July 6, 2021

"After 500 years of injustice, you can’t just put up a fake village manned by a token Indian and say, 'We’re good.' We want to meet with Biden and ask him to honor the treaties. We want to find out what he will do to stop the ethnocide of our people."

Said Phil Two Eagle, quoted in "The battle for Mount Rushmore: ‘It should be turned into something like the Holocaust Museum’" (The Guardian).

7 comments:

Ann Althouse said...

Brian writes:

"It says in the article, that the Black Hills are "sacred" to the Lakota
Serious Question: Is there a place on earth; that they DON'T consider sacred?

"If the Lakota are serious about giving lands back to the people that lived there first, Shouldn't we be helping the Ojibwe, and the Ho Chunk recover the lands the Lakota's Stole from THEM?

"Or, maybe, we should be helping the Sac and the Fox recover the lands the Ho Chunk Stole.... From THEM??

"It gets SO Confusing"

Ann Althouse said...

Jeffrey writes:

"I'm guessing that the "Holocaust Museum" idea for Mount Rushmore won't extend to an honest presentation of how the Lakota, originally from the lower Mississippi, came to "own" these lands. Will the museum chronicle the brutal battles over the land that characterized the millennia before a single European arrived on the scene? Or will it hew to the pretense that - just like there's some "correct" global temperature from which departure means cataclysm - everything was just as Mother Earth ordained just before Lewis and Clark headed west?"

I'll just say:

Every group romanticizes its own founding and eclipses what came before. It's impressive that any group is willing to look at something like what really happened let alone do anything about it.

Ann Althouse said...

Bart writes:

I could be enrolled as a Mattaponi -- Algonquian tribe in Virginia, related to the Cree -- but being under 20 percent have chosen otherwise, because I'm basically a white guy.

All the talk of Indians and how nice they were to both nature and each other is total bullshshit. My Mattaponi ancestors hunted deer almost to extinction, then pressed west and wiped out a couple of tribes to steal their hunting grounds and enslave their women.

Same thing in Kansas, where I've lived for over 20 years. I strongly suggest you read "Contested Plains" by historian Eliot West. It was incredibly nasty, and arrival of the white tribe imposed a peace and order previously unknown.

Slavery remained a common phenomenon in western Kansas until the early 1870s because not only would the assorted tribes capture and enslave each other, but periodically headed to New Mexico in order to capture and enslave whites.

Things were far from the slave-free Kansas everyone may imagine. And what we call Navaho people are actually Dene who plundered their way south from northern Canada, arriving in their 'traditional sacred lands' only about 200 years before the Spanish arrived to settle.

So it's all pretty much a steaming crock of BS ... bison shit.

Ann Althouse said...

Michael On The Road writes:

Visited Mt Rushmore in June. It led me to deeply reflect upon those four men.

I understand few of us are content with the condition of our country, and share the desire for something different. However, we seem to be stuck in a nihilistic destructive phase.

If we are to build upon our best and nurture a nation that is dynamic and just, then we're going to need leaders....leaders drastically different than what we've been given so far this century.

New leaders with the egalitarianism of Roosevelt, the heart of Lincoln, the brains of Jefferson and the balls of Washington.

Ann Althouse said...

chickelit writes:

"Basically Mr Two Eagle is proposing that Mt. Rushmore become a place where Americans can come to assuage guilt about their past. Or it become a gathering place for international tourists to come to berate Americans. I think it’s sketchy business model to expect that 3 million Americans will jump on board with this and spin money. But what do I know?"

Ann Althouse said...

chickelit writes:

"Brian wrote: "If the Lakota are serious about giving lands back to the people that lived there first, Shouldn't we be helping the Ojibwe, and the Ho Chunk recover the lands the Lakota's Stole from THEM?

"In the same spirit, the State of Wisconsin should consider returning Devil’s Lake to its original owners, the Ho Chunk Tribe. Each and every state has its own mini-Holocaust to atone for. And what about Peter Minuit's 60 Guilder swindle for Manhattan? Now that I think about, what gave Napoleon Bonaparte the right to even sell the Lousiana Territory to the Americans in 1803? It seems to me that the French should be on the hook for that one. This could be a bonanza for international grievance lawyers."

Ann Althouse said...

Robert Cook writes:

""New leaders with the egalitarianism of Roosevelt, the heart of Lincoln, the brains of Jefferson and the balls of Washington.New leaders with the egalitarianism of Roosevelt, the heart of Lincoln, the brains of Jefferson and the balls of Washington."

"Sorry. The above-mentioned character traits are career-killers to any who would sincerely seek to serve the people in our present-day major parties, both abject servants to the plutocratic entities who use America's government as a tool to steal from the people and destroy the planet."