Reflections from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People ... · Reflections from the...

1997Reflections from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)

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[draft]

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, theair in Southern California was clean, faintly res-inous with chaparral on warm afternoons, tangywith the sea, softly perfumed with the flowersthat carpeted the hills and canyons in the earlyspring. I, who have lived perhaps half a lifetime,remember standing amid the toyon and manza-nita in San Diego, watching the snow shimmer-ing on distant mountain peaks. As a child I playedbeneath the gnarled giants of ancient live oaktrees, and cupped my hands into cool smallstreams to drink the sparkling water.

[Co-authored by Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara NiiSka]Presented to the University of Minnesota’s Spring Anthropology Conference in the context of a workshop onlanguage jointly given by Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara; the paper was circulated at the conference.

Languagefrom an Ahnishinahbæótjibway perspective

Once upon a time, less than fifteen yearsago, my husband, Wub-e-ke-niew and I cutthrough the winter ice on Red Lake to get ourdrinking water. The deer trails were many acrossthe snow in the woods. We ate duck and rabbit,partridge, venison and moose, and in the summerour nets were heavy with fish. We filled ourpails with blueberries and raspberries, highbushcranberries and chokecherries, ate a surfeit, andleft more than we picked. We filled the cars ofvisitors with vegetables from our garden, and stillhad more than enough to last the winter. The

Wub-e-ke-niew talks with conference participant Mary Harding and anthropology graduate student MelisaRivera at the Spring 1997 Lake Itasca conference.

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morning birdsongs of spring and early summerwere loud enough to wake us at first light. Wub-e-ke-niew is Ahnishinahbæótjibway of the BearDodem, and dialogue and meta-dialogue withGrandmother Earth are an inherent part of hisnative language. Unlike “English, which is apseudo-male language,” he says, “the Ahnishi-nahbæótjibway language is both male and fe-male.”

It tears my heart apart to go to SouthernCalifornia, now. Richard Nixon signed the CleanAir Act, and the air is brown and acrid, burningthe eyes, clogging the lungs and obscuring eventhe closest hills. From the mountaintops, I havelooked down at scarred land disappearing be-neath the filthy haze. The smog spills throughmountain passes out into the desert, poisoningand even killing trees which grew when Colum-bus landed, some of them older than Christianity.The Pacific Ocean is faintly slimy with sewage,and I would hesitate to dip my hands into thescummy trickles of polluted water where clearstreams once flowed. Freeways roar throughthe canyons, shopping centers and parking lotsentomb the land once vibrant with chaparral, andtier upon tier of ticky-tacky suburban housingdevelopments suffocate the hills where earlyspring flowers bloomed. Wub-e-ke-niew, whovisited Southern California in 1995, told me, “Theoriginal plants are gone, replaced by alien plantsfrom all over the world. It is a dead land, like afatally ill man on life support—and they shouldpull the plug and let it die, it’s going to anyway.They are downsizing the ecosystem, and beforeeverything is gone, we need to downsize the bigcorporations and governments that are wreckingit. We all live here. We are all a part of it, and itbelongs to all of us. But, the English languagedisenfranchises us and we become corporateslaves.”

On a warm afternoon last summer, I sat onthe rocks by the shore of Red Lake, and watchedthe sun move slowly toward the horizon. Theplay of light between sky and water belied thedying lakes, the water so murky I would not swimin it. Those who still fish pull many empty nets,

and I would hesitate to eat any of the few fishthey catch, some with cancerous growths onthem. The snow-water we melt for washing inthe winter-time leaves a faint ring of oil in thepails—it’s been that way since the Gulf War.

Grandmother Earth has been raped andplundered: vast expanses of clear-cut stretch to-ward the horizon at Red Lake. Snowmobile trailsalong the highway have replaced most of the deertrails through the woods, and the rabbits and par-tridges are very few. I went blueberry pickingtwo summers ago, and during the course of aday found only a few handfuls of berries. Myhusband says that insecticides have killed thepollinating bees, and when a hibernating bee wokeearly in the house last winter, he lived with it ratherthan killing it or taking it outside where it wouldfreeze. When spring came, he caught the beeand let it go outside, and watched as it sat on atree, stretching its wings and cleaning itself. Eachyear, we see a few more of our trees die, andlast spring the birdsong was but a faint echo ofwhat it was ten years ago. My husband has be-gun feeding the birds to get them through thewinter, and tells the clerk in the co-op where hebuys the seed, “You cut down the forests to plantsunflowers and corn, and I have to come to townto buy sunflower seed and corn to feed the birdswhose natural food grows in the forest, and that’sfoolish and obscene. The forest took care of thebirds—that’s how it’s naturally supposed to be.I’ve never fed the blue jays before, but now ev-erything has been destroyed, and I had more thanfifty blue jays stay to eat all winter. It’s sad.”

I have a friend who defends the forest withthe ferocity of a grandmother protecting heryoung, writing passionate and carefully re-searched letters, and testifying to congressionalcommittees. I thank her for the acres for whichshe has gained a reprieve, and grieve for eachnew swath of clearcut, and for the regimentedrows of sterile tree-farms. I look beyond thefew rows of pine trees planted in what the De-partment of Natural Resources calls an “aes-thetic” buffer along many highways in northernMinnesota, to the ragged stands of aspen behind


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them, and notice that the piles of pulp-sticks wait-ing by the railroads in Bemidji are of smaller treesthan they were just a few years ago. Some werevery young trees, only a few inches in diameter.Destroying the ecological infrastructure uponwhich all life—including our own—depends, isunthinkable thought in Ahnishinahbæótjibway,beyond the pale even of insanity.

Wub-e-ke-niew says that the Ahnishi-nahbæótjibway language is egalitarian, but thatEnglish has hierarchy, disharmony and disrespect,“built right into the language.” In the late mod-ern/postmodern world, where the dominant dis-course is in English and other European lan-guages, Wub-e-ke-niew says, “There are nochecks and balances on the multi-national cor-porations. They are like a runaway bulldozerwith no operator at the controls, destroying ev-erything in its path. There need to be some checksand balances, people taking responsibility for whatis being destroyed. Newt Gingrich says that theyare downsizing ‘big government,’ giving respon-sibility back to the states—why isn’t Congresssolving the problems? The states are only partof the problem, and the states are throwing moneyto institutions like the school boards and the prisonsystem, and the problem never gets solved. It’spretty clever: delegating and delegating again,throwing money to some bigmouth, who gets themoney and it’s gone. It’s like Johnson’s War onPoverty: they kept delegating responsibility untilthe money was all spent, but the poor are stillwith us. They are not going to solve the prob-lem: there are no viable goals and objectives, theyhave slogans but they don’t have a plan to solvethe problem of destroying the ecosystem, and theydon’t want to solve the problems because theyneed conflict and chaos in order to govern.”

Wub-e-ke-niew remembers the old-growthforests which stretched across northern Minne-sota for the many millennia his indigenous an-cestors spoke in harmony with GrandmotherEarth and Grandfather Midé. Here lived whitepines two hundred and fifty feet tall and nine feetin diameter, sugar-maples more than two thou-

sand years old. In his book, We Have The RightTo Exist, he writes:

In my great-grandfather’s time, old-growth for-ests covered more than half of this Continent,from the Atlantic Ocean to the tallgrass prairieswest of the Mississippi. The trees rose to meetthe skies, and the sentience of these ancient liv-ing beings was a part of our Ahnishinahbæótjib-way community, part of the seamless continuityof time. They were more magnificent than thefinest of the Europeans’ cathedrals, but they werenot oppressively cold, psychologically manipu-lative man-made canyons of stone; nor flying-buttressed edifices like hordes of giant locustscrouched in waiting to devour the land and suckthe life out of Grandmother Earth. Our forestswere comfortable and nurturing, like the havenof baby chicks under their mother hen’s wings.The forests were home, serene and secure, gentleand wise. Theirs was a concert of voices: thesharp snapping of trees in the cold winter nights,the wind in the pines, the low calls of motherfoxes to their young, the soft conversation ofour Dodemian and the crackling of the fires inthe sugarbushes, the spring symphony of birds,the drumsongs drifting across the water in sum-mer, and the whooshing beat of the air as millionsof birds flew south in the fall. When I was young,I walked through these forests. The earth wassoft underfoot, like walking on a plush carpet.The undisturbed primeval forests had very littleunderbrush, and a person could see a great dis-tance.

When we were young boys playing in the old-growth pine forests, we used to watch the flyingsquirrels in the pines in wonder and amazement.We watched them glide from one tree to the next,walking behind them on a thick carpet of pineneedles. They were beautiful, graceful animals.It’s been more than forty years since I have seena flying squirrel. They have joined the vanishingspecies that disappear with the plunder of theecology. They are gone, because their home inthe ancient pines has been clear-cut, replaced byaspen, and the whole ecosystem has changed.There is no habitat for flying squirrels in aspenbrush. Where are the smallest of the woodpeck-ers, that used to be all over the woods when Iwas a boy? In the last ten years, I have only seen


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three of these tiny birds. Where are the cedarswamps, so thick that it was dark at noon? I usedto go down into these swamps and pick ourswamp tea, and a few of the moccasin-flowers.All of this is gone ... (1995:91-92)

Generation after generation, the ecosystemthat sustains all of life on this Earth has beendestroyed by the “civilization” brought to this con-tinent by the Europeans. Generation after gen-eration, small freedoms have been nibbled away.Returning to the Cities after an absence of eigh-teen years, I feel the tightening constraints: photoID to work, photo ID to enter the stacks at Walterlibrary, hyper-alert caution when walking aloneafter dark, police sirens and gunshots at night,windowless school buildings, car-alarms... the listgoes on and on. When I talked to my husbandabout my culture-shock, he told me, “violence isbuilt into the English language.”

Some of the older anthropologists at theUniversity of Minnesota have talked in class aboutthe destruction of the social fabric of the villageswhere they did their early fieldwork. The integ-rity and harmony of those villages has been pro-foundly altered by global market economies, theysay. Social theorists like Anthony Giddens writeabout the transformations wrought by “late mo-dernity”—in time, space, community and inter-personal relationships—with what seems to mea certain forced optimism. As one who has seenthe remnants of an intact egalitarian community,who has glimpsed the enormous loss of humanpossibility in late modernity, I read such writingwith sorrow. Wub-e-ke-niew adds, “This soci-ety does not have manners and respect. Peopleare not treated as human beings—manners andrespect are not a part of [Western] culture. Untilthat’s built into the culture and language, to treatother people with manners and respect, it’s go-ing to keep getting worse.” But, it is pointless tolament without offering an alternative.

As human beings caught in a web of posi-tive-feedback loops called “progress,” we standat a fork in the road, unique in scale if not in kind.On the one hand is an eight-lane superhighwayleading to increasing ecocide, and quite probably

to our own destruction—we are interdependentwith all of the other life on this planet, and if wekill the Earth which sustains us, we too shall per-ish, despite hubris and our faith in Science. Onthe other hand, there is an unmarked and un-mapped path: a historical moment in which radi-cal transformation is possible: of the deep struc-ture of Western society, and of the language withwhich that structure has been constructed.

Wub-e-ke-niew and I used to talk about,“Why Columbus?” For what, have his relatives,his Dodem, and his community been annihilatedduring centuries of genocide? He says, “Per-haps it had to come full circle, perhaps once ‘civi-lization’ began, there was no other way it couldfinish.” When George Bush bombed the ancientcradle of Western Civilization, the place whichthe Christian Bible calls the Garden of Eden, thecircle began to close—after millennia of destruc-tion of others, the force of Western technologi-cal warfare returned, against its own roots. Now,there is continual festering violence in what theChristians, the Jews and the Muslims call theirancient homeland. Wub-e-ke-niew asks, “Whenare the crusades going to end?” Humanity can-not survive another circuit of the same violentcircle. What is another path?

A crucial key is language, defined in thebroad sense of [any] “systematic means of com-municating ... “ (Webster, 1993). Language is acore aspect of the “software” of society: medi-ating social interaction, structuring the ways inwhich one interprets and then behaves in theworld. The shared meanings conveyed in lan-guage are a vital aspect of culture and society.Although I disagree with those who say that lan-guage is uniquely human, language is fundamen-tal to human society. However, Wub-e-ke-niewemphasizes crucial distinctions between indig-enous language and Western hierarchical lan-guages. Indigenous languages like Ahnishi-nahbæótjibway were an integral part of being ahuman being. Hierarchical languages like En-glish, however, “dehumanize you. I look at theEnglish language as a human rights violation, giv-ing you an identity which is not really you. I see


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that language as being crooked and full of dis-honest schemes. Part of its pious hypocrisy is itshierarchy—the people on the lower levels of theWestern hierarchies are excluded from what iscalled ‘proper English.’ These people’s adapta-tions to the language, like Ebonics, are discred-ited. Rather than being a part of the community,the English language is being used as a tool ofoppression and dehumanization.”

From at least the moment of our concep-tion, we are bathed in language, our mother’svoice resonating through amniotic fluid, sur-rounded by our mother’s emotional energy inconjunction with language, exposed to subtlebiochemicals transmitted through the placenta inassociation with language. As neonates, we growin the context of language; to some degree “hard-wired” for our native language as our neuronsgrow and our synapses link in the setting of lan-guage. The discourse through which our identi-ties are formed and maintained is coded and struc-tured by language. The interactions through whichwe negotiate our relationship to society—and, inthe aggregate, form our society—are mediatedby language. Our understanding of the world ispowerfully influenced by language, as are ouractions within the world. The thoughts whichwe communicate to others, and much of whatwe tell ourselves, is in language. Each languagetransmits across the generations the history andvalues of those whose language it is. Languageand the deep structure of society are inextrica-bly linked.

Changing the language in fundamentalways, will inevitably change society. The kindsof deep linguistic transformations which will healthe social ills compounded over millennia are notinstantaneous—the pathologies of Western civi-lization cannot be cured in years or even decades.However, profound metamorphoses can happenover just a few generations. Hierarchical lan-guage has been an effective tool of oppressionbecause most peoples’ understanding of theirnative language is implicit and the generativeforces of grammar, syntax, structure, patterns ofdiscourse, and constellations of word connota-

tion are outside of their usual awareness.Deconstructing the language and its meta-narra-tives (both present and absent) is a necessaryprecursor to debunking and transcending the illu-sions of Western Civilization.

Modern languages change continually, anda comparison of popular dictionaries, from thepresent and from fifty years ago, for instance,will reveal subtle but important changes whichare interconnected with social changes like thedecline in personal autonomy. Wub-e-ke-niewsees such shifts as being phase changes ratherthan structural or paradigmatic transformations,pointing out that, “When the Western Europeansemigrated from Europe, the majority of them wereslaves. What they found here was an abundanceof resources, which subsidized the ‘AmericanDream.’ But, now the resources are gone, andthe social system is changing back to the feudalslavery of medieval Europe. Old folks talk aboutthe ‘cabin at the lake’ they used to have, butnow, they and their children don’t have cabins atthe lake anymore. It’s not like it used to be. Thereare no more resources, and the ‘AmericanDream’ has become an abstract, hierarchical il-lusion. The imported European social systemhasn’t fundamentally changed—they can’t getout of the box that confines them, and the under-lying feudalism will resurface and prevail. Theygo around and around, like a caged animal pac-ing back and forth, but they are prisoners of theirlanguage. In order to change, they need femaleas well as male language, to create balance.Then, they can escape from the cage of feudal-ism.”

In English, the word “communication” hasacquired a new meaning involving transmissionof information in one direction only, as in “masscommunication.” The maintenance of hierarchi-cal society has historically involved the use ofeuphemisms, particular ones changing as theircurrency transmutes them from discrete hint todirect reference (an etymological study of eu-phemisms could disclose some interesting pat-terns about a society). Public relations and ad-vertising professionals are sensitive to the con-


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structive power of language, coining such cannyphrases as the “Wise Use Movement.” Wub-e-ke-niew adds, “Euphemisms and metaphors areabstract illusions. Replacing something that’s realwith something that’s full of metaphors—I thinkthat’s funny. The English language is so crooked,it allows people to tell lies with euphemisms andmetaphors, while pretending they’re telling thetruth. An example is the special way that junkdealers have of dealing with people. An old junkdealer not too far from here, when somebodyasks him how much he wants for an old rustywheel-rim, for example, has a long and eloquentspeech about how valuable his junk is, and howit’s worth much more than the (inflated) pricehe’s asking for it. He will tell his customers thathis junk is so valuable, he might want to keep itfor himself instead of selling it. He uses the samereverse psychology even when he’s selling hisused cars—he’ll tell you, ‘I want to keep thiscar.’ But, when you give him a good offer, he’llsell it right away.”

The underlying nature of Western lan-guages, including English, is partially revealed byancient writers like Plato (428 BCE - 348 BCE). InPhaedo, he writes in language in which hierar-chy is already implicit, embedded in apparentlyunquestioning acceptance of the legitimacy of in-stitutions of God and rulers. In a voice which hewrites as that of the condemned Socrates, Platourges retreat into what he describes as a perfectabstract, a rejection of the natural world, claim-ing “observation by means of the eyes and earsand all the other senses is entirely deceptive”(1971:83a). He characterizes that which is“earthly” (1971:81c) as tainting and contaminat-ing the immortal soul, and associates the “divine”(1971:82c) with “despising the body” (1971:65c).

Wub-e-ke-niew observes, “Creating an ab-stract and an illusion like God—that’s disgusting,revolting. They need a god to go to war, andthat’s obscene. Their god only talks to certaingroups of people; He never talks to me. Withillusions and abstracts talking to them, they shouldbe locked up in a crazy house. I never did see

the devil, either, although the Catholic prefect atthe Catholic mission school was always chasinghim, always looking for the devil. I never sawthe devil, but I did see a crazy man chasing anillusion—that’s what cults do to people.

“Abstract language is detached from theland. It needs to connect back to the land—weare all human.” With the rejection of reality em-bedded in Western philosophy, and in the abstract“ideal” of the English language, there is no cul-turally validated way of even communicatingclearly about the extent to which the ecosystemis being devastated. The material world, includ-ing the web of life of which human beings areinextricably a part, has been devalued, ignoredand evaded as a part of the ancient philosophers’strategy of denying death by denying the corpo-ral, visceral, vital aspects of life. We and ourchildren are confronted with the very real possi-bility of the extinction of all humanity because ofour destruction of the ecosystem which sustainsus—we have nearly come full circle to the ulti-mate irony of the ancient Greeks’ rhetorical de-nial of death. Wub-e-ke-niew points out, “Theydestroyed the ecosystem in Europe, and now theyhave come over here, but they haven’t changedtheir language or their values. They look at theecosystem for their food, clothing and shelter, butthey destroy it to get money, and use the moneyto buy things. Because of their male language,they continually keep on taking, and never putanything back. We looked at the ecosystem forour food, clothing and shelter, too, but we tookonly what we needed and kept it in balance. Whyare the immigrants from Europe destroying theecosystem? They didn’t take care of the eco-system in Europe, and they are not taking careof this one, either. Their language shows theirdestruction of it, their violence.”

Plato’s rejection of reality has powerfulpolitical implications. In Phaedo, he has Socratesstate the legitimacy of God and civil rulers in othercontexts, as well as in the construction of dis-course removing their inherent hierarchy fromeasy challenge. By also discrediting direct ob-servation of reality in favor of an abstract which


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is deeply knowable only by experts such as phi-losophers, he claims a monopoly on “truth” anddelegitimizes any potential challenge to the deepstructure of the state and its religious infrastruc-ture. Plato defines the senses as, “An impedi-ment which by its presence prevents the soul fromattaining truth and clear thinking” (1971:66a).This has been a very effective strategy: duringthe past millennia empires have risen and fallen,revolutions have toppled leaders, but the under-lying hierarchical structure, once established, le-gitimized and embedded in the vulgate, has en-dured and spread around the globe. In present-day Euro-American society, this inheritance fromthe ancient Greeks applies not only to church andstate, but also to multi-national corporations. Wub-e-ke-niew says, “Another abstract, make-believe,is living in La-La Land so the corporations cansteal from you—they say, ‘make believe we’renot stealing from you.’ They all have a juvenilementality, very childlike. That’s what’s wrong,part of it.”

Another aspect of late modern languagewhich is crucial to the problems facing us all, isdualism. Plato writes in Phaedo, “Are we satis-fied, then, said Socrates, that everything is gen-erated in this way—opposites from opposites?Perfectly, [said Cebes]” (1971:71a). Dualismhelps mask the dissonance between the abstractand reality. Wub-e-ke-niew writes, Westerners,“Use dichotomies to keep people inside of theirculturally and linguistically constructed box.Within the structure of illusions which comprisethe ‘shadows on the walls of the cave’ of Plato’struth, harmonious reality has been distorted andstretched, spun out into insubstantial polar oppo-sites. ... [Western] reality-of-the-mind is char-acterized by denial, loss of awareness into theblack hole of artificial subconsciousness, and anoverriding, transcendent fear” (1995:352). Du-alistic language rends the coherent totality of in-digenous reality into abstract shreds which arethen compartmentalized hierarchically. It is thedeep structure of English and other Western lan-guages which sustains the mind:body,master:slave, culture:nature, war:peace and

male:female dichotomies, and in conjunction withlinearity, makes coherent holistic understandingextremely difficult. Dualism makes possible theviolence which saturates the English language.Wub-e-ke-niew adds, “It also legitimizes slaveryby defining slaves as the ‘other.’ They createillusions; the language lets them be grand mas-ters of deception.”

Dualism also generates a second, less vis-ible, set of schisms on English, what Wub-e-ke-niew calls a “double perspective—everything thatcomes out of their mouth has a double mean-ing.” Because the reflections of reality whichcourse down the hall of mirrors comprising theabstract are split into opposing pairs, there is, inEnglish, an “unsaid” for everything that is said,an unspoken shadow of discourse, an impliedopposite that is an inherent part of the message—potent, but difficult to challenge because it is ob-scured beneath a surface of literal meaning. Theconsequence, Wub-e-ke-niew writes, is, “Layerupon layer of lies so deep that the truth has be-come invisible to them. By understanding theEuro-Americans’ language, and studying theirbehavior and thought patterns through their lan-guage, I can see who they are. They live in amaze of unreal dichotomies. Many believe thatthey are telling the truth, but beyond the bound-aries of their language, they are lying” (1995:72).When George Orwell, in his novel 1984, wroteof “double-speak,” he was touching on the dual-ism of English.

Violence and dualism are linked—vio-lence which is directed at a language-constructed,abstract other is significantly different in mean-ing from that which is directed toward the ex-tended self. In English, we can do to “them”what we would find unacceptable when done to“us.” Wub-e-ke-niew provides the example of“War and Peace. The Ahnishinahbæótjibwaydid not go to war. The European colonizers cre-ated an artificial foe—the Indians—and used theirlanguage to create a program of war, in order tojustify their stealing. In English, war is violent,but peace is even more violent than war. TheWestern Europeans claim that we were violent,


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but we didn’t go on their land—they are the oneswho came onto our land. If we were so violent,why didn’t they use our prisons, instead of hav-ing to build their own? They brought the Bibleand the gun, and these are both violent.”

The violence which permeates the Englishlanguage is perceptible semantically and gram-matically. A thesaurus hints at the range of vio-lence which writers of the English language havelexicalized, including: anarchy, anger, bedlam,brawl, brutality, chaos, choler, commotion, con-fusion, discord, disorder, ferocity, fierceness, fight,fray, frenzy, fury, harpy, intensity, ire, lawless-ness, mayhem, pitch, protest, rage, rebel, revelry,revolt, riot, savagery, scuffle, severity, shrew, ter-magant, tumult, turmoil, upheaval, uproar, vehe-mence, virago, wrath ... the list goes on and on.English grammar molds one’s most egalitarianintentions into hierarchical sentences: the sub-ject verbs the object, one-up, one-down, subject-ing the objectified to a good verbing (with ag-gressive sex-and-violence connotations lurking inthat grammar). In the English language, Wub-e-ke-niew observes, “sex and violence are insepa-rable—they are ‘two peas in a pod,’ if you wantto use a metaphor.”

Violence also pervades the discourse ofEnglish. Wub-e-ke-niew says, “Every day, youhear abusive language on the streets, ‘butch,’‘son-of-a-bitch,’ ‘mother-fucker.’ We did nothave anything like that in our language—thereare no swear words in Ahnishinahbæótjibway(and the closest translation of ‘war’ is ‘two orthree guys talking about something’—in nonvio-lence, and they would be able to come to a con-sensus about it, in balance and harmony). Whyare the Western European languages so violent?You can see the same kind of violence on thefreeway every day: people cutting each other off,shaking their fists at each other and cursing.Whenever they get behind the wheel of a car,their anger comes out. The Western languagesare designed to dehumanize people, to take awaytheir humanity, their identity and their self-esteem,to domesticate them, and to stereotype and labelthem, and that has to change.

“Western European civilization cannot ex-ist side-by-side with indigenous peoples—it is tooviolent. It has to destroy other people, and egali-tarian indigenous people are dangerous to West-ern hierarchy.” Wub-e-ke-niew says, “You canalmost see the vanishing species that are gone,because of the violence. It is out of balance.”Scholars of late modernity and postmodernitywrite of fragmentation, of deconstructed theoryand of an emphasis on the individual. From an-other vantage point, one can see profoundly dis-turbing patterns of violently oppressive hierar-chy, of invidious oppression, of shattered com-munities and of devastating destruction of theecosystem. Those of us who live in relativelyprivileged positions, in places insulated from thecataclysmic eradication of ecological integrity andindigenous communities, may not be fully awareof the total price extracted by the civilization, norof the entire cost of its fruits.

As Machiavelli makes explicit in ThePrince, violence is an intrinsic part of Westernstrategies of government. “Divide and conquer”is a ploy older than Julius Caesar, and the vio-lence embedded in English destroys extendedfamilies and community which might provide abase for resistance to the domination by thosewhom Chomsky calls “the opulent.” English,Wub-e-ke-niew says, “is not designed for ex-tended families, but for nuclear families within asociety where the church, state, and other insti-tutions are artificial surrogates, rather than theindigenous Dodems. The institutions created byEnglish are like adoption or placement in fostercare—they take away more of a person’s iden-tity. The hostility of the state toward familiesshows in its welfare policies. Their institutionsare such that people are depending on being fedby the state, but now the leaders say, ‘go find ajob.’ But, that’s just a slogan—they don’t have aplan, or goals or objectives. If the state is a sur-rogate family, why aren’t they out there helpingthem? It’s a very distant and cold father andmother that they have. ‘Find a job’ is the samekind of rhetoric they used on us during Reloca-


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tion. ‘Relocation’ means taking you out of yourhome and abandoning you—there was nobodythere to help you, no friends, they dump you outin the streets. It’s like abandoning an infant in achurch (or like Moses left in the bulrushes). Theleaders of Western Civilization don’t take respon-sibility: they are still juveniles, like schoolyardbullies.”

English takes away people’s identity, Wub-e-ke-niew says, “Like a ‘broken’ horse that achild can ride, compared to a horse in its naturalstate. A domesticated horse will run back into aburning barn, although a horse in its natural statewill run away from the fire. English is designedto have power over you, take away your identityand domesticate you. The English language takesaway people’s spirit and their energy, what theycall the ‘soul.’ English-speaking people try todomesticate everything including the ecosys-tem—that’s why everything which was so beau-tiful, has been destroyed. For example, the wa-ter has been polluted, and you can’t drink it. Wemight as well live in the desert—you can’t drinkthe water there either. They put animals in zoos.In zoos, there are emotions which are not naturaland normal, man-made (and very childish) emo-tions like anger, jealousy and greed. They damup rivers and then sell land on the flood plain,where the land is supposed to flood. ‘HonestBob’ sells used cars, but he also sells real estate,for example in downtown Grand Forks. Peopledon’t belong on the flood plain, in high rises, oron Hale-Bopp.”

Racism and ethnocentricism are among thesymptoms and manifestations of deeply ingrainedviolence in the English language. Of particularrelevance to anthropologists are the perceptionsof autochthonous peoples which are embeddedin the language and in the discourses in whichthat language plays a constitutive role. Althoughthe word “primitive” has often been replaced bypolitically-correct (but similarly loaded) substitutessuch as “non-modern,” the word primitive is onewhich is not infrequent in currently-used anthro-pology texts. In a thesaurus, primitive leads tosavage, uncivilized and crude; and savage leads

to untamed, as well as to brutal, ruthless, cruel,sadistic, animal, and fiend—as well as to wild,aborigine, native and uncivilized. Wub-e-ke-niewobserves that, after having been in contact withWestern civilization for most of his lifetime, hedoes not want to be “civilized, because only civi-lized people kill one another. (If we would havebeen civilized, we would have killed Columbus.)I don’t want to be civilized, and I don’t want tobe a White man. I don’t need a soul, either—you can keep all of those European things.” Healso comments, “There are many prevailing ste-reotypes of primitive people, for example puttinganthropologists in big iron kettles and boiling them.Where did the ‘primitive’ people get the kettlesfrom, and did they take the dirty socks off of theanthropologists first?”

Language structures the way in which oneperceives and interacts with the world; it is si-multaneously at the core of culture and society,the primary means of communication and thegeneration of praxis. In the Ahnishinahbæót-jibway language, Grandmother Earth is a pow-erful, female, being; nurturing, loving, and alongwith Grandfather Midé, the source of all life. InEnglish, “natural” is wild, wild is primitive, andprimitive is but a short semantic distance fromSatan. “Earthy” is crude and vulgar—and vul-gar is disgusting, obscene, and offensive. Theselinkages are more than word-games: the conse-quences of language are writ large across bothsociety and the landscape, starkly and appallinglyvisible to anyone who takes even a tentative firststep beyond the constraints of “civilized” lan-guage. As Wub-e-ke-niew puts it, “Civilizedmen—and women—are allowing our Grand-mother to be raped.”

“My Ahnishinahbæótjibway language isboth male and female,” Wub-e-ke-niew explains.“English is a male language, and language is theheart of any people and their culture. Languagetakes away peoples’ identity and their self-es-teem, and they don’t know who they are. Theyare confused by the language, by their imposedidentity—disconnected from their roots and fromwho they are, molded into slaves for the corpo-


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rations. They are trapped by the dualism in En-glish, and some become homosexuals becauseof the false unreality of the English language.”Wub-e-ke-niew continues, “Language molds theway people understand the universe, the way theylive their lives and how they are as human be-ings. I remember the old Ahnishinahbæótjib-way women who were still living when I wasyoung. Those old women had beauty, strengthand balance which I have never seen in a Whitewoman. When women change the English lan-guage so that it is a balanced male-and-femalelanguage, then the world will change.” By trans-forming the English language so that it is bal-anced, male and female, Western women canhelp rebuild the harmonious inter-relationship withGrandmother Earth and with community and fam-ily which was once the birthright of every woman.We can reclaim our real identity and live as whowe are meant to be as women.

Succinctly, Wub-e-ke-niew says, “WesternEuropean man is a prisoner of his language; West-ern European woman doesn’t have a language.Indigenous women had languages, the ones thatthe White man destroyed. Indigenous languageis what kept this land a paradise; it was the bal-anced male-and-female understanding which pre-served the harmony ... Grandmother Earth is veryfemale. Grandfather Midé and GrandmotherEarth, that is what our over-all-of-Aboriginal-time‘religion,’ ‘philosophy’ and ‘myth’ are about.”

Wub-e-ke-niew adds, “The female was notinvolved in making the languages of Western Civi-lization. Using institutions and disciplines whichhe controlled, the White man said, ‘We’ll make alanguage, and she can use it with us. That’s ar-rogance. It says it right there, that the languagedoes not have respect, nor manners, nor feelingsfor anyone else, just the few males at the top ofthe hierarchy.”

Language is the legacy of countless gen-erations. Hierarchy, duality, abstractions, violenceand pseudo-male imbalances have been en-trenched in Western languages over millennia,and resonate throughout these languages fromthe deep structure, through the grammar and the

lexicon. It is not probable that this heritage canbe fully transformed in a handful of years. How-ever, this is a moment in history profoundly un-like any other. The self-proclaimed heir of West-ern hegemony, the United States, is perched upona land from which a few of her surviving autoch-thonous people still speak: cogently, urgently, andin thoughtfully articulated and nuanced English.It is becoming increasingly apparent that West-ern society cannot long continue in present di-rections without dire consequences, including ir-reparable devastation of the ecosystem. We areat the brink of profound changes, at the edge ofa narrow window of opportunity to transform thedeep structure of society—in ways which couldlead to millennia of oppression amid the toxic ru-ins of the Golden Age of America, or, alternately,toward healing the violence, disharmony and im-balance which have been inherent in WesternCivilization.

Transformation of the English language isa way of beginning the healing. Such metamor-phosis needs to be done from the grassroots, re-generating from a network rather than orches-trated from a position of authority within a hier-archy. Beginning the process of understandingourselves as embodied human beings, intrinsicallyconnected to each other and inherently, insepa-rably part of the whole ecosystem, is a part of it.Deconstructing the English language, understand-ing the ways in which English has distorted ourperceptions and disconnected us from our selvesand the rest of nature, is another part of the pro-cess, and one in which the first tentative stepshave begun. Wub-e-ke-niew suggests that, forwomen, it could be profoundly helpful to renameour body parts, drawing on our own understand-ing of ourselves as female human beings and tran-scending the definitions imposed on us by autho-rized—and/or aggressively puerile—male termi-nologies. I have begun to see myself beyondwords, in faint flickers of wisdom beyond theabstract knowledge of Western mind.

I dream of midafternoon spring sunlight glis-tening across meadows golden with Californiapoppies, and remember the feel of warm earth


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beneath my bare feet. Another one of us maydream of crystalline midwinters punctuated bystarlight and the sharp popping of trees in sub-zero night, and, as Wub-e-ke-niew describes it,“the comforting howling of a family of wolvessharing a rabbit, and the safe, secure and blissfulsleep that I had as a boy hearing the lullaby ofthe wolves, knowing that everything was in bal-ance. In the morning, I would go outside andbreathe deeply in the fresh, clean clarity of frigidair.” And, yet another one of us might dream of

the kinetic, sensuous heaping of seals basking onrocky islands, nuzzling infant yelps wafted amidthe keening of seagulls on salt-tanged sea breezes.Everything is connected; we are all part of na-ture.

References CitedPlato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by Edith

Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. 1961. Princeton.Wub-e-ke-niew. We Have The Right To Exist. 1995. Black

Thistle Press, New York.

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“Squash Hill” featuring indigenous heirloom squash, in Clara’s garden


448Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara’s house from the air.

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VICTIMS OF CONGRESS:According to Friday’s Minneapolis Star Tribune,Congress finally passed its flood relief legisla-tion—which the President is expected to veto.The disaster which was sandbagged in the RedRiver Valley, is now being stonewalled in the Hallsof Congress. Law makers are in the back roomscutting deals to get more Pork for their Districts,and they are using promises to flood victims toget re-elected. Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. JoeBlow foot the bill: paying for Congressional boon-doggles out of one pocket, and inflation has gotits hands in all of their pockets. While the peopleof Grand Forks and other towns in the flood plainare digging the mud out of their basements, thepoliticians are rubbing their hands in glee, think-ing about the money that will go through theirgood buddies into their district.

The people who are living on the flood plainchoose to live there, and should not be called flood“victims.” If you bought a used car from HonestBob, and it broke down before you got it home,would the Federal Government reimburse youfor your good judgement? Honest Bob also sellsreal estate on the Red River Flood Plain. If youbought any property in that area—which hasflooded for millennia, and is supposed to flood—should the Federal Government bail you out, orshould Honest Bob reimburse you? It should beobvious to any schoolchild that the reason a “floodplain” is called a flood plain is because, plain andsimple, it is supposed to flood there. It has al-ways flooded there. That’s how all that nice richblack dirt got there—from floods. Or, didn’t any-body ever tell you that?

There is a song about the Red River Valley,which starts, “From this valley, they say you are

leaving.” That’s kind of a proph-ecy for you folks who got caughtup in the Army Corps of Engi-neers’ grandiose delusions thatthey could change the course ofMother Nature and the Red

River of the North. The U.S. Army Corps isfighting a loosing battle, building dams to movethe floods out of the floodplain and onto the topof the watershed. Did they ever hear of IsaacNewton, or gravity? Water is heavy, and theweight of all that water (upstream) is anotherdisaster, just waiting to happen. The Army Corpsof Engineers should have opened their floodgatesand let the excess water out last fall, but the ar-rogant dummies didn’t do it. Now, Red Lake—and probably other reservoirs—are filled beyondcapacity.

As one old timer says, “the more water youput in a hog waller, the harder it is to get themout.” Instead of letting the politicians play gameswith you, buying your votes with your ownmoney, and selling you pork in a poke in the formof more—and very expensive—dikes, why nottake your flood insurance and get out of the floodplain? Or, better yet, why not reverse the swindleand sell the land back to the “Indians” who sup-posedly sold it to you—for the original purchaseprice of four cents an acre? (Who were thevictims, then?) You don’t have to be a “victim”unless you choose to be—or unless you’re caughtup in cultural S & M.ANOTHER SOB STORY: The National Con-gress of American Indians has a half page ad inthe Sunday Star and Tribune. This $lick pieceof propaganda shows an old Indian woman, look-ing into the camera sadly. With all of the moneythat is supposedly going to Indian people with the“New Buffalo” of Indian gaming, why doesn’tthis old lady have a new hairdo, eyeglasses, anew sweater ... why doesn’t she have teeth?The NCAI’s ads remind me of fund-raising drivesthat the National Council of Churches used to

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By Wub-e-ke-niew (Francis Blake, Jr.)

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have years ago, with portraits of starving chil-dren who would never get any of the moneygiven to the churches to help them.

John Collier said, about the new Indians heintended to empower with the Indian Reorgani-zation Act, that these Indians have a “white-pluspsychology.” In plain English, this translates toCollier’s Indians exploiting their own people evenmore than the white man did, if that’s possible.The National Indian Gaming Association paid forthe NCAI’s ad exploiting the old lady. The nexttime you NCAI lackeys and you white FederallyRecognized Tribal henchmen run this ad, whydon’t you give the old lady you’ve been portray-ing some nice gold earrings, new clothes, a newhouse in the background, a new car with a chauf-feur—and some good teeth, with gold in them.

The point of the NCAI’s ad, was to protestproposals to tax the IRA “tribal” governmentsestablished by the United States Congress. Thisproposal to tax these “tribal governments,” whoare political pawns created and controlled by thewhite man, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Whatthis new tax proposal amounts to, is the US Gov-ernment taxing itself—Newt should save somepaperwork and send the Indians’ proposed taxbill to himself. If he’s really serious about Indiantaxation, he should also charge himself sales taxand surtaxes on all of the land that the Indiansare supposed to have sold.

SPEARFISHING: The annual spring rite of In-dian spearfishing controversy and promoting whitetourism has begun again. The flurry of newsarticles generated every year, blame the Indianspearfishers for declining walleye populations, butnever write about preserving the ecosystem.

The Indians make a big deal about “cer-emonial fish,” which reeks of New Age Indianmystique. But then again, maybe these fish are“ceremonial” because nobody in their right mindwould eat fish contaminated with mercury andPCB’s. The white resort-owners are going af-ter tourist dollars by promoting “catch and re-lease,” so they don’t have to put warning labelsabout mercury poisoning on each fish. That’s ajob that the DNR needs to start doing: labellingevery fish in the lakes: “This fish is contaminatedwith mercury and other pollutants, and eating itis harmful to your health.”

But then again, reviving the old treaties isjust another con job: a remarkable example ofcooperation between the Indians and the Whites.They are like two peas in a pod, and so wonder-fully crooked it has become a science. Just re-member: Jesus loves you, but I don’t. Have agood day.

My mailing address is P.O. Box 484, Be-midji, MN 56619, and my telephone number is(218) 679-3984.

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1) If you destroy the language, you destroy the culture. What is culture comprised of?

2) If you destroy the language, do you destroy the people? Do the people go extinct?

3) Why do you want to destroy the language and culture of any people to begin with? What benefit is it to you(plural) to do this? What are your (plural) motives?

4) The Western European culture and language have no respect or manners for other people, including them-selves. Why doesn’t it have manners or respect? They invaded this land, and remain here.

5) After all of these years, when they said they wanted to destroy the Indians (implying that the Indigenouspeople were Indians), saying, “they will not live amongst us,” now, all of a sudden, they are promoting theIndians. Why are they promoting them? They are teaching Chippewa in the schools, but they are notteaching it in the homes. They are teaching it with White teachers and wanna-be’s. I would like to know whois an Indian, and why is he here? Indian is a foreign language, a foreign term. What do they mean by Indianlanguages? From India? They are being very vague. They need to explain themselves. I want to know, andnobody tells me. I have been asking this question, and nobody answers me.

6) The indigenous language and Chippewa are two very different languages. Why are the distinctions beingblurred?

Six Questions About Languagefrom Wub-e-ke-niew to Dr. Harvey Sarles

Wub-e-ke-niew with Harvey Sarles in his office at the University of Minnesota.

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As Mr. Townsend, a Métis student of the CarlisleIndian School, told the Lake Mohonk policy-makers: I believe in education, because I believe it will kill the

Indian that is in me, and leave the man and the citizen. ...I believe in the Indian learning the English language: onepeople, one language, that is my idea. I contradict thestatement that the only good Indian is a dead Indian.The only good Indian is an educated Indian.

In 1887, General Whittlesey said: ... The reasons for desiring the Indians taught in the En-

glish language are so self-evident and apparent that itwas supposed every friend of Indian education wouldgladly co-operate with the government in the good work.... These Indians ought to be English-speaking Indiansto-day. The Seneca language should be a dead languageto-day, just as much as the language in which the ElliotBible was printed has become a dead language. Thereshould not be a tribe of Indians that had to be addressedin the native tongue after sixty years of missionary work.Judge Draper told us the other day that the majority stillspeak their own dialect and hold to their traditions andsuperstitions in the State of New York. ... We have heardit said in this room that we do not want to raise any more

(Interesting Quotations about Language)Indians; we shall keep it up, as long as we keep teachingthem their own language. ... They have found that theway to educate and civilize is to teach them English, sowe shall find it all over the country.

In 1888, the Reverend Lyman Abbott said: ... The impalpable walls of language are more impen-

etrable than walls of stone. ... If the Government were atonce to assume the entire work of educating the Indianchildren of school age in the United States, and of com-pelling them to attend the schools, and of furnishingthem thereat with sufficient knowledge of the Englishlanguage, the methods of industry and the moral laws tofit them for civilized life, the churches ... could bend theirenergies to the twofold work of the higher ethical andspiritual culture of the Indians ...

And, in 1890: As to the subjects taught, there must, in the first in-

stance, be the English language, which should be requiredof every pupil. Their own tongues tend to narrow theintellect, and are not fitted to impart and express theideas which expand the mind and excite higher aspira-tions. ...

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Red Lake Dam, from the Red Lake River side at the outlet


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INDIAN TAXES, AGAIN: In Wednesday, June18, staffwriter Pat Doyle published an article inthe Minneapolis Star Tribune. According to thearticle, headlined “County to get a fraction of itsrequest from tribe,” the Scott County board has“settled” for only two hundred thousand dollarsa year from the Shakopee Sioux to pay for “roadmaintenance, law-enforcement and court costsrelated to the casino in Prior Lake.” Is this anexclusionary rule, or is it an inclusionary one? IsScott County trying to tax the Sioux, is this aninsurance policy, or is this just a plain old shake-down?

Bud Grant has been telling his fishing bud-dies that we’re all equal under the law, and thatno group of people should have special privileges.But, then again, that’s not how the U.S. Consti-tution (or the Declaration of Independence) reads.Both in the fourteenth amendment, section 2, andin Article I, Section 2, Subsection 3, the U.S.Constitution clearly says, “excluding Indians nottaxed.” They put it there twice, so that youwouldn’t forget it. The Bureau of Indian Affairshas spent years (ever since a few Indians finallybecame literate) trying to put spin on this clause,telling people (with a straight face and tongue incheek) that this part of the U.S. Constitutionmeans “sovereignty.” But, the Founding Fathersreferred to “merciless Indian savages” in theirDeclaration of Independence, so I doubt that theyhad “sovereignty” in mind, not even the “limitedsovereignty” of “domestic dependent nations” (nomatter how the BIA defines these crooked, am-biguous words). What this slippery English, “ex-cluding Indians not taxed,” really means, is notincluding Indians under the protections of the U.S.Federal Constitution—that Indians are Constitu-

tionally prohibited from owningland or having representation inthe U.S. Government.

Bud Grant is talking abouta “level playing field,” but he’snot dealing with the facts. Bud

Grant has probably been out in the sun, fishing,too long, and he’s only thinking about hookingsuckers. Perhaps the time has come to repealthis little clause in the U.S. Constitution, espe-cially now that President Clinton wants to ad-dress racism, or else to amend the Constitution,and to change the “ex” to “in.” But, then again,instead of calling the Great White Fathers racistor apartheid, a person could give them the ben-efit of the doubt, and call this devious little phrasea “typo.”

I don’t know what the Scott County Com-missioners are complaining about. If they wantto treat the Indians just like everybody else, in-stead of having the Indians pay special fees, theyshould just negotiate an in-lieu-of-property taxsettlement. To be fair, they could charge the In-dians: the Scott County rate on the price that theWhite man claims to have paid for the land, from“the Indians.” If they used their own assess-ment of the price of the land, when they saidthey were paying for it, Scott County wouldn’tbe entitled to one red penny from the “red man.”They wouldn’t get anything, because even tenpercent of nothing, still comes out zero.POLITICKING: In the last election, PresidentClinton’s campaign slogan was “building bridgesto the twenty-first century.” I guess that a lot ofpeople wanted to be bridge-builders, because hegot elected. But, Clinton and the DemocraticParty didn’t let you in on the full details: that theseare toll bridges, that they want to build. You haveto pay to get on, and you have to pay to get off.

On the other side of the aisle, NewtGingrich has been censured by his colleagues—but he still has ambitions to become President.He wants to forget about his shady past, his

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money-making schemes and good ol’ boy deals.Bob Dole, who was defeated, has paid Newt’sfine, so Newt is hoping to start his Presidentialcampaign with a clean slate. His new campaignslogan will be, “burning bridges.”

Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister whorecently got elected into Parliament, his campaignslogan doesn’t make much sense. His sloganwas, “radical center.” It got him elected, butdoes anybody know what it means, besides bam-boozling people with socialist pork, or maybe justempty words?FLOODGATES: The Army Corps of Engi-neers’ floodgates at the top of the Red Riverwatershed are bulging at the seams. I supposethey’re waiting for a drought, so that the sugarbeet growers down in the floodplain will havewater for irrigation. But, there are other gates.

Twenty five years ago, Watergate was inthe news. The White House “plumbers” weretrying to close the gates for the twenty-first cen-tury. Since then, there have been a lot of other“gates” in this supposedly open society. Therewas Iran-gate, and there was Whitewater-gate.There’s Finn-gate, and then there’s Bill Gates.Just recently, there was Heaven’s Gate. In Min-neapolis, developers are talking about building“Gated Communities” to protect the opulent fromthe unwashed masses ... and then you have prisongates. Last but not least, there’s San Francisco’sGolden Gate. Have a good day.


Wub-e-ke-niew

RED LAKE WINS $27 MILLION? Accord-ing to the front page of the June 19 Bemidji Pio-neer, the Red Lake Band recently “won” 27 mil-lion dollars “compensation” for destruction of redand white pine after 1889. But, there is more toa forest than the pine trees. What about the de-struction of the indigenous people’s homeland?That pine forest provided food, clothing and shel-ter for us. What about the deer, moose, buffalo,partridges, rabbits and fish? What about thepermaculture: berries, nuts, grapes, chokecher-ries, pincherries, and medicinal plants? The Whiteman’s attorneys and their rubber-stamp Indiansmake no mention of what else was destroyed,along with the pine trees. The proposed settle-ment ignores indigenous people’s burial grounds,rice lakes, the loss of our homes, and pollution ofour water. It also ignores the violence that theWhite man brought in here.

What these Indians are set-tling for, is rapacious hypocrisy.They ignore the devastation andpollution caused by these “firstenvironmentalists” and so-calledconservationists. Since Roger

Jourdain and his cronies brought the 1934 I.R.A.onto Red Lake, the Bureau’s Indians have beenplundering the forests, clear-cutting. For nearlyforty years, truckload after truckload of stolentimber has been hauled off of this land at dis-count prices. And, what about the lake? Thegreedy Indians have destroyed one of the richestfisheries in the country, and it will be fifty yearsbefore Red Lake recovers, if ever—and now theywant “Indian management” of Mille Lacs Lake.The forests and the lakes go together: there areno fish flies to feed the young fingerlings, thefood for the fish has disappeared with the forest,and the Lake has been polluted by runoff fromcommercially grown domesticated rice and othersewage. You can’t drink the water here, it’s allpolluted. We might as well live in the desert, youcan’t drink the water there, either. The barrenenvironment that is now at Red Lake is the re-

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sult of greedy self-interest on the part of theAnglo-Chippewas and Franco-Ojibwas—wanna-be’s of Western European imperialism acting forthe benefit of the colonizers, selling land and re-sources that have never belonged to the Indiansor to the Whites.

The United States Government is trying tobuy time, with yet another “settlement.” Usingtheir crooked English language, they created in-stitutions to steal, and now they are negotiatingwith themselves, through their in-house “instru-mentality” the IRA Tribal Council. The purposeof the 1889 Nelson Act was to steal nearly threemillion acres of land, but the Tribal Council isn’teven questioning the land theft. In the Whiteman’s backroom deals with himself, the TribalCouncil signed legal papers that include the stipu-lation, “By Exception 41, the Red Lake Banddoes not contend that the Nelson Act is void,”and agree to “ab initio” provisions “that a statuteor treaties, in and of itself,” does not need to be“fair and honorable.”

The $27 million dollars mentioned in theBemidji Pioneer headline is a misleading figure.According to the next-to-last paragraph in thePioneer article, “before the settlement can befinalized, the band must submit a plan describinghow the money will be used.” This is the firsttime I’ve ever heard of a lawsuit where the plain-tiff had to justify their use of settlement money.Could this be a smokescreen? After the law-yers take their 33.3% share off the top of thesettlement, about nine million dollars, and the Bu-reau of Indian Affairs takes its third for “admin-istrative costs,” and then Franklin Roosevelt’s“New Deal,” the DFL party, takes it’s third in“campaign contributions,” what have you got left?Only a red herring, and it smells.ECONOMIC SUMMIT: The Sunday Pioneerpublished several articles about an “economicsummit” held at Red Lake last Friday. Abouttwo hundred people, mostly outsiders, discussedstrategies to increase employment at Red Lake.The Pioneer could have entitled their articles,“Deja-vu all over again,” “Treaty Reruns,” and“White history repeats itself.” The majority of

people who claim to be Red Lakers, both thoseliving on the reservation and those who have al-ready been relocated, did not attend, accordingto Bobby Whitefeather as quoted in the Pio-neer—although there were a few hang-around-the-fort Indians in attendance.

Although Friday’s session was billed as a“summit,” it sounds like yet another crooked dealwas being cut in the backrooms. This timearound, instead of selling stolen timber, they’recaught up in enabling further encroachment onland that doesn’t belong to them, using 99-yearleases. By the way, the colonizer’s lease on HongKong’s is up this year. Western European Impe-rialism is all over the world, where it doesn’t be-long, hidden under the slippery euphemism of“globalization.”

The themes of the 1997 “Red Lake sum-mit” are more than a hundred and thirty yearsold. Only the language changes: refurbished ver-sions of slippery and crooked English make it lookmore appealing. The kinds of economic plansthat are being offered generate low-class jobslike working in a car wash at less than the mini-mum wage—and you’re addressing poverty andunemployment? It sounds like the White BufferIndians and wanna-be’s are just doing their jobs,brokering the dirty work for their Western Euro-pean colonizing relatives. They are using socialengineering to entrench the class system pro-moted by the Whites. The in-group will keeptheir high-paying jobs working for their mastersin the Federal government, and once the welfarepayments are cut off, the out-group will be forcedoff of the reservation, in another historical re-runrelocation project. This isn’t surprising, sinceforced migration is a part of the here today andgone tomorrow, fly-by-night European culture.VIOLENCE AT RED LAKE: PresidentClinton has been in the news lately, trying to ad-dress racism. Could it be that racism hides thereal issue, which is classism? The class systemat Red Lake was created by the White coloniz-ers, using social engineering and eugenics blood-quantum policies. The White man’s Buffer Indi-ans are so good at math, that the Whiter they


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get, the higher their “Indian” blood quantum isand the more Hollywood Indian movies theywatch. When I was in school in the 1930’s, Iwas told by the Catholic nuns, “You Indians arethe Vanishing Americans, and you will go.” I amnot an American and I am not an “Indian,” andeven as a kid in boarding school, I was wonder-ing who they were talking about. The White manhas painted himself into a corner with his guiltabout the genocide they committed here: killingoff the indigenous people, and then replacing themwith Anglo-Chippewa and Franco-Ojibwa Indi-ans who are in fact Indo-Europeans.

The violence which is escalating at RedLake has nothing to do with the indigenouspeople. In school, the forcibly administeredtheme, repeated so many times I’m still sick of it,was “assimilate,” and “you will become civilized.”Apparently the Buffer Indians got the message,and assimilated into the White man’s violent civi-lization. If the indigenous people of this conti-nent would have been “civilized,” ChristopherColumbus would have never landed—we’d havekilled him. Only Western European “civilized”people go to war, and kill one another. Christianand other Western values have made their peopleimmune and desensitized to their stupid and sense-less violence. People need to take responsibility,take charge of their lives, and take back their

real identities, instead of acting like juveniles,gangs and schoolyard bullies.

Perhaps the violence at Red Lake is a mes-sage about the genocide that was committed here.Maybe the land is saying something to you—andbeing not connected to the land, you don’t listen.The English language is out of balance—beforethe coming of the European, the language on thisland was always a balanced male and femalelanguage. This is why we had all of the tall, beau-tiful red pine and white pine here, that you Indo-Indians are brokering to the White man. TheEnglish language is a male hierarchical language,and it’s out of balance with Grandmother Earthand the female ecosystem. English has no man-ners or respect for anybody—even for them-selves, that’s why there’s all this senseless vio-lence. We need female language, to balanceeverything out. With a female language, we canbecome human beings, treat each other with re-spect and manners, and nurture GrandmotherEarth—she gives us all life. On the other hand,the White man’s male, violent hierarchical En-glish language takes away life. This is called“civilization.”


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Wub-e-ke-niew at the 1997 Fourth of July Parade in Debs, Minnesota

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“Clinton is the first president to level about race,”according to journalist Syl Jones in the Commen-tary section of the June 17 Star Tribune. His-torically, all of the U.S. Presidents were “level”about race—most of them were prone, althoughLincoln went toward a vertical dimension inMankato. Clinton, like other second-term presi-dents, is playing politics for future history writ-ers, wanting to leave his legacy. But, like mostpoliticians, Clinton’s noble posturing is meaning-less: just another slogan. Nixon’s Clean Air Actwas a slogan, Johnson’s War on Poverty was

another slogan, and AffirmativeAction is another empty slogan.Without a serious plan of action,these words are nothing morethan hot air. Like the Ten Com-mandments, which are ten slo-

gans, they are meaningless: hypocriticalcatchphrases and empty platitudes.APOLOGIES: Ever since the Roman CatholicPope apologized to Galileo (about five hundredyears late), public figures have gone ape, mon-key-see, monkey-do, making headlines withmeaningless apologies. Sunday’s Star Tribunementions a number of these would-be apologists,including British Prime Minister Tony “RadicalCenter” Blair, who apologized for the Irish fam-ine of 1845. From another British colony, former

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July 11, 1997

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James Meier and his son Dan walk through Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara’s sugarbush, summer 1997


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U.S.A. President F.W. De Klerk apologized, “onour knees before God Almighty” for living at thewrong time, and getting caught. The Star Tri-bune quotes de Klerk as begging God’s forgive-ness (but not the forgiveness of the South Afri-can Blacks’) for being “the product of the cul-tural and political circumstances into which wewere born and with which we grew up.” Fromyet another continent of the stolen British Em-pire, Prime Minister John Howard of Australia“rejected recommendations” that he apologize tothe aboriginal people of Australia for more thana century of British genocide, rape, forced re-movals and other human rights violations. And,from still other heirs of the British, state of Min-nesota representative Martin Sabo is said by theStar Tribune to be “not prepared to respond”about either slavery or racism. Sabo is the DFLParty’s in-house Congressman. Another apart-heid statesman we haven’t heard from yet isNelson Mandela: who has been a highly toutedadvocate of “democracy” and “freedom,” butwhose administration is henching for Europeanglobalization and NATO imperialism. “Democ-

racy” and “freedom” are some snake-oil sales-man crooked English words, and in spite of thepositive “spin” on them, what they really mean is“exclusion” and “apartheid.” What NelsonMandela should be doing, is apologizing to DeKlerk for kicking out the old horse-and-buggyform of European apartheid, and bringing in anewer, updated, “electronic age” form of Euro-pean apartheid. If Nelson Mandela does themanly thing and apologizes, watch De Klerk’sface light up with a big, devious smile.MILITARY PROMOTION: The MajorCrimes Act has been promoted to the GeneralF--k-up Act at Red Lake. The Major CrimesAct, now known as the General F--k-up Act, waspassed by the White man in the 1800’s, as en-croachment legislation to control the communityon Indian Reservations, and that’s just how At-torney General Lillehaug is using it. He’s throw-ing the blame for recent reservation violence ontothe people of Redby, and hiding behind the “60 to70 day” countdown “to make a case.” WhatLillehaug is doing is even more encroachment,social engineering to give the FBI and the fed-

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eral government an excuse to create a police stateat Red Lake, and get their hands into the casinocoffers at the same time. Lillehaug could haveeasily arrested the people who were part of theschool-party murder. “60 to 70 days” is an emptyexcuse, because the Feds could have arrestedthe murderers on other trumped-up charges, likethey do for everybody else. Lillehaug’s delay isa part of a long-standing strategy, an old Ma-chiavellian concept, of creating conflict in com-munities which the Europeans have invaded andoccupied. The people at Red Lake need to sueLillehaug for the “consequential damages”caused by his unnecessary social-engineeringdelay—and, as a part of the wanna-be Whitegovernment, Lillehaug needs to make an apol-ogy for the pain and suffering that his high-handedapartheid policies have inflicted on people at RedLake.KA-LAI-JA: Years ago, when former vice-president Hubert Humphrey was still campaign-ing for Congress, Chairman-for-Life RogerJourdain adopted Humphrey into the Red Lake

Band of Chippewa Indians. Not so very longago, when Roosevelt’s machine politics were stillrunning smoothly on well-greased wheels, RogerJourdain didn’t need a medicine man to help himplay Indian, and he didn’t need a shaman, either.He adopted Hubert Humphrey, but through theIndian grapevine, it was always said that theygave Humphrey the wrong name—that his realname was “Walking Eagle.” And now, you knowthe rest of the story.

As long as I can remember, all the Whiteman had to say about Indians was “assimilate,and be civilized like us.” Now, politicians havegiven up on kissing babies, and are being adoptedinto Indian tribes. Under the authority of FranklinRoosevelt’s New Deal I.R.A., the Red LakeTribal Council has adopted Roger Moe (presum-ably with the approval of the Secretary of theInterior or his duly authorized representative).

Back in the 1950’s, when the Bureau ofIndian Affairs was “precipitating factions” to getthe Indian Reorganization Act onto Red Lake,the landless Indians who aren’t from here, like

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Wub-e-ke-niew and Beverly White in McGregor


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Roger Jourdain and his flunkies, backed theI.R.A. because the United States Governmentwas promising to give these outsiders land at RedLake. (The United States Government has neverhad any legitimate claim to the land at Red Lake,but that’s another issue.)

Bobby Whitefeather isn’t an Indian Medi-cine Man, like Roger Jourdain was. So, he hadto go get the Minnesota Legislature’s Indian Sha-man to make Roger Moe into an Indian. Thenewspapers don’t report how much blood quan-tum they gave Roger Moe when they adoptedhim—back in the old days, when they turnedWhite men into Indians, they usually made theminto “halfbreeds.” There’s something strangegoing on, with the highly advanced civilization thatthe White man was forcing us to assimilate into.Now, the children of the White Man who saidthat God entrusted them with Manifest Destinyare regressing, and their guilt is showing. (Guiltmakes people do strange things.) They’re so

ANOTHER NEW DEAL: Newt Gingrich andhis cronies are making moves to bring one ofDemocratic President Franklin Roosevelt’sprojects, the “New Deal,” to an end. Their “re-form” package includes privatizing social secu-rity and abolishing FDR’s social safety net, wel-fare (which has become a dirty word).

Before the 1929 stock market crash, mostof the United States economy had been priva-tized under President Hoover. Even small inves-tors were encouraged to put their life savingsinto Wall Street—and then the stock brokers soldthem more stock on credit. As long as the pat-terns remain embedded in the language, historywill repeat itself. If the reform to do away with

FDR’s new deal, and privatizethe economy again, succeeds,then the money in the Social Se-curity trust fund will be investedin the stock market. Stockprices will rise dramatically.

Then, more credit will become available for theU.S. Government investors to buy even moreworthless stocks. You guessed it: the stock mar-ket will crash—it will be 1929 all over again. Theonly difference is that along with your social se-curity number, you’ll be assigned your own pri-vate window to jump out of. That’s progress.CRIMINAL CULTURE: In the editorial sec-tion of Tuesday’s Star Tribune, the editorial staffwrites that the new Congressional “juvenile-crime” legislation “forbids the use of its fundsfor crime prevention.” The policy advisors tothe U.S. Congress are not fools, and in their crimi-nal minds, they know perfectly well that invest-ment in prisons increases the crime rate. So,

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civilized they’ve degenerated, and they all wantto become “natives,” “New Age Indians,” andWhite Federally Adopted Wanna-be’s. If youRepublicans really want to get rid of Roger Moe,all you have to do is terminate the Indians. With“one stroke on the keyboard,” you’ll get rid ofthat degenerated half-breed Indian Roger Moe,and then your troubles are over (or maybe they’rejust beginning). Well, anyway, the rest of you,who aren’t adopted Indians and wanna-be’s, havea nice day.

My mailing address is P.O. Box 484,Bemidji, MN 56619, and my telephone number

is (218) 679-3984. Wub-e-ke-niew

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why are they voting to condemn another genera-tion of children to a marginalized life of crimeand imprisonment? Ever since the Europeansgot to this continent, they have developed theircriminal culture: stealing land through crookedtreaties and unjust wars, killing all of the indig-enous people and replacing them with Indians,ripping off resources, polluting the water, andcreating mayhem everywhere they went. Thefunny part of it is, they’re so crooked they won’teven admit to what they did.

The congressmen who are voting to buildmore prisons, create gangs by forcing singlemothers into a marginal job market, destroy com-munities with “urban development,” and continuetheir generations-long strategy of attackingwomen and families, know perfectly well whatchaos their policies will create. They are buyingtime, and making money for themselves and theirgood buddies in the prison-contracting business,while the taxpayers pay to entrench the police-state more deeply.

The propaganda and spin doctors of themainstream media are very effective in hidingwhat the elite policy-makers are doing in this “landof the free and home of the [apartheid] brave.”The electorate looks straight at the schemes andcon jobs, and most of them are so brainwashedby crooked English that they don’t see what’sright in front of them—or, they’re into denial.According to the July 15 Strib, Green Bay Pack-ers’ defensive end Reggie White told a group ofhigh school students in Knoxville that the whitegovernment and white police “provoke youngblack men in order to put them behind bars, thusallowing the government to deprive them of edu-cation. [They] want young black males to selldrugs, join gangs and use guns, so they can bearrested.” Sportswriter Patrick Reusse dismissesReggie White’s observations by implying that hiscomments referred to a “conspiratorial view” ofthe white electorate, but, the common person inthe U.S. lost his power with the ratification ofthe U.S. Constitution. It’s hard to see from in-side the English language, but the feudal history

of medieval Europe is repeating itself. Serf’s up,peon the peasants.MORE SCANDALS: While we’re on the sub-ject of crime, congressman Fred Thompson ofTennessee is described by Robert Reno, in aneditorial reprinted in the Star Tribune, as “sol-diering bravely” through the muck of campaignfinance. There are different categories of fi-nancing the political parties, and nobody seemsto have a handle on what kind of money they’reupset about—it remains nameless in this bastard-ized English language (as the Indians would say,“it’s so sacred, we can’t talk about it”). Theissue of the moment is that somebody got caughtpublicly doing business that is supposed to be dis-cretely conducted behind closed doors and re-main part of the good ol’ boys’ exclusive tradi-tion. In the old days, some kinds of foreign rela-tions were called “gunboat diplomacy,” and veryfew people protested about that kind of influ-ence in other peoples’ governments. DesertStorm was another example of sticking your noseinto other peoples’ business, a “worldpoliceman’s” shakedown for well-entrenchedvested interests. But, now that the circle’s comearound, and the former victims of gunboat diplo-macy are using their finances to protect their owninterests, the good ol’ boys don’t like it, but no-body knows exactly what to call it: is it soft money,hard money, cold cash, clean money, launderedmoney, hush money, Indian money, bread, lots ofdough, or good old fashioned influence peddling?GOLD DIGGERS: When the colonial inves-tors wanted to get Europeans to leave their home-land and come to this continent, they planted ru-mors about the streets on this continent beingpaved with gold. When they wanted to get set-tlers into California, they had the Gold Rush of1849. Then, when they wanted people to go toAlaska, there was another gold rush. They maketheir advance settlers into fly-by-nights, crazedwith gold fever. Unwilling participants in thesegold rushes and settlement schemes are “trans-ported” prisoners—a lot of prison-boats were un-loaded on these shores, and it looks like their de-


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scendants are going to take another flying leap.There hasn’t been a good old American gold rushin a long time, so Uncle Sam sent Pathfinder toMars to look at rocks. If you’re going to investin the stock market, I recommend stocks in pick-and-shovel companies ... good luck to you Mar-

tian prospectors, and don’t forget to be inocu-lated for gold fever. ‘Bye.

My mailing address is P.O. Box 484,Bemidji, MN 56619, and my telephone number

is (218) 679-3984. Wub-e-ke-niew

Greetings and hello to all of you peasants andyou immigrants, and boozhoo to all you Indians,eh. When Mike Tyson telephoned Ross Perot,what did Perot say?NICOTINE FITS: This year, the city of Be-midji is celebrating its Centennial. For sixty ofthe past hundred years, since 1937, Paul Bunyanhas been standing on the western shores of LakeBemidji. This rugged individual, who was thefirst mercenary and eco-terrorist for the papermills and lumber companies who lobby in Wash-ington, D.C., has been the icon of Bemidji, and arole model for the local youth who wanted togrow up to be lumberjacks like Paul Bunyan.Now, the timber is gone, clearcut, but Paul stillcontinues to influence children: he has a pipe inhis mouth continually.

Rumor has it that Bemidji High School hasinstalled surveillance cameras throughout theschool neighborhood to apprehend studentssmoking on their lunch break, and the State isstepping up enforcement (and creating crimewhere there is no crime) by “carding” would-betobacco purchasers and running expensive “sting”operations. It seems like they’re spending anawful lot of money—and prohibition just makesillicit products seem more desirable. The guyswho are using tobacco prohibition for their owngain, making unnecessary laws to enhance theirown employment, are con artists, and they shouldbe in jail. If they really cared about public health,

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they would be focussing on bigpolluters instead of on mickey-mouse issues and scapegoatingtobacco. They’ve already cas-trated Babe the Blue Ox, so thepillars of Bemidji might as well

take away Paul’s symbol of manhood, his pipe,so he’s not a big example of filthy, rotten, dirtyhabits.DOUBLESPEAK: The discussions about theBoundary Waters “wilderness” have reached animpasse, and so the final settlement will be hashedout in Washington, D.C. Those of us who havedealt with Washington on a long-term basis knowwhat that means. The spin departments for thetimber industry are already planting “trial bal-loons,” including improbable stories about howthe ecosystems work, into the media. Amongthe rationales that they’re testing for public ac-ceptance are the “global warming” and the end-of-the world theories: that the BWCA is at the“southern boundary of the conifer forest area”—it never used to be, until the immigrant Europeanlumberjacks came in here and cut down the restof the pine forests. In another year or so, thepaper mills will try to persuade the public to cutdown the forests in the BWCA because the for-ests will “die anyway” from global warming andpollution, so they might as well cut down the for-ests so the trees aren’t “wasted.” Another cor-porate fable is that the trees in old-growth for-ests are “too crowded,” and “sound management”requires that they cut down two out of three treesto “make room” for the remaining trees. Thepart of this fairy story that they don’t tell you isthat this is the next step in demolishing the entireecosystem: cutting down the few stands of old-

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all Black, wouldn’t be “colored.” If they’re ex-pecting to win “justice” with their battles, they’rein for a big disappointment. There’s another in-stitution, called “repeat after me, ‘our father whoart in heaven,’” but that’s a dead-end White in-stitution, too.

Dealing with problems created by Whiteinstitutions inside of the context of these institu-tions isn’t going to solve the problems of racismand “race relations,” nor the hierarchical apart-heid which is embedded in the English language.If Euro-American language was not inherentlyapartheid, both the White immigrants and thedescendants of their Black slaves would not behere—they would still be at home, taking care oftheir “motherlands” and their “fatherlands” inEurope and Africa.

Violence is a part the un-natural makeup ofcultural and religion of Western Civilization, andis inherent in the English language. It amusesme, when the Euro-Americans create all kindsof different religions, political parties and otherinstitutions, and then fight about them. They arestuck in the violence, abstract unreality and stu-pidity of their language. If the NAACP and otherorganizations looking for social justice are seri-ous about wanting change, they need to look be-yond “race relations,” which is a White institu-tion created by the language, and take a damn’good hard look at the violence and oppression inthe pathologically unbalanced English language.

Perot said, “Go ahead, Mike, I’m all ears.”Y’all have a good day, eh.


Wub-e-ke-niew

growth which remain on this continent, replacingthem with “tree farms,” and then telling the pub-lic that there are “more trees” than there werefive hundred years ago. What they don’t say isthat these “more trees” are only about threeinches tall, and in sickly, chemical-laden treefarms—like the modern agricultural cornfieldswith nothing but dead birds in them.

Looking beyond the doublespeak, the En-glish language tells me what they’re going to do.I’m making a prediction and a prophecy: the en-tire Boundary Waters Canoe Area is going to bedestroyed: cut down, logged off, and “developed,”and the animals will be driven into extinction. YourEuropean English language is out of balance withnature, with yourselves, and with reality. Even ifGod came down and performed a miracle, theBWCA will still go into extinction—the bottomline for the White man is making money, and theEnglish language is filled with blueprints for ex-ploiting women, nature ... and everything else.That’s why the Euro-Americans left Europe andgave themselves a new name (although they kepttheir old criminal values).LAND OF THE FREE: In a Strib “Counter-point” editorial on August second, attorneys forthe National Association for the Advancementof Colored People quoted from a NAACP posi-tion paper stating that, “segregation was and istied inextricably to the ideology of white su-premacy.” The NAACP proposes battling theconsequences of white supremacist thinking inthe courts, as well as in “state legislatures andexecutive mansions, before boards of educationand councils of local governments, with localbusinesses and civic organizations, and last butnot least, with parents and students.” All of theseproposed NAACP “battlegrounds” are White in-stitutions, including the NAACP, which, if it was


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[Note: the following letter editor of the Native American Press/Ojibwe News is included in this collection of Wub-e-ke-niew’s writing, because Wub-e-ke-niew’s August 29, 1997 column addressed some of the issues raised below.Also, Wub-e-ke-niew enjoyed his occasional “hate mail,” understanding it as an indication that his writing andspeaking had touched the angrily defended illusions of Euroamerican language and culture.]

Greetings and hello to all of you peasantsand you immigrants, and boozhoo to all you Indi-ans, eh. Achtung! to you Germans and saintedGermans.ONE NATION UNDER JUDEO-CHRIS-TIANITY: According to the Metro/State sec-

tion of the August 14 Star Tribune, TV evange-list Robert Schuller was convicted for assault ona United Airlines flight attendant. In my book,We Have The Right to Exist, I write about theviolence of the Christians’ religion. In St. Mary’sMission School at Redlake, and in other boarding

By Wub-e-ke-niew (a.k.a. Francis Blake, Jr.)

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schools across the country, run by the U.S. Gov-ernment and the religious reich, indigenous chil-dren were beaten daily in the name of God andcivilization, so that we would become numb andimmune to the violence which saturates the Whiteman’s culture. Now, people are concerned aboutthe violence in Euro-American culture, about thedaily gunshots and murders which are a part ofEuro-American urban life. They keep pointingfingers and blaming television as causing the vio-lence. Instead of blaming the symptoms, theyneed to go to the source: male violent languageand the western religion that it molds, are thecause of their violence, and what about the BranchDavidians at Waco? The surro-great whitemother (acting on behalf of the Great White Fa-ther) burned up all of those little children to “pro-tect” them.

TIGHT SHOES (if the shoe fits, wear it):My name is Wub-e-ke-niew. That other namewas given to my father in the Mission School byracist Christians, to destroy my people’s real iden-tity. My father was the first generation with thename “Blake,” and using that derogatory “Indian”name is an insult, a human rights violation, dis-gusting and obscene. I have my identity—and Iam not a European and I am not an Indian or a“Native American.” The Indians, who werebrought onto my land by the White man, call me“Blake” just like their racist full-White relativesdo, because the Indians are hiding from their geno-cidal history like the rest of the immigrants. Whenyou claim to own stolen property, you are just asguilty as the people who murdered to steal it.

Hitler learned from the Americans, the Brit-ish, and other European colonizing nations, howto commit genocide and other vile human rightsviolations. These perversions remain embeddedin Western European thought, and are still a partof Euro-American language, culture and tradi-tion. In this beginning of this century, UnitedStates Senator Albert Beveridge spoke for themainstream when he addressed Congress: “Wewill not renounce our part in the mission of ourrace, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the

world. And we will move forward to our work... with gratitude for a task worthy of our strength,and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He hasmarked us His chosen people, henceforth to leadin the regeneration of the world... Mr. President,this question is deeper than any question of partypolitics; deeper than any question of isolatedpolicy of our country even; deeper even than anyquestion of constitutional power. It is elemental.It is racial. God has not been preparing the En-glish-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thou-sand years for nothing but vain and idle self-con-templation and self-admiration. No! He hasmade us the master organizers of the world toestablish system where chaos reigns. He hasgiven us the spirit of progress to overwhelm theforces of reaction throughout the earth. He hasmade us adept in government that we may ad-minister government among savage and senilepeoples. Were it not for such a force as this theworld would relapse into barbarism and night.And of all our race He has marked the Ameri-can people to finally lead in the regeneration ofthe world. [Such garbage—they didn’t take careof their land in Europe, and they still don’t knowhow to take care of the land here.] This is thedivine mission of America, and it holds for us allthe profit, all the glory, all the happiness possiblefor man.” By “man,” Beveridge and his cohortsmeant the invading European white man, and noteven their own women.

If anyone is looking for the Third Reich, allthey have to do is look at their own Euro-Ameri-can history—where did you come from, and whatare you doing here? The indigenous people ofthis continent did not invade Europe or anywhereelse. The European invaders and their Indiandescendants have been on this continent for fivehundred years, and they are behaving in a waythat gives pigs a bad name: polluting everything,killing people and sending entire ecosystems intoextinction. All you have to do is look at RedLake—the fish are gone, and the forests havebeen cut down by wanna-be Indians who haveEuropean values and are a part of the Euro-American parasitic culture.


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Racism is a European concept, and it al-ways has been. It’s embedded in the Europeanlanguages in order to justify stealing, enslavingpeople, dehumanizing and domesticating them,and taking away their real identity. There wereno “Indians” on this continent until the Europe-ans got here—the artificial Indian identity wascreated by the Europeans and Euro-Americansas a part of their racist culture, and it continuesto be funded by the White good ol’ boys who run“America.” The darker-skinned children ofWhite men were called Indians because theseWhites were so racist they excluded their ownchildren from their community. These Indians,who all have a White patriline, were used by theirfathers’ people to destroy indigenous people andour permaculture, and to hide the near-total geno-cide of my Ahnishinahbæótjibway people.

The “one drop of black blood” rule segre-gates people. Madame Albright points to Chi-nese “human rights violations,” but what abouther own back yard? The “black blood” rule re-mains enforced to this day, with Indians (whoseancestors were categorized as “mulattos” 137years ago) classified down to 1/508th non-Whiteblood quantum, and “federal recognition” of In-dians based on this fictitious “blood quantum” andcontrolled by the White government. Indian “sov-ereignty” is a part of this Euro-American apart-heid, in which the lily-Whites keep all of the powerand segregate their relatives who are a darkershade of White, into dependency as a part of afeudal class structure. And, you want me to bea part of that civilized society by calling me“Blake.” No thank you!

If the indigenous people here had been civi-lized like the Europeans, we would have killedChristopher Columbus—he would never havelanded. I don’t need to be civilized, and I don’tneed a “soul,” because I don’t condone slavery.Western civilization is a slave society, and I donot want to be a part of it. By refusing to recog-nize me as an indigenous person of this land, thelanguage of the invaders and their heirs like c.e.saint germaine, tells me that they want to con-tinue creating the American Reich, dripping with

the blood of my people. And, stay away fromme, saint—the further people like you stay away,the better I like it: in your arrogant self-righteous-ness, you have bad “manifest destiny” vibes.

“Racial purity” is an illusion and a con job,and “peace” is just another word for continualviolence. The people of Western Civilization havebeen mongrelized by the rape of war-and-peaceever since their violent society began. There isno such thing as race, but there is a class sys-tem. The egalitarian indigenous people of thiscontinent did not have either “race” or “socialclass,” but we had family, the Dodem, which ismy identity. This has nothing to do with “race.”As a diatribe-writer in last week’s Native Ameri-can Press/Ojibwe News observed somewhat lessthan compassionately, I am among the last of mypeople. All of my relatives of my Dodems weremassacred in the genocide against my people.They are gone. To label my remembrance ofmy relatives who were killed in the continent-wide holocaust of half a millennium, as “racism”is bad manners and no respect, as well as beingactive complicity in the coverup of the Whiteman’s perverted philosophy of “my brother’skeeper” which is an euphemism for genocide.When I reach down into the soil, when I touchGrandmother Earth, the bones of my ancestorsfor hundreds of millennia are right here. MyIndodemian may be dead, but I am not alone. Iam still connected to the Earth here.

There was never any genocide against theIndians, because they all have Europeanpatrilines—those who were killed, were murderedin fratricide (like Cain and Abel) by their ownfather’s people for economic reasons, greed.Both miscegenation and primogeniture were usedto disinherit the White man’s children: “race” isa part of the White man’s economic system andclass structure. That’s why the Indians nevertalk about genocide of the Indian people, andthey’re not going to. And, they never admit tothe genocide of the indigenous people, becausethey are in complicity with it.

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Indians write about their “venture into the nextmillennium,” because they are a part of theinvader’s Christian system. What I have to sayto them is: if you want to create a decent futurefor your next generations, you had better talk along, hard look at your history, if you can. But,you are caught up in the Euro-Americans’ lan-guage, you are into denial, you are a foreigner tothis land and it still terrifies you where you haven’tcompletely trashed it, beaten it into submissionand domesticated it—like in the BWCA, wherethe land is still a reflection of my ancestors’ lan-guage. Even if you cut down every tree, be-come a tree farmer, and said there was “nothinghere” but what you created, you would still be astranger to this land. Because of your alienationwith everything here, you refuse to say my indig-enous name, Wub-e-ke-niew. I am among thevery last of my people, and I will not vanish insilence—you will not get away with your “per-

fect crime” of stealing this content. Americanimperialism and the Third Reich have the sameroots and the same values. You aren’t afraid ofthe Thousand Year Reich—you already havethat, and after more than a five hundred years onthis continent, you’re more than half done. Itcan’t last, and projecting your immoral values andguilty fears onto me will change nothing: Euro-America had a beginning, and it will also have anend. And, until you face reality, the violence ofthe American Reich will circle back around onyou, again and again and again.

You need to be cleansed of some of yourignorant illusions, c.e. saint germaine—a goldenshower to you, eh. And the rest of you have agood day.


Wub-e-ke-niew

Since I’ve been writing this column, I’vebeen getting a lot of mail and telephone calls thatneed to be answered. Tuesday, my mail-ordercertificate for completing a home-study coursein Shamanism finally arrived. As is documentedby my genuine, gilt (guilt) edged diploma fromthe International Institute of Shamanism, I’vebecome a full-fledged Shaman, D.D.—but I’monly going to work part-time ... it depends onhow I feel.

Under my new title as Shaman, D.D., Iwant to thank the young lady in Cass Lake forcalling to let me know she agreed with me, onthe last column that Wub-e-ke-niew wrote. Thereare a very few Ahnishinahbæótjibway peopleleft. Thank you for calling.

Now, to the stack of mail:

Dear Shaman,I grew up a Chippewa reservation with an

Indian name, and there is no way I’m going to letanyone denigrate that upbringing. Yes, the wholenine yards: the tar-paper shack, 11 brothers andsisters, cutting wood for heat and cooking, haul-ing water, outside toilets, spearing fish in the springfor food, hunting ducks and deer in the fall forwinter food, trapping with the old man for neededcash items, etc. When we went into town tospend our hard-earned money, the white folkswere so glad to see us. We never experiencedany racism. The BIA was always there to helpus out when we needed it, and they gave us fineschooling, with scholarship opportunities to go tocollege so we could work as mid-level Token In-dian bureaucrats for the Bureau and other white


Reflections from the


September 5, 1997


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institutions. So, why don’t you quit bitching andcrying in your news column?

Signed, Jean-PaulDear Wemetigozhens (translated into English,

this means, “Little Burnt Stump”),Yeah, I guess I should quit complaining.

Some of the descendants of the French fur trad-ers, who got turned into Indians during the Warof 1812 with England, got a pretty good deal.Forty years ago, there were quite a few tarpapershacks in the northwoods, and almost nobody hadelectricity or running water—a lot of the whitepeople didn’t have it, either. Back then, therewere actually ducks and deer to hunt, and woodto cut. Nobody had refrigerators, and the onlyway to keep fresh food was to share it. AbeLincoln was born in a log cabin, and so were alot of other people.Dear Charmin,

Indian Religion, doesn’t it have degrees?How do I go about studying this religion, and get-ting some of these degrees? Is it like ChemicalDependency certification? And, do I have tolearn the language so I can help my people?

Signed, Wanna-beDear Helpful,

First of all, you spelled my name wrong.It’s Shaman, with an “S.” If you want Charmin,you’ll need to go see Roger Jourdain, Butch Brun,Bobby Whitefeather, Buggers McArthur, orformer Tribal Chairman Chip Wadena. Thoseare the official Indians you want to see; I’m notan IRA Indian, never have been, and never willbe.

The idea of “degrees” is a historical acci-dent. There was a Frenchman trying to be amedicine man, and he didn’t speak English toowell. He couldn’t say “the,” he always said “de.”He was talking to a blood quantum Indian aboutthe seven Crees up in Canada, and what he saidsounded like “de Crees” or “degrees.” It’s timeto start debunking this mythology of “degrees.”

If you want religion, there are still a lot ofmissionaries around who will be happy to giveyou a free Bible and save you. And, if you want

to help your people, it’s more useful to learn En-glish.Dear Shaman,

How do you make the wigwam shake?Signed, Curious

Dear Nosy,Use a bungee cord, some of the Real In-

dian Traditionalists (especially those with collegedegrees in Indian Studies) spell it bangii.Dear Shaman,

Some of your story-telling, some of yourWannaboozhoo stories, seem to be outdated.Why don’t you get “with it,” and give up on allyour useless old antiquated ideas? I don’t knowwhy you can’t be more like us.

Signed, White TraditionalistDear White Liberal,

The fish are all gone and the deer are dis-appearing. The forests are mostly clearcut orturned into sick agriculture called “tree farms.”The buffalo are gone, and the passenger pigeonsare extinct. They’ve been tearing down piñonnut trees to make room for more cattle, and thespin doctors are creating public opinion to de-stroy the BWCA. They want to “develop” theBWCA to make money. In plain English, theirEuroamerican motto is, “greed is good and ex-ploitation is healthy.”

We’ve given up a lot, already. Why don’tyou try giving up something for awhile, like maybequit stealing other people’s lands, stop giving otherpeople different identities ... why don’t you giveup your apartheid Constitution? And, violenceseems like a useless old antiquated idea to me.As long as you’re talking about giving up worth-less customs, why don’t you straighten out yourlanguage so it doesn’t lie so much?

Dear Shaman,I wanted to know if there really was a

Nanaboozhoo.Signed, Anthropologist

Dear Grave-Robber,I went and consulted a Real Indian Medi-

cine Man, and then I went and talked to several


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Real Indian Traditionalists. They informed methat, “It’s so sacred, we can’t talk about it.”That’s what Real Indians always say when theydon’t know, so I figured that they didn’t know. Idon’t know either, and I don’t really care.

That’s all for now. Keep the mail com-ing. My mailing address is P.O. Box 484, Be-midji, MN 56619, and my telephone numberis (218) 679-3984.

Wub-e-ke-niew


Reflectionsfrom the


Dear Shaman,Why are the Treaties only written in the

English language, why aren’t they also written inthe Indian languages? Shouldn’t a Treaty bewritten in both languages, eh?

Traditional IndianDear Wanna-be,

That’s a very good question. I’m glad youasked that. The treaties have been interpretedmany in different ways, by many different people:by sportswriters, by the DNR, by the BIA, bythe courts, by would-be Indian leaders... Thetreaties were not recorded in the indigenous lan-guages because they were never interpreted intothem. Here, for example, the treaties were in-terpreted into French and into the creole tradelanguage, Chippewa, but not into the indigenouslanguage, Ahnishinahbæótjibway, which is alanguage the treaty interpreters did not speak orunderstand.

One of the big problems with the so-calledIndian Treaties is that they were negotiated be-tween European parties: the Americans and theFrench Métis. The indigenous languages are nota part of the treaties, because the indigenouspeople were excluded from the treaties. The“Indian Treaties” were based European laws of“discovery,” which are foreign European lawswhich do not belong here.

The “Indian Treaties” are not really trea-ties. The World Court does not recognize them—and they never were a part of international law.Even when they were being negotiated, the “trea-ties” were considered to be internal affairs ofthe United States, on land already claimed asUnited States territory. They were never intendedto be international law, because neither the UnitedStates Government nor any other European na-tion ever recognized indigenous people’s right toour own land on this continent. That’s a humanrights violation.

The so-called treaties were written to ful-fill the bare letter-of-the law requirements ofArticle V of the U.S. Constitutional amendments,that: “No person ... shall be ... deprived of ...property, without due process of the law.” Be-cause of their white patriline, the Indians all cameunder the Constitution, and the “Indian Treaties”were the U.S. Government’s way of claimingthat they stole the land legally, in their way ofthinking. The English language is so crooked thatit creates a criminal culture.

Dear Shaman,What about the “hunting and fishing rights”

in the Treaties? Where do the rights of the red-blooded American citizens fit into this?

True Sportsfisherman (Catch-and-Release)

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Dear Bearer of Tall Tales,The whole thing is a tourist trap. Any way

it’s been interpreted, the Indian still has to buy alicense from the White man: from the State, orfrom the IRA “tribal councils” that the Whiteman established. Whether sovereign or semi-sovereign, the Indians have always come underthe jurisdiction of the White man, because Indi-ans are also Europeans.

The Mille Lacs Treaty has been a big cir-cus, because both the treaties and the white lawsbehind them are written only in crooked English,from a European point of view. The White mankeeps reviving the dead treaties because the ex-istence of the United States depends on them.In the early 1970’s, the American Indian Move-ment was hollering, “honor the treaties,” as werethe IRA “Tribal” governments. The U.S. didn’thonor the treaties, so the Indians quit hollering—their loud and violent protests didn’t produce any-thing but job security for the media, more vio-lence and social problems. But, the United StatesGovernment’s claim to this land rests on the trea-ties, so now the White man (Congress and ev-eryone else) is hollering, “honor the treaties.” It’shot air out of Washington, D.C.—theEuroamericans are hiding their genocidal guiltbehind the Indians that they created.

Hunting and fishing is a red herring: it ag-gravates and agonizes public feeling about thetreaties, builds White backlash, and makes moneyfor the White man. Even though some of thetreaties have clauses about hunting and fishing inthem, the United States never intended to honoranything about the treaties except that the U.S.got to claim the land: the French Métis and theSpanish Mestizos (who were the people whosigned the “treaties”) were a conquered peoplewho had to take the identity of “Indian” as a partof the conquest, had no rights then, and still don’thave any rights. “Indian” is a foreign name, andis not indigenous to this land.

Dear Shaman,How did “sovereignty” get into the treaties

and into these reservation tribal governments?

Indian Law StudentDear Future Shyster,

“Sovereignty” is a form of segregation, andthe “Indian laws” are so bad that the Whites don’twant to apply them to their own people. Theyare part of the Jim Crow system of apartheidwhich was supposedly abolished in the South af-ter the Civil Rights Act in the 1960’s. The UnitedStates has no legal basis for taking indigenouspeoples land and resources—they simply stolethem by declaring eminent domain under the au-thority of the Roman Catholic Church. “IndianSovereignty” discriminates against both Whitesand Indians, and it hides the genocide and thegrand land theft here. The Whites need to gethonest about their history, but they can’t, becausetheir language restricts them.

Dear Shaman,Why are all the Indians called “the First

Americans”?A Concerned White Guy

Dear White Boy,The indigenous people of these continents

were destroyed in the genocide. The “Indians”are called the “first Americans” to hide this geno-cide and to pacify the Euroamericans’ con-science.

The Pope made a statement in 1985 aboutthe genocide here, when the Catholic Church wasgoing to Canonize one of the Spanish Missionar-ies in California. But, the Catholic Church wasinto genocide on this continent. Since the mid-1500’s their legal documents have justified geno-cide here with statements like Aristotle’s, “Wararises in a certain sense from nature, since a partof it is the art of the hunt, which is properly usednot only against animals, but also against thosemen who, having been born to obey, reject servi-tude: such a war is just according to nature.”Aristotle tells you a whole lot about your Euro-pean criminal culture and values.

Dear Shaman,I went up to get my last payment check

from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and it wasn’t


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ready. Everyone was sitting around filing theirnails and standing at the water cooler, and justgossiping. What’s wrong with this system?

Ration IndianDear Dole,

When Custer rode off to his last appoint-ment, he told the Indian Agent at the fort, “Don’t

do anything until I get back.” This order hasnever been rescinded.

My mailing address is P.O. Box 484, Be-midji, MN 56619, and my telephone numberis (218) 679-3984.

Wub-e-ke-niew


Reflectionsfrom the


Dear Shaman,Why did the Pilgrims and other European

immigrants call this “The Promised Land,” whenthere were people living here?

signed, D.A.R. BluebloodDaughter

Dear Holier-Than-Thou,The “promise” in “the promised land” comes

from claims that the Christians made about whattheir God said to them. Although the Ten Com-mandments say, “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” theChristian God apparently told His followers thatit was fine to steal from the indigenous peoplehere. The Christian religion changed when goodChristian men saw the vast wealth belonging tothe indigenous people—greed became their illu-minating light, and this enlightenment created suchshady doctrines as Manifest Destiny.

There were a number of allegedly Divinemind-games that the Christians used to justifytheir rapacious theft to themselves, which arestill in operation today. Their thieving rationalesincluded saying that the indigenous people werenot really human beings (in the 1500’s the CatholicChurch revealed the “truth” that indigenouspeople were half-human homunculi). This is thesame kind of thinking as modern racism. Theyalso said that their God created this land and

therefore it “naturally” belonged to Christian im-migrants and not to the people they labelled pa-gans, heathens and savages. This is the still themodern legal foundation for the United States’“eminent domain,” which is why the media isdevoting so much attention to the Landless In-dian Treaties and to the IRA White GovernmentTribal Councils.

The immigrants’ Godly thieving strategiesdepend on crooked hierarchical languages, likeCrooked English. They called some of their ear-liest settlers, “Pilgrims,” but pilgrims are supposedto go back to where they came from, and pil-grimages don’t usually last three centuries, ei-ther.

Interpreted from crooked English, what“The Promised Land” really means, is “The Landof Broken Promises.” The American Dream isa broken promise, a decent living wage is a bro-ken promise, and the Mille Lacs Treaty is onlyone treaty out of more than four hundred trea-ties. Are they going to honor the rest of thosecrooked treaties? I think not.

Dear Shaman,It was in the year 1972 that Roger Jourdain

told all of the Red Lake Indians, “I am building,for you Indians and you white people, a good

September 19, 1997


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road from Bemidji to Red Lake. Look at what Ihave done for you, and you still don’t appreciateme.” People gossip about him and make fun ofhim, instead of honoring our first constitutionallyelected leader, the Father of the Red LakeChippewa Nation.

signed, Rez Shi-nobDear Landless Indian,

What Ira Jourdain did not tell you: to watchout for the big logging trucks that might run overyou, which have been going day and night eversince they straightened out that road. He alsodid not tell you that the White IRA governmentthat he put onto this land, was not to serve youIndians, but to serve the White institutions andthe White corporations. Take a good look aroundyou, and see that the forests have been clearcut,you can’t drink the water, and everything is go-ing into extinction. The Indian ReorganizationAct was encroachment legislation which concen-trated political power into the hands of a fewWhite Indians, and that 1934 IRA is a humanrights violation.

Dear Shaman,What is the meaning of “Indian and Free”?

signed, Indian and Proud

Dear Mr. Crow,The Red Lake Schools have been trying to

teach you English, and you haven’t been listen-ing. You’ll have to go to the back of the segre-gated bus, Jim. The meaning of “Indian and Free”is a con job, and whoever started it is ripping youoff. If you’re “free,” why are you living on thereservation under the U.S. Government’s WhiteIRA Tribal Government, without any civil or hu-man rights? Why is the white man paying you tobe Indian, when he could get all those New Agersto be his Indians for free? The hypothetical $27million is just another the devoting so much at-tention to the Landless Indian Treaties and to theIRA White Government Tribal Councils.

The immigrants’ Godly thieving strategiesdepend on crooked hierarchical languages, like

Crooked English. They called some of their ear-liest settlers, “Pilgrims,” but pilgrims are supposedto go back to where they came from, and pil-grimages don’t usually last three centuries, ei-ther.

Interpreted from crooked English, what“The Promised Land” really means, is “The Landof Broken Promises.” The American Dream isa broken promise, a decent living wage is a bro-ken promise, and the Mille Lacs Treaty is onlyone treaty out of more than four hundred trea-ties. Are they going to honor the rest of thosecrooked treaties? I think not.

Editor’s note: Space limitations in theSeptember 19, 1997 paper precluded publi-cation of the remainder of this column:

Dear Shaman,I’ve heard that the Red Lake Schools are

going to institute a tax on the Red Lake people toencourage reading the English language.

signed, Concerned FutureTaxpayer

Dear Bearer of Bad News,Well, you already live on the reservation,

which is segregated and at the bottom of theWhite man’s social class hierarchy. Why shouldanybody teach you the White man’s tricks, likethe English language, when you might rise up anddo the same thing to the White man as he hasdone to you: put him on a reservation and mis-educate him so that he doesn’t know who he isor where he came from.

If Superintendent Schmidt is really going toteach your kids to read and write—do you thinkthat five hours a year is too much to give yourkids?

Dear Shaman,Maybe you could clarify the statistics about

the millions of Indians who live in the UnitedStates. Do people who are 15/16 White, countas one “Indian” in these statistics?

signed, Full Blood QuantumIndian


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Dear Apple Indian,According to the White man’s way of think-

ing, one drop of “tainted” blood makes a personnot-White. A lot of people remain “Indians” be-cause they don’t want to be discriminated againstas low class almost-White people. Years ago, Iused to hear the tired old worn-out broken slo-gan, “Assimilate.” Now, the White and Indianleaders are using a divide-and-conquer strategyof splitting their subjected people into little ethnicgroups with artificial wanna-be identities. Theeducated ones who are related to the leaders,get better-paying bureaucratic token jobs thanthey could get in the White corporate world, andthe dregs get commodities, rations, and free ridesin the trunk of a police car.

In answer to your question, the White mancreated Indians, so he can do anything he wantswith his Indian statistics. His blame-the-victim

White culture needs somebody like Indians to behis political hockey-pucks and scapegoats.

Dear Shaman,I think you are a fraud and a fake, and

you’re actually nothing but a horse-trader and ahorse thief.

signed, UnbelieverDear Pagan,

Infidel dog! May the fleas of a thousandcamels infest your armpits, and may you leaveno footprints on the sands of time.

My mailing address is P.O. Box 484, Be-midji, MN 56619, and my telephone numberis (218) 679-3984.

Wub-e-ke-niew

Eagle landing near water’s edge at Red Lake, fall 1997.

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Clara by the Farm Station Road, west of Redlake.

“Out west” of Redlake, where Highways 1 and 89 fork.

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Ravaged ecosystems: pine planatation at Red Lake.

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Final reflections on the life of Wub-e-ke-niewWub-e-ke-niew of the Bear Dodem died

Thursday, October 16, at home with his Ah-nishinahbæótjibway land which, as he said, “hasbeen in my family for hundreds of millennia.”

Wub-e-ke-niew’s patrilineal great-grandfa-ther was Bah-se-nos of the Bear Dodem, wholived with his wife Nay-bah-nay-cumig-oke in abirchbark longhouse at Be-kwa-kwan, part of theAhnishinahbæótjibway land of the Bear Do-dem. His grandparents were Bah-wah-we-nind,also of the Bear Dodem, and Ke-niew-e-gwon-ay-beak of Leech Lake. Wub-e-ke-niew wasborn in Bah-wah-we-nind’s log house, also at Be-kwa-kwan, about June 6, 1928. His parents wereBah-wah-we-nind’s son Wub-e-ke-niew, andDelia Lufkins of White Earth. Wub-e-ke-niewexplained that his father was “given the nameFrancis Blake in order to impose an artificial In-dian identity on him,” and often added that, “myIndian name is Francis Blake, Junior.”

Wub-e-ke-niew spent most of his “forma-tive years” with his grandfather Bah-wah-we-nind. After Bah-wah-we-nind’s death in 1935,Wub-e-ke-niew “spent nine years as a politicalprisoner” in the Catholic boarding school at St.Mary’s Mission, Red Lake. Then, he workedfor two years as a part of the migrant labor forcein the Red River Valley. In 1946, he joined theUnited States Army, and after schooling in theMilitary Police Academy, served with the 28thConstabulary in Germany. Wub-e-ke-niew wroteof his military service, “I didn’t even realize thatI was not a U.S. citizen. Indians were madeU.S. citizens in 1924, but in 1946 I hadn’t learnedenough English to figure out that I’m not an In-dian. I enlisted, rather than waiting to be con-scripted, because I figured that if I had to go, Imight as well get it over with on my own terms.”

Wub-e-ke-niew worked after the war inGreat Falls, Montana and in Seattle, and thenmoved to Minneapolis, where he married NorbyFairbanks of White Earth in September, 1953.In the 1950’s and early 1960’s, he worked in in-

dustrial labor, as a handyman, truck driver, andfor J.D. Holtzerman of Minneapolis. In 1963 hewas a Teamsters Union 544 driver for CustomCartage in Minneapolis, and he drove truck until1970. He wrote, “I was teaching myself to readduring the time that I was parked at the dockswaiting for a load, or waiting for my turn to un-load the truck. Sometimes I would spend half aday waiting at the dock, and so I kept an assort-ment of magazines and books and a dictionarywith me in the truck. Whenever I got to a wordI didn’t know, I would look it up in the dictionary,and then write it down. I have always spenttime observing people: their dialect, their accent,how they used their words and their body-lan-guage, what they said and what they meant. TheEnglish language and the Euro-American cultureare still foreign to me—although I understand theimmigrant peoples fairly well by now, I’m stillastounded by some of the things that they thinkand do.

In 1965, Wub-e-ke-niew was part of thealcohol self-help group which started the Ameri-can Indian Movement. From 1971 to 1973, heserved as the Treasurer of AIM. He wrote, “Theway I initially saw AIM, was that this organiza-tion was going to create a vehicle for AboriginalIndigenous people to take back our identity, andre-empower ourselves and our community. As Ilook back on it now, this was a big mistake.”While Treasurer of AIM, he “managed to getthe first American Indian Movement SurvivalSchool,” Heart of the Earth Survival School,started in Minneapolis. After the occupation ofWounded Knee, Wub-e-ke-niew resigned fromAIM in June of 1973. AIM, Wub-e-ke-niewwrote, had an “implicit charter with the Whiteliberal organizations, who wanted to support AIMin working toward social change, but not in actu-ally making structural changes to society. Thekind of Indian leaders the White man supportsare professional Indians who talk a fine speech,but who are European subject people. When it

October 24, 1997


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comes to reality, many of these externally-sup-ported community leaders value their job and su-perficial prestige more than they do their owncommunity, and can be manipulated into stealingfrom even their own children. BIA Commis-sioner John Collier described these Indians ashaving a ‘white-plus psychology’.” He contin-ued, Métis people have their own identity, andthe capability of realizing themselves as a peoplein their own right, but they cannot do it from withinthe Indian identity, because that’s owned by theWhite man. I can’t speak for anyone else; it isup to each person to figure out who they are andto chart their own destiny. The only thing that Iwill say is that the Indians are not the AboriginalIndigenous people of this Continent, and that theydo neither themselves nor us any good by pre-tending that they are.”

After he resigned from AIM, Wub-e-ke-niew “devoted more attention to politics, still try-ing to make positive change from within the sys-tem.” He worked with his family in the JimmyCarter campaign of 1975, then after the election,went to Kansas City, Missouri. While there, heworked as an apartment caretaker and as a jack-of-all-trades for an office supply company. Healso helped organize the Longest Walk throughKansas City, and wrote that at that time he “didnot know what it was supposed to accomplish,”although he came to “understand why this kindof demonstration, although the participants feel afleeting moment of release and unity, is inevita-bly a charade and a waste of energy.”

In 1981, Wub-e-ke-niew returned to theAhnishinahbæótjibway land of his Bear Dodem,where he spent the remaining sixteen years ofhis life. He wrote that he “realized that I neededto become a part of the land again, and regainmy roots and my identity. I was born here, and Iwill die here. This is my land, my Ahnishinah-bæótjibway philosophy, my spirituality, my placewith Grandmother Earth.” Wub-e-ke-niew mar-ried Clara NiiSka by the Ahnishinahbæótjibwaytradition, on his land in 1984.

Wub-e-ke-niew drove school bus for sev-eral years, then attended Bemidji State Univer-

sity, where he “took a writing class and learnedhow to write in English.” In 1985, he began writ-ing Freedom of Information Act letters to theBureau of Indian Affairs, as well as doing politi-cal writing protesting the “colonial practice whichis applied to Aboriginal Indigenous people; usinga foreign infrastructure to separate us form ourlands. The U.S. Government used their Indiansto tell me that I was not welcome on my ownland, which has never been ceded or sold by mypeople the Ahnishinahbæótjibway, whose landthis is. As far as I am concerned, the so-calledIndian government could leave tomorrow, andtake their Indians with them. I have told theWhite people on the BIA’s Tribal Council, ‘goplay Indian some other place.’ ... The BIA andthe Tribal Council are classic examples of racistinstitutions. No matter who fills the positions,the structure of the institution compels them tobehave in a racist way.”

In 1986, Wub-e-ke-niew was appointedchairman of the Economic Development Com-mittee for the Red Lake Peoples Council. Hewrote, “we spent two years working with one ofthe top grantwriters in the State of Minnesota,”trying to build community-owned economic de-velopment on Red Lake Reservation, but “couldnot get any foundation funding. ... There seemsto be plenty of grant money to study problems, topromote Indians, or to fund institutions whichaddress the symptoms on the surface, but noneat all for Aboriginal Indigenous grassroots orga-nizations to address the problems on our own land,at the root causes.” He also spent several yearsworking on a gardening project. He wrote, “Wefocussed on the Ahnishinahbæótjibway tradi-tion of gardens partly because, for anybody,growing one’s own food brings a person back intouch with the land. Connection to the land isthe foundation of a healthy society. We werealso addressing the serious health problemscaused by poor diet, and wanted to change thecutting-the-forests-to-buy-supermarket-food eco-nomics which the BIA has encouraged.”

After having spent more than two decades“trying to make positive change from within the


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system,” Wub-e-ke-niew decided to heal the “de-formed culture” which the Euroamericansbrought to his land by going to the root causes.He began doing research and writing We HaveThe Right To Exist, reading archival and histori-cal documents validating what he had “alwaysknown but couldn’t prove.”

In December of 1990, Wub-e-ke-niewwrote to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior that,“I will no longer be identified by your racist termof ‘Indian.’ I am not an ‘Indian,’ I am not a‘Chippewa,’ and I am not a ‘Native American’.”He explained that, “If I allow myself to continueto be falsely identified as ‘Indian’ I am guilty ofcomplacency and conspiracy; I want to partwhatsoever of the fraudulent Indian identity thatthe United States Government is still using todestroy the legitimate people of these two conti-nents. ... I wipe my hands clean of being identi-fied in the same category as those who are con-tributing to ongoing genocide, dispossession anddestruction of my own Aboriginal Indigenouspeople and my own Traditional Aboriginal Indig-enous culture. I’m sending my ‘Indian IdentityCard’ by certified mail to the Supreme Court. Iam turning it in as a false document issued withfelonious and genocidal intent by the United StatesGovernment in collusion with their colonial In-dian Reorganization Act ‘Tribal Councils.’ I amnot an Indian!” In accor-dance with provisions ofthe U.S. Constitution,Wub-e-ke-niew sent hisIndian Identity Card toChief Justice ThurgoodMarshall of the U.S. Su-preme Court, who kept it,and so Wub-e-ke-niew le-gally regained his own realidentity, Ahnishinahbæót-jibway of the Bear Do-dem.

In 1995, Wub-e-ke-niew’s book, We Have

The Right To Exist, was published after nearlyten years of research and writing. Wub-e-ke-niew wrote columns for the Native AmericanPress/Ojibwe News for many years, and didother writing and public speaking. He was alsostudying language, comparing the harmoniousmale-and-female balance of his egalitarian Ah-nishinahbæótjibway language, with the violenthierarchical abstractions of male-dominated lan-guages like English. He had begun writing twonovels.

Wub-e-ke-niew gardened for many years,and maintained his ancient Ahnishinahbæótjib-way permacultural tradition, making maple syrupand maple sugar in the sugarbush of his BearDodem. He cut his own firewood, repaired hisown vehicles, and led an active life. In collabo-ration with Jean Houston and the Mystery Schoolin New York, he was working to establish a ra-dio station as a memorial to the indigenous peoplewho were killed in the genocide of these twocontinents.

Wub-e-ke-niew was buried on his land Fri-day by family, joining his ancestors “who are apart of every handful of this Earth.” His legacyincludes the decades of his work “to make this abetter world for all human beings.” Wub-e-ke-niew described himself as, “just an ordinary hu-man being.”


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November 17, 1997Dear Noam Chomsky,

Thank you very much for your letter ofcondolence about my husband Wub-e-ke-niew. Yourletter is one that would have meant a great deal tohim, as it does to me. (Ahnishinahbæótjibway peoplecommunicate with their deceased relatives, so perhaps“means” is the more appropriate verb.)

Wub-e-ke-niew credited you with giving himthe insight which enabled him to understand theEnglish language beyond its surface. One of theagreements which we made at the outset of ourrelationship, was that he would teach me as much ashe could of what he knew, if I would in turn teach himas much as I could of what I knew, especially theEnglish language. After we had been together only afew years, he would ask me repeatedly what was the“key” to the English language, which was a questionI did not know how to answer. He would say, “Whywon’t you tell me? It’s your native language—youshould know what it is.” At that time, I did not havethe insight into an Ahnishinahbæótjibwayperspective, from which might have answered hisquestion. Among Wub-e-ke-niew’s many gifts to mewere such questions about my “native” language andculture, pushing me to consider things which I hadtaken for granted, to try to explain them in the contextof a very different world-view.

Wub-e-ke-niew read some of your books,and after having read an article of yours in TheProgressive, wrote to you, although without reallyexpecting a reply. He was delighted when youanswered, defending Lorraine Kingsley’s paper on“discipline.” We subsequently gave your letter toLorraine, who also very much appreciated it. Fromhis reading of your work, and his correspondencewith you, he gained what was a deeply meaningfulinsight from his perspective: that the “key” to theEnglish language was that it is “abstract, linear andhierarchical.” He would tell people with pride, “NoamChomsky showed me the English language.”

Wub-e-ke-niew thought about issues oflanguage until the very end of his life. As heunderstood the English language more clearly, hebecame increasingly convinced that “language createsthe world,” and that transformation of English,particularly to include what he understood as an“indigenous female perspective,” had the potentialof radically transforming the world.

Throughout this past summer, I worked withWub-e-ke-niew intensively, trying to understand the

meaning behind what he was saying about“language.” One of my academic advisors, Robert“Robin” Brown, is a linguist (among other things).During my brief sojourns to the University, RobinBrown and I also discussed what both Wub-e-ke-niew and you were saying about language; Wub-e-ke-niew and I would talk at length about what youand Robin Brown were saying.

The topic merits a longer discussion thatwhat I can give you right now, but it seems as thoughpart of the crucial distinction between Ahnishinah-bæótjibway and English has to do with underlyingorganization: that the core referents of Ahnishinah-bæótjibway are patterns of interrelationship, while inEnglish they are abstract ideals. There is more to itthan that, and another part of it has to do withinterrelationships with the natural world. After nearlya full day of wrestling with questions this past summer,Wub-e-ke-niew finally told me, “All you have to do islook at the ecosystem. Ahnishinahbæótjibwaymaintained a paradise. Now look at it. The water is allpolluted, everything has been wrecked and plundered.There’s your answer.” He returned to this idea, of theenvironment as a manifestation of language, severaltimes throughout the summer.

Another aspect of it became apparent onlytoward the end of the summer. Wub-e-ke-niew hadgiven me a car this spring [to be strictly factual, herepaired a car which I’d bought from a friend last winterfor $35 (neighborhood entrepreneurs pay people $25to tow them away before the City does), turning itinto something very close to my “ideal” car]. Hesteadfastly maintained it was “your car, so you drive.”During the years of our marriage, I had always let himdrive when we traveled together, in part because hehad been an extremely competent professional truckdriver and was a fairly critical backseat driver. Duringthe summer, I struggled to make sense of his oftenurgently-delivered advice on how to drive, and finally,I asked him what he was seeing, that I didn’t. He toldme that I wasn’t paying attention to “the energy,”which he then extended into lessons on how to seearound corners and predict other drivers’ actions.What he said fit with what he had showed me, yearspreviously, about hunting; as well as with the contextof other aspects of Ahnishinahbæótjibway culture andways of being. ...

I’m not certain what else to write about thisright now. I am amply aware that much of what I mightsay is not only quite strictly beyond the parametersof Western academic discourse, but that there are


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dogmatic defenses in Western epistemology to keepit outside of those parameters. However, it is quiteclear to me that there are integrated elements of Ah-nishinahbæótjibway awareness and culturallylegitimated communication which include thesedomains—and Wub-e-ke-niew was always rightabout whether or not there was a car around the curve,on the lightly trafficked rural roads we drove thissummer. “Keeping people in a box” which cuts themoff from these kinds of awareness and communicationis something which fits quite nicely with otherpatterns of Western societal hierarchy; using oldanthropological terms, it’s functional within thesystem. And, there are people in what Wub-e-ke-niew called “White society” who do communicate inthese domains, although perhaps in ways which areonly vaguely recognized as “intuition.”

… Wub-e-ke-niew very clearly saw hisapproaching death. During the last few days of hislife, he asked me to do a number of things, “because Ican’t.” Among the four key issues, which he returnedto several times during his last days, was his request,“Be sure to tell Noam Chomsky that it’s in thelanguage, not in the institutions. The languagecreates the institutions.” [Wub-e-ke-niew and I] talkedat some length about that letter [that you wrote me

last Spring]. Wub-e-ke-niew then gave me severalexamples of “institutions” excluding people, includingobservations about the buildings at the University ofMinnesota. He explained that, “those buildings aredesigned through language,” and noted that theirimposing architecture made them inaccessible topeople in wheelchairs; he also commented that accessto them is limited fairly exclusively to people of certainsocial classes.

Wub-e-ke-niew and I had discussed yourfairly tightly delineated definitions of “language,” bothin the context of your letter and with regard to theterminology I might use in my Ph.D. thesis. I hadconveyed to Wub-e-ke-niew, Robin Brown’sexplanations of the political and historical factorswhich, according to Brown, may have played a role inyour definitions, focus and research emphasis. Wub-e-ke-niew and I talked at length about “discourse”versus “language”—and Wub-e-ke-niew insisted thatwhat he meant was language.

If one begins at the reality-base of the Ah-nishinahbæótjibway instead of the philosophical baseof the Western Europeans, then what Wub-e-ke-niewwas saying begins to make sense, at least to me,although I haven’t figured out how to describe itclearly, yet. …

Clara and her “ideal car,” summer 1997.

Pho

to —

Wub

-e-k

e-ni

ew


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This is getting to be a long letter; the mainpoint of it is Wub’s message to you, that “it’s in thelanguage.”

…Your correspondence with Wub-e-ke-niew,

the work of yours which he read, your ideas, and yourendorsement of his book, meant a great deal to him.He was passionately interested in language: both inthoroughly understanding and being able to use the

English language, and, especially during the last fewyears of his life, in understanding “language” in abroader sense. He deeply believed that language ashe saw it, was a key to healing the pathologies whichhe saw in Western society. “Thank you” is aninadequate acknowledgement, but I don’t know whatother words one might write.

Sincerely,Clara NiiSka

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