"White Indians" Vexed with the CBC and Barack Obama in Particular for Their Opposition to Cherokee Anti-African Racism...

22.4.08

Funny how First Nations sovereignty after five centuries of anti-Aboriginal genocide, racism and colonial domination, Indians are finally ready to close ranks and do battle. What are we fighting about/for? The legal rejection of African sisters and brothers from the nation.

Despite the fact that the violation of our human and internationally recognised sovereign rights are continuing to be violated by a political entity that recognises torture and imperialism as activities duly sanctioned by the Palestinian teacher Jesus, some American Indians are considering taking their sovereignty fight to the World Court over the legal and/or moral right of the Cherokee Nation to liquidate African members of the nation.

I personally can think of several issues that Indians concerned with their national independence could focus on such as Native American sterilization, Aboriginal alcoholism First Nations peoples and HIV/AIDS and American Indian domestic abuse, but evidently these killers and the age-old haunt of diabetes do not merit as much attention as a putsch to eliminate the "Black" problem. The fact that it has become more and more apparent every successive day that this is at its base an issue of White Indians versus the Black Indians is still insultingly dismissed as "counter-racism" by the "left". The "other" Cherokee as a collective and Euro-Indians uniquely concerned with such issues when not sporting Confederate Flags on their bumpers put on their best Ron Paul and swear that this is purely a matter of Indian governments versus the state. The point that they are fighting over ejecting African folks and only African folks is beside the point to them. Or so they say.

It is clear that after and historically before the first European invasion of the Americas, African Aboriginals, the original Asiatic people of the planet Earth, enjoyed harmonious relations. The history of schism between the two groups officially began when Indians were hired to "return" slaves seeking their freedom. Later, ex-slaves fresh from the plantation and hardened by the American Civil War were formed into the Buffalo Soldiers to fight Indian nations White colonial troops could not defeat on their own which added to the separation. The nations plains and further west that faced African troops had nothing to do and were not aware of the alliance between some Indian nations on the east coast that adopted White racism from the churchon the p, (namely: The Five Civilized Tribes) and were unfairly disliked by many Africans who believed most Indians to be just as ethnically biased as the White population against them. In other words, divide and conquer. And not surprisingly it works every time and in nearly every instance.

Of course there was massive intermarriage and cultural mixing despite all of this and people like me are a direct product of this fusion of peoples via shared experience of genocide, displacement and eternal colonialism. But this I feel counts when one looks at the traditional/full-blooded Aboriginal population. Even during the early colonial period, it was the mixed-bloods, European-Aboriginals who bought African slaves and turned into land barons until Andrew the "Indian Killer" Jackson decided that enough was enough and placed Aboriginals on the Indian Death Walk to the midlands. Their African slaves, many mixed-blood themselves, walked and died along the way with the rest of the nation to Oklahoma Territory. Then, the White colonial government took that away too.

In fact they gave away land to any White man who could marry a Cherokee woman and get a deed to his own personal tract of the nation. Under traditional matrilineal rules, marriage brought the spouse into the nation regardless of ethnicity or nationality. Whites took this to the max and married up or kidnapped and married under force Cherokee women with the express purpose of gaining land in the new territory. This history is spoken of in private, not in polite society where discussion of American history as it applies to genocide makes White people choke on their saliva.

I for one can really care less anymore if Indian Country is seeing fit to go for the gusto and make a move to become "White". I am Afro-Indio. I am Keetoowah by direct matrilineal blood relation and many of my extended relations identify themselves as "Freedmen". I also proudly carry a direct blood relation to the Gullah/Geechie Nation and frankly after decades of intense and emotional soul-searching about it have finally come to the conclusion that Afro-Indios can and should recognise ourselves as a separate ethnic/political identity within Indian Country as well as the international community.

There are two good reasons for this. One, we are foolish to believe that the impetus for this measure and similar suggestions by other federally recognised AKC pedigree "White Card" Tribes is centred around Indigenous independence. These claims are being made primarily by Indians of a substantial co-European identity and the fact that after five centuries of colonial genocide which often eliminated entire Native nations, we have to logically conclude that those who call themselves "American Indians" today are to some degree or another a mixture of European and Indian ethnic heritage. And like most other colonialised people around the world, these Indians identify very strongly with the most powerful aspects of their ethnicity, their European origins, and then generally within that given framework of the dominant society, navigate the American landscape on their individual ability or in-ability to "be White" enough to be accepted.

And to be accepted in America one must despise and reject the Black man. It is a prerequisite to U.S. citizenship and one will not be invited to business meetings and suburban cookouts until that vital issue is addressed. That is the litmus test of the United States. The litmus test James Baldwin, Malcolm X and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out exists to measure where you stand in the racial hierarchy . The Black man and woman were and are on the bottom rungs of this pecking order and this ruler is used every day. So my point is, with Indian Country getting "Whiter" each census, expect more traditional White Indian racism to be more active if not apparent. Like the overwhelmingly Europocentric society that controls both Aboriginal and African subjects within its realm, Indians are having a hard time looking at the more Nazified aspects of their own history let alone the record of violence towards them by the society they wish to be a part of. And if that many White Indians wish to disassociate themselves with us to the point of even considering a vote to remove us from the Nation, to teh White man's understanding of Hell with them. I will not fight to be accepted where it is clear that i am not wanted.

Second reason: Latin America, the rest of the damned continent, has retained Indigenous, African and co-cultural communities and shared consciousness philosophies for centuries. Even before White people got lost and wound up here. As a Geechieman, I know by looking at my own family history that a Afro-Indio identity is not only possible but already here, one needs only be willing to see it apart from the larger muddying context. We are the real survivors. Need I mention the Seminole, who also have sought to eject their African members? To do that would truly be the end of the nation since it was founded primarily by my people, the Gullah.

In Venezuela Hugo Chavez strongly identifies as Afro-Indio and South America and especially Brazil have strong African communities that understand what it is to be Afro-Indio. This is the Indigenist/Indigenismo perspective missing from the North American debate. In my humble opinion, it is a line of discussion that should have occurred decades ago and is long past due. Now is the time.

So let all that trickle down while you review the text below. Barack Obama, despite his kissing of the mainstream's fat, broad corporate and racist derrières to gain their votes, and in light of the fact that he and his wife are taking the worse racist public slave-flogging of an African public official in the history of modern American politics, "American" Indians are getting their licks in against him and the CBC in general. Where was Indian Country when Africans were removed from the voters rolls in Florida and several other states? Oh, that's right, Indian Country is a separate political entity from the United States, so for Skins its a non-issue. Although most Natives who wish to, lodge their votes each election and proudly fly American flags during Grand Entry. Oh, that's right, many Natives served in the United States military forces in wars of colonialism and imperialism and for this, we, you, I, as American Indians must stand at attention out of respect for their sacrifice to liberate other people's lands for Euro-American big business interests while Indians starve and die of exposure smack dab in the middle of the continental U.S.

Please, read on... The Angryindian
-------------------------------------------------------------

Source: American Chornicle

Native Americans across the country are getting fed up with the double talk coming from presidential candidate Barack Obama saying he supports the sovereign status of tribal governments while supporting the Congressional Black Caucus on several bills that include terminating federal recognition of the Oklahoma Cherokee Nation.

The CBC Caucus members are beating their chest on capitol hill demanding that Congress and Senate members back them in denying federal health care, school and housing funds for citizens of the Cherokee Nation. The CBC Caucus is upset over Cherokee citizens voting to reinstate its' Cherokee blood quantum heritage as a requirement to be a citizen of their Indian Nation. Cherokees are stating: "the federal government broke all treaties made with their nation, no federal treaty can dictate who can or cannot be a citizen of any Indian Nation!"

Cherokees are claiming the Freedmen group and CBC members are falsely framing the Cherokee issue as racist toward an Oklahoma Freedmen group. Fact is, African Americans with proven Cherokee heritage are citizens of the nation. The only so called Freedmen that have not to date proven their Cherokee blood heritage to the nation were affected by the Cherokee Nation's citizenship vote last year.

The CBC is creating a racial divide between Native Americans and African Americans over it's Federal action against an Indian Nation. Native Americans walked side by side with African Americans in the sixties for both groups civil rights movement. The CBC now sees fit to take a different road over unity between the two groups.

Native Americans are pointing out the lack of support and non-action from the CBC on Indian community issues before Congress over the past several years. The CBC stands firm on getting it's fair share of federal funding for inner-urban city support programs covering health, education, housing and poverty; while it's forty three caucus members block the Native American Housing and Self Determination Act now before the U.S. Senate. The CBC is blocking funding that would greatly help millions of First American Indian men, women and children to include care for the elderly.

Read on...

Labels: africans, american racism, cherokee