Leonard Peltier (of the Anishinabe, Dakota, and Lakota Nations) traces the roots of his political activism to the rank racism and brutal poverty he experienced every day as an Indian child growing up on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa and Fort Totten Sioux reservations in North Dakota. This is his story.
Peter Matthiessen's book, hyperlinked here, is likely the most incontrovertible story ever of our government's scapegoating an actually innocent defendant, with factual accuracy established through the U.S. Courts themselves. It cost Viking over 2.5 Million $ to defend itself against relentless and repeated lawsuits I'd call entirely "frivolous," except that: 1) it cost the plaintiffs about the same amount to press these suits, and 2) the net result was to establish the book's accuracy beyond all doubt. (Peter Matthiessen, pp. 593-600, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Penguin Books, New York, 1992, ISBN 0 14 01.4456 0) This page's author is deeply grateful to book author Peter Matthiessen and to Viking-Penguin, the publisher of this outstanding work, ISBN 0-670-83617-6 in hardcover, and ISBN 0 14 01.4456 0 in paperback.
Everyone who grew up in the U.S.A. knows of the conflict between the Crips and the Bloods. Serious bad sh*t! But there's another conflict even more serious and deadly today - back on the Rez. Note: The Rez means: today's Indian Reservation, where your homies are all tribal members. This conflict is between the Skins and the Bloods. On the Rez, the "Bloods" are shorthand for halfbloods or part-bloods. The "Skins" represent verbal shorthand for "Redskins," or traditionalists. But I'm not really telling the whole truth here. The "battle lines" just aren't that simply drawn by pure genetics: The actual division between the groups really only represents different attitudes.
But these differing attitudes are a major problem? Well, yes - they are. Here's why:
Today, everyone "knows" this nation's treatment of Native Americans was a genocide that transpired in the past, even though few understand why. However, the Native American culture our settlers (pioneers) found here took profoundly different approaches to human life than ones common in Europe. "Indians" took a solidly communal view of land and property. Native Americans revered the practice of sharing resources. When Columbus first encountered "Indians" (Arawaks of the Bahama Islands), he reported these Indians "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed then would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone. . . ." (Howard Zinn, p.3, A People's History of the United States, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, New York, New York, 2005, ISBN-13: 978-0-06-083865-2)
This attitude was a profound insult to the glorification of power and self-interest dominant in the Western Culture of Europe throughout Colonial times. It could not be tolerated. For example, speaking to philanthropists in 1885, Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts explicitly condemned their "communism," observing that among Indians "There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization." (Matthiessen, ibid, p. 17.) It was exactly that communal attitude towards land that had to be destroyed so the buffalo plains could be domesticated and so that huge railroad, oil, and cattle empires could rule the West. (Matthiessen, ibid, p. 17.) Strangely enough, Native Americans didn't take kindly to the destruction of their way of life and "strongly objected!" This produced "Indian Wars" in the late 18th century. You know: General George Armstrong Custer at Little Big Horn. The massacre of men, women, and children at Wounded Knee on December 29th, 1890. And so on. And on. Etc.
In 1887 Congress passed the General Allotment Act (also known as "the Dawes Act"), yet another in a long series of reform laws designed to force the Native America into the mainstream of American (European) life by breaking down their traditional means of existence. The "Indian Wars" happened in the late 1800s - more than a century in the past. In 1893 when the last herd of northern bison was wiped out by soldiers and mercenaries on the Cannonball River, a century of utter dependence on the white man had begun. This was a highly colonial period of world history. Congress, in its "Christan duty" set out to "civilize" the Indian the same way that European nations were "civilizing" nonwhite natives of South America, Africa, and Asia: I.e., through bullets and bibles. In 1872 Commissioner Francis Walker remarked "There is no question of national dignity . . . involved in the treatment of savages by a civilized power." He boasted that the purpose of the reservation system was to reduce "the wild beasts to the condition of supplicants for charity." (Matthiessen, ibid, p. 8.) Native Americans could no longer live in their old way. Forced into "Reservations" - swaths of useless land nobody wanted and forbidden to sustain themselves as they had in the past, they became dependent on the white man's largesse to keep body and soul together. The children were sent away to "Indian Schools" in attempt to exterminate their own culture.
These policies often weren't deliberately intended to be evil; often they sprang from the "good intentions" of whites who failed to comprehend their eventual consequences if and when applied in the real world. Although chartered to protect Indian people from exploitation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) actually accomplished just the opposite. Its land-tenure rules ensured that each family's allocated land be divided in equal interests among the heirs. So after a few generations the holdings consisted of many small parcels, insufficient to support a family. At this point the BIA (the "trustee" of Indian land) would take control over its administration and lease it out at at nominal rates to the white ranchers who today control most of the good land on the reservation. For example, by 1942, almost 1 million of the 2722000 acres assigned to Pine Ridge when the reservation was created in 1889 had passed into other hands. By the 1970s over 90% of reservation lands were owned or leased by by whites or those with vanishingly small proportions of Indian blood. This wasn't because such people were more able, but because the dispossessed traditionals had no money or means to work "their" lands.