Red Nation Rising
Bordertowns
At the end of 'Red Nation Rising' There is a manifesto titled 'Don't go Back to the Reservation: A Bordertown Manifesto' summarizing the points made in the book and section 3 reads:
The values that govern life in all settler nations-competition,aggression, self-interest, exclusion, violence, exploitation-are values learned, practiced, and perfected in the bordertown.
The bordertown is the violent wellspring from which all of settler society is made and remade. Settlers flew flags made of the scalps of our murdered ancestors over their forts, those outposts of early British, French, Spanish, and American imperialism. These were all bordertowns. Plymouth and Jamestown were bordertowns. The frontier man camps and settlements built to facilitate colonial, capitalist exploitation like mining, fracking, logging, ranching, and commercial hunting were bordertowns. All settler cities and towns were born as bordertowns and, today, maintain the primary characteristic of a bordertown: Native erasure.[1]
Relocation Programs
As part of the federal program of Indian termination, relocation policy set into motion the mass removal of reservation-based Natives to urban centers, such as New York, San Francisco, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. The goal was to eliminate Native people by removing them from the land and assimilating them into settler society. Mormon Utah senator Arthur V. Watkins adopted the language of civil rights by equating termination-in his words "the freeing of the Indian from wardship status"-to the E mancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves during the Civil War. Lakota scholar Edward Valandra, however, contends that termination and relocation were little more than an attempt to overthrow Native governments, an attempt that many Native nations successfully resisted, but not unscathed.
In 1953, US Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108 immediately terminating the federal status of the Flathead, Klamath, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribes. That same year, Public Law 280 authorized states to assume criminal and civil jurisdiction over Native lands. Three years later, Congress passed the Indian Relocation Act to further remove Natives from the reservation. The consequences were devastating. From 1953 to 1964, more than one hundred Native nations were terminated, and 1.3 million acres of Native land was removed from trust status to be converted into private owner ship. Termination ended federal and treaty responsibilities, including access to education and health care. From the 1950s to the 1980s, as many as 750,000 Natives were relocated to cities.[2]
Pick-Sloan Plan
Termination and relocation policy also coincided and worked in tandem with large public works projects that removed Natives from their homelands. For Missouri River Native communities, for example, the 1944 Pick-Sloan Plan authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to build five earthen-rolled dams that deliberately flooded reservation lands. As a result, 30 percent of Lakota and Dakota people living along the river were removed from their homes in the 1950s and 1960s. Because it coincided with termination and relocation, the Pick-Sloan Plan, Vine Deloria Jr. argues, "was without a doubt, the single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States."[3]
Cited
- ↑ Estes N. Benallie B. Denetdale J. Cody R. Correia D. & Yazzie M. K. (2021). Red nation rising : from bordertown violence to native liberation. PM Press
- ↑ Estes N. Benallie B. Denetdale J. Cody R. Correia D. & Yazzie M. K. (2021). Red nation rising : from bordertown violence to native liberation. PM Press.
- ↑ Estes N. Benallie B. Denetdale J. Cody R. Correia D. & Yazzie M. K. (2021). Red nation rising : from bordertown violence to native liberation. PM Press.