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<p class="p-title center"> <a
href="http://indigenist.blogspot.com/2010/05/indigenous-crisis-us-7th-cavalry.html">
Indigenous Crisis - US 7th Cavalry Continues to Insult the People of
Indian Country and the Lakota Territories</a></p>
Press Release<br>
<div align="center"><big>Aboriginal News Group Press Statement</big><br>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">05.01.2010<br>
<br>
“<span style="font-style: italic;">The Pioneer has before declared that
our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians.
Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect
our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed
and untameable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies
future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under
incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as
full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.</span>”<br>
<br>
<div align="right">- <span style="font-weight: bold;">L. Frank Baum</span><br>
</div>
</div>
<br>
<div style="text-align: center;"><big>To the Original Peoples of the
Fourth World and all International Press Services:</big><br>
</div>
<br>
At high noon today US Army helicopters of the US Seventh Cavalry air
division attempted to land their Blackhawk aircraft upon Lakota Sacred
Burial grounds in South Dakota. The presence of military aircraft from
this unit is a sad and insulting reminder of the slaughter of more than
300 American Aboriginals on December 29,1890 when soldiers of the US
7th Cavalry gunned down more than 300 Aboriginal Minneconjou Lakota
refugee children, women, infants and the elderly at what is now called
Wounded Knee in South Dakota Indian Country. The military then left the
bodies of their victims to decay unburied in the driving snow.<br>
<br>
According to reports from Indigenous Rights Movement Radio host Wanblee
this afternoon, Lakota resident Theresa TwoBulls was given less than 24
hrs notice that three US Army 7th Cavalry helicopters would make a
landing on the sacred burial grounds at Wounded Knee. As of this
writing, the US military was confronted by angry but peaceful and
steadfast community resistance as the Aboriginal people of the area
have so far, according to reports from Lakota people on the ground,
managed to prevent the aircraft from touching Indigenous ground.<br>
<br>
For all American Aboriginals of the Americas, this is a sacred area.
This is the place where the promise of a people died while fleeing from
a genocidal US military unit hell-bent on liquidating the continent of
its Indigenous population. There has never been any official apology
offered for this massacre and the military awards bestowed upon the
genocidal aggressors involved in this conflict still stand, as does a
physical monument in honour of the US Army killed during Custer’s “last
stand” against a defiant and united Indigenous resistance to their own
demise.<br>
<br>
The history of the US Army 7th Cavalry is important to understanding
the level of violence used against Indigenous peoples. It is important
to remember that after the US Seventh Cavalry officially ended the
"Indian Wars" at home, they were then dispatched to do battle against
Indigenous Filipinos struggling to maintain their hard-won national
independence from the colonialist Spanish. In other words, the US War
Department sent this very same unit to do overseas what was done here
to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. In this historical light, it
is only logical for Indigenous peoples to assume that the Obama
administration is attempting to make a political point out of this
spectacle. Only, what sort of message are you sending by insulting and
humiliating a people already suffering from five centuries of
continuous pro-Europocentric, anti-Indigenous genocide?<br>
<br>
This domestic military action is a deliberate insult and an obvious
message of ongoing colonialism, state-sponsored racism and apathetic
Indigenous genocide to all Indigenous peoples across the Fourth World;
to the whole of the Lakota/Dakota Nation; and to the Indigenous
residents of Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee. The symbolism of dispatching
the Seventh Cavalry to Wounded Knee in an attempt to land weapons of
mass destruction on Aboriginal sacred ground tells us how little this
government, and this particular administration, respects the people of
Indian Country and our significant historical perspective as survivors
of the racist Euro-settler xenophobic purges waged against the Indian
in the Americas.<br>
<br>
To make matters worse, this action comes on the heels of newly-passed
legislation in Arizona state that requires law officers to
racially-profile anyone they believe “looks”, “sounds” or “dresses”
like an illegal immigrant, a thinly veiled “race law” that directly
effects both our Indigenous sisters and brothers native to Occupied
Mexico as well as the Native American population of Arizona in the
United States. Given that most Indigenous peoples of the Americas share
the same general physiotype and more often than not, similar Spanish
last names, the passage of this guideline will without a doubt lead to
widespread abuses against that state’s brown-skinned population. The
legal door now opened, Texas and other states led by neo-confederate
constituencies are moving to pass their own
anti-immigrant/anti-Indigenous directives that will broadly effect
anyone and everyone who could be perceived by the colonial European
majority as a “foreign invader”.<br>
<br>
The Obama administration has shown America and the world that they are
no different than any other previous US government in their view that
the American Indian on both sides of the US border is nothing more than
a prop or a tool to be displayed only when it is useful to promote the
“contemporary” 21st century neo-colonialist capitalist agenda. The
Obama administration, an office headed by a man of African descent, has
shamed itself and all those who have supported his candidacy in
arrogantly dismissing the memory of our people interred at Wounded Knee
by rubbing the military might of the historically anti-Indigenous 7th
Cavalry in our faces by forcibly entering Indian Country in an attempt
to land their machines of war on top of the bodies of our ancestral
dead.<br>
<br>
Clearly, the culture war against the American Indian is not over.
Welcome to the new American century.<br>
<br>
<br>
The Aboriginal News Group<br>
--<br>
The Aboriginal News Group is an international association of Indigenist
blog-journalists working to provide accurate under-reported Indigenous
news items to the people of the Fourth World and others with a concern
for human justice and Aboriginal political issues.
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wahjeh
rolland nadjiwon
______________________________________________
Light travels faster than sound.
That’s why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
______________________________________________
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