Indians Need to Decide and Right Now...

18.9.08

Image by Daniel Greene via Flickr By the Angryindian

Right on the heels of RezNet's sincere "Can we chat" note to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, here is Tim Giago of Indian Country Today doing his bit to defend Gov. Palin from American Indians concerned about her position on Native issues. According to Mr. Giago, her husband being part Indigenous knocks out any negatives for natives voters who have received nothing from Democrats over the years.

I would like Mr. Giago to explain to all of us who oppose Gov. Palin and the entire White Man's system in general how Republicans over the years have stood up for Indians. I would like to know which republicans and Gov. Palin in particular have thrown in for the struggle to have Indian /U.S. Treaties honoured, the names of republican personalities and organisations that have fought institutional racism against the American Indian and worked alongside us to return these stolen lands to the rightful owners.

Like Dr. David Yeagley, I know Mr. Giago has a problem with Indians who fight the powers that be. His opposition to the American Indian Movement is well documented and like most prominent people in Indian Country, his attitude towards the “movement” can be summed up as conciliatory at best with our occupiers. That's my opinion on his work as an editor of an Indian newspaper. He simply doesn't report from an Indigenist perspective. As he says in this piece, “What is it about the word “undecided” that self-professed liberals find so hard to understand?”

What exactly is Mr. Giago undecided about? Which colonialist political party to lend his considerable editorial weight to amongst the Indigenous voting population, or the reality that either way the American Indian votes in the occupier's faux-election the result for us will be the same? While he talks about the lack of action on the part of the democrats, he says nothing about the political apathy and acts of genocide that occurred under BOTH political parties over the past two centuries. When the Senator Frank Church intelligence hearings uncovered the widespread practise of ethnic sterilisation of Aboriginal women in this country, does it really matter which branch of the White power structure gets in office? Has this republican administration done right by the Indian?

How many Native nations were federally terminated by the stroke of a pen by a republican? Ask the Duwamish Nation. Indians who vote should do so with the awareness that their vote, more so than the general colonial population, is purely symbolic. Bush the Younger did not win either election and cheated African males in several states from using their legal right to vote in this nonsense. And once the Electoral College swings into play, your vote means nothing anyway.

Ask yourself this question Mr. And Ms American Indian, how can the vote of an occupied population possess any meaning? Can we vote to end the oppression of our people or the illegal occupation of our ancestral territories? We can get together to eject Africans from our nations, but we can't seem to get it together to decide whether or not we want to be free from the United States as our Indian Nations/U.S. Treaties specified by the very nature of the international treaty process.

Today's “Tribal” leaders love to speak of “government to government” relations and “sovereignty” yet send their children to fight imperialist wars for the same entity that occupies their lands. That decision alone shows how damaged we are as a people. So much so, few of us are willing to say aloud that our people are in pain and do not deserve to be treated as the anachronistic garbage of the White American mythic past. If we are truly “undecided” as to who we are and where we need to go and how to go about getting what we think it is we need, the first thing we need to ask is why we are not able to decide these things for ourselves. We do not make our own decisions. We ask the White man to make up our minds for us each time we cast a vote for either side of the monolithic political coin.

We invite them into our communities to lie to us to our faces and we make them honorary members of the “Tribe”. And after they vacate the premises we pray in the White Man's religion that the Great Spirit reminds him of his promises which we know on the physical plane do not amount to anything more than more White lies. So I ask again, why is the American Indian editor still undecided about which colonialists to support?

I also think it is fair and apropos to ask if he is “undecided” as well to whether or not Leonard Peltier should be granted a new trial too. Leonard does not seem to think that Mr. Giago in interested in the truth about Indian realities in the colonial United States and I am in agreement. Mr. Giago does not represent Indigenist interests in any way shape or form.

So while his tabloid and the rest of the “respectable” Native American newsmedia continues to masquerade their seemingly non-partisan editorial support for another four years of the past 500 years of Indian genocide under a Republican/Creationist/Imperialist banner the rest of us will continue to see the American system for what it is, a sham if there ever was one. Mr Giago has every right to support who he wants and to make his position known to the Indigenous community. But to suggest that Gov. Palin is being unfairly manhandled by the non-existent liberal media after the racist arse-kicking Barack Obama has received from the neo-conservative right-wing is beyond ridiculous. It's embarrassing that Indians in such visible positions can be so actively anti-Indian. If you listen to Mr. Giago, Indians should give a decided preference to the republicans because of Palin's Alaskan Native hook-up, namely her marriage to a White Yupik Indian.

How much more republican can you get?

- The Angryindian

Labels: barack obama, Native American, RezNet, Tim Giago