“As America has developed within the last 100 years, wealth has become a determining factor of one’s place in society…. free enterprise and optimistic demands that would be met at the expense of American Indians and their lands” (Fixico) It is a well known fact that since the very beginning, from the moment of contact with Europeans, that the Indigenous people that populate what is now known as the United States have been fighting an endless battle against territorial encroachment with settlers and other Europeans who sought to profit off the land. “During the 1500’s and 1600’s, the conquerors of the new age of European imperialism in the Western Hemisphere scarcely recognized the Native inhabitants who utilized the natural resources for their own livelihood. Within a short time, they assaulted the Native populations and took whatever they wanted. They were unabashed in their greed…the “laissez-faire” attitude of capitalism became the guiding force of the economy as competition intensified for natural resources such as oil, coal, uranium, and water” (Fixico). These circumstances vary only in the slightest for Indigenous groups and individuals across the country. The experiences were no different for the people of the White Earth reservation as they watched the logging industry tear across their lands ripping it apart from the roots or for Natives of Wisconsin simply looking to exercise their hunting and fishing rights that had been granted to them through treaty.
“The late nineteenth century marked the rise of modern America and changes…but it excluded minorities, especially American Indians due to their traditional values” (Fixico). The world was changing, changing in almost every aspect and for Europeans this change was for the better. The years around the 1980’s are something that most of us can remember, we remember how the world was at that time and it’s not something we have to read in a book. The establishment of the reservations had long since passed, so long, that most Europeans had categorized such a thing into the “early American history” section of their memories. The days of the hippies had come and gone and now we had reached a time when for most, Native issues simply didn’t exist.
“Indians have found their traditional order of life challenged legally by non-Indians and the U.S. government” (Fixico). In the mid-eighties, only twenty something years ago, Natives of Wisconsin found themselves in a heated and sometimes violent struggle to defend their rights to fish, hunt and gather on lands outside of the borders of their reservation. Very commonly they found themselves challenged by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR). Many Natives brought their cases to the legal system and so started tensions between whites and Natives. When the cases were finally seen in court, it was undeniable, through treaty after treaty, these Native Americans had the right to continue their traditional practices of hunting, fishing and gathering upon the lands that lay outside of the reservation. The 1837 treaty granted hunting, fishing and trapping rights to the Ojibwe people in Wisconsin, this agreement guaranteed “the privilege of hunting, fishing, and gathering the wild rice, upon the lands, the rivers and the lakes included in the territory ceded” (Fixico). Following treaties also reinforced the explicit rights of the Ojibwe to continue these practices upon/in the territories they were ceding.
Unlike the outcome in Wisconsin, not every battle can be won. The U.S. “discovered” that there were vast expanses of mineral deposits within Anishinaabeg territory and then devised and implemented treaties to push the people out of such areas as the Kewanee Peninsula which contained the “Ontonagon Boulder”, a 2,500 lb boulder of naturally occurring copper and the Mesabe iron-ore belt in northern Minnesota (LaDuke). It was now becoming standard practice for the United States government to create treaties to remove people from an area that they had found something valuable in/on. These sorts of practices were occurring to almost all Nations of Indigenous people across the entirety of the United States. It was the same for those in White Earth.
“There is a myth, which was created at that time,” Bob Shimek, a local Native harvester turned forest activist, reminds me. “It was this Paul Bunyan myth, Paul and Babe, and their ability to change the landscape. That myth is in the center of America, and that myth is what we are dealing with today” (LaDuke). The logging industry had come to Minnesota, to a place where the Natives were known as a “woodland” people. White Earth was just one of many areas that contained a rich growth of desirable trees. “The United States, England, and Canada entered into more than 40 treaties with the Anishinaabeg, the bases for some of the largest land transactions in world history” (LaDuke). Most of these treaties were over land and with every treaty the land base guaranteed to the Natives shrank and were repositioned around the things that the government desired the most. “Not content to take just the great pines, the lumber companies and land speculators set their eyes upon the land itself. Mechanisms were set in place to pry land from children at boarding school, blind women living overcrowded housing, soldiers at war, veterans, and those who could not read or write English” (LaDuke). These underhanded practices became so common that they were even given a name: “Fleecing the Indian”, which one can only assume it describes how Natives were being taken advantage of by having the metaphorical wool pulled over their eyes.
The relationships that Native Americans have toward the land are steeped in values and traditions and view the land as a living entity where as the Europeans or Whites hold the value of the land at strictly monetary gain. These two opposing viewpoints have seemed to hold steadfast against each other since the time of contact. I cannot see a way for the relationships between Natives and Whites to change. It is the culture and tradition of Europeans to consume and they are driven by individual successes and greed. The culture and traditions of Natives center around group, community, respect for each other and the surroundings they live in. These two view points are so vastly different that until either side gives up and joins in the belief of the other, there will always be a struggle.
Works Cited:
Fixico, Donald L.. The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century. Niwot, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1998. LaDuke, Winona. All Our Relations. Cambridge, Ma: South End Press, 1999.
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