The image that perfectly describes my 'harsher' email signature......
"I drop people with no warning.
We're getting too old to explain to others what they know they're doing is wrong."
Speaking of deeply ignorant people doing wrong ~ and apparently loving it...Let me contribute to your understanding of the drama going on in Oregon right now. There, passionate people and groups that function from a mentality and conscience that appears to be very narrow have captured the headlines. I say 'narrow' because their perspective is pretty self-righteous, as in, "Whatever I want....that's all that matters!"
Please read this article that gives the history of the turmoil, theft and appropriation of the millions of acres of land in Oregon now the subject of this armed stand-off between the U S government and white militiamen.
And I ask your pardon Beloveds, as I so want to bring you joy and beauty (well maybe the look on the face of the tiny 8 inch Burrowing Owl made you chuckle?). I just want your understanding to be full, and this article includes information that surely the national news media will overlook and ignore.
One last thing. I'm pissed that in all of the Executive Clemency President Obama granted last month, he failed to free Leonard Peltier. The 71 year old Native American leader has spent 40 years in prison for a crime which he did not commit. Support his freedom:Who is Leonard Peltier
lovu,
Kendke
If Anyone Should Be in a Standoff, It’s the Paiute Natives Whose Land Was Stolen By Feds & Ranchers
By William N. Grigg | FreeThoughtProject
What if the armed protesters who seized control of empty
administrative buildings on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge were
Paiute activists, rather than white militiamen?
Would left-leaning critics of this arguably ill-considered action
denounce the protest as an act of “armed sedition against lawful authority” carried out by “
domestic terrorists,”
and call for immediate military action to slaughter the occupiers? Or
would they consider the possibility that federal control over the land
is illicit, the status quo untenable, and that the demonstrators are
animated by legitimate grievances?
Harney County, Oregon, where the standoff is taking place, was named after
General
William S. Harney, who rose to prominence during a punitive expedition
in the 1850s to “chastise” restive Upper Brule Sioux for organizing
armed resistance against white encroachment on lands supposedly
guaranteed to them by treaty. In the 1860s, an outpost named after
the general was established near present-day Burns, Oregon, not far from
the scene of the ongoing standoff.
Fort Harney
played a key role in the “Snake War,” a four-year campaign to subdue
and assimilate the Paiute and Shoshone in Idaho, Oregon, and Nevada.
That relatively obscure conflict was,
in the words of historian Gregory Michno, “the deadliest Western Indian war in American history.”
One federal objective in the Snake War was to break the resistance of
the Paiutes and confine them in a reservation. As originally
constituted in 1872, the Malheur Reservation encompassed some 1,778,560
acres of land supposedly set aside for the use of nomadic Indian bands
who had lived in the region since time immemorial. An official named
Samuel Parrish was appointed as Indian agent in 1873, and he endeared
himself to the Paiutes by treating them respectfully and dealing with
them equitably.
His replacement, Harrison Linville, was a more typical
bureaucratic specimen, padding his requisitions and charging
extortionate prices for rations which the Indians had been promised
during peace negotiations.
During Linville’s tenure,
records a Paiute tribal history,
“stockmen and ranchers were pressuring the government to turn over
reservation lands for settlement and grazing of cattle. They were not
even waiting for a federal mandate but began to run their livestock and
even build ranch homes on the reservation.” Contention over the area
near Fort Harney was especially acute: The Paiutes gathered camas roots –
a staple of their diet — in the fertile valley. Then, without any
legitimate claim to the land, white ranchers threw up fences and began
running cattle.
Rather than treating those ranchers as terrorists or subversives for
unlawfully seizing land held in trust by the federal government, the
administration of President U.S. Grant simply ratified the illegal
seizures.
In 1876, President Grant “ordered the northern shores of Malheur Lake
open for settlement,” thereby cutting off another important harvest
area from the Paiutes. Compounding the injury with an insult, Grant
appointed William Rinehart, a veteran of the Snake War, as the Indian
Agent. In that position Rinehart continued the effort to exterminate the
Paiutes, choking off their rations and allowing white settlers to
invade Paiute lands at will.
Paiute Chief Egan confronted Parrish in a bid to stave off extinction.
“Did the government tell you to come here and drive us off this
reservation?” the Paiute Chief demanded to know. “Did the Big Father
say, go and kill us all off, so you can have our land? Did he tell you
to pull our children’s ears off, and put handcuffs on them, and carry a
pistol to shoot us with? We want to know how the government came by this
land. Is the government mightier than our Spirit-Father, or is he our
Spirit-Father? Oh, what have we done that he is to take all from us that
he has given us? His white children have come and taken all our
mountains, and all our valleys, and all our rivers; and now, because he
has given us this little place without our asking him for it, he sends
you here to tell us to go away.”
Within a few years, the Paiutes – hungry and desperate – joined in the regional uprising called the
Bannock War.
After putting down the Indian insurgency, the victorious Feds rounded
up every Paiute it could find for transport to Washington’s Yakima
reservation. Those who evaded federal custody melted into the hills
throughout the ION (Idaho Oregon Nevada) region.
General George S. Crook, the U.S Army’s most accomplished Indian
fighter, candidly admitted that the Bannock War was provoked by the
government he had served with such distinction.
“It cannot be expected that they will stay on reservations where
there is no possible way to get food, and see their wives and children
starve and die around them,” Crook wrote of the starving Paiutes and
Shoshones. “We have taken their lands, deprived them of every means of
living…Our Indian policy has resolved itself into a question of warpath
or starvation; and, merely being human, many of them will choose the
former alternative where death shall be at least glorious.”
From Washington’s point of view, the behavior denounced by Crook was a
justified exercise of “plenary” authority over Indian lands obtained
through conquest of an inferior race.
In the 1823 case
Johnson and Gram’s Lessee v. William McIntosh,
the U.S. Supreme Court held that while Indians “were admitted to be the
rightful occupants of the soil, with a legal as well as just claim to
retain possession of it,” they were denied clear title to their property
– that is, the “power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to
whomsoever they pleased.”
Ownership of the land on which the Indians lived was supposedly
transferred from them to the newly arrived Europeans through royal
grants issued by monarchs whose authority was ultimately derived from
the Pope. According to the Court, those decrees by distant kings of whom
the Indians had never heard were sufficient to “convey the soil as well
as the right of dominion to the grantees.”
Henry Wheaton, who was the reporter for the Supreme Court at the time
of that ruling, later wrote that the Indian tribes, as “heathens,” were
“the lawful spoil and prey of their civilized conquerors” and that it
was a “maxim of policy and of law, that the right of the native Indians
was subordinate to that of the first Christian discoverer.”
Arch-nationalist legal commentator Joseph Story elaborated on this idea,
describing the Indians as “infidels, heathens, and savages [who] were
not allowed to possess the prerogatives belonging to absolute, sovereign
and independent nations.”
The racial and religious roots of federal Indian policy have been exhumed through a lawsuit filed on behalf of
Nevada cattle rancher Raymond Yowell, a
former chief of the Te-Moak band of the Western Shoshone Indians.
In May 2002, the BLM – acting without a court order — mounted a
paramilitary operation to confiscate Yowell’s 132-head cattle herd for
refusal to pay grazing fees. The rustlers then billed the rancher
$180,000, and began to garnish his monthly Social Security check when he
refused to pay.
Yowell’s ancestors were among the signatories of the 1863 Ruby Valley
Treaty with the federal government, which recognized the tribe’s
sovereignty over a 24 million acre swath of western lands the Shoshones
called Newe Segobia – “The Land of the People of Mother Earth.”
While demanding that the Shoshones refrain from interfering with
telegraph lines and stagecoach routes, the Feds did nothing to
discourage or deter illegal settlements on Shoshone land. In 1962 – one
year shy of the centennial of the Ruby Valley Treaty – the federal
Indian Claims Commission proclaimed that this pattern of federally
abetted “gradual encroachment” by Euro-American settlers and speculators
had “extinguished” all Shoshone claims to their lands.
A brief filed on Yowell’s behalf
observed that while cases subsequent to the 1823 Johnson decision
“tended to omit explicit reference” to the doctrine that Indian land
rights must yield to the “superior” claims of white Christian settlers,
its core precepts did occasionally bob to the surface.
Thus
in the 1877 Beecher v. Weatherby
case, the Court decreed that Indians should be dealt with in a fashion
appropriate to “an ignorant and dependent race.” In 1946 – the year
Congress created the Indian Claims Commission to dispose of Indian land
claims –
Justice Stanley Reed batted away a suit filed by the Alcea Band of Oregon’s Tillamook tribe by breezily stating that “discovery by Christian nations gave them sovereignty over and title to the lands discovered.”
Nothing in the US Constitution justifies the institutionalized
assumption that the federal government had the right to act as “trustee”
on behalf of its so-called Indian “wards.”
The Supreme Court struggled to find constitutional warrant for that
belief in the 1886 case United States v. Kagama. When the text refused
to yield the desired outcome, Justice Samuel Miller threw up his hands
and concluded that the plenary authority to regulate Indian affairs grew
out of “the ownership of the country … and the right of exclusive
sovereignty which must exist in the National Government, and can be
found nowhere else.”
That ruling, one commentator wryly observed, introduced the “`it-must-be-somewhere’ doctrine of Constitutional interpretation.”
The “finders keepers” or “might makes right” approach to Indian
affairs “has never been repudiated,” notes Yowell’s brief. “It is the
continuing basis for all aspects of federal Indian law.” The federal
government insists that it is acting on “well-settled” legal principles.
The brief replies that “slavery and racial segregation were considered
`well-settled’ law, and were nonetheless subject to challenge as
fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution and the principles of
respect for human rights.”
Ammon Bundy, the de facto leader of the militia group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge,
describes the objective of the standoff as the restoration of “the people’s constitutional rights.”
He also claims that the militia intends to occupy the federal buildings
“for as long as need be” and won’t leave until the people of Harney
County “can use these lands as free men.”
However, as the
CATO Institute reports,
property rights advocates who want to change public views need to find
ranchers more appealing than the Bundys, who want to overgraze other
people’s land without paying for the right to do so, or the Hammonds,
whose unauthorized fire on federal lands threatened firefighters’ lives.
Without better representatives–preferably ones willing to pay their own
way and not rely on taxpayer subsidies–they won’t be able to capture
the hearts and minds of the American people, which means the future of
ranchers who depend on federal lands is dim.
If he’s serious about that objective, Bundy should make specific
overtures to Paiute residents of the county, who would have a great deal
to say about the subject of dispossession by federal decree. After
comparing notes, these two groups might come to understand that the
federal Leviathan State is, and has always been, the bane enemy of
people of every ethnic origin.
