Ethnic cleansing at Kahnawake;
The eviction letter tells non-natives they have 10 days to leave the reserve: “We trust that you understand the seriousness of this letter and that you will govern yourselves accordingly.” […]
In 1981, the community announced a moratorium on mixed marriages, which meant that non-natives who married Mohawks after that year would no longer have the right to live on the reserve. Any non-native who had married a Mohawk before the moratorium is still permitted to live on the reserve.
In the 1980s, some Mohawks contested the policy before the human rights tribunal, but lost. The courts have ruled that Mohawks can make any membership policy they deem necessary for their survival as a people.
h/t
Also – No mixing of the races!
I’m a “Non-Mohawk,” I’m one third English, one third German and one third French. My ancestors shot at each other at the Plains of Abraham, Waterloo, Dieppe and Ypres. I thought it all ended in 1945. Guess I was wrong!
Someone said “you create what you fear” – fear of racism creates racism. If one were to go far back enough into these whitey’s or your ancestory far enough – back to lets say – early settlers – most would discover they in fact do have native blood. Country wives – as they were called – native women – were taken by all the early explorers/settlers in order to survive. Many of you on this site probably do not realize that you have native blood in your veins. Go back 200 years – do some digging. The country wives were abandoned or simply accepted under the guise of homestead help.
I need some sense of scale – is this worse than speaking English?
?24u&i – Yea, or maybe not. More likely if you’re French Canadian. Then again we might be part Jewish, given their diaspora. In my case being part Gael and part Anglo Saxon (or is it Norman?) they all went about raping and plundering, I could be just about anything. Looking in the mirror I would say I’m white, balding, graying and as biased and bigoted as anyone out there.
This is more like the Hell’s not wanting anyone without a vest in the clubhouse. They aren’t going to take the chance of “whitey” ratting them out.
The Natives will do whatever they want to protect Smugglers Alley (smokes, booze, guns, people)and NO ONE will stop them. The St. Lawrence River is absolutely alive at night with boats in the summer and skidoo’s in the winter making the smuggling runs.
I love this so much….this kind of racism will finally open the eyes of Canadians on how useless it is to help these people…especially Mohawks…I for one will always vote against any law supporting our disfunctional first nations…
?24u&i:
I have a friend that is French, and he claims that if it would have been left to the Frenchmen, there would have been no trouble with the natives. They would have mixed with them and diluted them until everyone was of mixed race. It was the uppity English, which I am part, that came along and said that mixing was not acceptable.
Oz at February 3, 2010 7:36 PM
“What I meant, DaWG, was that because homosexuality has historically been an accepted part of Indian life your scenario @ 4:41 PM is moot.
It wouldn’t happen.
Pose another scenario that could happen.”
I’d like to see some cites for your assertion that homosexuality was this “accepted part” amongst Indians before I’ll agree with your statement. And, please, no links to sites that are clearly “Out and Proud.”
Real historical/legal information that backs up what you say.
Thanks. 🙂
DaWG
A resident of America’s Hat.©
DaWG, use
American Indians history homosexuality
as a search device on Bing, Google, Altavista, whatever. I got about 268,000 hits.
Being from the Calgary area I grew up knowing a lot of Indians: Blackfoot, Stoney, Blood, mostly plains Indians. I got my information from them.
I also know some Haida from the BC coast, same story. The stigma associated with homosexuality is a European thing that the Indians never shared.
Their ancestors were cannibals too. No social stigma there either, just a part of their way of life.
They told me these things back in the 1970s, before the “gays” came out of the “closet”.
I don’t know any of them personally any more.
They were a waste of time.
None of them I knew ever amounted to anything or did anything with their lives or even wanted to better themselves.
I know some of them are dead, and not from natural causes.
Welcome to Trudeauvia…where some tribes are more equal then others, and a majority population and culture is strictly forbidden.
“don’t it always seem to go –
that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
today paradise put up a parking lot.”
Joe Citizen @ 9:12, how can you be one third, one third, one third? An immaculate conception somewhere along the line perhaps?
Just askin’.
About the homosexuality thing, any standard textbook on the American Indian will verify that there was no stigma attacked to it in many of the tribes. No big deal.
Louise
I was trying to figure the XYs of Joes heritage too.
Immaculate conception or XYY are two options.
I think it might have been David Warren who once made an observation to the effect that the natives on the reservations seemed to be willfully moving towards what could only be considered a self-imposed form of apartheid.
Actually, it was not just the French who mixed. Other Europeans and those of Nordic descent also had country wives – the natives also traded their women for goods. I havwe always believed I was of a certain descent until I had to do some ancestrol digging, for a university course several years ago, and discovered I had nativve blood going back in my family tree on both sides -Nordic and English – I was shocked to say the least – apporximately 20% of those taking the course discovered the same – I’m sure it would be higher, but many of the children were simply abondoned later. Btw – this mixing of the races prevented the planned genocide of the native population.
?24u&i: “..this mixing of the races prevented the planned genocide of the native population.”
“Planned” genocide???? Serious allegations or the blathering of an idiot, which is it? Let’s see your evidence.
Genocide is the wholesale killing of a people and is seen as a deliberate strategy by one group of people to wipe out another. When European Nations began their colonial ventures (different time and methodology to their exploration activities), this was a concept which justified gaining title by conquest. As their citizens began to protest the slaughters in Africa in the mid-1880’s and the cruelties inflicted on the Aboriginal peoples, these Nations’ governments had to find some other way to achieve the same goal.
Ethnic Cleansing is the process, through murder or assimilation , of eliminating a segment of the population based on race or ethnic origins. We have seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of cases of ” Ethnic Cleansing ” directed toward parts of the Aboriginal Nations throughout both North and South American history : The great ” Indian” battles were actually simple government executions cleverly justified by fabricated acts of aggression by the Indian population toward the settlers who were trying to steal their and and resources.
Assimilation is the practice of forcing an individual to stop being who he/she is and to become someone else. This is a process that must be developed over time and done in such a way that “Aboriginal” remains intact, but is a reflection of someone else in the final phase.
In this way, a government could say to its citizens, “See we are humanitarian, we practice equality and we have the Aboriginal’s best interests at heart”; while in reality they have ripped a peoples’ spirit apart leaving them physically intact. The first legislation for Indians in Canada came about in 1850 because of land-hungry settlers and from then on two opposing purposes were used to solve this:
1. Protection of Aboriginals and their land, and
2. The assimilation of Aboriginals.
http://offreserve.tripod.com/articles.html
http://www.praxismedia.ca/transcripts/transcript_DarknessVisible.pdf?id=12099
Assimilation – kind of like what Duke William did to the English, or Cromwell did to the Irish. The Irish were said to be “priest-ridden” a favourite term of many, including the convert Conrad Black, when in fact the English killed or assimilated the gentry of Ireland, stealing their lands and edifices. The same can be said for any other country or people in the world, including and especially, I should think, various aboriginal tribes.
Move their reservation to Antarctica. If they misbehave again, move it to the moon.
Indiana Homez
I don’t want to see the disappearance of the culture of Natives, before reservations became self made prisons.
The Government with certain forces in Native groups, have collectivized, infantiled, than ripped off not only natives. But us all through taxes. Native schools are a joke that are there to stop people from becoming educated.
My Family has been in both America & Canada since 1745. You can bet I have a few Natives in the family tree as well.
The fact is, most North Americans have Indian blood in them. If there families have been here 100 years or more.
By assimilation. I mean adhering to the Meta-culture in law & National interest. Not abandon ones background.
BZZZZZZZ. Not good enough, ?24u&1. I wanted real evidence that somewhere in Canada’s history some government or monarch, as the case may be, planned to wipe out the original inhabitants and that somehow, the French prevented it through more intimate relationships with the Natives. After all, that is more or less the claim you made @ Feb. 4, 1:52 pm.
And BTW, the reason the French had a different relationship was because their primary concern was the fur trade. You don’t wipe out the people with whom you are trading, especially when that trade is making you very wealthy. The very same thing can be said of the English/Scots people throughout most of the fur trade era when the Hudson’s Bay Company held a monopoly. They also country wives, without whom they would not have survived in the wilderness.
You really need to tell your university professors that they are full of crap. You and they are an example of what constitutes the academic wing of the Indian Industry. The academic wing has as it’s goal the creation and maintenance of hatred, a sense of superiority and entitlement, the “spirit” of resistance to modernization AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, the enrichment of their own bank accounts at the expense by creating and nurturing perpetual grievance among Aboriginal people. The Industry has been hard at work for thirty five years and have produced very little of lasting benefit for their clients. Indeed, they have siphoned off millions of Federal and Provincial dollars that should have been more directly targeted at First Nations development.
Oh, and the concept of genocide, indeed the very word itself, was not invented until after WWII. In the vast sweep of history prior to that, you will find legions of examples of invasion and conquest. It is hardly unique to the Americas. Only in North America and the Middle East are these long past epics been used to fester hatred and backwardness.
Rev @ 3:37 AM “The fact is, most North Americans have Indian blood in them.”
The fact is, most Indians, at least in Canada, have European blood in them as well.
You’re also right about the assimilation versus cultural retention notion. Nobody’s culture is the same today as it was 150 years ago, let alone 500 years ago. The only cultures that remain unchanged and the ones that are dead. That the very essence of human nature. We adapt. We invent. We absorb from elsewhere. Our cultures are always evolving.
All I am saying is that if we could have, we would have, eliminated the natives after we were settled and had mastered the necessary skills to survive in a foreign land. The fact that there was a mixing of blood through the adoption of country wives went along way in preventing any plans, official or not, to rid the pioneers of the “native problem”. Simple as that.
BTW, I am not saying I agree or disagree with the Mohawks current standing on interacial relationships – it is a form of discrimanation to be sure, especially in light of the fact that interacial relations is what saved the natives, historically, in the first place. All, I am doing is giving an unofficial history lesson. I simply noted and attempted to communicate the irony.