Here we go, what will most likely be published in the Newport News Times, two-times a week dwindling newspaper. I will then follow up, for sure, at the end of this fit-for-small-town-news column.
November is National Native American Indian Heritage Month
By Paul K. Haeder
Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.
– Chief Seattle
It’s sad to gauge the ignorance Central Coast residents possess regarding Native American history and present day activities: education, culture, arts, language and political engagement.
The month of November is mostly the only time K12 students learn about Native Americans, and even then, it is most always in the past tense and lessons about Indians as helpless “wards of the state.”
Most of my students over four decades have had trouble with the concept that hundreds of books — especially textbooks — can lie. That first week of class, we research students’ family lines – those not native come from myriad of places. We then make up a passport of those countries they or their ancestors came from.
Accordingly, I steal them for a few weeks. Eventually, we see this theft as a process of stealing their own pasts, their histories, and their very identities.
I run into people DAILY in Lincoln County, who most vociferously display ignorance and outright racism when discussing Native Americans.
However, I’ve clashed with this ignorance in other parts of the USA: Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Washington, and Oregon.
I’ve confronted college students’ parents who wanted to give my department heads a piece of their mind about the materials students in my research writing, composition and literature classes were asked to read, view and discuss.
I am embarrassed at the ignorance of who and what Columbus was and represents to many millions of people who are not Anglo Americans. Many college students do not know when the Civil War was fought (or why) or what James Madison or Frederick Douglass did.
Most do not know which Native lands their schools or neighborhoods are built upon. For sure, though, they enter the classroom with this myth of a brave fellow named Christopher Columbus “who discovered America” (sic).
Again, school textbooks have, by omission or otherwise, lied to them.
Today more than five hundred federally-recognized Indigenous nations comprise nearly three million people. Today’s doctors, lawyers, educators, nurses, construction workers and, yes, homeless, sick and substance abusers, are the descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land.
I’ve utilized interviews of, and essays by, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz to enlighten students (and de facto, their parents/ the public) on a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples.
The original peoples did resist expansionism and genocide. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz takes readers into a deep dive debunking the official founding myth of the United States.
Part of the book and teachings give students a sense of how policy against Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize their territories, displacing or eliminating them.
This gives students who might be watching (or attending) COP26 (climate change summit in Glasgow) a sense of a worldwide effort by Indigenous activists to stop the pollution, water theft, elimination of ancestral lands through outright criminality.
Teaching about Native American history, I can challenge students to reflect upon their future, whereupon the youth understand they must act locally, learn deeply their own regions but also think and respond globally.
Global Witness’s, Last Line of Defense, looks into land defenders around the globe who have been murdered for fighting for their right to water, land and liberty. Teaching about Native American present day issues, we will broach these larger issues.
We don’t have to go far back to see how the fight in the US for Native American sovereignty is a constant reckoning with racist roots:
- In August 2011, environmental and indigenous groups launched a massive campaign designed to press President Obama not to approve Phase IV of the Keystone XL Pipeline project that would run through and near tribal lands, water resources, and place of spiritual significance.
- In 2013, the Havasupai Tribe Files a Lawsuit to Stop the Operation of a Uranium Mine.
- On April 1st, 2016, citizens of the Standing Rock Lakota Nation and ally Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota citizens, under the group name “Chante tin’sa kinanzi Po” founded a Spirit Camp along the proposed route of the bakken oil pipeline, Dakota Access. They are dedicated to stopping the Dakota Access pipeline, illuminating the dangers associated with pipeline spills and the necessity to protect the water resources of the Missouri river.
The educators I have met in the Lincoln County School District who work with the youth of Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians on the history, culture and current struggles of the Central Coast original people are amazing and should be regarded as cultural heroes.
What Local Residents Really Can’t Take
The amount of racism I experienced teaching/subbing just a year in this Coastal County is not so unusual, but still disheartening. This concept of “we beat them, so they have to eat our crow” is how the lowly, the poor speak, and the more educated, well, they have seven syllable words and books 22 people read that say the same things, but in a thousand pages.
Hick, small-town, and backwards? Nah, the great liberal city of Portland now is going after BIPOC.
Yeah, this is a story, November 3, 2021, the blue state, the build back better retrograde land:
An analysis by a Portland city watchdog found that complaints about property maintenance have been highly concentrated in the city’s most diverse and rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods.
The report from the city ombudsman’s office made public Wednesday showed that neighborhoods with some of the fastest-rising home prices, and those with the most racially diverse residents, tend to also face the most financial consequences for property violations like overgrown grass, trash in a yard or a deteriorating building.
But back to the Native American Indian Heritage Month. I have countless fights with co-workers, members of the public, students, and more. Countless. As if I am the first asshole in their lives to put up a resistance to their racism. It is a deep racism. All the way to the core, and while I don’t pull my revolutionary anti-USA, anti-Military, anti-Anything-to-do-with-capitalism rank on them immediately, I do not stand for insipid ignorance that pushes racism as a way to delineate the victors and the losers. Again poor white trash, or rich white trash, complaining about China, about billionaires, about misrepresentative government for, by, because of the rich, the lobbyists, on both sides of the red-blue manure pile. Yet, they do not see themselves now as the losers in this billionaire’s game. Nope. Every social safety net, every infrastructure net, every security net, frayed, cut, burned, and they still believe that the Indians, or the Africans, or whomever, if they are under the thumb of this or that white great savior, so be it. But, again, these whites losing everything, including their Oxi lives, their coronary arterial clogged lives, but they do not see that as “well, we are the losers in this rich man’s/oligarchy system, so shut up and take the comeuppance delivered . . . just like we think the conquered tribes should too.”
Old Teddy — Swing a Big Racist Stick, Roosevelt, oh, that family!
When Theodore Roosevelt took office in 1901, he already had a long legacy of animosity toward American Indians.
Seventeen years earlier, Roosevelt, then a young widower, left New York in favor of the Dakotas, where he built a ranch, rode horses and wrote about life on the frontier. When he returned to the east, he famously asserted that “the most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.”
“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are,” Roosevelt said during a January 1886 speech in New York. “And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” (source)
And, so, what does this racist’s offspring have to say? You got it, once a racist from their loins, always a millionaire racist with loins to breed more and more racists:
“He was a man of his times,” said Tweed Roosevelt, a great-grandson to Roosevelt and interim director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association. “In his presidency, he wanted the Native Americans to experience the American dream, but to do that by assimilating. The Indian population had been shrinking for a long time, and he believed that if they assimilated, that meant prosperity for everyone.” (source)
And Build Back Better Biden, oh, man, 2021, and his level of enlightenment, whew:
There’s no federal environmental impact statement on this project, which is why we want Joe Biden to stop it. I mean, they stole 5 billion gallons of water, fracked 28 rivers out, and then they have this broken aquifer losing 100,000 gallons a day of water. They have no idea how to fix this stuff, since January. You know, it’s really horrible up here. So, you know, Enbridge has been trying to rush to get this online before the court will rule against them, because, generally, courts have not ruled in favor of pipelines. That’s the status that we have seen, you know, in the federal court ruling on the DAPL, where the federal court ordered them to close down. This is the same company. Enbridge was 28% of DAPL. And when the federal court ordered them to close down the pipe, they said no. When the state of Michigan ordered them to close down a pipe this last May, they said no. So they’re just trying to continue their egregious behavior.
It’s so tragic that, you know, on one hand, the Biden administration is like, “We are going to have Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but we’re still going to smash you in northern Minnesota and smash the rest of the country.” Same thing, you know, Klobuchar and Smith, the two Minnesota senators, shameful their lack of courage, not only for Indigenous people but for the planet, you know?
When I left there to go to the second gathering of another couple thousand people closing down the line at the headwaters of the Mississippi, shortly after that is when they came in with the helicopter and kicked up this sandstorm so everybody could get all beat up by sand. And I just want to put out: That’s a federal agency; that’s not a state agency that came in. Most of the cops have been just financed by Enbridge, but that helicopter was financed by Biden. So, we have some really — we’re really concerned that Department of Homeland Security would come in and basically assault Indigenous people in our own homeland.
— Winona LaDuke
And this is what a strong advocate for Native American truth gets in the USA: You will have to read between the crap lines of Mother Jones, if you want the entire story — Churchill is 73 now, “I Never Claimed I Was F***ing Sitting Bull“:
Standing before the crowd, the 69-year-old Churchill cut the image of the bomb-throwing radical—“a traitor,” as O’Reilly put it—that he’d been cultivating his entire life: 6-foot-5 in cowboy boots, with a long gray-black ponytail cinched with a black band and his waist lassoed with a beaded belt. He grit his teeth while talking, like he was chewing tobacco, and spat out his words with disgust. “American jockstrap sniffers,” he called his critics, in particular the academics who’d picked apart his scholarship and helped get him fired. He compared them to SS officers, to apparatchiks helping the trains of a supposedly corrupt University of Colorado system run on time. “That’s what Eichmann did,” he said. The crowd gasped with delight.
Churchill’s penchant for this comparison, ad-Nazium, runs deep. Each of his 18 books is a brick in a monumental project dedicated to proving that Native Americans were subjected to a genocide comparable to the Holocaust. The day after September 11, he published an essay describing the stockbrokers and technocrats who died in the Twin Towers as “little Eichmanns.” Right-wing media was incensed: The O’Reilly Factor aired 41 segments on him. The Weekly Standard tagged him “the worst professor in America.”
Back on the highway, Churchill stomped on the pedal and gunned it to 80 mph. He lit his last Pall Mall. “I’m only human,” he said, as the city he no longer recognized gave way to farmland and snowy peaks. He went even faster—85, 90.
It was as though he were trying to outrun Boulder, but without a clear destination in mind. The seatbelt warning screamed. “It hurts,” he said. “I’ve been hurt. No one said the fucking process of decolonization was going to be painless.”
[Ward Churchill in 2006, before he was fired from the University of Colorado. Thomas Boyd/Zuma]
So, any National Indigenous People’s month should be National Indigenous People’s Year, full of reparations, full of the white man’s own burdens cast away on some Gates or Soros or Trump Island.
And of course, it is Heineken, brothers and sisters. Of course, AMLO, el presidente de Mejico, is not socialist. Wine, soda pop, booze, beer.
In front of the cameras of a national newspaper, he showed the arid land where there used to be fruit trees:
“All of this disappeared due to lack of water; because we don’t have enough water. We do not have a permit to extract water with a well, and we would like Blanca Jimenez, the head of CONAGUA, to consider us before the large water consuming companies. Heineken has more than 12 wells, and the aquifer is overexploited.”
The Kumiai people don’t have water to plant. Óscar recently participated in an assembly and in organizational meetings for the self-determination of the Kumiai people; to defend the water against the constant assault of the corporations. He was always on the lookout to prevent wineries, foreigners or avaricious locals, (he called them “vivillos”), from taking land away from the community. (source)
This has been going on throughout Mexico’s history with those drug-dealing and neoliberal and thieving last six presidents — 36 years since they serve 6 year terms. Since 2017, Mexicali resistance groups have been defending the capital of Baja California’s water supply against foreign investment brewery Constellation Brands. Booze all with these double dealings and contracts with the state government of Baja California and its governor Francisco “Kiko” Vega.
Of course, Constellation Brands is a Fortune 500 company, an international producer and marketer of beer, wine and spirits with recognizable imported brands such as Corona Extra, Corona Light, Modelo Especial, Modelo Negra, Pacifico and Ballast Point.
Ahh, not just booze — Coca-Cola, FedEx, Walmart, Samsung and Hyundai are among the more than 400 companies stealing water and polluting rivers and water systems.
Baja California governor accuses big US companies of water theft
Man, is this coming close to home — since 1981 when I was a reporter in El Paso, the entire black lagoons and multiple strange diseases from pollutants coming from the transnational twin plants (maquiladoras) got many of us militarized against these pigs of profits. Babies born with part of their brains outside their skulls. Flesh eating parasites. More and more cancers. This is the gift that keeps on giving in capitalism, and that was 40 years ago.
And it is, of course, worse: “That corruption contributed to chronic under-funding of the state water agency, known as the Comisión Estatal de Servicios Públicos de Tijuana or CESPT, Bonilla said. To cover up the water theft, the auditor says, some companies also installed their own clandestine drainage systems to illegally discharge contaminated water into Tijuana’s already strained storm drains and canal.”
Here’s a student at Cal State Fullerton:
In a 2016 letter to Coahuila state Governor Rubén Moreira, former Mayor Leoncio Martínez Sánchez of the municipality of Zaragoza wrote, “We have no water for human consumption.”
The ache I feel from that single sentence grows in addition to anticipating the worst to come once the brewery completes its Mexicali plant. There is not one community in that city I don’t worry about. Constellation Brands damaged Zaragoza, so who’s to say it won’t hurt my home as well?
I have yet to see people move away from beers like Modelo, mainly my peers at Cal State Fullerton. — “Column: Modelo’s time is up after shady business” by Rebecca Mena
So yes, this is National Indigenous People’s Year, Decade, Century. As always, it’s about the beer, the coffee, the sugar, the needless shit of tourism and the rich and the disposable income fucks:
In October 2019, the Mexican Association of Beer Makers (ACERMEX), an organization similar to the United States’ Brewers Association, estimated the country would surpass 1,000 craft beer companies by the start of 2020, many of whom are based in the state of Baja California. But this persistent rise of beer businesses has been fraught with roadblocks, forcing scrappy entrepreneurs to fight tooth and nail to operate openly.
These obstacles range from a near-complete stranglehold of the market by Anheuser-Busch InBev–owned Grupo Modelo and Heineken-owned Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma to prohibitively expensive import taxes on ingredients. When asked what’s stifling Baja breweries’ growth, Collin Corrigan, a San Diego native and founder of Ensenada’s Cervecería Transpeninsular, just laughs. “Do you have a couple days to listen? I could go on for hours.”
So that Dutch company is still the colonizer, and those indigenous heroes are murdered so the 12 wells that this amazing man was protesting can continue to pump while thousands of people can’t grow bean, squash, tomatoes, and more. Ownership of Heineken Holding N.V is listed on the NYSE Euronext Amsterdam. Its single investment is Heineken International. It is majority owned by L’Arche Green N.V an investment vehicle of the Heineken family and the Hoyer family. All in the family, in MEXICO, Baja!
Native Americas Month, no? Turtle Island. All of the Americas.
[Óscar Eyraud Adams: A Warrior Who Defended the Water of the Kumiai People]
And then, the white guy (Louis Wilson, Global Witness senior adviser) with the British accent tells us today on Amy “Soros” Goodman this —
Absolutely. So, the stories that we hear — and they’re each, in each instance, a tragedy, but as you look at the global picture, you see a common thread: The threats against environmental activists are caused by the same forces that are driving the climate crisis. So, the same force that is pulling minerals out of the ground, that is felling trees, that is polluting our air, is also causing violence and threats against activists.
So, the case you’ve just referenced in Mexico was just a month prior to Fikile’s death. An activist called Óscar Eyraud in Tecate, in northern Mexico, had been protesting for years water access. His community, an Indigenous community there, had been denied access to traditional water resources, at the same time as a big corporation, Heineken, was granted additional access by the local government. Óscar was murdered on September 22nd. And nobody, I think, would suggest that Heineken directly organized that killing, but it’s clear that they created the conditions that made that murder possible. And it’s very difficult to see that murder, or indeed many of the other 227 murders, taking place without that resource extraction by big companies.
And this is the stuff of Americans, of the consumers, the consummate consumers and thieves of cultures, both indigenous and those in conquered lands of their own doing. “Baja Beer Is Crushing It — The craft beer scene in Baja is emerging from San Diego’s shadow and coming into its own” by Beth Demmon February 10, 2020 — San Diego Magazine
This is the heartlessness of the American and Canadian and European and Australian and elites in all the other capitalist strongholds scene. Cancel Culture, for sure — no more people of the land, no more farmers of the land, no more cultures of the land, no more unique tribes and communities of the land, no more languages and arts of those people. It is all Edward Bernays, Madison Avenue and the other bourgeois sickness that is the “scene.”
And this, of course: “Every Monday night in the small community of Shiprock, New Mexico, a group of young Navajo leaders meet to decide how they will help their community. For more than seven years, the Northern Diné Youth Committee has worked to give youth opportunities to directly make changes within their community. But while the NDYC works to make changes, many members also consider their own futures, commitments to family and the world outside of the Shiprock. While they love their community, they all must consider their options both on and off the reservation.”
So there you have it — Heineken, oh, the innocence of this Dutch Company and the Family, man, the Family.
And relevant for COP26, the green porn, man, killing native communities, one activist after another. The horror, man, the horror of it all.
“Heineken Mexico has been present in Baja California for 76 years, and represents employment for 2,200 citizens, which are added to 100 employees, who operate in a brewery, in nine distribution centers and in continuous improvement,” said Escobedo.
On the other hand, Oscar Galvez, General Director of Corporate Affairs of Heineken Mexico, stated that the company’s commitment is based on the sustainable development of the country and Baja California. Proof of this is that since 2015 the company began the transition from a linear economy to a circular economy and implemented ecological chillers in which 98% of its components are recycled or reused and achieved a significant reduction in CO2 emissions.
It is worth noting that Baja California ranks fourth in beer production in Mexico and third in job generation.