Indigenous

From comrade Sungmanitu:

Last thread we dispelled some major misconceptions of Indigenous people and the founding of America, but what about Western Expansion? How much do you honestly know as a historical materialist? One of the most common misnomers I hear in educating people is “why should we care about something that happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago?” Capital was written 1867, the same time we signed our first treaty. When I say we I do not mean some homogenized conception of Indigenous people, but rather I am speaking specifically about the Oceti Sakowin and the ending of Mahpiya Luta’s (Red Cloud’s) War. Classically the story goes that as the US moved westward they conquered and erased nations in their wake, a seemingly unstoppable machine of capitalist expansion. In reality, the US lost many wars and only won the ones they started by surprise. In our classic conception of manifest destiny, we assume a wave of red, white and blue moving across the continent. In reality the situation was far more complex than what Marx simplified in Capital, and reality shows that the US and Canada (although wanting to) could not move across as a wave due to the level of military and political cohesion among Indigenous nations of the plains.

Instead what we actually see is the coasts be settled first (with some Mexican and Spanish settling occurring in the SW and West Coast, but it's not until the Anglos that we see the full extent of settler barbarity against an “other”- even other settler populations that weren’t Anglo) while the California gold rush starts in 1848, the Trail of Tears had been going on since 1830 and wouldn’t end until 1850. The land was not yet settled and they already were in such precarious positions they sought land across the continent, and worse through the plains. The Oregon trail of course is how we imagine everyone moving west, and that is certainly how worse off settlers would be, the reality showed most people preferred to safely sail to Mexico, walk across, and then sail to California or Vancouver (See Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris for more details).

Famously the “mighty Sioux” as Thomas Jefferson described us, exacted tolls and were expert scouts. Those “sioux” (a Anishinaabe slur adopted by the French) are us, the Oceti Sakowin, and when Louis and Clark set out westward they were told to make sure to become our friends. Instead they chose to try and avoid the toll, only to be caught a few days into our territory. Since then we watched and enacted our toll, and enacted our justice when it was avoided, against settlers passing through. The only issue is nobody who went west ever came back the same way. Muhpiya Luta saw that we were being surrounded, and so he went to the Big White Mountains where the mouths of the Missouri and Montana Rivers. There while they camped they had council and made the decision to make a long journey to pray on what needed to be done. They then went on to follow the watershed of these rivers deeply understanding the bioregion, only we had no way of explaining the science behind these decisions then. They crossed to the south side of the Platte River and followed it east to what is now Council Bluffs in Omaha, and crossed at the trading post that was there to the East River which is a small creek compared to all these others. There is where they began to complete their circle, following the watershed back to the headwaters, and when they arrived back they knew we must go to war.

The Civil War had only ended 2 years prior, and the US would seek to reunite North and South (and incorporate freedmen) by genociding Natives and giving people more “living space” or “living room” to solve tensions and economic hardship. This was also a large driver (as well as the economic turmoil leading up to the Civil War) in the move all the way to California, but some brave patriots would take up the call to fight in the Indian Wars. We get the famous Buffalo Soldiers from this era, and from there a slew of contradictions we face today wrt anti-blackness in Indigenous communities. By 1868 instead of being conquered and forced to sign a treaty as the common myth goes; Grant who was now president would urge the Army to make peace and “give the Indians whatever they want” so we won and wrote the treaty. This is why our oral histories to this day hold up as legal arguments in court, and why the US would renege on the treaty, it was a symbol of how badly they lost. This is our famous Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, and with this treaty the watershed was turned into the Great Sioux Reservation, cutting us off from our siblings on Canada’s side of the line. This of course isn't the first misconception of the treaty settlers tend to have, another is clearly seen by assuming its about only land, which I have demonstrated the selection of land was based on the watershed of two rivers. This wasn’t just some arbitrarily chosen land, but an entire bioregion, and we can see that by the treaty’s stipulation that the border extended to the far side of the River where the tide rises. Along with this very specific border, this was not just a treaty between the US Nation and Oceti Sakowin Oyate (our concept of Nation), but we negotiated on behalf of the other-than-human nations on this bioregion. Most specifically, the buffalo.

Because of this close bond with other-than-human life, there have been a plethora of racist policies enacted against various nations, as well as vigilante actions. In Canada the federal government began relocation of bears to Indigenous land because “we thought you were kin”, and unfortunately they were lying, and in fact that they were being allies. Another example is the infamous “one dead buffalo, is a dead Indian” folklore, that resulted in the transcontinental railroad selling bullets to passengers to wantonly massacre Buffalo. Along with systemic ecocide campaigns, the term ecocide has always been synonymous with the murder of Indigenous peoples and cultures. My favorite is during the 1965 ‘Fish-ins' in the Pacific Northwest, ‘Back to the Land’ liberals and socialists counter protest with signs saying ‘save the fish, spear an Indian’ a slogan paraphrase around the Termination period of the Menominee nation. The only difference was these were conservative “rednecks”, whose bumpers read “save a deer, shoot an Indian” one fact remained the same however- settlers wanted Indians gone.

This fact was well known, the federal government had been powerless to stop settlers from organically organizing themselves into militias, and lynch mobs to kill Indigenous and Black folks. To this day Indian rolling remains a popular pastime in reservation border towns (see Red Nation Rising for more details), but we will return to this idea. In the treaty the US insisted on building first around the territory to assure whites would not enter, and illegally extract resources. This lofty goal was admirable of Grant, as should be expected for a champion of reconstruction, but like all well-meaning liberals- admirable goals of the bourgeoisie does not appeal to an emerging settler-worker. Settler-workers had only one way to achieve success, steal the land and money of those less fortunate, or even just less than you. In a white supremacist society it is easy to find your targets, especially with helpful charts race scientists had made by then. So for white workers in the plains they set their sights on finding gold somewhere closer than California, and folks like John Gordon, would be remembered and revered by their fellow workers for leading them illegally past the forts into Indigenous territory.

This is where the bordertown Gordon Nebraska gets its name, another detail we must remember for later, but it is this citizen organizing themselves to break the treaty without the aid of the federal government that leads to the conclusion that it is not enough to be a worker when claiming to want to liberate all. You must demonstrate an actual desire to liberate all peoples, and not just stop when your life has marginal gains. This lesson we did not learn from the communist movement, but instead we learned it from our own mistakes.

Muhpiya Luta’s War was filled with many atrocities, and so Oceti Sakowin on the Great Sioux reservation were happy to be at peace and have their own nation. What they did not realize was this was a prison disguised as what we wanted. We became an island nation suddenly, only there were no vast oceans. Horses were our vessels, the stars our GPS, and we knew the land better. Because settlers kept illegally entering our lands, the US military eventually decided they were no longer going to uphold the treaty, and congress decided in 1871 they would no longer deal directly with the Great Sioux, but instead introduced the Indian agents. These agents would become the Bureau of Indian Affairs when the department of War becomes the Department of Interior, and Indians to this day would be managed as national parks and wild game is. From there slowly one aspect of the treaty after another was repealed, and when Col George A Custer announced there was gold in the Black Hills officially, a renewed interest in war with the Oceti Sakowin was ignited. The Black Hills War is what it has become known as today, and it is this war where we find the infamous Tasunka Witiko (Crazy Horse) and Tatanka Iyotake (Bull Bison who sits on hindlegs, or Sitting Bull). Tatanka Iyotake was Hunkpapa Lakota, Tasunka Witiko was Oglala Lakota, and they led the radical faction to war by 1976 after a failed summit the previous year with more moderate chiefs (these chiefs would refuse to join the war still). Because these chiefs lacked the foresight to see the word of the wasicu would not be kept, we stopped at only liberating ourselves. It is by embracing the liberation of the Arapho, Cheyenne and others that Tatanka Iyotake was able to bring together a large coalition of bands by the Battle at Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn), and Custers folly would be realized as thousands of warriors road into put an end to the genocidaire.

For his defeat he was granted the rank of General, and now another myth has entered the American psyche, Custer’s Last Stand. The strategy would severely target women and children from that point onward (more than they already were) and after the slaughter of women, children and elders in obscene ways (like using infants as skeets for target practice) peace would be made and the railroad companies interests would continue to dominate, despite overseas shipping being cheaper than ever investing in the transcontinental- but that sure was a great ad campaign. Eventually the Great Sioux would lose its portions in Montana being and Nebraska being reduced to only the Dakotas, until the General Allotment Act of 1887 which helped divide us further into the reservations we see today. The first to be assassinated was Crazy Horse and it was by another Indian working for the BIA on Pine Ridge, my family is rode in his band, then they went after Sitting Bull (by this time that was actually his name as he gets it while running from the calvary in Blackfoot territory in Canada) when that new reached the Mniconjou chief Unphan Gleske (Spotted Elk) who was Tatanka Iyotake’s half-brother, they sought refuge with Red Cloud at Pine Ridge knowing he was one of the last leaders of the Black Hills War.

This wasn’t the only factor at play, but it's an undeniable one, the other two critical elements we must be aware of in telling this history are: the Ghost Dance Movement, and yellow-journalism of a young William Randolph Hearst.

For those unaware of the Ghost Dance Movement, it was a spiritual pan-Indian movement started by a Paiute man named Wovoka who had a vision that stemmed from an earlier vision that his father presumably taught him. This vision was about a violent end to the wasicu’s world, and a return to an Indigenous way of life, but this wasn’t some decolonial movement. It was instead a cultural reaction movement that was the result of the church’s influence on Indigenous communities, and although it dreamed of a future without oppression, it did so through idealized means of a Messiah figure. The Ghost Dance told this history and vision, and was easily adapted into nations beliefs across the US despite Wovoka never leaving his home in Nevada, but much like Marxism, each nation would develop it for their conditions and incorporate it with their other beliefs. By the time the Ghost Dance came around the Lakota people had already had many visions in much the same way, but there was no Messiah who would save us. It is instead the Oyate, the people, who must save themselves. The Ghost Dance particularly focused on the removal of white people from the land, some suggested divine intervention as if judgment day would take away the Christians leaving us heathens to enjoy our lives. The Lakota took our other visions from our leaders like Tatanka Iyotake, Tasunka Witiko, etc and we identified our enemy as the Indian agents. With an increase in hostilities, the US banned the movement and began repressing it along with other things like Sundances. This emergent liberation theology is the primary reason the 1890 massacre happened, but the lesser part of the story is the notorious anti-communist and nazi sympathizer, and media mogul; Hearst.

The Hearst name lasts into this century, and is because of specifically Williams yellow journalism, that helped expand the US empire. Most famously he is remembered for his reporting on Spanish occupation of Cuba, the issues were of course not the practical slavery, colonial violence, or anything real frankly. Instead much like our reactionaries today, he invented fake issues from real contradictions. One of the most offensive was the report of Spanish soldiers molesting Anglo women during inspections of boats, but there were also claims of feeding people to sharks and more. Before Bernays, we had Hearst. Through this journalism the drumbeat of war became louder, and because he was friends with the likes of Teddy Roosevelt (at the time the assistant secretary to the Navy) and the larger ruling class that craved a trans-oceanic Empire instead of one confined to the continent.

So when Teddy’s boss went on a trip leaving him in charge of operations, the USS Maine was stationed in Guantanamo Bay (before the US leased it), and ordered a fleet to begin sailing to the Philippines where the US was funding guerilla’s to destabilize Spanish holdings in the region. All of this without anyone’s approval but his own, as they were conspiring to manufacture consent for the war. The USS Maine caught fire and was blamed on Spain, historians suggest it was actually an engine fire, I suggest it was purposely destroyed to push the goals of the Empire. We get the War and America becomes a global power, betraying Cuban and Filipino “allies” who were really only pawns. This they accomplished with laws dictating the US has final say over decisions in Cuba, and by BUYING the Philippines from under the revolutionaries feet who they used for cannon fodder, as they shelled from warships. Once again this is a longer story for another time, but what I want to stress is this was not the first time Hearst fueled murder to undermine liberation of colonized peoples, nor would it be the last. After the fall of Custer, the General Allotment Act, and around when the Ghost Dance Movement reached the Lakota, we had already mentioned the lust for gold that made the wasicu lose more humanity. The people reporting this to the nation were capitalists like Hearst, who knew the foot soldiers for their accumulation were settlers breaking the law. However it wasn’t enough to have settlers move in, as the goal was to start another war, and take the rest of the land in my educated opinion. Most people are not well educated on the Hearst’s and so we limit our understanding to only the media campaigns that helped build the Imperial order. How many would argue this is an over prescription? But no, when you realize where Moribund capitalism crystalizes, Palo Alto, we have to ask what are the social and material conditions the San Francisco born William Randolph would be shaped by.

This is when all of our stories meet together, the book An American Genocide by Benjamin Hadley was covered by the Citations Needed podcast, highlighting just how common and blaise genocide apologia and support has been in the United States, but focuses on California. Similarly Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris (discussed only briefly really on Upstream podcast) lays out the policies in California, and frankly the crystallization of the banking cartel Lenin imagined, that inclined working class settlers toward organizing militias to kill Indians, of course at the behest of budding industrial titans that lay the folklore for the silicon valley geniuses like Elon Musk and companies like Apple, Bank of America, and much more. One of these budding capitalists was George Hearst, born in Missouri, found his way to California at the start of the Civil War. In Missouri he was already known for prospecting and land surveying, and brought those skills to California where he would become a gold mine owner (he would not do the mining himself of course, just owned the land he let people work) and ranch owner. If you can’t see the easily applicable theme here to the Black Hills, but gold and ranches were the original reason our land was stolen; the oil and uranium discoveries came later. This placed Hearst not only as a part of a family invested in the dispossession of natives from their land, but made his reporting on mining to encourage illegal excursion, as more of a favor to his father’s business instead of some pursuit of reporting the news (an exploration of Hearst’s reporting to come later on the Chunka Luta Podcast). This is of course because like most nepo babies, William’s dad gave him the job after acquiring the San Francisco Examiner. One of the most fascinating aspects of this dialectical relationship comes from the Hooverism that fueled Hearst’s anti-communism, and we would see some of the first examples of red coating happen when he suggest Lakota were all communists (a line we would here nearly a century later at the re-occupation of Wounded Knee) and reported on an ever looming threat on western civilization from a possible national liberation movement. A story as old as time really.

This increased the number of calvary members in the area, many young who had been propagandized by the latest myth of Custer’s Last Stand, and of course many of whom were rebuilding the US through the time tested tactic of Indian genocide. So we return to the band of Mniconjou fleeing Cheyenne River Reservation to Pine Ridge Reservation. This trail is memorialized today as BIA 27- The Chief Bigfoot Memorial Highway, or Bigfoot Trail. This is also the road the organization's land is on. It was the end of December, and considering it was only last year we saw dozens of people freeze to death, that spurred the need for this organization to exist; it comes to no surprise the conditions they fled in were dire. When discussing this topic it takes a great deal of tact, and you should learn about it so you don't post pictures of the mass grave to score clout points or whatever possesses people to ignore the wishes of the survivors and their children and grandchildren who survive them.Politics of Hallowed Ground is where you should begin, but needless to say we will only be brief. The trail took them through the Badlands which to this day are still bad. Jokes aside, Unphan Gleska (Chief Bigfoot) was walking in his too small shoes and caught pneumonia along the trail, succumbing to it before they reached Pine Ridge. The group continued on to the Agency, but before they arrived the calvary intercepted them and brought them to Wounded Knee Creek.

Separating the men from the women, they confiscated the guns and destroyed them, and while camped under a peace flag; they began to dance. Wovoka by the band Redbone captures the feeling a bit as to why, and their song We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee tells the story. I highly recommend you listen to it before we continue. Ghost Dances are very sacred and very serious affairs, people have died continuing them to this day, but the dance simply requires special shirts, a round dance, and tossing dirt into the air. A symbolic gesture, a living history, call it what you will; it wasn’t threatening in the immediate. Nonetheless the reason the shooting started has many claims, some say it must have been one of the men when they confiscated the guns and hid one, some place the massacres start at the confiscation. In reality it was obviously the people who still had the guns. This would be the equivalent of claiming the group you control their access to food, water, medicine, and access to the outside world are at fault for retaliating after the kidnapping of countless children is at fault for resisting your oppression.

Even if we did fire first, the resulting battle (as the government framed it) was certainly an overreaction to what could've been at most one gun- we do see this same tactic again last century during Yellow Thunder Camp led by Russell Means, and again only last decade during the #NoDAPL protests arresting a close family friend through a honey trap (Red Fawn). Instead we call it what it is, a massacre of mostyle women, children, and elderly. There are plenty of accounts of the aftermath you can find elsewhere, but one of the most gruesome scenes is described by my ancestor Tasunka Wasicu (American Horse).

“...When the firing began, of course the people who were standing immediately around the young man who fired the first shot were killed right together, and then they turned their guns, Hotchkill guns, etc., upon the women who were in the lodges standing there under a flag of truce, and of course as soon as they were fired upon they fled, the men fleeing in one direction and the women running in two different directions. So that there were three general directions in which they took flight.

There was a woman with an infant in her arms who was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce, and the women and children of course were strewn all along the circular village until they were dispatched. Right near the flag of truce a mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing, and that especially was a very sad sight. The women as they were fleeing with their babes were killed together, shot right through, and the women who were very heavy with child were also killed. All the Indians fled in these three directions, and after most all of them had been killed a cry was made that all those who were not killed wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little boys who were not wounded came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there…”

That very child lived a long time, and many of our leaders today knew her very well. At this time the official history I came to tell, but history doesn’t stop after the moment an event happens. Instead there is a great deal of blowback. Of course the podcast won’t do a season about Wounded Knee, so we will be discussing the blowback on an audio documentary I have been writing for the last 3 years, this piece will be a podcast episode as well, but I wanted to focus on the long history leading up to the massacre as that’s what this anniversary is about. The assassination of our leaders that our org and movement was born from, and the long road it took to get there. If you remember the last effort post was about the real Thanksgiving story, well now we see where that eventually led. There is plenty to the story we have left out, but I think you can see a beautiful mosaic I hope to create to tell the real history here.

The next post will cover the conditions between 1890 and 1973 on Pine Ridge, and settle on the Wounded Knee Occupation History which by that time our audio documentary series should be releasing. The best way to stay informed on its release and to here it early would be the patreon found on linktr.ee/chunkalutanetwork but I understand a lot of people here prefer https://liberapay.com/ChunkaLutaNetwork/ which I dont understand well enough, so if you have ideas how to keep ya’ll better informed. Part of my goals next year is to become more active in this space and lemmygrad, but obviously the real life stuff and mainstream social media take up so much time. We do have several organizers engaging here, but we all have lives y’know? When our website launches we will announce on all our social medias, but the public podcast finally launches the 20th, and early releases again will be on the patreon so listening there or the Marx Madness podcast will probably be the quickest ways to hear from us, besides patreon AND Marx Madness is free and educational. So why another post? Well this really about the harshness of winter and our genocide, that continues today both by gun, and through social murder. We are also doing a Winter Drive to help keep folks alive until we can start establishing more permanent changes to ease the struggle there. This would be things like poplar trees for pollarding, preparing dry material in the summer into heating bricks that will help start fires easier but also supplement the wood usage, and of course gather a larger stockpile this year. https://www.gofundme.com/f/deliver-wood-coats-supplies-to-pine-ridge it will only take 4-5k to send 2 organizers in a Uhaul to pick up the gathered supplies and bring it to the reservation. It will take several days so lodging will need to be paid for, gas, and food. A large portion of that (2k) is for more agitprop and paying the camera guy. Plus extra money to support our organizers family as they usually are the childcare, so without them their partner cant work unless they can afford childcare while one of the parents are gone therefore not losing a week of income.