Steve and Megan Dragswolf - thoughts, life, etc.
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The Indians of Russia

The Russian Itelmen look a lot like the natives in the Americas and they may just be relatives. The short article states that it's somewhat unknown if their dress and rituals have survived since before the great migration or if they're simply taking current Native tradition and making it their own. Either way, it's an interesting photoessay that the article links to.

Some people like to say that ancient tribal peoples migrated to the US from Asia thousands of years ago, but I think it was the other way around. We were created here in America, with the creation stories to back it up, and migrated and filled the other lands. I think the Mormons even say that the Garden of Eden was around Michigan somewhere. Now add to that the fact that Adam and Eve were Indian and I think we're getting somewhere :)

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Filed under  //   Adam and Eve   America   ancient   Conspiracy Theory   Garden of Eden   history   Itelmen   migration   Mormon   relatives   Russia  

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Filed under  //   America   death  

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Tim Giago: How will Universal Health Coverage Affect Native Americans?

Health care in America is a failing proposition. An estimated 47 million Americans do not have health insurance. And yet Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius calls the health care of Native Americans a “historic failure.” What about health care in the rest of America?

The new head of the Indian Health Service, Dr. Yvette Roubideaux, was not as harsh. She said, “It’s clear that there’s a call for change and improvement in the Indian Health Care Service, and it’s also clear the IHS has been significantly under-funded for many years. The staff of Indian Health Service has been doing the best it can with limited resources, and in some cases they are providing excellent quality of care with limited resources.”

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the man in the Senate leading the way, said that Congress will pass comprehensive and meaningful health care legislation this year. He compared the legislation as the most sweeping since the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “It’s gonna pass. It’s gonna happen. There’s no doubt about it,” he said.

The efforts to introduce universal health care can be traced to the days of Woodrow Wilson and more recently to the political fiasco during the Bill Clinton administration in 1993 and 1994. The most powerful opposition to universal health care can be found in the medical profession and the insurance companies. They present a formidable lobby on Capitol Hill.

Those Americans opposed to it compare it to Canada’s or Britain’s health care systems, which they say are nothing but socialized medicine. The Indian Health Care system, deemed a “historic failure” by Sebelius, has also been labeled as socialized medicine, and the fact that she would label it as a failure does not place much faith in an even larger universal health care system. It just seems that every time the federal government takes total control over anything, failure is almost assured. Watch out General Motors.

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Filed under  //   America   Canada   health care   Indian Health  

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Actually, the liberal leftists are the worst things that’s ever happened to America, let alone [to] the Indian people. They are, supremely, extremely racist against Indian people. The liberal left is our worst enemy. It’s been the Democrats in Congress that have consistently for almost two centuries, that have put the most debilitating laws into effect that strip us, bit by bit, of our freedoms.

Russel Means in an interview discussing Property Rights and Natives.

This is an intriguing interview with Russell Means by Scott Horton of AntiWar Radio that follows the same theme as yesterday by asking the question, Who really owns Indian land?

Delta Foxtrot: Rebuliding America, one Neighborhood at a Time - Russell Means with Scott Horton

Russell Means in discussion with Scott Horton on topics from Corporate Farming, Establishing Neighborhood Power and the Mass Thievery known as Property Tax.  Among other topics in this thirty minute interview, they speak to the imperial laboratory of Indian Reservations and how tactics perfected there have been exported to other countries, and now brought back to America itself.

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Filed under  //   America   Congress   Democrats   land   laws   liberal   politics   quote   reservations   Russel Means  

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A Call To Young Warriors, To All Young People

deltafoxtrot:

by David Swallow
Indian Country Today - 2 January 2009

Young American Indians today suffer from many problems of the modern world. Alcohol and drug abuse, early pregnancies, gangs and psychological disorders are everywhere on the reservations. However, a lot of the development of these issues can be historically traced back to World War II or shortly before.

The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act created a special kind of dual citizenship which made American Indians into citizens of the United States (for the first time) as well as citizens of their own sovereign nations. Finally, Indians could vote. But also, for the first time, they could be drafted into the military.

The young Lakota Warriors looked at the military as a way to prove themselves as warriors. They believed it was an honorable extension of the traditional warrior ways.

So, young American Indians went off to WWII. After 100 years of forced boarding schools which resulted in generations of young Indians losing their sense of identity, family and traditions, the military became like the family they had never been allowed to have. They were grouped into companies which lived together and fought together and bonded with each other as a unit, as a family.

When the young warriors came home, they often became lost. With their military family no longer existing, gangs began to form to take their place. An example is the Hell’s Angels, the famous motorcycle gang, which was started in the late 1940s. It is commonly believed to have been founded by ex-members of famous military fighting units of the same name.
The young warrior knew his real purpose was to protect his people and their lives.

Then, in 1953, long after Prohibition had ended, President Eisenhower made it legal to sell alcohol to American Indians for the first time. This changed the lives of all Indian people.

In his grandfathers’ day, the Lakota warrior came from a good family where he had been taught good behavior, good manners, respect for all life and good relationship with all living things. His parents never lied to him and he never lied to anyone. He was reliable and practiced honor and respect with a clean mind.

Even with all those qualities, he still had to qualify to be a member of a warrior society. He had to prove himself. It wasn’t just about fighting. But when he did fight, even then he practiced respect. He never mutilated another warrior.

The young warrior also never stole from his own people. He never beat up or took advantage of his people. He never practiced sexual assaults on anyone.

The young warrior knew his real purpose was to protect his people and their lives. He knew his purpose was to protect the c’anunpa carriers, the sacred pipe carriers, and the holy men and spiritual leaders. He also listened to and learned from the holy men and spiritual leaders. He not only respected and protected life but he also learned to practice compassion. He acted with honor.

The young warrior knew that if he did all this, life would be beautiful and all would live in harmony.

But with the effects of alcohol, drugs, and the continuing policies of the federal government towards the Plains Tribes, most of this has become lost and forgotten.

These policies aren’t so different from those practiced against other ethnic groups throughout history. The Irish, the Italians, the Jewish, the Gypsies, and many others all experienced what was called ethnic cleansing. But, for the American Indian, the policies still continue today.

These policies try to force us to live in ghetto housing called cluster housing. These policies have taken away our traditional foods that kept us healthy. These policies have created a private state prison system that makes money on incarcerating our young people rather than rehabilitating them. These policies have kept my children, my grandchildren and nephews and nieces, from learning how to survive and live from the land.

These policies and politics have created the “haves” and the “have-nots,” a two-level society of extremes on the reservation favoring corruption and nepotism in BIA and reservation government relationships.

We have no YMCA. Many have no job or any possibility of a job. We have no vocational training centers. We have no residential treatment centers for children and teens as an alternative to jail like they have in the cities.

Hope is hard to find. So belonging to a gang has become the only way for many of our young people to feel good, to feel needed and wanted.

Now, they say the Lakota are “Third World welfare recipients.” But worse is the fact that our young people steal from each other. Our people shoot and hurt each other. They practice deceit and abuse our girls. Elders now live in fear. The traditional values of the Lakota warrior no longer exist. They have become lost to alcohol and drugs and gangs.

So today, I am calling on all young Lakota warriors and young Lakota people. We need you to help save the future generations to come. Not me, not Grandpa, I don’t need saving. But your children and your grandchildren do.

Get back into your own traditional spirituality and traditional ways and values. Those hold the answers for you. Those will guide you and help you to know who you are more than any gang ever could. And it will be you who will bring the harmony back to our lives.

It will be you who will bring back hope to our People.

Ho he’cetu yelo. I have spoken these words.

(David Swallow, Wowitan Yuha Mani, is a Lakota spiritual leader and a Headman of the Lakota Nation. He resides on the Pine Ridge Reservation in Porcupine, S.D.)

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Filed under  //   America   boarding school   government   history   Lakota   native   Pine Ridge   warrior   WWII   young  

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Inside USA - The Native American voting block - 01 Mar 2008 (via AlJazeeraEnglish)

This week Inside USA travels across America to speak to the Lakota Sioux, the Western Shoshone, and the Navajo. 

The Native American voting block in swing states like Arizona and New Mexico can be crucial. 

But what happens when Native Americans want to opt out of the US altogether?

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Filed under  //   America   Arizona   Lakota   Navajo   New Mexico   Shoshone   Sioux   video   vote  

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DCist: DCist Interview: Sarah Vowell

http://dcist.com/2008/10/09/dcist_interview_sarah_vowell_1.php

Presumably you had a pretty good grasp of the colonists’s behavior toward the Native Americans before you started writing …

Yeah, that part of it is not complicated at all.

Did you uncover anything that actually shocked you?

I don’t know about shocked. I mean, it is shocking, the idea of burning 700 people alive is shocking, which they did to the Pequot, babies included. Baby burning is always pretty shocking.

But I do talk about my own little epiphany I had with my own background, being part Cherokee, and the Cherokee are one of the so-called five civilized tribes, and always

prided themselves on their civilized behavior. And to me, that aspect of Cherokee heritage always made me a little uncomfortable, because I just felt like the English showed up and the Cherokee just dropped everything they were doing and said, “sounds good to me,” and immediately converted to Christianity and wanted to become white southerners to the extent that they owned black slaves. There’s nothing Geronimo about the Cherokee, and I always wondered, where was their backbone? And then when I was researching the big plague, the one that happened essentially right after the first European contact, and I was specifically researching the plague that happened amongst the Native American population in Massachusetts between 1616 and 1619. The reason that the Pilgrims and the Puritans can sort of swoop in and settle Massachusetts was that pretty much the entire native population was killed off by this small pox epidemic. That basically happened up and down the Americas starting in 1492, starting from fisherman and traders and explorers, that initial contact brought so many germs that some scholars estimate as much as 90 percent of the native population of the Americas was wiped out even before organized colonization started.

So I was reading all that and then I came across one sentence from some anthropologist who said that when the Cherokee suffered through an epidemic like that, their priests destroyed all the idols of the tribe. Basically, they abandoned their God, because God had abandoned them. And that was just a light bulb moment, it was like, oh, that’s why when the English show up and they’re so healthy and their God protects them from all these horrible diseases and epidemics, that’s why the English ways and especially English religion and education would seem so attractive. So that answered that little thing that had pretty much nagged me my entire life.

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Filed under  //   America   Cherokee   Christianity   essays   God   history   Massachusetts   Sarah Vowell  

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An indigenous vision to heal America Peter: An indigenous vision to heal America | Indian Country Today | Opinion

http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/opinion/28625494.html

There is only one path that I see for America to truly become a land of life, liberty and justice for all. That path is to heal itself through an uncompromisingly honest acknowledgment and thorough addressing of its atrocities and lies. Without this, our country will continue to act out of ignorance, fear, greed and an obsessive need to forcefully control human lives, both domestically and internationally.

Humanity has experienced time and again how a history rooted in dysfunction and unsustainability feeds the fire of self-destruction. As sure as the Roman Empire collapsed and a drug addict smiles as his last dose ushers him to death, the United States will continue to blindly and, in some cases, consciously inflict suffering at home and abroad if it does not acknowledge and address the truth of its past and current actions.

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Filed under  //   America   health care   Indigenous   vision  

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Native images

Tribune Photo/BARBARA ALLISON “American Indian #4,” by Fritz Scholder from the Midwest Museum of American Art.

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Filed under  //   America   Indian   painting  

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Native images

Tribune Photo/BARBARA ALLISON “Last Indian with American Flag,” by Fritz Scholder from the Midwest Museum of American Art.

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