Showing posts with label Original Sin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Original Sin. Show all posts

Friday, November 27, 2020

First Nations (Native American Appreciation Day)

 RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: NATIVE AMERICA


First Nations

 

Arapaho Cherokee Standing Rock Sioux

Laid claim to this land before me and you

Apache Hopi Cheyenne Hoh

They planted seeds that we should sow

Comanche Paiute Seminole Cree

If you cannot help then let them be

Lakota Iroquois Navaho Crow

Let the spirits rise and the four winds blow

Mohawk Inuit Huron Osage

Remember all the wars we waged

 

Their numbers followed the buffalo

Twelve million to 235 thousand

From Columbus to near extinction

There are no sides to genocide

 

But the buffalo is still alive

Along with Turtle Island’s tribes

Their way of life is still here

Like the earth mother they hold dear

 

Our first nations are owed a debt

We cannot rest until it’s met

So give respect and give again

What is the price of original sin?

 

(Today is Native American Appreciation Day)

 

 

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Washita River Massacre

 RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR:  INDIAN HISTORY


Washita River

 

Black Kettle remembers the day

The blue coats came to Sand Creek

He remembers holding the white flag

Of peace that the government said

Would protect his tribe

He remembers the thunder of hooves

The onslaught of gunfire

The plunging of bayonets and knives

He remembers trails of blood that ran

From the camp to the creek

He remembers the cry of women and children

He remembers Medicine Woman Later

By his side as they rushed to cover

He remembers surviving to witness

The scene of bloody carnage

Through the reeds by the creek

He remembers the soldiers

Cutting body parts from his people

To become trophies and curiosities

He survives to tell the story

 

The blue coats said it was a mistake

It could not happen again

The survivors moved to Indian Territory

And settled by the Washita River

The blue coats gave him a white flag

That he buried in remembrance

Of those he buried as Sand Creek

They swore it would not happen again

 

It is daybreak under clear skies

When he hears the thunder of horses

With their pounding iron hooves

A sound he has heard before

He looks to Medicine Woman Later

And knows that she knows

Together they sing their death songs

And take comfort in knowing

They will not witness the scene again

Their blood marks a trail to Washita River

Where they leave behind a curse

The white eyes will never forget

What their blue coats did this day

 

(The Washita River Massacre:

November 27, 1868)

Thursday, August 15, 2019

TRUE HISTORY: THE QUESTION OF REPARATIONS

JAZZMAN CHRONICLES:  TRUE HISTORY





TRUE HISTORY:  ORIGINAL SINS

My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys

By Jack Random


There has been some discussion of reparations for slavery as candidates vie to succeed Donald Trump as President of the United States.  All Americans should be taught the dark side of our history alongside the good for only then can we wipe the slate clean, turn the page and address the challenges of the future.  Only then can we have a candid discussion on the question of reparations not only for slavery but for the many sins of our past. 
There was a time when Manifest Destiny governed the history of America.  Those days are gone.  We know now that our nation was born in genocide and built on the backs of African American slaves.  We have chosen to ignore the fundamental truth for far too long.  Columbus was a killer.  Cortez was a killer.  We can no longer assume that those who stood in the beginning of our founding are heroes.  They are not.  They were in some cases heroic but they are not heroes today. 
The legacy of racism in America runs long and deep.  The father of our country was a slaveholder.  George Washington owned two hundred slaves.  To his credit he freed his slaves after his death.  Thomas Jefferson, who owned over 600 slaves, did not.  He infamously impregnated his slave mistress Sally Hemings, with whom he had five children.  He publicly condemned the barbarism of slavery and proposed a gradual emancipation, retraining and re-colonization of slaves to Africa but his intellectual opposition yielded to his financial interests.  He needed slaves to maintain his standing in a racist society.  Other slaveholder presidents include James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Zachary Taylor, William Henry Harrison and Martin Van Buren. 

GEORGE WASHINGTON

George Washington did not chop down the cherry tree.  That was a myth invented by his first biographer.  Washington was not a super hero.  He was a man with all the flaws of humanity and many of the failings of his time.  He was not only America’s first president but also America’s first slaveholder president and the first to kill Native Americans.  He did so as a young man in the British army in the French and Indian War.  As president he set the policy of westward expansion that would become known as Manifest Destiny.  He wrote that he wanted to take Indian lands peaceably and at a fair price but he favored force whenever the natives refused.  The term he used for Indian removal was “extirpation.”  That term refers to uprooting and utter destruction.  Thus Washington can justly be characterized as the Founding Father of the Great American Genocide.  [1] 

JAMES MADISON

Credited as a primary framer of the constitution, James Madison purportedly believed in emancipation of the slaves but he did not free his own slaves and he infamously drafted that part of the constitution that gave slaves 3/5ths of a person value for purposes of apportioning congressional representation.  Without that provision – a provision that would poison congress until the Civil War and the 13th Amendment – slavery might well have been abolished decades sooner than it was.  At best Madison’s beliefs and policies on race were complicated and contradictory.  At worst he was hypocritically racist like most of his “progressive” contemporaries.  [2]

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Those of us who treasure the legacy of Jefferson’s words – we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal – have learned to become apologists.  If you, we rationalized, lived in his times and under his circumstances, you also would have accepted the norms of those times.  It is more difficult to rationalize his sexual abuse of Sally Hemings though that also was a common practice in the days of slavery.  Moreover, despite his support of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 barring American participation in the international slave trade, Jefferson reportedly wrote that blacks were inferior to whites “in mind and body.”  [3, 4]  The more you look for Jefferson’s redemption, the stronger the case for impeachment grows. 

JAMES MONROE

James Monroe, fifth president and founder of the Monroe Doctrine, supported a movement headed by Speaker of the House Henry Clay to remove African slaves from the American continent and transport them back to Africa.  Monroe seized land on the West African coast for that purpose.  It would later become Liberia.  It should be noted that Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, also once supported repatriating slaves back to Africa. 

ANDREW JACKSON

The president most deified by the Trump White House and often pictured in the background of his presidential statements is Andrew Jackson.  The seventh president from the state of Tennessee, he made his name as a military leader in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812.  He recruited and fought alongside Cherokee and Choctaw warriors, many of whom he grew up with, only to turn on them when the war was won.  Despite a decision by the Supreme Court upholding the independent Cherokee nation, Jackson enforced the Indian Removal Act by ordering the rounding up natives in Georgia and Tennessee and marching them to Indian Territory on what would become known as the Trail of Tears.  

ANDREW JOHNSON

The seventeenth president, succeeding the assassinated Lincoln, Andrew Johnson did everything in his power to undermine Reconstruction and the 13th Amendment.  He elevated slaveholders with amnesty and restored voting rights.  He nullified the order granting all emancipated slaves 40 acres and a mule.  He paved the way for the Jim Crow laws the deprived blacks of civil rights and voting rights for over a century.  For all that he did and his clear racist beliefs, Huffington Post gave him the honor as the most racist president in history – at least until now.  By my reckoning, he is the second most racist president named Andrew. 

WOODROW WILSON

This came as a recent revelation to me but it shouldn’t have been.  Known as the founding father of the United Nations, Wilson’s racism was well known to historians and those who knew him.  He was a defender of segregation at a critical time in race relations.  At the Versailles Convention in 1919 Wilson was credited with killing a Japanese proposal recognizing the principle of racial equality.  Born in Virginia, raised in Georgia and South Carolina, a descendant of confederate soldiers, he openly defended the Ku Klux Klan and is quoted in the infamous movie The Birth of a Nation:  “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation…until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”  President Wilson screened the racist screed at the White House. [5]

LYNDON JOHNSON

The president who did more than any other to fulfill the promise of civil rights was at heart a southerner.  He had no qualms about using the N word and reportedly used it a lot.  His term for the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was: the N bill.  Prior to his elevation to the vice presidency LBJ was a reliable member of the Dixiecrats.  When he nominated Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court he told his biographer:  “When I appoint a N to the bench, I want everyone to know he’s a N!”  He once told his chauffer Robert Johnson:  “No matter what you are called, N, you just let it roll off your back like water and you’ll make it.  Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”  Given Johnson’s attitude toward blacks, his legacy of civil rights may best be interpreted as a political strategy.  [6]

RICHARD NIXON

Like Donald Trump, Nixon reportedly did not believe he was racist but his words left no doubt.  The greatest of all mistakes Nixon committed was to leave a tape-recorded record of what he and those he communicated with really thought.  Of course, he did not believe it was a mistake at the time.  He believed it was an honest record of what civilized and educated individuals actually thought.  A conversation with president-to-be Ronald Reagan recently came to light.  It left no doubt that the conservative Republicans most venerate has secured a place on the list of racist presidents.  Nixon called numerous friends and advisors to quote his friend Reagan on the inferiority of blacks.  In fairness, Nixon was an equal opportunity bigot.  He frequently made disparaging remarks about Jews, Mexican Americans, Italian Americans and Irish Americans.  [7]

RONALD REAGAN

Reagan did not know he was being recorded so he spoke his mind.  He had just observed a United Nations vote in which he concluded – wrongly as it turned out – that delegates from the African nations had tipped the vote against American interests.  He compared the diplomats to monkeys and suggested that they looked uncomfortable in shoes.  Reagan said:  “Last night, I tell you, to watch this thing on television as I did.  To see those monkeys from African nations.  Damn them!  They’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!”  Nixon laughed. [8]

MARK TWAIN

Samuel Clemens – aka Mark Twain – is a giant of American literature.  Much has been said and written about his liberal use of the N word in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  At the time of Tom Sawyer the author had no convictions toward slavery either way but by the time he wrote Huck Finn he recognized the inhumanity and immorality of the institution.  [9] While his views toward blacks are subject to controversy, his attitude toward American Indians is not.  He openly challenged James Fennimore Cooper’s depiction of the noble savage and consistently described natives as disgusting people prone to drunkenness and violence.  Twain’s racism toward Native American has few defenders outside the white supremacist community. 

NATIVE GENOCIDE:  INDIAN WARS

When Shawnee war chief Tecumseh was away recruiting Choctaw warriors to unite against the white invasion in 1811, Indiana Governor and future president William Harrison ordered the attack and burning of Prophetstown on Tippecanoe River.  In the war that followed, Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of Thames and the hope of uniting the tribes died with him. 
By the end of the Indian Wars in the late 1800’s the Native American population had declined from an estimated 5 to 15 million in the time of Columbus to less than 238,000.  By any standard or definition, that is genocide on a grand scale and it was inflicted systematically and deliberately by a series of racist presidents and congressional leaders who believed the European white man was superior and therefore destined to rule the American continent from sea to shining sea. 
Among those who are celebrated for their participation in the Great American Genocide:  Davy Crockett, George Armstrong Custer, General Philip Sheridan and Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Benjamin Harrison, who disgraced the nation by awarding twenty medals of honor to the soldiers who massacred the disarmed Lakota Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee. [10] Teddy Roosevelt aided the cause of hunting the buffalo to the edge of extinction in an effort to cut off the primary source of living for the plains Indians. 
The 26th president of the United States once said:  “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians but I believe 9 out of 10 are and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.”  [11]
In the end no one in the American government escapes responsibility for acts of cruelty, betrayal and inhumanity to the tribes who cared for the land before the whites came. 
In 2012, in response to a lawsuit brought by representatives of the American Indians for mismanagement of tribal lands and accounts, under the presidency of Barrack Obama, the American government agreed to pay $3.4 billion in settlement to the surviving natives –  $1.9 billion toward Indian lands and $1.4 billion to individuals.  Whether this settlement is considered the fulfillment of treaty obligations or reparations for past inequity or both, it would seem to offer precedent and a case for reparations.  [12]

MEXICAN CESSATION & REPATRIATIONS

In the wake of the Mexican-American War circa 1848, Mexico gave up claim to more than half of its territory, a vast expanse of land including present day California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and part of Wyoming.  People of Mexican ancestry who did not wish to relocate south were granted citizenry.  In the latter half of the nineteenth century political instability in Mexico created a wave of immigration.  The Southern Pacific Railroad and other companies anxious to exploit a cheap labor force welcomed the immigrants and even sent envoys south to recruit immigrant workers. [13]
Anglo Americans resented the new workforce, giving rise to the stereotype of lazy, stupid Mexicans.  Angry mobs killed thousands of Latinos from California to Texas.  When America faced the Great Depression, white Americans blamed Mexican Americans for taking their jobs and the era of “repatriations” began.  An estimated two million people of Mexican descent were forcibly uprooted and sent south – regardless of their citizenship status.  Colorado ordered all Mexicans to leave the state in 1936 and erected a barrier on its southern border.  In one incident in 1931 Los Angeles police rounded up some 400 Mexican Americans without regard for legal status and shipped them to Mexico.  Adios, mes amigos! 
The Great Repatriation is another less violent form of genocide for which reparations should and must be considered. 

JAPANESE INTERNMENT

After Pearl Harbor President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of over 110,000 Japanese Americans in camps scattered across the country.  Over sixty percent of the interned were American citizens.  The US Census Bureau assisted the administration’s efforts by providing confidential information and the Supreme Court upheld the internment with one of its more convoluted decisions in that it asked not to be considered precedent.  In 1980 President Jimmy Carter initiated a review of the internment and in 1988 President Ronald Reagan signed into law an official apology.  The law authorized payments of $20,000 to each survivor of the camps.  The government eventually dispersed over $1.6 billion to some 82,000 survivors.  That is equivalent to approximately $3.4 billion in today’s dollars.  The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 is an important legal precedent for historic reparations. [14]

SUBJUGATION OF WOMEN

White males were granted the right to vote in the year 1789 in the US Constitution.  African Americans were granted freedom with the thirteenth amendment in the year 1865.  Five years later they were granted the right to vote.  Fifty years later in the year 1920 women were granted their right to vote by the nineteenth amendment.  How do you begin to quantify fifty or one hundred and twenty years of the right to vote?  Does it have a monetary value?  What would this nation look like had women had the right to vote from the nation’s birth?  Would women still suffer from substandard wages?  Would women have equivalent power in the halls of congress?  Would women have equal standing in the world of business and finance? 

FOREIGN GRIEVANCES

Traditionally Americans have justified their engagements in foreign wars and interventions with rationalizations of the greater good.  The Cold War and the Domino Theory were used to justify an estimated three million dead in the Vietnam War.  Islamic terrorism, the September 11th attack and weapons of mass destruction were used to justify hundreds of thousands dead in the Iraq War.  Neither justification is valid.  Even if you believe in the Domino Theory, Ho Chi Minh should have been our ally in Vietnam.  He pleaded with the United States to abandon colonialism to no avail.  In any case, there can be no justification for the terror we reigned on that small Southeast Asian nation. 
The justification for the Iraq War is even thinner.  Iraq was a sworn enemy of Al Qaeda and possessed no weapons of mass destruction.  The Shock and Awe we brought down on those unfortunate people remains to this day but it is the shock of shame and the awe of knowing we were completely in the wrong. 
How do we gage our debt to Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and all those Latin American nations we attacked to secure our financial and strategic interests? 

REPARATIONS

The question of reparations is long overdue.  The precedent has been set.  We have acknowledged the sins of our forefathers.  They include genocide by extermination, genocide by relocation, slavery, systematic discrimination in all facets of life, denial of civil liberties and denial of the right to vote.  Aggrieved minorities are due retribution.  Justice demands payment for rightful grievances. 
There are problems of course.  There are many who refuse to acknowledge the plain truth.  There are many who choose to believe the mythology of American history.  There are those who claim to believe that discrimination against white Anglo-Americans is the leading problem of inequality.  These individuals may or may not be ignorant of the truth.  They may be victims of warped education and maleficent propaganda. 
We must do everything in our power to replace willful mythology with true history but it is not enough.  It is clearly impossible to even consider reparations as long as our government is actively engaged in crimes against humanity and abuses of human rights.  Only after we bring our current offenses to a halt can we begin to address reparations for the past. 
When that day comes we will acknowledge our debt and the solemn fact that it can never be fully repaid.  For now, we must go about the business of changing our government and reclaiming our nation.  For now we must be content to believe that the truth will prevail and to know that the debt once acknowledged will be addressed. 

Jazz. 


1.  “George Washington’s Tortuous Relationship with Native Americans.”  By Colin Calloway.  Zocalo, August 2, 2018.
2.  “James Madison’s Lessons in Racism.” By Noah Feldman.  New York Times Opinion, October 28, 2017. 
3.  “These are the most racist presidents.”  By Jess Bolluyt, Cheat Sheet, November 21, 2018. 
4.  “The Eleven Most Racist U.S. Presidents.”  Ibram X. Kendi, Contributor.  Huffington Post, May 28, 2017. 
5.  “Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist – even by the standards of his time.”  By Dylan Matthews.  Vox, November 20, 2015. 
6.  “Lyndon Johnson was a civil rights hero.  But also a racist.”  By Adam Serwer.  MSNBC, April 11, 2014.  Update April 12, 2018. 
7.  “A history of racism is woven into the US presidency.”  By Russell Contreras.  Associated Press, July 30, 2019. 
8.  “Ronald Reagan’s Long-Hidden Racist Conversation with Richard Nixon.”  By Tim Naftali.  The Atlantic, July 30, 2019. 
9.  “Mark Twain’s Inconvenient Truths.”  By Shelley Fisher Fishkin.  Stanford Magazine, November-December 2007. 
10.  “When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of Civilization.”  By Donald L. Fixico.  History, March 2, 2018.  Updated August 31, 2018.  
11.  “Teddy Roosevelt Laid Bare.”  By Tim Stanley.  History Today, Volume 62, Issue 3, March 2012. 
12.  “US finalizes $3.4 billion settlement with American Indians.”  CNN November 27, 2012.
13.  “The Brutal History of Anti-Latino Discrimination in America.”  By Erin Blakemore.  History, September 27, 2017.  Updated August 29, 2018. 
14.  “Senate Votes to Compensate Japanese American Internees.”  By Irvin Molotsky.  New York Times, April 21, 1988.