Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.
He offers his own reflections on organizing and the state of America's declining empire....
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
OWNING OUR SORDID HISTORY
3 comments:
Brother Jonah
said...
There is a hole in the ground, at Deadwood. What was described at the start of the series of TV movies with the same name, an encampment of essentially illegal aliens. An illegal town dedicated to illegal activities and, at Little Big Horn and later at Wounded Knee, and in my lifetime at Wounded Knee again, defended in its so called right to existence by the United States Army.
The Black Hills, especially around Deadwood, are known as the strongest medicine on the earth, the very heart of the earth. The heart of Wakan Tonka, not "Great Spirit" but "Great Buffalo". I've heard that from satellite images, the Black Hills have the appearance of a bison heart. Maybe that's wishful thinking, a massive huge Rorschact Inkblot like seeing what you want to see in the movement of the clouds, or hearing what you expect to hear at a seance.
I think they're right. There's also that hole at Deadwood. It's a strip mine that's the last incarnation of the original illegal gold mining that brought Custer to defend. Many feel, and I think with them, that they have drilled a hole into the very heart of the Earth mother. Certainly the Mt Rushmore monument is a blasphemy to any but the most diehard worshiper of money. The Capitalist gods carved into a wall of a cathedral built by God Himself, I see that as a Christian. It would be like going to St Peters in Rome and writing your name on the walls in shit-based paint. There's a movement, still, to carve the face of Ronald Reagan onto the hill.
Offensive, yes. Worse, it is seen as the final death of the Earth Mother. And what if they're right? AND, the hole in the heart of Wakan Tonka... is to take out the death-blood of Capitalism, the ultimate prize... gold.
Midnight rambling, that. There's a related story, several in fact. The Northern Cheyenne reservation/POW/Concentration camp has had a rigged election process which for the past ten years has allowed strip mining for the biggest coal deposit yet found. I heard a couple of well dressed business fellows on the DART/TRE train running between Dallas and Ft Worth talking about it. Boasting about it, it was their energy corporation doing the deed. We had to wait about ten minutes outside Downtown Ft Worth while a huge coal train, one every 27 minutes was the time given, heading from the Canadian borderlands to the ports at Houston and Galveston to be loaded onto ships and sent to China. I tried that old thing I did as a child when a train passed by, count the cars... If it gets past a hundred you just give up and say "damn that's a big ol' train".
There's a song, I think Loretta Lynn sang it, about the Peabody Coal Co. strip mining Kentucky into oblivion "And poppa won't you take me back to Muehlenberg county down by the Greene River where Paradise lay...
Well I'm sorry my child, but you're too late in askin' Mr Peabody's coal train done hauled it away".
Kentucky is sacred ground to the Cherokee. So is Tennessee. Chattanooga is the capital of the Cherokee Nation from before LaSalle brought his boats up the Mississippi. Word traveled slower in those days, but it had traveled. The Spanish had defeated the Aztec empire, wowing them with their horses, their Iron Shirts and their muskets.
By the time they got to the Mississippi, though, word had traveled. The muskets and cannon, so fearsome, were inaccurate, didn't have much further range than a bow and arrow and they took a longer time to load. If you boxed up the Spaniards on their boats, their horses were useless. One name for the group that includes Cherokee is "Muskogee" which means "creek". Water nations who had a lot of experience in controlling what did, or did not, go past on the river. Oh, and that if they shot above the collar on the armor, it too became worthless. And that it was incredibly hot and uncomfortable. Bugs and sweat got into it. LaSalle was technically handed a defeat.
Chattanooga has a sacred mountain, that a coal company is in the process of strip mining. They struck a deal with the governor of Tennessee to mine the hill, leased from the state and not from the Eastern Band, and with the curious rider that they didn't have to deal with the Cherokee Nation because there wasn't a long string of documents written in English, French and Spanish specifically declaring the mountain to be Cherokee land. And that somehow, down the road from the Governors office where the Cherokee Nation has government offices, somehow they couldn't find any of the descendants of the original owners...
Isn't that amazing? It's a miracle, call the pope! They couldn't find Cherokee in Tennessee.
It's enough to give you that rabbit-in-the-headlights stare of utter helplessness.
And the priests, when they came with the Conquistadores, had images of God nailed to a cross made of the gold they truly worship.
I added a comment on Not My Tribe and linked this. Every Memorial Day, there's a special ceremony in Washing Tundy Sea honoring Medal of Honor wearers. The twenty-seven names from Wounded Knee will of course be recited. And they will soil any honor associated with that medal.
My dad knew a man in the Air Force, who had been cut up badly while charging a machine gun nest, a few more shots and it would have severed the torso from the legs right about the belly button. They patched him back together, he lived, actually recovered, had a line of bullet wounds from his right nipple to his left hip and some really horrendous exit wounds in the back. He also got a CHOH.
He would, according to Dad, show up for inspections in fatigues, wrinkled and often dirty, unshaven, and the only extra adornment the CMOH.
I guess he had an attitude. Good on ye, lad. I didn't even have to get almost chopped in half with a machine gun to get mine. Of course, mine doesn't have a CMOH to go with it either.
But, 27 for essentially what a slaughterhouse worker does every hour. They've screwed the very notion of honor out of all proportion. Not the worst part of what they did, but heinous nonetheless.
3 comments:
There is a hole in the ground, at Deadwood. What was described at the start of the series of TV movies with the same name, an encampment of essentially illegal aliens. An illegal town dedicated to illegal activities and, at Little Big Horn and later at Wounded Knee, and in my lifetime at Wounded Knee again, defended in its so called right to existence by the United States Army.
The Black Hills, especially around Deadwood, are known as the strongest medicine on the earth, the very heart of the earth. The heart of Wakan Tonka, not "Great Spirit" but "Great Buffalo".
I've heard that from satellite images, the Black Hills have the appearance of a bison heart. Maybe that's wishful thinking, a massive huge Rorschact Inkblot like seeing what you want to see in the movement of the clouds, or hearing what you expect to hear at a seance.
I think they're right. There's also that hole at Deadwood.
It's a strip mine that's the last incarnation of the original illegal gold mining that brought Custer to defend. Many feel, and I think with them, that they have drilled a hole into the very heart of the Earth mother. Certainly the Mt Rushmore monument is a blasphemy to any but the most diehard worshiper of money. The Capitalist gods carved into a wall of a cathedral built by God Himself, I see that as a Christian.
It would be like going to St Peters in Rome and writing your name on the walls in shit-based paint.
There's a movement, still, to carve the face of Ronald Reagan onto the hill.
Offensive, yes. Worse, it is seen as the final death of the Earth Mother. And what if they're right? AND, the hole in the heart of Wakan Tonka... is to take out the death-blood of Capitalism, the ultimate prize... gold.
Midnight rambling, that. There's a related story, several in fact. The Northern Cheyenne reservation/POW/Concentration camp has had a rigged election process which for the past ten years has allowed strip mining for the biggest coal deposit yet found. I heard a couple of well dressed business fellows on the DART/TRE train running between Dallas and Ft Worth talking about it. Boasting about it, it was their energy corporation doing the deed. We had to wait about ten minutes outside Downtown Ft Worth while a huge coal train, one every 27 minutes was the time given, heading from the Canadian borderlands to the ports at Houston and Galveston to be loaded onto ships and sent to China. I tried that old thing I did as a child when a train passed by, count the cars... If it gets past a hundred you just give up and say "damn that's a big ol' train".
There's a song, I think Loretta Lynn sang it, about the Peabody Coal Co. strip mining Kentucky into oblivion
"And poppa won't you take me
back to Muehlenberg county
down by the Greene River
where Paradise lay...
Well I'm sorry my child,
but you're too late in askin'
Mr Peabody's coal train
done hauled it away".
Kentucky is sacred ground to the Cherokee. So is Tennessee. Chattanooga is the capital of the Cherokee Nation from before LaSalle brought his boats up the Mississippi. Word traveled slower in those days, but it had traveled. The Spanish had defeated the Aztec empire, wowing them with their horses, their Iron Shirts and their muskets.
By the time they got to the Mississippi, though, word had traveled. The muskets and cannon, so fearsome, were inaccurate, didn't have much further range than a bow and arrow and they took a longer time to load. If you boxed up the Spaniards on their boats, their horses were useless. One name for the group that includes Cherokee is "Muskogee" which means "creek". Water nations who had a lot of experience in controlling what did, or did not, go past on the river. Oh, and that if they shot above the collar on the armor, it too became worthless. And that it was incredibly hot and uncomfortable. Bugs and sweat got into it. LaSalle was technically handed a defeat.
Chattanooga has a sacred mountain, that a coal company is in the process of strip mining. They struck a deal with the governor of Tennessee to mine the hill, leased from the state and not from the Eastern Band, and with the curious rider that they didn't have to deal with the Cherokee Nation because there wasn't a long string of documents written in English, French and Spanish specifically declaring the mountain to be Cherokee land. And that somehow, down the road from the Governors office where the Cherokee Nation has government offices, somehow they couldn't find any of the descendants of the original owners...
Isn't that amazing? It's a miracle, call the pope! They couldn't find Cherokee in Tennessee.
It's enough to give you that rabbit-in-the-headlights stare of utter helplessness.
And the priests, when they came with the Conquistadores, had images of God nailed to a cross made of the gold they truly worship.
I added a comment on Not My Tribe and linked this.
Every Memorial Day, there's a special ceremony in Washing Tundy Sea honoring Medal of Honor wearers. The twenty-seven names from Wounded Knee will of course be recited. And they will soil any honor associated with that medal.
My dad knew a man in the Air Force, who had been cut up badly while charging a machine gun nest, a few more shots and it would have severed the torso from the legs right about the belly button. They patched him back together, he lived, actually recovered, had a line of bullet wounds from his right nipple to his left hip and some really horrendous exit wounds in the back. He also got a CHOH.
He would, according to Dad, show up for inspections in fatigues, wrinkled and often dirty, unshaven, and the only extra adornment the CMOH.
I guess he had an attitude. Good on ye, lad.
I didn't even have to get almost chopped in half with a machine gun to get mine.
Of course, mine doesn't have a CMOH to go with it either.
But, 27 for essentially what a slaughterhouse worker does every hour. They've screwed the very notion of honor out of all proportion. Not the worst part of what they did, but heinous nonetheless.
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