John Trudell, 2001 (Ken Ige, Honolulu Star-Bulletin)
John Trudell (1946- ) is a Native American (Santee Sioux) activist and spoken-word poet. His FBI file, at over 17,000 pages, was once among the biggest.
He took part in the Occupation of Alcatraz (1969-1971), becoming the voice of Radio Free Alcatraz.
From 1973 to 1979, he was Chairman of the American Indian Movement (AIM). It was modelled in part on the Black Panthers – and was taken down in much the same way, through the FBI’s Cointelpro operation.
On February 11th 1979, he burned the US flag on the steps of the FBI building. That night, his pregnant wife, his three little children and his mother-in-law, back in Nevada, were burned to death in a house fire.
He fled to Canada, seeking political asylum. He turned to poetry, seeking to deal with his grief.
In the 1980s, as a spoken-word poet, he recorded three albums with Kiowa guitarist Jesse Ed Davis. Bob Dylan said that “AKA Graffiti Man” (1986) was the best album of the year.
Trudell’s picture of US history: After the battle for the land, came the battle for the spirit of the People. Some defended themselves by becoming drunks instead of giving into the spiritual disease that Columbus and the other Europeans had brought with them.
Those who had the disease called themselves Christians. Those who did not were called heathens. The Europeans themselves had once lived in tribes as free people, but then, thousands of years ago, came the disease.
The Christian disease is based on guilt, sin and blame, on male authority and violence, on lies, on taking more than you need. It is not based on respect, love, harmony or peace. Christians see the Earth not as their Mother, but as something to rape.
The Earth in time will recover from the disease, whether it does it through holes in the ozone in the sky or through other means. It is just a matter of time.
His generation, like the generation of Crazy Horse, did the best they could. But they acted out of emotion, not true understanding.
Trudell quotes:
“We’re not Indians and we’re not Native Americans. We’re older than both concepts. We’re the People, we’re the Human Beings.”
“The great lie is that it is civilization. It’s not civilized. It has been literally the most bloodthirsty, brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That’s the great lie, is that it represents civilization.”
“Grandmother Moon,
We love you and we are angry
At the invaders who trash you
And violate our universe with
Their mechanical uncleanliness.
We pray for you, for us, and for the
Invader who just can´t comprehend
Respect, love, or the balance of life.
We do not join the invading madness.
From the way they act,
It speaks of spirit sadness.
Machine, money, progress is the
Cause of our common abuse.”“Protect your spirit, because you are in the place where spirits get eaten.”
– Abagond, 2015.
Update (December 9th): John Trudell died of cancer on December 8th, just three days after I wrote this post. Rest in peace.
See also:
Abagond 
[…] Sourced through Scoop.it from: abagond.wordpress.com […]
LikeLike
Anybody can correct me if I’m wrong, as I know very little about this man, but it seems from this post that Mr. Trudell is suggesting that Christianity was behind the mentality of the European imperialists. I’m not saying that view is incorrect, if he does indeed believe that, but I wonder how such beliefs might be taken if heard by a Christian of color.
LikeLike
Jesus, like many of us, was racist/ethnically prejudiced (at least according to the Bible, which is admittedly a pretty dubious source):
“A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to Him, crying out, ‘Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is suffering terribly from demon-possession.’ Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to Him and urged Him, ‘Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.’ He answered, ‘I was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel.’ The woman came and knelt before Him. ‘Lord, help me!’ she said. He replied, ‘It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.'”
Well. Ouch! That’s how he’s portrayed in a text written by his own followers, who were trying to spread his message everywhere. At least many of his ideas were good ones.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Paige
Yes, that comes across as certainly racist. However, you are leaving out the final piece of the text, which reads the following:
“Then Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.’ And her daughter was healed at that moment.”
So, ultimately, Jesus DID heal her daughter. Even if he was bigoted against the Canaanites, he did not seem to believe that they were beyond redemption/saving.
LikeLike
re: Benjamin’s comment
You don’t need to know much about Trudell to know this about US history.
Reading about the founding of Maryland, I found it is all about Christianizing the native heathens and then getting rid of them.
LikeLike
@Benjamin
First the Canaanite woman had to argue with Jesus and degrade herself by agreeing that she and her people were dogs (assuming that the story really happened, and happened that way).
LikeLike
@jefe
Of course. I’m not disagreeing with his view at all. My question was more, since, according to him, Christianity is responsible for European imperialism, how do Christians of color, who have suffered under said imperialism, reconcile their Christianity?
@Paige
True. One could argue, however, that perhaps Jesus was simply testing her faith. Seeing if she’d still ask recognize him as “The Lord” even if she had to degrade herself. In any case, yeah, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture of Jesus.
LikeLike
@Benjamin,
I am trying to figure this out myself.
I recently have been studying about the first landing of English in Maryland in 1634, when the Yaocomico Indians (sub-tribe of the Piscataway chiefdom) ceded an abandoned settlement to the English for their settlement as a haven for Catholics. In 1640, Father Andrew White baptized the Yaocomico leader chief. In 1642, that chief was shot dead and the surviving Yaocomico tribe members fled across the Potomac into Virginia.
I can probably get some more info from the modern day Piscataway who are overwhelmingly Catholic and celebrated their 375 years under Catholicism this past July.
LikeLike
Not being funny but is John Trudell really native American? He looks like an older version of James Franco to me.
LikeLike
[…] https://abagond.wordpress.com/2015/12/05/john-trudell/ […]
LikeLike
@jefe, @Benjamin,
The way around this conundrum is simple for “a person of faith”. I’ve had a discussion with a black minister regarding the idea that only through Jesus can one get into the kingdom of heaven. Essentially, I asked how a person who only by circumstance of birth can be denied peace, moreover cast forever into hell’s fires to suffer for all eternity. I probed further with a specific example of a lifetime of good work — a tenant of Christianity that remarkably mirrors certain Eastern belief systems — and his answer was that even Buddhists would be shown the light of the Lord upon their death and hence given the opportunity to accept the one true Lord and Savior Jesus Christ into their lives.
The irony of convenience did not reveal itself to this minister of the Lord – that only by way of generations upon generations of his forebears’ suffering at the hands of ministers of his creed, serving their nation as well as their God, was he bestowed such wisdom. There’s little accounting for taste, fate, and faith.
LikeLike
So can it be confirmed that the FBI did horrifyingly murder this guys entire family? Is there any evidence?
LikeLike
@1tawnystranger
Lots of Native Americans are mixed race. Each individual tribe establishes its own guidelines for “blood quantum” to qualify for membership.
Ryan Red Corn of the 1491s comedy group is even more European in appearance than Trudell, so he frequently gets to play the white guy in their skits. This is his poem Bad Indians: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuzPoidV4nI)
LikeLike
“but I wonder how such beliefs might be taken if heard by a Christian of color.”
@ Benjamin
I suppose that an individual Christian of color beliefs would be shaped by his or her’s unique and individual perspective (or idea) regarding whether Christianity really originated with white people.
Truth is steadily being revealed. The Garden of Eden was never in some Scandinavian (or other caucasian) country with a white/blond Adam & Eve as the mainstream once suggested. White people were not the ORIGINAL humans as WHITE people in the recent past have ballyhooed. There is and was never was (to the chagrin of many) any real WHITE person known as Jesus as depicted in portraits seen all over Amerika. Conventional wisdom and other lies are continually being uncovered and destroyed by the light of truth.
http://stewartsynopsis.com/africans_wrote_the_bible.htm
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Fan
I saw a Netflix documentary ‘Jesus’s Wife’ done by the Nat Geo or Smithsonian I forget which one. It was about the evidence transcribed from a scroll that seemed authentic enough to suggest that Christ did have a wife. Well the important thing is it had experts from Harvard and other elite institutions corresponding. And the reenacting actors in flashbacks were all Middle Eastern looking, including Jesus himself. So ‘White’ scholars seem to acknowledge Jesus’ ethnic background without a doubt these days.
LikeLike
A John Trudell quote about Christians:
LikeLike
Trudell’s mother was Mexican, his father Santee Sioux.
LikeLike
@ Benjamin
Many White Americans worship a false god made in their own image called White Jesus.
As James Cone put it:
Even in Frederick Douglass you see the idea that Whites practised a fake Christianity.
LikeLike
“Jesus, like many of us, was racist/ethnically prejudiced (at least according to the Bible, which is admittedly a pretty dubious source):” – Paige
“Protect your spirit, because you are in the place where spirits get eaten.” – John Trudell
Here, Mr. Trudell is correct also because Amerika in all its demonic behavior, uproot everything that involves the spirit of righteousness with something of their own that’s drenched in profaneness and contrary to the words of the Most High (e.g., same sex marriage, man/boy association NAMBLA, different tiered laws for different groups of people).
@Page, you correct and you’re wrong. You are correct in that Yahawashi (the world ignorantly refer to him as Jesus) was a racist because He came only for the deliverance of His people to free the Israelites from perpetual sin. However, you are wrong in the sense that the Bible is dubious. Perhaps the Bible is untrustworthy or uncertain to you due to your lack of understanding. Proverbs 4:5 Get wisdom, get understanding: forget it not; neither decline from the words of my mouth. Proverbs 1:22 How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?
It is obvious that you’ve been deceived by “that old serpent” the Bible speaks of. Furthermore, don’t think the serpent for one second is talking snake. The serpent the Bible speaks of is in fact a man. However, you could proceed to prove me wrong, … but only if you have a backyard full of talking snakes on video ready for upload.
LikeLike
“The Lord” even if she had to degrade herself. In any case, yeah, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture of Jesus. – Benjamin
Just to prove to that Yahawashi (Jesus) could care less about what you or anyone else thought of Him. As you remember, He wasn’t even going to respond to the Canaanite woman pleas to help her daughter. He did so only after the Apostles that accompanied him, encouraged Him to respond to the woman and she also recognized Him as Masayach(the Messiah). If you were not of the seed of Abraham, Isaac or Jacob, He thought less of you. More specifically, if you were of a heathen nation, he thought of you as a bucket of spit. Here we go:
2 Esdras 6:56 “As for the other people, which also come of Adam, thou hast said that they are nothing, but be like unto spittle: and hast likened the abundance of them unto a drop that falleth from a vessel.”
He even likened her to a dog. Even today, a female dog is said to be a BITCH. In the urban areas of Amerika, the youngsters would say beeeotch. So yes, Yahawashi (Jesus) didn’t have a lot of love of people from the other nations because of how they collectively treated or persecuted His people, the 12 tribes of Israel, more commonly referred to as the Israelites.
LikeLike
@abagond, Fan, davidly
The thing is, if you watch Trudell’s video on “The Tribes of Europe”, he seems to say that Christianity ruined the European “tribes”, rather than the other way around. I had a feeling most people here were going to mention how Europeans altered or otherwise manipulated Christianity for their own gain. Sure, I’m not denying that. But I think what Mr. Trudell is saying, at least from that “Tribes of Europe” video, is that perhaps Christianity was a bad belief system right from the get go.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Really? I think religion (Christianity in my case) is as simple as Christ’s two greatest commandments.
I think people get out of it and the Bible whatever they need or whatever they are looking for.
I’ve read it from beginning to end 13 or 16 times and I have a different understanding each time I read it.
Did Christianity destroy countries and cultures? Not in my opinion. I think the misuse and misunderstanding of it has.
LikeLike
@ Benjamin
This is my understanding too of what he believes. In the post I express that as;
No Christian, almost by definition, is going to believe that.
On the other hand, I think most Western Christians who thought about it would agree that, when Columbus set foot in the Americas in 1492, Christianity had been corrupted and was badly in need of reform. It was an age of evil popes. Thus the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation of the 1500s.
So you can say Christianity arrived in a diseased state. But racism, I would argue, was not part of that disease. Racism came later, in the 1600s. The moral atrocities committed by Christian extremists like Columbus were ideologically unsustainable in Christian terms, especially as Africans and Americans converted. Racism grew out of Christian guilt. It gave morally-blind cover to enslaving Africans and wiping out Americans. But even that rationalization did not work for long, as shown by the rise of the abolitionist movement.
So I would not say that Christianity is the disease, but it has become diseased.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@1tawnystranger
I saw this article on Native Circle (http://www.nativecircle.com/mlmEverydaymyths.html) and thought of your comment re: John Trudell’s appearance. Indigenous people have a variety of looks, from the Hollywoodized Plains Indian look to a European look, Latino look and an African look. Some Indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest look very Northeast Asian.
I’m struck by how some of those looks are on display in the header that Abagond is using for Native American month https://abagond.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/122209_devenney_500.jpg. The eldest boy looks so much like his mother right behind him, albeit with an African cast. I really love the proud bearing of the entire family group. It is even more amazing when you consider that the photo was taken in the early 1900s. It’s not hard to imagine the tremendous pain and loss this family endured in the preceding 30 years when the “West was won” at their expense.
LikeLike
re: looks,
Across the country, there is European, African, Asian, etc. as well as some mesoAmerican, south American mixed throughout the Native American population that you will get a wide variety of looks. Most of the ones in the mid- and south Atlantic region are triracial (and generally look as such). Some First Nations people in British Columbia did indeed mix with Chinese in the 1800s.
There will be no look that will identify indigenous American.
To most of their groups, it is irrelevant anyhow, as connection is almost always based on kinship. It was white US Government policy to make it all about race. So later on, tribes were forced to add membership rules with blood quantum provisions.
In any case, John Trudell looks like many Native American identified people.
Here are a photo from younger years.
With his family (when they were still alive)
LikeLiked by 2 people
@abagond
And I thought you were Catholic…
LikeLike
thanks for putting it this way.
I got very confused when I was young about how religion teaches love and compassion yet justifies violence and dehumanization. The very church I attended Sunday School at in MD opened an academy so that their white kids would not have to go to school with n1663rs. I joined them on a tour to their megachurch / college headquarters in Chattanooga, TN which fit 10,000 people and no blacks or other POC. It felt awful.
It was God’s will to kill the g00ks in Vietnam. My maternal grandfather was a deacon in a Southern Baptist Church in Alabama and you can imagine all the stuff I heard there, not least of which that my parents were going to hell for what they did.
By the time I was a teenager, I was so disillusioned, that I stopped going to church for a very long while.
But, it looks like Christianity has been diseased for 600 years. Is it permanently diseased?
LikeLike
I believe all religions are diseased. They don’t start out that way as they are very fluid and spiritual. But they mutate into hierarchies that offer privilages and special keys to heaven. Christianity became diseased within a few generations maybe sooner.
I raised my kids as skeptics and never took them to church. You can be ab athiest and still be a spiritual person. Thats not a contradiction.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@jefe
“There will be no look that will identify indigenous American…connection is almost always based on kinship.”
You are right. Indigenous Americans are like other original people around the world (such as the native Australians, the Maori of New Zealand and the Native Hawaiians) are much more concerned with kinship and culture than “looks”.
Perhaps sometime soon, African Americans will emulate that model. For too long we have enveloped people who “look” like us only to find them disinterested, disconnected and culturally incompetent.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Afrofem,
I really doubt that black Americans are heading very quickly to any kinship based social model, given the history of US society and the role that blacks played in that.
Whites cherry-picked the system of kinship to fit their race model, ie,,
“Slave” status was based on the status of the mother
yet
Inheritance and family connection was largely patrilineal, but also somewhat bilineal.
Other than that, social status was not largely kinship based. This includes racial membership.
Stuff like Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws (and the Dawes Act for indigenous Americans) were used to enforce the racial social structure in the USA. It didn’t have much to do with kinship.But it did force whites, Asians and Native Americans to disown their connections to their relatives who married blacks.
In order for black or African-Americans to adopt a kinship based system, they would have to do it independent of whites. Not likely in the short term, esp. in a society that places a value on rented Negroes.
For indigenous Americans, it is easier as
– it is their traditional way anyhow.
– tribes are small enough (both in numbers and geographical spread) to retain kinship based systems.
– they are off the radar to most whites
How would you even start to make the 40+ million blacks in the USA switch to kinship based systems? It might be possible with some of the more isolated groups (eg, the sea Islands of South Carolina). It might also be possible if an immigrant black group settled in the USA in close geographical proximity and set up social clan-based institutions independent of both black and white Americans.
Do you know many blacks who identify as such because of their connection to a larger clan? Even most of those who are descendant of (West Indian or African) immigrants become just “black” after a generation.
I think Asians in the USA had a more kinship based (largely patrilineal) system pre-civil rights, but they have moved away from that – it has become more race based. I don’t necessarily think that it is a good thing, but it shows what some of the “benefits” of civil rights were.
LikeLike
” You can be an athiest and still be a spiritual person. Thats not a contradiction.”
.
@ MJB
You can be Christ-like and still be a spiritual person, also.
That’s not a contradiction, either.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@abagond
Christianity even before the 1600s had blood on its hands. The Crusades and the horrific war against the Turks.. It goes beyond what happened in ‘the New World’ if you do your research.
LikeLike
@MJB
If you sit through a sermon or whatever they call it in church, the message is educational. You can’t completely condemn a cultural revolution that is historical record and stood the test of time. Yes it’s been exploited for a ton of bad but it’s still a major component of recorded history. Why not take your children into all places of ceremony that are welcoming, all Eastern and Western religious institutions. Think of it as a cultural studies experiment.
LikeLike
“Think of it as a cultural studies experiment.”
Or a brainwashing.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Their is nothing Trudell has written that I would disagree with.
I rejected Christianity in my teen years and that turmoil resulted in drug abuse for a number of years. So when he writes about how some natives resorted to alcohol and simular abuse that made perfect sense to me
LikeLike
I don’t think I could ever take Christianity, Judaism, or Islam as a blue print to life. But my parents are Buddhist. The more I examine this particularly religion, the more I begin to understand it’s a psychological state of mind rather than a deity fearing moniker such as the Abrahamic religions.. But I still respect them as historical record with some non-fictional historical links to the past.
LikeLike
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOWwwzYKung&app=desktop)
Hanging on the Cross …
LikeLike
In Arizona you can pay some white guys thousands of dollars to sit in a sweat lodge and consume Peyote. This allows white people to have that “experience” and “connect” with Native Americans. This is cultural appropriation of the worse kind. This leads to consuming a tradition into white suprememcy, not connecting with the Earth.
LikeLike
I was in my younger years when I consumed LSD and mushrooms periodically. It allowed me to see things differently. Sometimes it was in a setting at a party and sometimes it was me camping out in the desert. The latter proved more rewarding as it allowed me to focus on inner introspection without distraction.
I raised my kids differently when it came to drug use. My conversations about drug used revolved around using them responsibly and dealing with the consequences of your actions. Which drugs were self destructive and which drug combinations could kill you.
All my sons have used LSD. I told them that tripping at a party isn’t the same thing as being in a safe place where you can loose yourself. One of my sons talked about having conversations with “fractal entities” and those conversations led to changes within his life.
LSD was the last drug my youngest has ever used. He told me he saw “his life pass before him” and that led to him writing down his life plan and directing him to a specific life course. He told me he now sees drinking and smoking pot as distractions from his “life plan”.
Their experiences were intensely spiritual and powerful that never would have occurred within a religious setting or hierarchy. None of them required a “God”.
LikeLike
^ So you recommend using drugs to get in touch with our spiritual selves?
LikeLike
@ MJB – Could the same results have been achieved by an extended fast?
LikeLiked by 1 person
“So you recommend using drugs to get in touch with our spiritual selves?”
I’m not recommending it for everybody, just saying its a valid choice. Nor am am I suggesting that it is the only way to get in touch with “our spiritual selves” only that is a valid path that gets lost in how “evil” drugs are in society.
We know some Native Americans used Hallucinogens in the context of their religion. I don’t know enough about Native American religion to suggest that what I’m talking about has anything to do with that.
LikeLike
@TeddyBearDaddy
To be fair, the Turks invaded Europe also. In fact, the entire modern Republic of Turkey was built on what used to be Greek Anatolia.
LikeLike
@ MJB – Recent studies suggest that the bacteria in the gut have more of an influence on more things than previously thought.
Maybe Christ’s 40 day fast (NOT recommended) had the same end result as Hallucinogenic means.
LikeLiked by 1 person
michaeljonbarker
Even though I accept the title of Christian, I can honestly say I am pulling away from it. It seems to me that as time passes it become more tainted or “diseased”. The value I once got from it just is not there. I felt more spiritually feed by meditating back in my teen years.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Insightful post.
LikeLike
@jefe
Your assessment about African Americans moving to a kinship-connection model are on point.
My comment about African Americans emulating that model were wishful thinking. Like you, I understand many aspects of this complex culture, how it separates people and how it classifies people.
Yet, I feel the loss of the tightly-knit Black communities of my childhood. Many of my classmates and I lived in close walking distance to a host of relatives (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and adult siblings). Many of those relatives were also members of the same churches, went to the same schools and partied at the same nightclubs on the weekends. They shared some daily meals and holidays were big multi-house affairs with feasting, dancing, poetry, speeches, singing and games.
There was very little distinction between relatives, friends and neighbors. Every adult (except parents, grandparents and adult siblings) was addressed as “Aunt” or “Uncle” and treated my siblings and I like nieces and nephews.
That community was far from perfect and had its share of dysfunction: domestic violence (wife-beating as it was called at that time), child molestation, intense colorism and classism.
However, the current ethos of hyper-individualism (aka “I got mine, you get yours and the devil gets the hind most) that many Black people have adopted from the majority culture shreds the fabric of the community in ways Black people can’t afford.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@ TeddyBearDaddy
I did not say the violence started in the 1600s. I said the racism did.
LikeLike
@ Bobby M
What did I say that was against Catholic doctrine?
LikeLike
Is not the “kinship based connection model” still apart of many African communities? I read somewhere about Somali clans and how marriages amongst different clans made up the fabric of society. Clan identity was rooted in the many families that comprised its total.
Maybe Somaliprince can expand on that.
LikeLike
@MJB
Somalia has many clans. It is traditional for the member of one clan to marry someone of another clan. This is to strengthen bonds. To the Western eye, it is what represents ‘society’.
I married a woman from another clan. You can technically marry someone from within the clan, but even then it is usually someone from a sub clan.
The clans are seen as extended families in Somalia. That is why people usually marry people from outside the clan. The concept of clan or ethnicity is primarily a Western thing.
Westerners tried to class these different clans as separate ethnicities. Many argue that the problems Somalia has faced over the last few decades was because of ‘clan conflict’, when in actual fact, it is a remnant of the way Westerners tried to class each clan as being a separate race and play them against one another.
Basically, the same thing that happened in Rwanda between the tutsis and the hutus.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@MJB,
Wow, you are really into the white default model for US society.
Even for US blacks, you have to look at overseas models of kinship, as though they were a foreign culture. I thought you only did that to Asians.
LikeLike
@Afrofem,
The white US model for society is not clan-based or kinship-based but race-based. Every single person, blacks, whites, Asians, even Native Americans have to organize their communities against the backdrop of the US model.
In fact, I wonder if the US culture specifically specifically wanted to break up the clan-based societies, even those that whites may have had. They don’t like them as their social organization runs outside of the mainstream culture and therefore out of their control. They must be broken up to maintain the race based culture of the USA.
All of the neighborhoods I grew up in went from being “white” to hyperblacks (80-98%). I did not see any kinship-based culture in those neighborhoods I have experience with either when they were white or after they became majority black.
I imagine you would have seen more kinship-based culture in black communities during Jim Crow in the South and during the the Great Migrations in the mid-20th century to the North. But post-1980s, when a black person enters a community, he will do it as a black person, not as the uncle or cousin or nephew of so and so. The prison system and War on Drugs has not done anything to nurture any kinship-based culture. US society wants to make it race based.
Besides blacks and whites, I have also personally witnessed what happened to both Asian and Native American communities.
Prior to the 1960s-70s, Chinese American communities still retained a kinship-based culture. Chinatowns had associations for each clan who came from the same county or region in China (ie, who spoke the same dialect). They viewed each other as “cousins” and related to the same clan back in their home villages. Parallel institutions which formed outside the white mainstream were largely kinship-based. Even where the population was spread out and there was no Chinatown (eg, across the Mississippi delta), 6 surnames made up 80% of the population and new arrivals would be the brother, nephew, cousin, or son-in-law (or a chosen wife) of someone already there. Instantly upon arrival, they would be connected to a community to which they had a kinship relationship.
Whether in chinatowns or small town Mississippi, this connection also spread to the children of Chinese men who took white or black or Latino wives, so it was not strictly race based (but more patrilineal kinship).
–> Whites forced it to be race based (remember Jim Crow).
–> in fact, the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 helped to destroy the kinship-based culture as immigration prior to that HAD to be kinship based (as well as institutions set up to support the community).
Now the communities form more on the basis of language / dialect or just race and less on kinship. With the high exogamy of Asians (especially women), I don’t see how any community related to Asians could continue for long using the mainstream white model. If multi-ethnic Asians marry each other and have children, that too would coalesce into a race model and not a kinship model.
Native American communities have remained intact precisely because of their kinship relationship. Even where I grew up, where American Indians had no reservation, there were small, separate communities of closely related individuals who clustered together around shared ancestors who had purchased land in a prior generation. They segregated themselves from both whites and blacks. But, there has always been a move by governments to break that organization up, and make it about race (think Walter Plecker). Also, once one of them leaves the community (say to work in a city), they lose their social organization based on close kinship connection (and reorganize it largely along racial lines), where they blend more into either white or black communities.
Asians and Native Americans were organized around kinship ties, and that is being lost (if not destroyed already). I really don’t see how black Americans, who had less connection with each other in the first place (esp. after the great migrations) would be able to reverse that trend, given the policies of governments in the USA.
LikeLike
@ jefe.
I’m into destroying the white default modle for society. That is what is foreign to humanity.
It is white supremecy along with Christianity that destroyed cultural identities both in the U.S. and Africa.
The problem has been identified. The question is what will replace it. Thats why I think the answer lies within the universal roots of culture like the kinship modle. That history and those traditions need to be examined and relearned.
Afrofem spoke off her tight knit community growing up. Thats in spite of white cultural interference. So I wouldn’t dismiss the kinship modle completly as not possible for communities.
LikeLike
So, we can reorganize the entire US society into a kinship based system?
Or convince enough of them to move to a clan-based model instead of a race-based one?
Good luck with that one.
Anyhow, in order for that to happen, kinship-based institutions would have to be set up (similar to what used to exist in Asian American communities and arguably in some black communities). Can we establish kinship based communities in the era of the Internet?
Even if we could, I am not saying that it would not have its problems too. Instead of race wars we would have clan wars.
LikeLike
^ Further thought.
Native American communities ARE based on the kinship model. We still have modern communities organized around that. Look what happened to them.
Has that done anything to challenge the white supremacy race model?
Originally, tribes formed alliances with whites to help them fight their traditional clan-based enemies. Again, look what happened to them.
LikeLike
“tribes formed alliances with whites to help them fight their traditional clan-based enemies”
Are you sure about that ? Or are you relying on the history created by white people to justify bringing civilization to “war like tribes” in a country where nobody was starving except the white people who arrived here to being “Christianity” ?
LikeLike
@Jefe
“Some First Nations people in British Columbia did indeed mix with Chinese in the 1800s.”
A few years ago, I met a member of the Yakima Nation who said he was a quarter Filipino and that this wasn’t uncommon due to the Manong generation of Filipino immigrants intermarrying with the Yakima.
LikeLike
@MJB,
There is plenty of archaeological and oral history evidence that tribes had conflict with each other even without white people present. Even native Americans can corroborate that for you.
There were starving American tribes that raided other villages for food and sometimes taking their children or bringing male survivors into their tribe. This explains why many villages had multilingual residents and how culture got diffused among tribes.
The explanation of the settling of Manhattan by the Dutch or southern Maryland by English catholics can be traced to one American tribe seeking allies to resist other tribes.
Little good it did them.
LikeLike
@Solitaire,
Do you have any sources documenting the contacts between native Americans / First Nations people and Asians? I only found a few things so far, and apart from the few tribes that mixed with Asians, there is little oral history about that.
LikeLike
@MJB,
Why did Eastern Woodlands people surround their villages with log palisades?
LikeLike
The north east Indians were both argrian and hunters. They lived in towns. They grew food staples like beans, corn and squash. The Pilgrims were starving but not the Indians that fed them who were farmers. The pilgrims used biological warfare to kill them so they could get their farm land because they were heathens.
Native Americans had fences around their crops to keep out deer and log palisades to keep wolves and bears out. Native Americans constructed irrigated water ways. The tale that Native Americans were starving before white people showed up is a myth. They had treaties between different tribes and marriages between differnt tribes to build alliances. Their were trade routes that ran from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic. Their were trade routes that ran from the Pacific to the Colorado. White people didn’t build the roads because they all ready existed. When the Spansih arrived the built their missions along trade routes that had been used for hundreds of years. This idea the the Native Americans were starving war like savages is a myth. They only fought back when white people tried to take their farm lands and private property away.
Once white people showed up the first thing they did was sow discontent and distrust amongst different tribal groups. They made contracts they had no intention of keeping .and deliberately favored some groups over others. It was typically divide and conquer stratagy used in conquest.
LikeLike
But wasn’t it the point of religion to replace all of the old clan, ethnic, state,… models of division with one based on an ideology that encouraged everyone to treat even their enemies well?
LikeLike
@Uglyblackjohn
You make a good point. Some religions do indeed appear to try and replace tribal or ethnic loyalties with religious ones. Thus, I could see religion potentially uniting people of different backgrounds, and having them see one another as part of the same group.
LikeLike
Christianity and Islam certainly did not replace tribal or ethnic loyalties with religious ones. It didn’t then, it doesn’t now.
Are you suggesting that once two different opposing tribes adopt the same or similar religion that they unite as one people?
In Maryland, after converting natives to Catholicism, they pushed them off the land or killed them.
All of the civilized tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, etc.) of the southeast were Christian converts (hence, “civilized”). However, in no way did whites see them as an ingroup based on religion. They banished them to Oklahoma (or killed them along the way).
Part of Trudell’s point is that after adopting christianity, they took their land and killed their spirit and tried to wipe them out as a people.
I would argue that that is still the case now.
LikeLike
@ jefe – People self-segregate all the time based on many issues or traits – even on blog sites where people don’t know each other and can do no real harm to anyone else. On blogs, no one has any power to oppress another yet there seems to be Black blogs, white blogs, Asian blogs, female blogs, gay blogs, conservative blogs,…. People seem to identify by what makes them different from or a victim of any perceived oppressor.
The idea was that people belonging to the same religious institutions would operate on a higher principle and look for the best in those different from themselves.
LikeLike
@MJB
Agree that the Indians were not starving that winter if they had enough spare food to feed the pilgrims.
Agree that Indians were semi-agrarian. They were farmers, but at the same time, they were hunter/gatherers. For example, they ate meat and fish but did not raise livestock or fish farms. They foraged for berries and tubers.
Not all tribes always had enough food for all people to eat at all times, ie,
– floods, hurricanes, etc. could flatten settlements, ruin crops (sep. in the Chesapeake Bay and along the coastal areas. Some river settlements could flood in spring runoffs.
– Crop failures caused by late or early frosts (common during the Little Ice Age), disease, pests, animals, etc. would cause food shortages.
– sudden change that yielded less animals for food from hunting or fishing
– raid from another tribe
So food shortages did occur. Accordingly,
– they formed larger confederacies and chiefdoms as a buffer against food shortages. Not all of the villages would be hit by a food shortage at once.
– they sometimes raided other tribes for their food or for their settlement sites or hunting / foraging grounds.
– confederacies and chiefdoms formed to share food, to trade items across long distances, and to form military allies against attacks from other tribes.
Yes, but also to offer some protection from raiding bands.
Where did you hear this myth? The more likely occurrence was the other way around (white people were starving), but even native Americans occasionally encountered food shortages, like all people do.
Yes, for reasons I gave above. Why would one need to form alliances if it had nothing to do with food or military protection? (the other reasons would be to trade for other things)
Agree with this part. Why do the fighting yourself if you can get them simply to fight each other?
But they would be fighting each other even without white people showing up. Why else would they need to form alliances? Do you really believe that there was 10,000 years of peace before white people started showing up?
LikeLike
@Jefe
Unfortunately that one conversation is the extent of my knowledge. I was surprised at first, but it made sense considering the restrictions on Asian immigration and the anti-miscegenation laws of that era.
It would be interesting to research.
LikeLike
One of the first things Massasoit did was to broker an alliance with the Pilgrims against the Narragansett, the traditional enemies of his people.
LikeLike
@Solitaire,
I have a youtube copy of an interview with a British Columbia first nations tribe discussing their Chinese heritage and a graduate research paper which focused on Chinese – American Indian interaction in the American west in the mid-late 1800s and some books that compared the Chinese expulsion pogroms with the Native American pogroms, but I think there is a big whole in the amount of research available that discusses this. I promised Abagond I would draft something – maybe could start the discussion.
Of course we have the Filipinos who settled in Louisiana in the late 1700s. Some married Native American women. A few Chinese in Mississippi married Choctaw. And of course we have centuries of Manila Galleons which brought Filipinos and Chinese in contact with Native Americans in Mexico, and even some in California. At least 2 of the Filipinos were killed by Natives in the first landing in 1587.
But, by and large, Asian – Native interaction is dwarfed by Asian-black interaction. There is considerably more Asian ancestry in the US black population than there is Asian ancestry in the Native American population.
LikeLike
@Solitaire
Yes, there is considerable historical record, at least from the English side, of their forming alliances with some Native tribe to join forces in fighting / resisting another.
However, it seems that some anthropologists have pointed out that the use of “traditional enemies” is rather Anglo-centric, as that is the point of view of the particular Anglo- centric person who made the records (or deduced that from reading the records). In other words, an anglo-centric historian would label them “traditional enemies” when it might have been simply a new tribe that they had a recent skirmish with.
LikeLike
@jefe
“Of course we have the Filipinos who settled in Louisiana in the late 1700s. Some married Native American women. A few Chinese in Mississippi married Choctaw. And of course we have centuries of Manila Galleons which brought Filipinos and Chinese in contact with Native Americans in Mexico, and even some in California. At least 2 of the Filipinos were killed by Natives in the first landing in 1587.”
Oh, duh, I was tired last night. I did already know most (not all) of the above. What I meant about the extent of my knowledge was that I didn’t have any links or sources or anything that you wouldn’t already be aware of. You definitely have looked into the subject more than I have.
Most of what I’ve read covers Asian/Native interaction in one sentence. For example, everything I’ve seen about the Filipinos in Louisiana has one sentence saying that some of the men married Native American women–and that’s it.
“However, it seems that some anthropologists have pointed out that the use of “traditional enemies” is rather Anglo-centric, as that is the point of view of the particular Anglo- centric person who made the records (or deduced that from reading the records). In other words, an anglo-centric historian would label them “traditional enemies” when it might have been simply a new tribe that they had a recent skirmish with.”
Good point. I just meant it as a counter to those saying Native Americans didn’t fight each other before European contact. The Aztecs and their neighbors were certainly busy at it.
LikeLike
He has indeed just left us.
LikeLike
@Solitaire
I guess what that means is that the subject has not attracted the attention of white historians and very few Asian or Native Americans have researched the topic.
The interview video I saw with the British Colombia First Nations leader was produced by RTHK (Radio Television Hong Kong) and was narrated in Cantonese. The paper I read on the subject was a graduate thesis by a Chinese student at a US university.
Oh yes, I found the suggestion that Native Americans never had conflict with each other until the Europeans came to be very strange.
I mean, what is the point of forming alliances and confederacies in the first place?
It should be obvious that doing it with the English (and the succeeding US government) was a mistake. Who is the “Indian Giver” there?
LikeLike
Update: John Trudell has just died of cancer. Rest in peace.
LikeLike
@ Lord of Mirkwood
Comment deleted for using French.
LikeLike
Rest in peace, Mr. Trudell.
LikeLike
Does anyone else think the prayer for souls in purgatory is inappropriate here? John Trudell walked the Red Road and that ought to be held in respect.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Grandmother West: You take the sun from us and cradle it in your arms, then you bring darkness onto us so that we may sleep. When you bring the darkness to my friends here, do so without the nightmares that we have had for so long. Let your stars and moon shine on my friends in a gentle manner; and as they look at the stars, they remember that those stars are the spirits of my friends shining on them and those friends are at peace. —Lakota Sioux
LikeLiked by 2 people
RIP
LikeLike
The more I learn about the laws of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the more I disapprove of them. The fact that anyone would want to live under such harsh and cruel laws is beyond me. Perhaps Trudell was right.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Just ran across this documentary on the life of John Trudell
Trudell (2005)
(https://youtu.be/ukxfp-svFms)
Still find it amazing that this post went up just 3 days before his death. It was almost as if it was a tribute to him.
LikeLiked by 2 people
[…] a god-given Indigeneity, the “Citizen of the world” whose purview knows now end. Activist John Trudell and others have spoken to the phenomena of how Indigeneity becomes constructed. When the settlers […]
LikeLike