What happens when we’re not all human? Part III

Jews are strangers in a strange land. The Native Americans are strangers in their own land. Our relationship with the native tribes who live and lived in our country is complicated and deplorable. I’ve included the past tense, because many of the tribes have become extinct. We (the immigrants) played no small role in this extinction. I’m going to briefly summarize and generalize about this history, because if I get into the details, I might as well write the history of anti-Semitism.

There were hundreds of tribes in native North America who were living their lives as they had over the thousands of years since their arrival, many believe over the Bering Land Bridge following herds of migratory animals during the last glaciation. That’s a long time ago. They were the first human inhabitants of this land and lived here without much interference until we (Europeans) showed up. When we came in small numbers and felt vulnerable, we treated the tribes as foreign nations and wrote treaties with them. As our numbers and our power increased relative to the tribes, we quickly chucked the whole notion of equality in our relations and accelerated an abusive and shameful approach to these people. Fortunately for the tribes, those treaties still exist. As with the words of the Bill of Rights and Constitution, they’ve got to love the words in those treaties. Were the treaties honored? Often, no, but they have the words. They have words, and they have lawyers and they have courts.

Unfortunately, they don’t have power and they don’t really have a constituency to support their cause. Most Americans don’t care. Most Americans don’t think about these people. If they did, they’d likely feel enough shame and embarrassment to do something about changing their life circumstances. And make no bones about it … we have all benefited the most directly from the results of how we’ve treated the Native Americans.

Right now, please look down. You are standing on their land. Your house is on their land. Your community is on their land. Your city is on their land. They’ve been moved off to someplace where our leaders believed there was no value and where they would be out of our sight … and mind. But this was all theirs before we arrived and stole it from them. And I say stole, because the way these treaties were negotiated wouldn’t pass the straight face test in any court of law or in the court of public opinion today. These negotiations were not among equals. We killed off their food supply, and then we negotiated. We took their children away from them and sent them to boarding schools to assimilate, and then we negotiated.

When colonists arrived in America, the native tribes inconveniently lived on every square inch of the continent. Many of the tribes were nomadic, following buffalo herds across the great plains as their primary food supply. Some tribes had an abundance of resources that made a more sedentary life possible. The tribes of the northwest coast are good examples of this way of life. Some of the tribes depended on both horticulture and hunting. What all these tribes shared in common was the belief that a human being could not own land. Land ownership was entirely foreign to them. Equally unfamiliar was the belief that land could be a commodity; that land could have monetary value and be bought and sold. This difference between the tribes’ and western beliefs about land ownership made it possible for the native groups to be easily taken advantage of in ‘negotiations.’

We wanted their land and we did what we needed to in order to move them off it. The tribes in the western states were forced onto reservations. The reservations were incredibly small compared to the tracts of land these tribes lived on for hundreds if not thousands of years. For the tribes that lived east of the Mississippi River, their lot was even more brutal. These tribes were moved west, many to what is now Oklahoma, and at the time became known as Indian Territory. During the 1800s when this forced migration was accomplished, the west was an enormous wasteland. The sole purpose of this forced migration was to get these people out of our way. President Jackson led this effort, which became known as the trail of tears. Jackson’s policy was inhumane. If he attempted to enact this kind of policy today, the United Nations would condemn him and the United States for a massive human right’s violation. Instead, we honor Jackson by putting his face on the twenty-dollar bill. We’re very confused.

After the civil war, the United States became far more aggressive about emptying land for our (the immigrant) use. We had a standing army available once the north won the war, and troops were sent out west to corral any of the tribes that resisted efforts to move them off their land. There were forts built across the western states to support this effort. We (the immigrants) allowed women and children to be slaughtered during these episodes.

You can only do this if the people we are killing are not human. You can only destroy a way of life if that way of life is not as valuable or worthy as our own. You don’t take human children away from their parents. You don’t kill off the food supply of human beings. All of this was okay to do because these people were different; they were not really human.

The tribes were never offered honest compensation for their land. And what compensation that they did receive was often mismanaged or stolen by the government (us – the immigrants). There are court cases today that are still dealing with these issues.

Every program we established with the tribes, and we came up with a new one every ten minutes, was designed to destroy their way of life. Some of what we did was to destroy the people themselves. Assimilation was the primary theme. We (the immigrants) did an awesome job of trying. The results, however, have not turned out so well.

The tribes held their lands collectively from the time the reservations were established. The government (us) forced them to split up their land and they dolled it out to the members of the tribes in an attempt to make them into farmers and ranchers. I have farmers in my family. Observation – farming is learned in a family and passed down from generation to generation. It is a complicated business and, more so, it is a way of life. Hocus pocus, you’re going to be farmers and ranchers isn’t going to cut it. The tribes had no experience running a business and didn’t share a value system that supported this way of life. “Time is money’ is a very western concept that had no meaning in these tribal cultures. Writing a will and the notions about inheriting land were totally foreign concepts. Thus, over generations, the lands originally dolled out have been subdivided so many times, that there isn’t much land for a single family to farm or ranch, and particularly in western states where they talk about acres per cow as opposed to the Midwest where we think about cows per acre.

The programs we pushed on the tribes strove to assimilate them as quickly as possible. We tried to move large numbers of them into cities, with the expectation that they would assimilate more quickly if they lived among the inhabitants of Cleveland. Honest. There was an Indian Relocation Center in Cleveland. We figured out that the reservations were just large pains in the butt and we might want to sell off the reservation lands and try to get rid of the whole system. But the tribes have those pesky treaties! All those words, and lawyers and courts. We’ve tried almost everything, and almost none of it in the best interest of the tribes. Almost always in the best interest of us (the immigrants). Lo and behold, we started finding valuable resources on many of those reservations which were thought to be large tracts of land with little value. Coal, uranium, oil have over the years only further complicated these relationships between the tribes and the government (us, the immigrants).

A short story about Fort Belknap sort of encapsulates the whole stinking mess. I lived on the Fort Belknap Reservation for two years. It was established as the home for the A'aninin (White Clay People) and the Nakoda (Assiniboine). Geographic boundaries are interesting phenomenon in the United States. Most boundaries are determined by geographic features, such as rivers and lakes. When those don’t exist, we tend toward drawing straight lines to separate this town, city, county, state, or reservation from another. (An exception to this straight-line approach is my gerrymandered voting district the shape of which is so convoluted, it couldn’t even be characterized as an amoeba – and the people who drew it only pretend that our country is a democracy, and they’re not going to heaven).

The southern boundary of the reservation is in the Little Rocky Mountains and was supposed to be a straight line running east and west. When the reservation was first established, it was a straight line. Then in 1884, gold was discovered in the Little Rockies. We (the immigrants) wanted the gold, and the tribes were convinced (forced) to give up this land. If you look at the southern boundary, there is a big notch removed from the reservation that is totally inexplicable until someone describes the whole sordid tale. The gold gets mined. The company that does the mining rips the crap out of the beautiful mountains, they leave an enormous environmental and safety disaster behind, and then go bankrupt and can’t pay to have the mountains reclaimed or the environmental disaster mitigated. Cyanide was used to leach the gold from the ore. Okay, ponder that for a minute. I lived in Hays which was at the foot of the mountains. A creek ran out of the mountains and through Hays. I lived at the mouth of a canyon going up into the mountains. This place is out in the middle of nowhere. The closest large population is 180 miles away, and that was a city of 90,000 people. No factories anywhere. No nothing. I should have been able to drink the most pristine water out of that creek. Cyanide.

If we counted all the ways we’ve screwed these people, we’d still be counting. It is endless. And the screwing has been so devastating in every direction.

I’m sure that there were good people who spent their lives with these tribes who had only good intentions in their hearts and worked tirelessly to bring positive into people’s lives. I wanted to say that before I go on to say that, in general, the people we’ve sent to work with the tribes has not been the best of American society. Often, the Indian Agents who were sent to administer the programs enacted by the government (us, the immigrants), were not honest with the tribes and sometimes stole more than they helped. If you spend years becoming ordained in the Catholic Church, do you want to be sent to Chicago or to a reservation in North Dakota? The states do not have jurisdiction on reservations, because of those pesky treaties, so law enforcement is administered through local reservation police and by the FBI. What FBI agent wants to be assigned to a reservation in Montana? I’ll leave it up to your imagination as to how people end up on reservations as representatives of one form or another from the dominant American society.

We destroyed their culture and we didn’t offer them a satisfying replacement. Can you imagine what it must be like to have your language forcibly taken from you … everything you believe, your religion, your values, what you eat, where you live, how you dress … and be forced to take on all of the culture from a different society. You can’t. You couldn’t possibly know. That’s what we (the immigrants) did to them. I’ve thought a lot about this forced assimilation and with all of the empathy I can muster, I still can’t even imagine what it must be like to have everything about my life stripped away and be forced to accept something entirely foreign. Here, this is your spank’n new way of life. This is what you believe. These are your new values. These are the things that need to be important to you. You know that whole thing about the tribe and collective ideals, forget about it. You are now all about individuality. You are going to dress like this and eat these things. This is how you are going to define your relatives. This is what marriage means. You are now going to speak English and good luck with spelling.

Totally unsatisfying replacement and you have ten minutes to learn it and internalize it. The current state of affairs for so many of these tribes reflects all the failures in our (the immigrants) treatment of these people.

The reservations are among the most impoverished places in the country and, in some cases, in the world. If we had unemployment rates in our cities as they experience on the reservations, we’d be marching in the streets brandishing our broom sticks and axe handles. Every reservation represents the most significant health crises, from alcoholism to drug abuse to heart disease to diabetes. There is a serious shortage of housing and of infrastructure. Pick the social problems, they’ve got them all in abundance – teen suicide, accidents, teen pregnancy.

We caused this mayhem. Our treatment of these people has been worse than deplorable. And the worst of it is that we don’t care. I think about it every day because of my life experiences and the relationships that were formed during my time living in this community. For almost all the rest of America, we’ve got these people tucked away in places that don’t burden our view. You can pretend that all is glorious from sea to shining sea and that the purple mountains majesty isn’t littered with all the crap we’ve caused in stealing the land and the way of life from these people. You can pretend that you aren’t responsible.

But then look down at your feet – look at the ground upon which you stand. This was all theirs.

We can’t fix our problems until we acknowledge and accept that we have problems and that we’ve caused the problems. That acknowledgement starts with dealing with reality.

I was introduced to a lot of history during my schooling in elementary, middle and high school. I never learned anything about Wounded Knee or the Trail of Tears, or anything else that accurately characterized what happened to all these tribes as a result of our appearing on their lands and in their lives. What I did learn about was Manifest Destiny. After the Louisiana Purchase during Jefferson’s presidency and the Louis and Clark expeditions to explore our bargain purchase from France (hey, why did the French think they owned this land, and why weren’t we buying this from the tribes?), America had a whole new and gigantic piece of property to inhabit. Manifest destiny became a popular concept in the mid-1800s. It was G-d’s will for us (the immigrants) to move across our great land and spread our political (democracy) and economic system (capitalism) onto every living thing across the continent. Isn’t that convenient. While I was learning all about this stuff, I never gave any thought to what this notion really meant. I sure do now. How can one possibly argue with directives learned at the burning bush?

The tribes should have told all these people that G-d told them that they (the immigrants) all need to get into boats and sail back to the places they came from.

The accurate account would have described what we did to these people and the motivations behind our policies and actions. They were in our way, we had plans for their land and their resources and we needed to get them out of our way by any means possible. And we were able to effectuate all these programs and actions, because these people weren’t human.

And here’s an irony to chew on for a while. One of the more profound observations I made in my two years of living on the reservation and a lifetime of relationships with people from this community - I’ve never seen a more patriotic people. They love the United States of America. I haven’t memorized the numbers, but I would guess that in relation to their population size, the proportion of Native Americans serving in the military is extremely high as compared to other groups. They have bravely fought in all our wars. They honor their veterans regularly and they are proud of their service to the country that has so thoroughly screwed them since the Mayflower arrived in 1620.

They are also the most generous people I’ve ever known. They have nothing and they would give you everything. They are among the most human people I’ve ever known.