“Stereotypical Elements (that) appear… in Athletic Contests”

(@ 10:00 – promoted by winter rabbit)

However, nowhere does the insensitive misuse of American Indian images, icons, and stereotypical elements appear more brashly than in athletic contests at the public high school level in Oklahoma.

Savage Country: American Indian Sports Mascots Part One

The tomahawk chop motion, we see that all the time…they get thousands of people to get going through the motion for the spirit of the game or whatever…not knowing that it’s degrading…it implies something bad that our ancestors were, people that did this. Therefore their team is going to be just like that, chop them up, do battle, or whatever…

Tomahawk.

Chop.

Who are the sports fans engaging in that racist behavior imitating? They surely do not think that they are imitating the American Indians who resisted nonviolently, they obviously think they are imitating the American Indians who resisted forced relocation and genocide self defensively; except, for the element of genocide denial that they exhibit in their racial exhibitions. Racism being based on ignorance, among other things, can and should be combated with education and historical facts. The sports fans engaging in the racist behavior of “tomahawk chopping” seem to be imitating, while being wholly ignorant of them, Warrior Societies which had a key beginning and a key ending in 1825 and 1878 in accordance with the “stereotypical elements (that) appear… in athletic contests” that they racially exhibit.

These facts in my opinion: that the U.S. traded weapons to the American Indians which naturally increased violence, and that the U.S. did not keep its treaties and created desperate conditions wherein American Indians would either have to starve or fight; may possibly provide a foundation for historically understanding and doing away with “stereotypical elements (that) appear… in athletic contests.”

The U.S. traded weapons to the American Indians which naturally increased violence.

Source

And the Chiefs and Warriors, as aforesaid, promise and engage that their tribe will never, by sale, exchange, or as presents, supply any nation or tribe of Indians, not in amity with the United States, with guns, ammunition, or other implements of war.

And trade in general increased violence, as well as how “Europeans and Americans manipulated traditional hostilities.”

Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians

Edited by David J. Wishart. p. 103

Destructive war in the plains intensified after contact because of migration of eastern tribes (the Cheyennes and the Lakotas, for example) into the Plains as settlement moved west, because Europeans and Americans manipulated traditional hostilities, and because tribes competed for access to European and American trade, especially in fur – rich areas of the Northern Plains and Prairie Provinces.  

The increased violence caused by weapons trade and “Europeans and Americans manipulated traditional hostilities” affected not only Indian Nation to Indian Nation, but it also spread from Indian Nation to white settlers. This certainly wasn’t the last conflict, but the last Indian Raid was in Kansas in 1878. Within those raids and the brutality therein lie much racial resentment in my personal conversations and readings, and quite understandably so. There were deaths on both sides and it matters not to the surviving family members why their ancestor died, only that they were murdered and how. I don’t pretend to have the answer for that; I just know that this racism we are speaking of is not the solution. Let us continue.

The U.S. did not keep its treaties and created desperate conditions wherein American Indians would starve as part of the extermination policy against them, and that meant making a choice to fight in order to survive or to starve to death.

Custer’s Indian Hostages: (One White Woman & 2 White Children, Part 1)

Moxtaveto lost even more respect for signing the Little Arkansas Treaty of 1865 after the Sand Creek Massacre. It gave some land to Black Kettle and others, promised food and other survival necessities, promised that conflicts would be handled by taking Indians into custody rather than being murdered, “and that no white person, except officers, agents, and employees of the Government, shall go upon or settle within the country embraced within said limits, unless formerly admitted and incorporated into some one of the tribes lawfully residing there, according to its laws and usages.”

Custer “Stayed The Course” & The Kansas Raids

Confining and binding those Native Nations to land where they could not survive by hunting or agriculture, breaking promises to provide those survival means, and propaganda revolving around the Kansas Raids reset Custer “on the course,” as if they were without severe provocation in the first place.

Furthermore, the Sand Creek Massacre descendants were

Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians

Edited by David J. Wishart. p. 49

…promised indemnities under the Treaty of Little Arkansas Treaty in 1865, which had not yet been paid as of 2001, although the Cheyenne Sand Creek Descendants Association continues to make legal efforts to collect the funds.

And at that Massacre at Sand Creek

“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown. p. 92.

Chivington and his soldiers destroyed the lives or the power of every Cheyenne and Arapaho chief who had held out for peace with the white men.

So: trade in general increased violence, how “Europeans and Americans manipulated traditional hostilities” increased violence, the U.S. not keeping its treaties helped create violence, and the Massacre that started the so called “Indian Wars” that involved “destroy(ing) the lives or the power of every Cheyenne and Arapaho chief who had held out for peace with the white men -“ created much, much, more violence.

Those sports fans who condone the tomahawk chop might start to see how offensive it is, if they had been taught at least the following about the Sand Creek Massacre, but of course this wasn’t taught to them via Colonial Education.

143rd Anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre of Nov. 29th, 1864

Kurt Kaltreider, PH.D. “American Indian Prophecies.” pp. 58-59:

– The report of witnesses at Sand Creek:

“I saw some Indians that had been scalped, and the ears cut off the body of White Antelope,” said Captain L. Wilson of the first Colorado Cavalry. “One Indian who had been scalped had also his skull smashed in, and I heard that the privates of White Antelope had been cut off to make a tobacco bag of. I heard some of the men say that the privates of one of the squaws had been cut out and put on a stick…”

John S. Smith…

All manner of depredations were inflicted on their persons; they were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the heads with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word…worse mutilation that I ever saw before, the women all cut to pieces…children two or three months old; all ages lying there.

(Emphasis mine)

The process of colonization involves one nation or territory taking control of another nation or territory either through the use of force or by acquisition. As a by-product of colonization, the colonizing nation implements its own form of schooling within their colonies.

Nor do they probably ever consider the full implications of their actions. Who and what are they imitating?

Christopher Columbus & His Crimes Against Humanity?

http://images.google.com/imgre…

It would be easy, he asserted, to “subject everyone and make them do what you wished (3).”

The very dishonorable Cotton Mather?

http://www.notablebiographies….

http://images.google.com/imgre…

“In a little more than one hour, five or six hundred of these barbarians

were dismissed from a world that was burdened with them.”

Or, are they imitating Chivington with their “chops”?

http://www.forttours.com/image…

Source

“the Cheyennes will have to be roundly whipped — or completely wiped out — before they will be quiet. I say that if any of them are caught in your vicinity, the only thing to do is kill them.” A month later, while addressing a gathering of church deacons, he dismissed the possibility of making a treaty with the Cheyenne: “It simply is not possible for Indians to obey or even understand any treaty. I am fully satisfied, gentlemen, that to kill them is the only way we will ever have peace and quiet in Colorado.”

(It is worth noting also that the Fuhrer from time to time expressed admiration for the “efficiency” of the American genocide campaign against the Indians, viewing it as a forerunner for his own plans and programs.)

In conclusion, the sports fans are obviously imitating each other in the phenomenon of mob mentality in the moment, so what is to be said to the adults who think that behavior doesn’t hurt anybody? Well, the past isn’t quite the past now.

Ecuador investigates massacre reports

Ecuadorean authorities combed swaths of the Amazon jungle on Thursday looking for victims of a reported massacre of Indians by loggers, part of a long-running fight over land.

Local media and indigenous leaders said the loggers gunned down 15 Indians from the Taromenani tribe, which in the 1950s cut ties with rest of the country to protect their hunting and gathering customs.

And, as I said in Pledge: Become A Modern Day Warrior For Indigenous Rights (Updated & Edited):

A web of land theft in a “a new kind of Indian war” is taking place. Non Indians’ racism and genocide denial, who engage in attempting to steal tribal sovereignty through the court system, ignore an obvious question. Where would they meet to practice their religion, a white Caucasian word, if their churches were stolen, condemned, and being used to drill for oil and uranium? The “spirit” seems to be this: “What one group calls genocide, another group may call progress.” Let’s try to get an overview of the “progress” in the web of land theft in the “New kind of Indian war.”

There is “a new kind of Indian war” taking place in the courtrooms, and the ones that make the decisions are human beings who will either be motivated by more racism or less racism, depending on  whether or not things like the tomahawk chop and “the insensitive misuse of American Indian images, icons, and stereotypical elements” are more or less influential in their minds. In that way, it could cause harm in my view in the realm of political influence with a more racial social climate. Everyone accepts that racism played a decisive factor in the South in court cases, for example with the Jim Crow Laws. Why wouldn’t the

Tomahawk

Chop

and “the insensitive misuse of American Indian images, icons, and stereotypical elements” with Law in the Shadow of the Bible yield a comparable result in deciding court cases, resulting in more and more lost sovereignty for the American Indian Nations?

Crossposted at Progressive Historians,

The Wild Wild Left,

&

Native American Netroots