cherokee lands by "borderers" and the Cherokee allied themselves with the British during the revolution. They continued to fight the Americans until 1794, when the signed a treaty with the US Government. This was breached in the letter and spirit repeatedly by the US Government in the subsequent years. In 1828 Andrew Jackson, who had been a famous Indian fighter and borderer and who had beaten the British in the battle for New Orleans, was elected President. Almost immediately, he persuaded Congress to pass the Indian Removal Act, 1830, which enabled him to remove all Indian tribes to west of the Mississippi (the Mississippi had become the new line between the colonized lands and Indian Territory, replacing the Appalachians of the Royal Proclamation). At about the same time, gold was discovered in the remaining Cherokee country, and the Georgia legislature passed an act confiscating all Cherokee land within the state, declaring all laws of the Cherokee Nation null and void, and forbidding Indians to testify in any state court against white men. The Cherokee lands were to be distributed to whites through a lottery system. An appeal from John Ross, the Cherokee Chief, to President Jackson got nowhere. An appeal to the Supreme Court also failed, as the court refused to take jurisdiction on grounds that the tribe was not a foreign nation (and therefore within the legal jurisdiction of Georgia?). Two years later, the arrest of some missionaries who refused to swear allegiance to Georgia while resident in Cherokee territory brought about the famous (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) John Marshall decision that: The Cherokee nation, then, is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter, but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves, or in conformity with treaties and with acts of Congress. (Collier, p.123) This decision was based on Marshall's concept that Indian tribes or nations ...had always been considered as distinct, independent, political communities, retaining their original natural rights...and the settled doctrine of the law of nations is, that a weaker power does not surrender its independence -- its right of self-government -- by associating with a stronger, and taking its protection. (ibid.) Jackson reacted with contempt: "John Marshall has rendered his decision; now let him enforce it." (ibid.) The destructive policies toward the Cherokees continued. A "fictional treaty" which assigned the remaining 7 million acres of land still held by the Cherokees to the US government for $4.5 million which was to be deposited in the US Treasury to the credit of the Cherokees was signed at a set-up meeting. Three years later, US troops and "a non-military rabble of followers", invaded the Cherokee lands and removed the Cherokees to concentration camps. "Livestock, household goods, farm implements, everything went to the white camp-followers; the homes were usually burned." (Collier, p124) 14,000 were forced to trek to Arkansas. Of these, 4,000 reportedly died on the way. A great lie was woven around the exodus: In addressing Congress on December 3, 1838, President Van Buren said: The measures [for Cherokee removal] authorized by Congress at its last session have had the happiest effects...The Cherokees have emigrated without any apparent reluctance. (Quoted in Collier, p.124) Like the Cherokees, the others of the Five Civilized Tribes, the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles were also removed to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma.
