THE NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE, FRIDAY, 12 OCTOBER, 1979 PAGE 7 NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE RIGHT TO SURVIVE Almost 500 years ago a seaman from Genoa made a mistaken landfall that began immediately a process of obliteration that destroyed entire peoples. Uncounted millions were enslaved, and having previously been among the freest peoples of the Earth, the slavery quickly killed them. Other millions perished without ever having seen or suspected their killers, struck down by diseases brought by the newcomers that rapidly spread across an entire hemisphere. The newcomers were another virulence. Whomever their diseases did not destroy they finished off themselves in a wild hunger for land, a hunger the native peoples never understood. To them the land was like the sky, it could never be owned, but their belief that the people belonged to the Earth was crushed and trampled by the acquisitive strangers who held a rather opposite view. by John M ohawk In New Mexico, an elderly Navajo woman gazes past her corrals towards the roads which cut across her lands to the uranium deposits in the distance. In the cities of the Northern Great Plains, people gather in small groups to dis cuss problems as varied as political prisoners and sterilization abuse. In the State of Washington, yet other people meet to discuss their problems with state authorities and the fish ing industry, and in the Northeast, the people meet to dis cuss land claims, water pollution, and nuclear power plants. Meanwhile, around the United States, groups of non- Indians are organizing protests against the dangers of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle . . . protests which were intensified this Spring by a major nuclear incident at Harrisburg, Pa., and stimulated by a coincidental movie, “The China Syndrome.” As difficult as it may be to believe, the Native people and the anti-nuclear people may have a great deal more in com mon than immediately meets the eye. Something may be beginning during this quarter century which hasn’t truly happened for a long time, but it may be something of al most earth-shaking significance. It should be clear to anyone familiar with the history of United States-Indian relations that it is U.S. policy to de stroy the Native peoples as peoples. U.S. law and policy has "We don't celebrate Columbus Day. " The New Year’s slaughter at Wounded Knee took the final heart out of the native Americans. For more than half a century they faded into whiskey and tourist blankets. Then happened the great Civil Rights struggles of the 1960's, and prominent among them was the American Indian Movement which went back to Wounded Knee and changed it from a symbol of defeat to one of renewed strength. Earlier this year the Non-Government Organizations of the United Nations declared in Geneva, Switzerland, that the date of the disastrous landfall by Christopher Columbus upon a Caribbean island hereafter be known as THE INTERNATIONAL DAY OF SOLIDARITY WITH THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF THE AMERICAS. made some room for the idea that Native people may ha some (albeit limited) rights to property, and they may hi some rights to a “religion,” maybe even some theoretical rights to a “culture,” by whatever vague definitions thosi terms are interpreted. But the U.S. has never recognized Native rights to be a distinct people. The policies of the U.S. and their English-speaking for bears has been characterized by a consistent denial of the rights of Native peoples to exist. Even into the 20th centui we still find policies which remove Native children from their families and communities, promote sterilization of Native women, practice forced acculturation through alie school systems, and implant foreign systems of governme in the Indian country to legitimize the alientation of the land base and to destroy the existing social order. All of those are acts and policies which have the net ef feet of destroying the Native peoples as peoples. They ha’ been acts which have inflicted and which continue to inflict untold misery and suffering upon hundreds of thousands of innocent victims. The destruction of Native peoples as peoples is part of a much larger program of the United States. It may not be possible, in the long run, to bring the outrageous wrongs done to the Indian peoples to bear on the conscience of the vast majority of the American population, because only a very small percentage of the American people seem to be capable of understanding the immensity of the crime of destroying the spirit and physical reality of a whole peo ple. Some Americans are capable of understanding the process in terms of the effects of U.S. policies in terms of race, others see it in terms of the destruction of a groups property rights, and a few are offended that the policies destroy families. A smaller number of people are alarmed at the fact that these same policies will almost certainly destroy the remaining Native cultures, just as similar poli cies have already destroyed dozens-perhaps hundreds-of Native cultures in the past. The history and present condi tions of Native peoples is a dismal tale indeed Most of our nations face extinction as peoples during this century. It doesn't even seem to help that, by and large, the in ternational community has adopted a morality which holds that it is a violation of human decency and the spirit of international law for a nation state to commit acts which are intended to destroy groups of national, ethnical, reli gious and/or religious identity. Dr. Richard Arens, a pro fessor at Temple University Law School, recently stated that the international compacts on genocide forbid acts which result in physical or mental harm to “groups” — peoples such as Native peoples. Governmental policies which are designed to destroy such peoples are clearly contradictory to the spirit of such international conventions. The United States, through its representatives to the international community, simply denies that it commits The unwieldy title suggests another change, that the mistakenly named Indians - the Great Navigator thought he was in India — do not like the name. They prefer to be known as the Red People, the Native Americans, or the Indigenous Peoples, though it is doubtful they will accept a shortened version, Indigens. Their comeback has been difficult and their future is in doubt. For a comprehensive view of the continuing oppression against Native Americans, The TIMES EAGLE turned to the published transcripts of two speeches by John Mohawk, editor of the Mohawk Nation newspaper, AKWESASNE N 0TES- any acts of genocide. How they can do this with a straight face is simply incredulous. They would deny that their policy since 1784 has been the destruction and absorption of Native peoples? Would they deny that they have policies which take Indian land, Indian children, and which have as an expressed purpose the dismemberment of Native com munities? The representatives of the United States would tell you that things have changed since Colonel Chivington and his “ troops” butchered innocent women and children at Sand Creek-things are getting better. It is possible to agree that things have changed, but it is highly doubtful that the prospects for the survival of Native peoples, as peoples, are getting any better. The single pros pective positive change on the horizon-the one which offers some faint shimmer of hope, hasn’t even begun to penetrate the marble halls of government. But that possibility of change has made its first faint appearance in American culture. It could signal the most profound change in many centuries. Four or five centuries ago, when European peoples first came to the Americas, changes in cultures were triggered which were to alter the course of history. The Medieval ad venturers who sought trade routes to the Orient belonged to a culture which even most Europeans have difficulty re calling. The Spanish and English of the early 16th century had evolved a culture which claimed that all the knowledge of the world was contained essentially within two sources- the Bible and the philosophies of Aristotle. When the Spanish first returned to Europe with tales of landings in strange lands, it was several years before it be came widely believed that what had been found was actually a new land-a New World. Columbus thought that he had discovered India-he called the people Indians-because it was widely believed that the “ known world” was the whole world. To suggest that a continent and a people existed that were not mentioned in the Bible was something akin to here sy, and the customs of the time dealt harshly with heretics. Soon enough, however, it became obvious that the Americas were indeed a new world, a world not described in either the Bible or the wisdom of Aristotle. That dis covery set off events of enormous impact in Europe. American Indians were not supposed to exist, but there they were, undeniably real. Frantic Biblical scholars sought to prove that the Indians were a lost tribe of Israel in an ef fort to preserve the spiritual and moral universe of the Medieval world. It was a theory which would be found in scholarly works into the 20th century and one which was revived by Joseph Smith and incorporated into the Book of Mormon But the psychological universe of the Medieval world was doomed Something began to happen in Europe follow ing the discovery of the Americas -there occurred on a M ichael M cCusker E ditor massive scale what can only be described as a crisis in faith. It didn’t happen overnight, but happen it did. The Americas (and the Indians) were living proof that not all knowledge lies in the Bible, that neither the Bible nor the Pope were infallable. The Age of Reason was upon the world, and things would never be the same. All over Europe, groups arose proclaiming themselves to be agnostics and even athiests. Martin Luther tacked his 96 thesis to a chapel door, others scanned the heavens with telescopes, and the Puritans fled Amsterdam so that their children would not be corrupted by the liberal thoughts of their Dutch neighbors. The discovery of the Americas led to great changes in European thought in other ways also. European traders and missionaries, especially the French and English, travelled among North America’s Native nations, most notably the Algonkians and the Iroquois. Jesuit missionaries partially financed their exploits through writing what were received as adventure stories, The Jesuit Relations. On at least sev eral occasions, the early Jesuits saw Native people had no recourse to falsehoods, and that they were generally open and generous to a fault. A few of them saw Native people who valued human re lationships far above material things, and they recognized that here was a whole people who practiced the spirit of the teachings of Jesus as they-the Jesuit missionaries under stood those teachings. And they realized, too, that a people of such “ nobility” -(th e term “ noble savage” arose from that experience) could not survive in the Modern World. The early Jesuits feared that Native people could only be corrupted and destroyed by contact with civilization. Their writings stirred the imaginations of European peoples, and set the stage for an image of Native peoples which persists to this day. English-speaking missionaries, on the other hand, viewed Native people quite differently. A number of them came to the Americas to escape the ravages (as they say it) of the Modern World in their homeland, and to preserve the mor- Coniinited on Page 8