Posts Tagged → Sioux
Shockwave: from 1649 to 2019, 370 years of violent migration in America
Until 1649, the Huron Nation were a mighty Indian tribe, unafraid to use overwhelming violent force to take or raid the better hunting and trapping grounds of nearby Indian tribes who were not strong enough to withstand them.
For hundreds of years, from their fastness in Canada, the mighty Huron tribe had ranged deeply into rich hunting grounds that would become Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. But a now familiar combination of factors resulted in their loss of power, a retreat back into Canada, and a resulting cascade of westward Indian migration that did not end until 250 years later, when the very last battles of the Indian Wars played out on the Great Plains in what is today Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and the Dakotas.
Beaten by imported cholera, smallpox, and an ad hoc alliance of lesser tribes, themselves the products of desperate starvation, loss of homeland, and mechanical pressure emanating outward from growing European settlement on the east coast, the year 1649 marked the defeated Huron Nation’s inability to project violent force beyond their original tribal base around the eastern Great Lakes in what is today southeastern Canada. It marked the beginning of their tactical retreat.
So in 1649, as the surviving Hurons retracted northward and westward, eventually southward, the demographic dominos really began to fall, as they already had along the east coast for the previous fifty years, but now en masse. One by one, two by two, smaller or lesser known Indian tribes in the Great Lakes region began to migrate westward and southward, pushed by those coming up from behind. One tribe displaced another along its southwestern migration path, with new tribes emerging and some old tribes merging. Some tribes were literally stamped out in genocidal raids. Historically, Indians colonized and occupied each other, and they always migrated because of “economic” circumstances.
The Oglala Sioux and the poverty-stricken, fish-eating Cheyenne (Tsi-Tsi-Tas in their own language) had emerged onto the Great Plains from the Minnesota lake district with a finely honed hunger for survival and unoccupied open spaces. We know them today as the most dominant and war-like of all the western Indians, but the truth is that they were simply of the few Indian tribes most determined to survive and prosper out of the stream of refugees fleeing ahead of the 1649 shockwave. And when we see magnificent and inspirational pictures of brave Plains Indians mounted on their war ponies, totally free on the prairies, we are not looking at thousands of years of cultural evolution. Rather, the horseback Indian is a modern creation of America and Europe.
On the southern plains, migrating Indians on foot had encountered the remainders of once-domesticated Spanish conquistador horses, subsequently gone wild and feral since the 1600s. By the 1750s herds of wild mustangs were being captured, broken, and ridden by Indians. Comanches, Sioux, Cheyenne, Pawnee, and many others used these new horses to keep pace with bison herds, to fight each other, and eventually to face off with mounted US Cavalry.
So in 1649 there was a demographic shock, a vacuum, and then an explosion which marked the fragmentation and full-throated migratory shift of Indian tribal power in the east, until the surviving results of their waves of westward migration then turned and fought the Bluecoats at the Washita and Little Big Horn in the 1880s.
The history lesson here is that already by 1630 European migratory settlement on the east coast had started a cascading migratory effect that only ended when the Oglala Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow, and Arapahoe were herded onto “reservations,” and spirit-starved of any remaining patriotic vigor and will to fight in the 1890s.
Which leads us to the practical lesson here: The uncontrolled mass migration invasion into America that we are witnessing right now is really nothing new. Mass migration has been a natural constant in America, started by the American Indians themselves, with subsequent migrants coming from all around the globe. The recent undocumented and hostile migration is illegal according to a “peace treaty” of sorts that the two major political tribes negotiated years ago, but that ‘treaty’ has now been openly violated and broken. Today’s mass migration into America is being orchestrated primarily by one political “tribe” in order to gain political power over the other political “tribe,” and over everyone else living in America, too. And once that power is gained, the illegal invader political tribe will use the coercive force of official government to wrest whatever control over the citizens they desire, to compel us to live as they believe we should. Needless to say, that particular tribe is hostile, and does not believe in any of the founding agreements that created America, like the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.
You don’t like this? Don’t feel like being a demographic refugee in your own land? Don’t want your personal liberties forcefully stripped from you? Then act like an American Indian: Project your force and protect your tribal land. Because in fact, your back is already up against the wall. Many of us just don’t know it yet, don’t know how dire things are. Many of us are a bit too materially comfortable and complacent to recognize our actual situation.
And then again, maybe we do just want to live on political reservations, to go where we are told to go, think what we are told to think, do as we are told to do. It seems easier than messy freedom and personal liberty, doesn’t it?
Remembering neat people, Part 1
A lot of neat, interesting people have died in the past year or two, or ten, if I think about it, but time flies faster than we can catch it or even snatch special moments from it. People I either knew or admired from afar who changed me in some way.
There are two men who influenced me in small but substantial ways who I have been thinking about in recent days. One of them died exactly ten years ago, and the other died just last year. Funny how I keep thinking about them.
It is time to honor them as best I can, in words.
First one was Charlie Haffner, a grizzled mountain man from central Tennessee. Charlie and I first crossed paths in 1989, when I joined the Owl Hollow Shooting Club about 45 minutes south of Nashville, where I was a graduate student at the time.
Charlie owned that shooting club.
Back before GPS, internet, or cell phones, the world was a different place than today. Dinosaurs were probably wandering around among us then, mmm hmmmmm. Heck, maybe I am a dinosaur. Anyhow, in order to find my way to the Owl Hollow club, first and foremost I had to get the club’s phone number, which I obtained from a fly fishing shop on West End Avenue. Then I had to call Charlie for directions, using a l-a-n-d l-i-n-e, and actually speaking to a person at the other end. You’d think it was Morse Code by today’s standards.
After getting Charlie on the phone, and assiduously writing down his directions from our phone conversation, I had to use the best map I could get and then drive way out in the Tennessee countryside on gravel and dirt roads. Trusting my directional instincts, which are good, and trusting the maps, which were pretty bad, and using Charlie’s directions, which were exactingly precise, I made my way through an alien landscape of small tobacco farms and Confederate flags waving from flagpoles. Yes, southcentral Tennessee back then, and maybe even today, was still living in 1865. Not an American flag to be seen out there by itself. If one appeared, it was either directly above, or, more commonly, directly below the Confederate flag. The Confederate flag shared equal or nearly equal footing with the American flag throughout that region.
Needless to say, when I had finally arrived at the big, quiet, lonesome gun range in the middle of the Tennessee back country, the fact that I played the banjo and was as redneck as redneck gets back home didn’t mean a thing right then. Buddy, I was feelin’…. Yankee, like…well, like black people once probably felt entering into a room full of Caucasians. I felt all alone out there and downright uncomfortable. And to boot, I was looking for a mountain man with a deeeeep Southern drawl, so it was bound to get better. Right?
Sure enough, I saw Charlie’s historic square-cut log cabin up the hill, and I walked up to it. Problem was, it had a door on every outside wall, so that when I knocked on one, and heard voices inside, and then heard “Over here!” coming from outside, I’d walk around to the next door, which was closed, and I would knock again, and go through the process again, and again. Yes, I knocked on three or four of those mystery doors before Charlie Haffner finally stepped out of yet one more doorway, into the sunshine, and greeted me in the most friendly and welcoming manner.
Bib overalls were meant to be worn by men like Charlie, and Charlie was meant to wear bib overalls, and I think that’s all he had on. His long, white Father Time beard flowed down and across his chest, and his long, flowing white hair was thick and distinguished like a Southern gentleman’s hair would have to be. And sure as shootin’, a flintlock pistol was tucked into the top of those bib overalls. I am not normally a shy person, and I normally enjoy trying to get the first words in on any conversation, with some humor if I can think of it fast enough. But the truth is, I was dumbfounded and just stood there in awe of the sight before me.
Being a Damned Yankee, I half expected to be shot dead on sight. But what followed is a legendary story re-told many times in my own family, as Charlie (and his kindly wife, who also had a twinkle in her eye) welcomed me into his home in the most gracious, witty, and insightful way possible.
Over the following two years, I shot as much as a full-time graduate student could shoot out there at Owl Hollow Gun Club, which is to say not as much as I wanted and probably more than I should have. Although my first interest in guns as a kid had been black powder muzzleloaders, and I had received a percussion cap .45 caliber Philadelphia derringer as a gift when I was ten, I had not really spent much time around flintlocks. Charlie rekindled that flame in me there, and it has burned ever since, as it has for tens of thousands of other people who were similarly shaped by Charlie’s re-introduction of flintlock shooting matches back in the early 1970s, there at Owl Hollow Gun Club.
Charlie died ten years ago, on July 10th, I think, and I have thought about him often ever since: His incredible warmth and humor, his amazing insights for a mountain man with little evident exposure to the outside world (now don’t go getting prejudiced about mountain folk; he and many others are plenty worldly, even if they don’t APPEAR to be so), his tolerance of differences and willingness to break with orthodoxy to make someone feel most welcome. Hollywood has done a bad number on the Southern Man image, and maybe some of that negative stereotype is deserved, but Charlie Haffner was a true Southern gentleman in every way, and I was proud to know him, to be shaped by him.
The other man who has been on my mind is Russell Means, a Pine Ridge Sioux, award-winning actor, and Indian rights activist who caught my attention in the early 1970s, and most especially as a spokesman for tribal members holed up out there after shooting it out with FBI gunslingers.
American Indians always have a respected place in the heart of true Americans, and anyone who grew up playing cowboys and Indians knows that sometimes there were bad cowboys who got their due from some righteous red men. Among little kids fifty years ago, the Indians were always tough, and sometimes they were tougher and better than the white guys. From my generation, a lot of guys carry around a little bit of wahoo Indian inside our hearts; we’d still like to think we are part Indian; it would make us better, more real Americans…
Russell Means was a good looking man, very manly and tough, and he was outspoken about the unfair depredations his people had experienced. While Means was called a radical forty years ago, I think any proud Irishman or Scottish Highlander could easily relate to his complaints, if they or their descendants stop to think about how Britain had (and still does) dispossessed and displaced them.
Russell Means played a key role in an important movie, The Last of the Mohicans. His stoic, rugged demeanor wasn’t faked, and he was so authentic in appearance and action that he easily lent palpable credibility to that artistic portrayal of 1750s frontier America by simply showing up and being there on the set. Means could have easily been the guy on the original buffalo nickel; that is how authentic he was.
Russell Means was representative of an older, better way of life that is disappearing on the Indian reservations, if that makes any sense to those who think of the Indian lifestyle that passed away as involving horses and headdresses. He was truly one of the last of the Mohicans, for all the native tribes. Although I never met you, I still miss you, and your voice, Mr. Means.
[Written 7/23/14]
Out of all proportion
If there is one core element to the “new thinking” taking America down, it is victimology.
You know, the idea that everyone is a victim, and some people are special victims and some are especially victimized.
For someone to be a victim, there must be a perpetrator, and political correctness has created all sorts of creative solutions to real and perceived wounds which perpetrators can, or must!, endlessly do to atone. America has been afflicted with this, to the absurd point where illegal aliens crossing our borders in search of better work are “victims” and deserve our taxpayer money and the right to vote themselves a lot more of it.
It is a fair idea that people should be treated fairly. No arguing with that. But what happens when whatever apology, compensation, or other action worth remedying the problem has been completed, and the victim identity remains? This phenomenon is nowhere more clearly evident than in the Middle East, or technically the Near East, where “Palestinian” Arabs have wallowed in artificial and purposefully perpetuated victim status for five decades.
Even their refugee status is inherited, contrary to every other refugee situation around the world. The UN helps maintain this arrangement.
Although there were nearly twice as many refugee Jews ejected from Arab and Muslim nations at the same time, no one talks about them. Islamic imperialism and Arab colonialism are responsible for one of the largest and longest-standing occupations ever on planet Earth, where the farms, homes, and businesses that once belonged to Jews are now the property of supposedly well-intentioned Muslim Arabs. Billions of dollars worth of property and banks were stolen overnight, from one group of people and given to another group that had no claim on it other than they held the knife and gun, and the victim did not.
If someone were looking for victims to feel bad for, the Jews have had that victim experience in spades, not to mention the Armenians (Christians who suffered a none-too-gentle genocide and land-theft at the hands of the Muslim Turks from 1910-1915), Kurds, Tibetans, and, well, never mind that the iconic and fiercely warlike Oglala Sioux ejected the Mandan, Cheyenne, and Pawnee from millions of acres of their historic Happy Hunting Grounds and militarily occupied them for hundreds of years…after all, the American Indians who massacred, tortured, and occupied one another are considered to have engaged in acceptable behavior. Anyhow, I digress…..
The Jews now find themselves fighting for their lives with their backs to the wall, yet once again against Islamic supremacists, Islamic imperialists, and Arab colonists; and those same Jews are now presented with yet another double-standard: Proportionality.
This is the idea that, if someone hits you in the face with the intention of killing you, but fails to do so that first time and is winding up to hit you again and harder this next time, why, you are only supposed to hit them back once and only just as hard as you were first hit. You are not allowed to land a knockout punch, despite having survived an attempted knockout punch.
The EU demands that endless Arab rockets from Gaza onto indigenous Jews, living an unbroken 3,000-year presence in their homeland, be met with…thousands of random rockets from Israel? My God no! Unacceptable!
Obviously, the idea of proportionality is alien to every people that has fought a war, especially a defensive war. War is fought to be won, and dumbing-down and reducing the effectiveness of your response is a foolish and possibly suicidal thing to do.
But Europe and America cater first and foremost to artificial victims, and no matter what, those victims are due every gift, every extra opportunity, every kind gesture in the face of bloody hands, truckloads of taxpayer money despite tremendous waste by the recipients, and so on and so forth. Although this behavior seems suicidal, suicide seems to be the new definition of democracy, in the interest of appeasing the ‘victims’ among us, out of all proportion to whatever happened in the first place.
But to give the supposed victims their due, proportionality must be maintained, and in the Middle East today, Western civilization is expected to fight Islamic aggression, theft, murder, and occupation with both hands tied behind its back. It is apparently the new thing to do.