[Nettime-bold] Indigenous Mind - Winona LaDuke

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan {AT} london.com>]

INDIGENOUS MIND

WINONA LaDUKE
Native people have taken great care to 
fashion their societies in accordance with 
the flow and law of Nature.

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES believe that all 
societies must exist in accordance with 
natural law in order to be sustainable. 
Cultural diversity is as essential as 
biological diversity. Indigenous peoples 
have lived on Earth for thousands of years,
 and I suggest that their ways are the only
 sustainable ways of living. Because of that,
 there is something to be learned from 
indigenous cultures.

Natural law is superior to the laws made by 
nations, states and municipalities. It is the
 law to which we are all accountable. Nature 
is cyclical. The moon, the tides, the seasons 
and our bodies all move in cycles. Time itself
 is cyclical. Through this cycle of life 
nature maintains a balance. Our ceremonies are 
about the restoration of balance. That is our 
intent: to restore balance.

According to our way of looking, the world is
 animate. This is reflected in our language, 
in which most nouns are animate. The word for 
corn is animate; tree is animate; rice, rock 
and stone are animate. Natural things are 
alive, they have spirit. Therefore, when we 
harvest wild rice on our reservation we always
 offer tobacco to the earth because, when you 
take something, you must always give thanks to
 its spirit for giving itself to you. When we 
harvest, we practise reciprocity, which means,
 when you take, you always give. This is 
balance. We say that when you take, you must 
take only what you truly need and leave the 
rest. Because, if you take more than you need,
 you are upsetting the balance of nature.


OVER THE PAST 500 years our experience has 
been one of conflict between the indigenous 
and the industrial world-views. This conflict 
has manifested itself as a holocaust The 
industrial world-view has caused the 
extinction of more species in the past 150 
years than the total species extinction from 
the Ice Age to the mid-nineteenth century. The
 same industrial way of thinking has caused 
the extinction of about 2,000 different 
indigenous peoples in the Western hemisphere 
alone. The extinction of species and the 
extinction of peoples are closely linked. And 
the extinction continues. The Bureau of Indian
 Affairs, in 1992, declared nineteen different
 indigenous nations in North America extinct.
 The rate of extinction in the Amazon 
rainforest, for example, has been one 
indigenous people per year since 1900. And if 
you look at world maps showing cultural and 
biological distribution, you find that where 
there is the most cultural diversity, there is 
also the most biological diversity. A direct
 relationship exists between the two. That is 
why we argue that cultural diversity is as 
important to a sustainable society as 
biological diversity.


Our greatest problem in America is that there
 has been no recognition of cultural 
extinction. When I ask people how many 
different kinds of Indian they can identify, 
they can name scarcely any. America's 
mythology is based on the denial of the 
native. Nobody admits that the holocaust of 
native people took place. Yet it was a 
holocaust of unparalleled proportions. 
Bartholomew de las Casas estimated that fifty 
million indigenous people in the Western 
hemisphere perished.


It is absolutely correct for me to demand 
that the holocaust of my people be recognized.
 Instead, nobody knows anything about the 
native people. Why? Because this system is 
based on a denial of native existence. We are 
erased from the public consciousness because, 
if you have no victim, you have no crime. In
 America we do not exist as full human beings 
with human rights and human dignity.


I'D LIKE TO TELL you about indigenous peoples'
 efforts to protect our land and restore our 
communities. I'll use my own community as an 
example The White Earth Reservation, located 
at the headwaters of the Mississippi, is 
thirty-six by thirty-six miles square, about 
837,000 acres. It is very good land. A treaty reserved it for our people in 1867 in return 
for relinquishing a much larger area of 
northern Minnesota. There are forty-seven 
lakes. There's maple sugar, there are 
hardwoods, and there are all the different 
medicine plants my people use: our reservation 
is called "the medicine chest of the 
Ojibways". There are wild rice, deer, beaver,
 fish every food we need; there is plenty of
 it. On the eastern part of the reservation 
there are stands of white pine. The land is 
owned collectively, and we have family-based 
usufruct rights: each family has traditional 
areas in which it fishes and hunts. In our 
language the words which describe the concept
 of land-ownership translate as "the land of 
the people", which doesn't imply that we own 
our land but that we belong to it. Our 
definition doesn't stand up well in court, 
unfortunately, since America's legal system 
upholds the concept of private property.



The White Earth Reservation is a rich place. 
And it is our experience that industrial 
society is not content to leave other peoples' 
riches alone. Wealth attracts colonialism: the
 more a native people has, the more colonisers 
are apt to covet that wealth and take it away, 
whether it is gold or, as in our case, pine 
stands and Red River Valley farmland. A Latin 
American scholar named Eduardo Galeano has 
written about colonialism in communities like 
mine. Re says: "In the colonial alchemy, gold 
changes to scrap metal and food to poison. We 
have become painfully aware of the mortality 
of wealth, which nature bestows and 
imperialism appropriates." For us, our wealth 
was the source of our poverty: industrial 
society could not leave us be.


OUR RESERVATION WAS created by treaty in 1867. 
In 1887 the General Allotment Act was passed 
on the national level, not only to teach 
Indians the concept of private property but to 
facilitate the removal of more land from 
Indian nations. The federal government divided 
our reservation into eighty-acre parcels of 
land and allotted each parcel to an individual
 Indian, hoping that through this change we 
would somehow become yeoman farmers and 
become "civilized". But the allotment system 
had no connection to our traditional land 
tenure patterns. In our society a person 
harvested rice in one place, trapped in 
another place, got medicines in a third place, 
and picked berries in a fourth. These 
locations depended on the ecosystem; they were
 not necessarily contiguous. But the government said to each Indian; "Here are 
your eighty acres; this is where you'll live."
 Then, after each Indian had received an 
allotment, the rest ofthe land was 
declared "surplus" and given to white people 
to homestead. On our reservation the entire 
land base was allotted except for some 
pinelands that were annexed by the state of 
Minnesota and sold to timber companies. What 
happened to my reservation happened to 
reservations all across the country.


The government turned our land into individual
 eighty-acre parcels, and then let the state 
of Minnesota take the rest of our land. The 
native people were each required to pay tax on
 each eighty-acre area. When the Indians 
couldn't pay the taxes, the state confiscated 
the land. How could these people pay taxes? 
They could not read or write English; they 
could not fill in the tax forms.


By 1920, 99 per cent of original White Earth 
Reservation lands was in non-Indian hands. By 
1930 half of our population lived off-
reservation. Three generations of our people 
were forced into poverty, were forced off our 
land and made refugees in white society. Now a 
lot of our people live in Minneapolis. Of 
20,000 native people only 4,000 or 5,000 live 
on the reservation.


Our struggle is to get our land back. But we 
have exhausted all legal recourse. The 
implication for native people is that we have 
no legal right to our land in the United 
States or in Canada. The only legal recourse 
we have in the United States is the Indian 
Claims Commission, which pays you for land; it 
doesn't return land to you.


When you do not control your land, you do not 
control your destiny. Two- thirds of the deer 
taken on our reservation are taken by non-
Indian sports hunters. In the Tamarac National 
Wildlife Refuge nine times as many deer are 

taken by non-Indians as by Indians. Ninety per 
cent of the fish taken on our reservation is 
taken by white people who come to their summer
 cabins and fish. Each year in our region 
about 10,000 acres are being clear-cut for 
paper and pulp in one county alone, mostly by 
Potlatch Tim- ber Company. We are watching the 
destruction of our ecosystem and the theft of 
our resources.


The federal, state and county governments are 
the largest landholders on the reservation. A 
third of our land is held by them. That land 
should just be returned to us. It would not 
displace anyone. A third of the privately held 
land on our reservation is held by absentee 
landholders, who do not see that land, do not 
know it, do not even know where it is. We ask 
these people how they feel about returning 
land, on a reservation, to the native people.


PEOPLE LOOK AT OUR reservation and comment on 
the 85 per cent unemployment -- they do not 
realize what we do with our time. They have no 
way of valuing our cultural practices. For 
instance, 85 per cent of our people hunt deer, 
75 per cent hunt for small game and geese; 50 
per cent fish by net; 50 per cent garden. 
About the same percentage harvest wild rice, 
not just for themselves: they harvest it to 
sell. About half of our people produce 
handcrafts. There is no way to quantify this. 
It is called the "invisible economy" or 
the "domestic economy". Society views us as 
unemployed Indians who need wage jobs. That is 
not how we view ourselves. Our work is about 
strengthening and restoring our traditional 
economy, thereby strengthening our traditional
 culture.


Our stories are stories of people with a great
 deal of tenacity and courage, people who have
 been resisting for centuries. If we do not
 resist we will not survive. In native culture 
we think ahead to the seventh generation; 
however, we know that the ability of the 
seventh generation to sustain itself will be 
dependent on our ability to resist now.


Winona LaDuke is an Indigenous Rights activist. 




-- 

_______________________________________________
Sign-up for your own FREE Personalized E-mail at Mail.com
http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup


1 cent a minute calls anywhere in the U.S.!

http://www.getpennytalk.com/cgi-bin/adforward.cgi?p_key=RG9853KJ&url=http://www.getpennytalk.com

_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold {AT} nettime.org
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold