Native American Position Paper
categories covered below include: 1) preface; 2) the issues; 3) the plan, a)
apology and Native American Renaissance, b) history revision and more Native
American school curriculum options, c) tangible direct amends (land give backs
and relocation moratorium), d) indirect land give backs, e) more indirect amends
(cash reparations), f) more quality drug and alcohol treatment, g) Native
American cultural education for/and about Native Americans, h) National mourning
and “National Native American Holiday”
Joe media quotes:
“We think the country was built on ethnic cleansing and we’ve never
owned up to that,” said Schriner. –Lewiston (ID) Journal
“This is an era of American history we not only need to remember, we
need to make it right,” said Schriner. – Sequoyah County Times,
Sallisaw, OK
The candidate (Schriner) also said another form of amends (to the Native
Americans) could come in the form of more… health care, job opportunity and
other social services. – Pawhuska Journal-Capita newspaper,
Pawhuska, OK.
Schriner added he believes it was God’s intention the Europeans and
Native Americans were to share with each other and create a society based on
trust, on love. And while that isn’t how it played out initially: “It’s
still not too late,” he said. –Pawhuska Journal-Capital,
Pawhuska, OK.
“Is there still a new world of sorts to be found? One of camaraderie
between cultures? Average Joe Schriner believes so.” – columnist Leah
Beth Bryson, The Vision newspaper, Lambuth University, Tennessee.
1) preface:
“Instead of turning around and going back and fixing things, we rush madly
forward toward we know not what and call ourselves ‘progressive.’”
–author G.K. Chesterton
This quote is key to the Native American issue.
And it is key to shifting our country in the direction it needs to go.
We have extensively crisscrossed the country looking, in depth, at Native
American issues within the context of the above paradigm. We have been on South
Dakota’s Rosebud Reservation, Minnesota’s White Earth Reservation, the Osage
Reservation in Oklahoma, the Hopi and Hualapai Reservations in Arizona… We
followed the “Trail of Tears” some 1,000 miles to Oklahoma. And in addition,
from Missoula, Montana, to Gallup, New Mexico, to North Augusta, South Carolina,
to Camden, Maine… we have talked to a wide cross section of people close to
this issue.
2) the issues:
Something happened at the inception of our nation that pointed us in the
wrong direction. And we’re still going in the wrong direction with
Native American affairs.
What’s more, it’s a blot on the collective American culture that has
never really been reconciled. And we’ve never really made adequate amends for
either.
What hasn’t been reconciled is the following:
In Camden, Maine, Fr. Eugene Gaffey, who worked at the St. Francis Apache
River Reservation in Arizona, offered this take on history:
For 2,000 years God creatively inspired many parts of the Native American
culture, as God inspired many parts of the European culture, said Fr. Gaffey. In
1492, God began to orchestrate a “coming together” to create a wonderfully
improved society, mixing the best of both cultures.
What happened instead was “perhaps the biggest incidence of genocide in the
world,” Native American activist Bruce Two Eagles was quoted in an edition of
the Mountain Xpress newspaper. The article noted that in 1492, there was
an estimated 20 million Native Americans. The 1890 U.S. Census showed only
250,000 Native Americans.
We’d picked up the Mountain Xpress on a campaign stop in North
Carolina. On our next stop in North Augusta, South Carolina, Tina Grover (a
half-blood Native American) said to us that it wasn’t just physical genocide
– it was “cultural genocide.”
In the process, land was taken by force or swindled by deceitful treaties.
Native American children were taken from their parents, put in boarding
schools, forced to cut their hair, abandon their language and culture, so they
could be “civilized.”
And Ms. Grover added that the white man didn’t just take Native American
children, lives, land… “The white man took the Native American’s
spirit,” she lamented.
How this translated, Harrison Jim of the Eagle Plume Society in Gallup, New
Mexico, told us on a stop there, was that many Native Americans are still today
experiencing the effects of “Post Colonial Stress Syndrome.” (Same
psychological features as Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.)
And this affliction has passed from generation to generation, resulting in
high incidence of poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, suicide…
3) the plan:
a) apology and “Native American Renaissance”
As president, at the outset I would go to a Reservation(s) and
offer a heartfelt apology to the Native Americans for all the past atrocities
committed by our forefathers and perpetuated, in part, by racist tendencies even
until today.
Then to start heading in the direction we should have been going since the
beginning, I believe that there needs to be a nationwide “Native American
Renaissance.”
We should start by creating a “Native American Awareness Division” within
the Bureau of Indian Affairs expressly to design and institute a
multi-dimensional plan for getting the uncensored, Native American message and
story to the general populace in a broad-brush fashion.
The Division should include things like: a Native American Speaker’s
Bureau; a documentary production arm; the generation of more Native American
literature; Native American theatre troupes… (In Cortez, Colorado, I took our
children to the Black Shawl Drama. Sponsored by the Cortez Cultural
Center, it was a poignant -- I was a poignant re-enactment of the tragic, early
days of our country as seen through Native American eyes.)
b) history revision and curriculum change
In tandem with this push, I would also appoint a Native American Commission
to help revise history books to better reflect Native American cultures, tribal
dynamics and offer a closer (and much more expanded) look at the atrocities to
Native Americans, not only at the beginning of this country, but throughout our
history.
“The cost in human life (to the Native Americans) can’t be accurately
measured. And the suffering not even roughly measured, ” wrote Howard Zinn in
his book A Peoples’ History of the United States. “Most of the
history books given to children pass quickly over it.”
On a campaign stop in Florence, Alabama – along the Trail of Tears – a
newspaper reporter said to us that history often gets skewed “because the
victors always write the history books.”
I would also propose that grade school and high school curriculum include
classes specifically about Native Americans, and when possible, they be taught
by Native Americans.
On a campaign stop in Wyoming, I learned that school trustees in Ranchester,
Wyoming, approved a class on American Indian culture and hired an instructor
from the nearby Crow Reservation to teach it.
Besides existing Native American classes at a collegiate level, we would
propose actual minors, and majors, in Native American Studies. And we would
propose the Federal Government provide grants to get such programs going.
In Missoula, Montana, Chris Landis told us that she had taken college courses
on Native American culture and has a personal quest of helping to save as much
of the culture as possible. She also said she wanted to incorporate as much of
the culture and spiritual practices into her own personal life, while still
maintaining her Catholicism.
In Carmel Valley, California, I met with Fr. Scott McCarthy, a Catholic
priest who has spent a considerable amount of time on Native American
Reservations around the country and wrote the book Earth Centered Theology.
The book explains how Fr. McCarthy draws from Native American rituals in
practicing his Catholic faith. (For instance during some Masses, Fr. McCarthy
burns sage on the altar and says the Our Father in the Lakota Tribe’s
language.)
It is in these types of pursuits (as with studying the Native American
environmental stewardship model, the intricacies of their tribal village
orientation, family and ancestral traditions…), that we will learn what we
should have learned from the beginning.
And while it will take generations to meld the cultures, we will – at last
– collective be going in the right direction.
Note: And this is if the Native Americans even want to move
toward a melding of cultures. This would need to be explored at an in-depth
level at the outset.
c) tangible direct amends
(land give backs and relocation moratorium)
To continue in the ‘right direction,’ there needs to be a series of
tangible amends (reimbursements) to the Native Americans for past wrongs.
We took much of their land through unadulterated greed. We consistently
killed the Native Americans, drove others from the land (like in the Trail of
Tears), or took the land through broken treaties and other deceits.
I met with Teton Tribe member Richard Shangreaux in a tipi in Pierre, South
Dakota. He told me amends should encompass making right the treaties and
returning some of the land.
As an example, he said the Black Hills of South Dakota were an incredibly
“sacred place” to the Native Americans. But once gold was discovered there,
the U.S. Government took the land from the Native Americans.
Our administration would propose giving it back. And our administration would
propose giving, for instance, a percentage of some of the National Forests to
the Native Americans.
And while the tribes in the South Dakota area look at the Black Hills as
sacred, the Dine Tribe in Hoteville, Arizona, look at their land as sacred as
well. However, the Dine’s Tom Bedonie had been traveling the country trying to
raise awareness that the Dine land was in jeopardy. I heard him talk in
Columbia, Missouri, where he said energy companies interested in extracting coal
from that area of Arizona were creating pressure for the relocation of 10,000
Dine Tribe members.
This simply harkens back to the forced Native American relocations of old,
for material gain. As president, I would push for a moratorium on any more
Native American re-locations.
d) indirect land give backs
And while logistically it would be difficult to return all the land, a series
of creative initiatives could be undertaken to come at this in a variety of
ways.
For instance, the Federal Government (in tandem with private citizen
fundraising) could help fund the White Earth Land Preservation Project, and
similar projects on Reservations across the country.
On a campaign stop at White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota, we
talked with White Earth Preservation Project Director Winnona La Duke. (Ms. La
Duke, an Ojibwe Tribe member, ran as Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential candidate
during Campaign 2000.)
We learned the project had established a fund to buy back Reservation
property sold to such concerns as corporate farms. On this land, they were
replanting indigenous trees, reintroducing sturgeon to the area rivers, teaching
the Native Americans the ways of ancestral organic farming, traditional hunting,
and so on.
Ms. La Duke said the Ojibwe’s ethos is to respect the earth and live as if
one is responsible for “the next seven generations.”
Another way to give back some of the land would be to get behind an
initiative of the Nez Perz Tribe living along the Columbia River in Idaho.
At Findlay College in Ohio, we heard the Nez Perz’s Allen Pinkham say that,
for generations, his people relied heavily on Columbia River salmon runs. But as
more and more people moved to the Pacific Northwest, there was a greater demand
for electrical power. So the Columbia River was tapped for power with a series
of hydroelectric dams – that all but ended the salmon runs.
Pinkham said his tribe was trying to get some of the dams in the area removed
and was asking people to “shut off one light for one salmon.” That is,
Pinkham’s tribe is asking people in the Northwest to cut back on their energy
use in general to decrease the need for as many dams.
We would shut off more than one light (cut back the thermostat, stop using
air conditioning, put up a wind turbine…) in the White House for this – not
to mention to reverse global warming. And we would give some of the money to the
Nez Perz’s Chief Joseph Foundation, which our family personally has already
done.
e) more ‘indirect’ amends (cash reparations)
A famous quote by the Nez Perz’s Chief Joseph summed up the Native American
plight of the past: “…The old men are all dead. The little children are
freezing to death. My people -- some of them have run away to the hills and have
no blankets, no food… I want to have time to look for my children… I will
fight no more forever.”
Then to make even more amends, our administration would propose every Native
American, trans-generational war victim -- and that would be every Native
American -- would receive $25,000 in reparations. (The U.S. government has
recently awarded every Japanese WWII internment camp prisoner $20,000 in
reparations.)
And because of the trans-generational nature of Post Colonial Stress
Syndrome, many of these Native Americans have been mental and emotional
‘prisoners’ as well.
At a seminar on Racism that I attended at Ohio’s Bluffton College, it was
explained colonialism is: “An act of aggression against a people by a country
which takes land, exploits resources (including the indigenous people of the
land), destroys indigenous culture and requires allegiance to the conquering
country.”
f) more quality drug and alcohol treatment
Post Colonial Stress Syndrome has, in part, led to trans-generational
alcoholism in some of the Native American people.
In Gallup, New Mexico, the Navahos Gabe Kanawite is trying to do something
about this. Out of a sense of personal responsibility and grief about what is
happening to his people, Kanawite told me he shifted his college major from
accounting to drug and alcohol counseling.
Likewise on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma, Osage Tribe member Monte
Roubideaux told me he was at nearby Bacon College majoring in drug and alcohol
counseling as well. “I want to give back to my people,” he said.
As part of reparations, our administration would propose providing more
college grants to Native Americans like Kanawite and Roubideaux for pursuing
this type of major. What’s more, our administration would propose more funding
for such Reservation Drug and Alcohol Treatment Centers as the Eagle Plume
Society Center (mentioned earlier) in Gallup.
g) Native American Cultural Education for/and about Native
Americans
The Eagle Plume Society not only helps Native Americans get clean and sober,
it helps them “Get Navaho!” On a tour of the center, Harrison Jim told us he
tries to help the Navaho recover from Post Traumatic Colonial Stress Syndrome
through “talking circles” to deal, not only with their addiction, but also
the trauma of western philosophy encroachment. These Navahos are encouraged to
reconnect with their native roots, sacred songs, sacred prayers, age-old
ceremonies… (Our administration would propose financial help for more
treatment models like the Eagle Plume Society.)
Osage Monte Roubideaux is also trying to learn as much about his tribe’s
culture, including learning the language. And he is now teaching it to his
children as well.
In Pawhuska, Oklahoma (also on the Osage Indian Reservation), Stephanie
Mashunkashey told me she would like to see the Federal Government help subsidize
more Native American cultural education for all tribal youth, and adults –
because of the cultural genocide that was committed against her people, leading
many to be quite out of touch with their roots. (Our administration would agree,
and push for more funding help in this area as well.)
Note: I would not support any type of subsidizing of casinos on the
Reservations. In Benson, Arizona, I interviewed Sergeant Jashawa Cloud, who is
with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Sgt. Cloud, who is from the Osage Tribe, said
he travels among the 26 Native American Reservations in Arizona as an
investigative police officer. And he said casinos are a big problem. Sgt. Cloud
said with the casinos come “mobsters, prostitutes and other vice related
activity.” He said that in his own opinion, the Native Americans don’t need
fast money, but rather sustainability. That is, they need the establishment of
more local businesses that pay a fair wage, etc.
h) National mourning and National Native American History Month
As we followed the 1,200 mile Trail of Tears on a research trip, we learned
gold had been discovered in south Georgia, and shortly after the Georgia
legislature declared Cherokee land confiscated, opening the door to the force
march – through the winter – to Oklahoma.
Men were seized from their fields, women from their spinning wheels and
children from their play. Some 4,000 of these men, women and children (almost
one-fourth) died along the way, according to literature about the Trail.
“It was the cruelest work I ever knew,” said one U.S. militiaman.
Congress has designated some of the main routes west as the Trail of Tears
National Historic Trail.
Our administration would go much further.
We would call for a week of national mourning for, not only the Trail of
Tears deaths, but all the Native American deaths at the U.S. hands. These
would be days filled with graphic eulogies about these things, town education
forums, TV specials, marches…
And as a follow-up, we would propose a yearly “Native American National
History Month” every year.
