US Seventh Cavalry air division attempt landing on Wounded Knee Sacred Burial grounds

[Rolland Nadjiwon]

  Indigenous Crisis - US 7th Cavalry Continues to Insult the People of 
Indian Country and the Lakota Territories 
<http://indigenist.blogspot.com/2010/05/indigenous-crisis-us-7th-cavalry.html>

Press Release
Aboriginal News Group Press Statement
05.01.2010

"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."

- L. Frank Baum

To the Original Peoples of the Fourth World and all International Press 
Services:

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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".

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.

Clearly, the culture war against the American Indian is not over. 
Welcome to the new American century.


  The Aboriginal News Group
--
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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