[quote=“Jeff Weise”]
I think most people on this Reservation would respond well to the racial question if it was disguised.
For example, if I asked your average teenager on this reservation: “Are you proud to be Native?â€[/quote]
Great thread Mig,
With Jeff Weise, the whole Neo-Nazi / National Socialist connection with native american indigenous cultures seems on the surface at least a bit of a contradiction in ideologies at first, but then there’s the idea of promoting racial purity argument that he brought forward.
With regards to acts of extreme violence like this I always wonder about the influence and ‘social conditioning’ aspects of main stream media. Is this over saturation of violence in the media a reflection of our society or is what’s happening in our society a reflection of all the violence in the media? And was this even a factor in this incident?
[quote=“Jeff Weise”]
I think most people on this Reservation would respond well to the racial question if it was disguised. For example, if I asked your average teenager on this reservation: “Are you proud to be Native?â€[/quote]
I read in an article last year in my Indignea class about how this one set of First Nations decided they weren’t going to fight against the changes that were being implimented on them by the Europeans.
They gave up pretty much everything and made where they lived into the model european town. or as close as they could get it. they even had a brass band.
They waited for the prosperity that was promised them. But none really came.
Anyways, the point is, that they were/are stuck without an identity because they gave up the culture that they had for another that never really accepted them.
Good point. Jeff had a choice to make: attempt to embrace what culteral his Native people has (I believe many Native people have been experiencing a renewed identity (through the fine arts and language to name two example), or to find a replacement identity through gangs, counter-culture and the like. Jeff seems to have embraced the counter-culture.
What Dave says is true, but the Native youth aren’t so much identifying with African Americans rather than Native Americans, but rather than the Europeans. So much of the First Nations’ culture was taken away from them through missionary work, government interference and residential schools that many of these peoples no longer know what it is to be Sioux or Cheyenne or whatever. As a result, the youth look for a cultural role model that is different from the Caucasian norm. They know about the struggle African Americans have been through and use them as the template to show their own difference from the white people.
ok in your world that happened but they didnt give up there culture on the most part. it was slolen from them, these people were treated less the animals and in most parts were wiped off the face of the plannet. and it still happends today in parts of the world. If you would look into what happened with tribes being hurded like cattle moved off there land, to other parts of the country, and most of time it was to get at the resourses of the land, wether it be gold, silver, copper, or farming. durring the 1960, 70 guess how many natives died in south dakota more then a thousand, for standing up to the american goverment who wanted to mine the uranium that was found in the black hills, these are the same people were asked to leave becouse of the gold and silver that were found there a hundred years earler.
good book to read is In the Spirit Of Crazy Horse. by Peter Mathiessen, or the documentry by Robert Redford Incident at Oglala or the movie Lakota Woman.
natives are still being sold all the lies and losing more of thier land every day. The Goverments don’t want soverign entities within thier boarders, they want slaves to make the vote…Feed people poision and they will become so tired that even to lift a finger would cause one to fall asleep…
My world? Does not my existence occur in the same period and place as your own?
I do not attempt to argue the fact that the First Nations people were treated ill on many an occasion during and after the colonization of this continent. The reprehensible acts imposed on them are still being felt with full force to this day.
The events that I relayed in my previous post were only one example of the tragedy that has become of the Aboriginal people. It was merely an effort to provide one reason why some First Nations youth would have difficulty identifying with their own culture.
If I recall correctly, the American government also treated the Cherokee ill in a few circumstances to say the least. They too made an effort to quell the overwhelming of their people and culture.
They adapted their society in order to survive in the realization that the colonists were not leaving. They developed a constitution and other things like a written language. They even had a newspaper written in their own language.
However this, of course, proved insufficient in the prevention of their displacement. The Trail of Tears testifies to this to the utmost degree.
I suppose that what I am trying to communicate is simply the fact that I find it heartbreaking. The knowledge that even though they tried everything to impede their cultural dissolution and that it was still not enough, makes it even more of a tragedy to me.
Well the war is still going because I’m alive awake and well. They tried to send us to hell with thier washing words and the fears whiped into my culture. They killed all the wise ones they could and still do thier best to dumb down the rest…
cultural dissolution, We all suffer the same because we were all treated the same sometime in history. How long ago was your culture wipped away from your family and into an evil past. The wave of distruction and murder sweped through Euroupe, then The Americas, out with the old and in with the no clue…Now I present our wonderful society created by the blood of others…A soul assylum
Do you realize that’s an example of a racist attitude? The tragedy lies in the fact that no matter how a given band may work to preserve it’s past and integrate the new reality, many perceive that adaption as assimilation instead of an addition to our society as a whole. They’re not ‘losing’ something, the country is gaining something by integrating native cultures.
Look no further than the USA’s “melting pot” where it’s still a ‘big’ thing for a black person to be elected to the Senate, vs Canada where we have natives, ethnic chinese, pakistani and indian, and far more women We’re a more inclusive society, so let’s avoid the exclusive attitudes.
Who says it’s not good enough? Only racists… on both sides.
Cultural heritage only makes up part of who we are, we’re all a blend of some other culture adapting to a bunch of other cultures.
I’m cooking Thai with Szechuan pork, just did a repair job in exchange for Italian lunch for my crew, home from setting a network up for some rednecks and fixing adsl’s on the rez… then I’ll book a flight to see Mom and have the shot of Glayva together cuz I wasn;t there Robbgie Burns day, visit my sister and her Polish husband who speaks nine languages and go out for Greek dinner in Van…
It wasn’t good enough because they were still treated like second-class citizens. They were kept down by the larger dominant culture.
They were not given a chance to even integrate into that culture. They tried but were kept out.
This was the same for the Italians, Irish, eastern Europeans, Asians and people form the Middle East. The immigration laws in the early 20th century show that Canada didn’t want certain people in their society. Ideas have changed since then and we are ever striving to become a multicultural society. However racism is still prevalent in this country, as recent studies have shown.
I’m saying that they were given a choice: convert or you won’t survive. These particular people choose to convert but still weren’t treated as equals.
It is not that they didn’t do enough, or whether or not they should have done anything, it is that they were not accepted by the imposing dominant culture despite everything that happened. They are still struggling with this identity crisis. They haven’t been allowed to integrate as you have said other cultures have. There is just an over lap and it is causing conflict. The results are similar to those experienced in Red Lake.
we can only assume to speak from our own personal experience, racist attitudes and what constitute dominant cultures are a matter of perspective, and come from the fact most of us have enjoyed a relatively priviliged existence resulting from our own colonial culture. Most of us can only speculate as to how we would feel and why, given similar experiences and circumstances. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the sense that most of us involved in this discussion thus far are not first nations, with the possible exception of words based entirely on previous comments, not that this matters one little bit, but only that it would be interesting to hear the perspective from others in similar circumstances, or from similar background as jeff weise, if this is even possible, and why and/or what do you think drove him to such an extreme act of violence. forgive my ignorance on the subject, but other than the link that MiG provided in his first post on this I haven’t read much of the main stream media take on this whole incident.