[toeslist] 'Cowboys and Indians' -- Part I
 
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 02:06:15 -0500 (CDT)

 
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This is two articles, one a recent writing about Hurricane Katrina's
aftermath and the squalor and injustice that she exposed, and the
second a fascinating analysis of western white supremacy.  The
second article is split between the Part I and Part II email messages.

Rather than making the point that the Neocons are the functional
equivalent of Nazis, perhaps we ought to merely point up the fact
that the Nazis were carrying on a centuries-long cultural tradition
of conquest, extermination, and domination (enslavement) of the
survivors.

-- John Wilmerding

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a longtime activist, university professor,
and writer.  In addition to numerous scholarly books and articles,
she has published two historical memoirs, 'Red Dirt: Growing Up
Okie' (Verso, 1997), 'and Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years',
19601975 (City Lights, 2002).  She is working on a third, 'Norther:
Re-Covering Nicaragua', about the 1980s contra war against the
Sandinistas.

In 1968, she became a founding member of the early women's liberation
movement.  Along with a small group of dedicated women, she produced
the seminal journal series, 'No More Fun and Games'.

Dunbar-Ortiz was also a dedicated anti-war activist and organizer
throughout the 1960s and 1970s.  During the war years, she was a
fiery, indefatigable public speaker on issues of patriarchy,
capitalism, imperialism, and racism.  She worked in Cuba with the
Venceremos Brigade, and formed associations with other revolutionaries
across the spectrum of radical and underground politics, including
the SDS, the Weather Underground, the Revolutionary Union, and the
African National Congress.  But unlike the majority of those in the
New Left, Dunbar-Ortiz grew up poor, female, and part-Indian in
rural Oklahoma, and she often found herself at odds not only with
the ruling class but also with the Left and with the women's movement.

"... a remarkable life: harrowing and joyful, searching and achieving,
a life that brings together threads of a complex, troubled, and
rewarding era, a life that really made a difference to moving towards
a more humane and just world." -- Noam Chomsky

"Roxanne Dunbar gives the lie to the myth that all New Left activists
of the '60s and '70s were spoiled children of the suburban middle
classes.  Read this book to find out what are the roots of radicalism."
-- Mark Rudd, SDS, Columbia University strike leader

"Dunbar-Ortiz takes us into the heart of the women's liberation
movement, grassroots anti-war organizing and solidarity work with
third world liberation struggles around the world and in the U.S.
Outlaw Woman is a fierce and honest narrative about organizing,
resistance, and a passion to remake the world." -- Chris Crass,
Food Not Bombs

<...>

http://www.counterpunch.org/dunbar09072005.html

Why Do They Hate You?

John Wayne and the New Orleans Indians by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

"The Cavalry is coming!" announced a reporter on the Fox News Channel
when finally National Guardsmen trooped into downtown New Orleans
on the fourth day of apocalypse.  I said to myself, "There they go
again, racist Fox News."  I switched channels and found reporters
and government officials repeating the same phrase, "The Cavalry
has arrived."  I should not have been surprised; during the preceding
two days, they had been referring to the scene in brown water-lodge
New Orleans, not as genocide as I saw it, rather "the wild west."

Racism on top of racism, revealing the scaffolding of United States'
history, its intact structure bared, all the glitter and trappings
washed away.

New Orleans became "Indian Country," the military term for enemy
territory.  "This place is going to look like Little Somalia,"
Brigadier General Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National
Guard's Joint Task Force told Army Times, for an article published
September 2, 2005.  "We're going to go out and take this city back.
This will be a combat operation to get this city under control."
The Army Times report could have been about Baghdad in stating:
"While some fight the insurgency in the city, others carry on with
rescue and evacuation operations."

For days I have been thinking of Sitting Bull's observation that
the United States knows how to make everything, but doesn't know
how to distribute it.  He was being generous in attributing the
lack of equitable distribution of goods to benign ignorance rather
than to design.  But, he knew better.  Once in Chicago while
performing with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West, Sitting Bull spoke
through his translator to the huge crowd of ragged white men, women,
and barefoot children:  "I know why your government hates me.  I
am their enemy.  But why do they hate you?"  The U.S. Cavalry, the
7th to be exact, Custer's old regiment, massacred Sitting Bull's
unarmed, starving people in December 1890 at Wounded Knee, a few
days after Sitting Bull himself had been shot and killed by the
federal Indian police.

The cavalry sent into the wild west of New Orleans had orders to
pen in the starving black population that had been abandoned in
order to protect property.  It is not a sad or shameful day for the
United States; it is a typical day in the United States for the
poor, magnified.

How ironic that the Superdome became a house of horrors for the
dispossessed for five grueling days.  Most of the African Americans
who were herded into the Superdome came from the infamous New Orleans
projects, and are descendents of those evicted from their neat
little homes in the working class district that was seized and
bulldozed to build, with public funds, the Superdome.  Their cemetery
was also destroyed.  Construction began in August 1971 and was
completed four years later.

I moved to New Orleans in December 1969, and lived there for more
than two years, leaving unwillingly after being arrested and escorted
to Texas, and told never to return.  I was then, as now, a social
justice activist.  This story is told in my 'Outlaw Woman: Memoir
of the War Years, 1960-1975'.

In New Orleans and the surrounding area, the group I was a part of
did unionizing, women's liberation and antiwar organizing, and
community work.  The big local issue at the time was opposition to
the proposed Superdome and to the "urban renewal" that would make
it possible, removing tens of thousands of working class residents
and transforming them into welfare recipients, a process taking
place during the 1960s in nearly every city in the United States,
as well as in copycat apartheid South Africa, where Cape Town's
mixed working class District 6 was similarly destroyed.  Working
with the community against the Superdome in organizing demonstrations,
petitions, and boycotts, I learned about past hurricanes and floods
when gates were opened to flood the poor (black) neighborhoods in
order to spare the wealthy and white uptown.  I learned to hate the
fun-seeking tourists in the French Quarter who never bothered to
notice the sixty percent of the poor of the city.  And, once i!

t was built, I harbored an abiding hatred for the Superdome.

I returned to New Orleans in the spring of 1979 to give a paper at
the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, which
was held at the Hyatt Hotel that is attached to the Superdome, the
first time I had seen it.  I reluctantly stayed in the hotel and
never went outside while there, because I was well aware the
surrounding area was a no-man's land where police did not dare to
go, a low level insurgency operating from the day the doors had
opened four years earlier.  I kept warning others that they should
not go out, even in taxis, because they would be in danger returning.
I tried to explain why, to no avail.  Sure enough, a young historian
from Maine was shot and killed by a sniper in front of the Hyatt
after returning from fun in the French Quarter.  After that, the
historians stayed inside until ready to go to the airport in buses.

Now, New Orleans will be rebuilt as one big "urban renewal" project,
destroying the remaining working class homes and apartments, a sort
of Disneyland for tourists and the wealthy.  It's been going in
that direction for forty years, as have other cities like Manhattan
and San Francisco.  But, it may not be that easy with that insurgency
which, hopefully, will not capitulate.

<...>

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0703dunbarortiz.htm

The Grid of History: Cowboys and Indians by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

"We were like Custer.  We were surrounded."

-- Sergeant James J. Riley explaining why he ordered surrender in
an engagement in Nasiriyah, Iraq on March 23, 2003.{1}

At the onset of the U.S. military invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert
Byrd emotionally queried: What is happening to this country?  When
did we become a nation which ignores and berates our friends?  When
did we decide to risk undermining international order by adopting
a radical and doctrinaire approach to using our awesome military
might?  How can we abandon diplomacy when the turmoil in the world
cries out for diplomacy?

As a historian, I would have to respond to Senator Byrd that 1776
or thereabouts was when.  Many admirable U.S. anti-imperialists
have been making the same point as Senator Byrd.  An erasure of
history is at the heart of some of the most anti-imperialist critiques
of the Bush administrations foreign policy.  Continuity is hidden,
and a small departure is exaggerated.  From Gore Vidal, to Manning
Marable, to Michael Moore, lost democracy is a refrain.  Edward
Said writes: The doctrine of military pre-emption was never voted
on by the American people or their representatives ... It seems so
monumentally criminal that important words like democracy and freedom
have been hijacked, used as a mask for pillage, taking over territory
and settling scores.  Said ends his essay by, correctly, stating:
Bush looks like a cowboy.{2}

That observation is also common to critics of the war around the
world.  Although it is meant to be understood as a bad thing, in
fact, the cowboy is not a negative metaphor for many U.S. citizens,
particularly those who are descendants of the old settler class,
as are the majority of the ruling class and officers of the military.
How many generations of children now have grown up gleefully playing
cowboys and Indians?

Perhaps the fact that I grew up as a child of a cowboy father and
Indian mother narrows my view of this metaphor, making it loom too
large and out of perspective.  Then again, maybe that experience
brings with it some insider knowledge.

The Rise of White Supremacy and Imperialism/Capitalism

To allow no dissent from the truth was exactly the reason they had
come to America.{3}

Are your garments spotless?

Are they white as snow?

Are they washed in the blood of the lamb?

As this traditional evangelical Christian hymn suggests, whiteness
as an ideology is far more complex than mere skin color, although
skin color has been and continues to be a key component of racism
within the United States.  The origins of white supremacy as it is
now experienced and institutionalized -- and denied -- in the United
States (and, due to colonialism and imperialism, throughout the
world) can be traced to the prior colonizing ventures of Christian
Crusades into Muslim-controlled territories, and to the Calvinist
Protestant colonization of Ireland.  These were the models for the
colonization of the Western Hemisphere, and are the two strands
that merge in the genetic makeup of U.S. society.

The Christian Crusades against Islam/Africa gave birth to the law
of limpieza de sangre, cleanliness of blood, which the Spanish
Inquisition was mandated to investigate and determine.  The Christian
Crusades, particularly the Castilian conquest of the Iberian Peninsula
and expulsion of Jews and Muslims, created the seed ideology and
institutions for modern colonialism with its necessary tools --
racist ideology and justification for genocide. The law of limpieza
de sangre was perhaps the most important cargo on the 1492 voyage
of Christopher Columbus, sailing under the flag of Spain.

Great Britain emerged as an overseas colonial power a century later
than Spain, and absorbed aspects of the Spanish caste system into
its colonialist rationalizations, particularly regarding African
slavery, within the context of chosen people/New Jerusalem Calvinism
and Puritanism.

In the pre-formation of the United States, Puritanism and Calvinist
Protestantism uniquely refined white supremacy as a political/religious
ideology (a covenant with God) requiring the shedding of white blood
for purification.  The Ulster-Scots Calvinists were the settler/colonizers
of Northern Ireland and constituted a majority of settlers in the
western lands over the Appalachian/Allegheny spine of English North
America.  Their origin story became the origin story of the United
States.  It tells of pilgrim/settlers doing Gods will and forging
into the promised land, being surrounded by savages, and killing
the heathen (first the Irish in Ulster, then the Native Americans
in North America).  Thereby, the sacrifice and blood shed is perceived
as proof of the sanctity and purity of the nation itself.  All the
descendants of those who made such sacrifices are the true inheritors
of the land.

The Crusades and Purity of Blood

In the eighth century, Muslims came to power in all but the northern
fringe of the Iberian Peninsula and ruled for centuries.  However,
by the end of the fifteenth century, the last Muslim state held
only a foothold in Granada, an enclave on the southeastern coast
surrounded by the expansionist Christian monarchies of Castile and
Aragon.  During those intervening seven hundred years, various
Christian kingdoms based in the north of the peninsula attacked
Moorish territory, seizing their lands and properties.  The Christian
crusaders named this process La Reconquista, the reconquest.  This
military/religious project created the institutions and practices
later established in Spanish America, especially the encomienda
(conquered land granted to the conquistador along with the people
on it, with the conquistador earning the noble title of hidalgo).

The Reconquest meant the slow and systematic extension of Christian
power over all those lands that had been Muslim since the eighth
century, and so involved the clash of Christian and Muslim armies
and societies.  What the Reconquest destroyed, however, was the
racial and religious coexistence, which despite incessant armed
conflict had distinguished the society of mediaeval Spain.  It was
claimed by a contemporary that when the Christians went to war
against the Moors, it was neither because of the law (of Mohammed)
nor because of the sect that they hold to, but because of the lands
they occupied and for this reason alone.{4}

Before Christian aggression and eventual expulsion of the Moors
from the Iberian Peninsula, Christians, Jews, and Muslims had enjoyed
a mutual tolerance so the question of racial or religious conflict
had not existed.

The Vatican created the original institution of the Inquisition in
1179 for routing out Christian heretics, the original mandate being
free of racialization.  However, the 1400s in Spain saw increasing
Inquisition investigations of conversos, that is, Christian-converted
Jews, and of moriscos, Christian-converted Muslims.  Jews and Muslims
who refused to convert were finally deported en masse from the
Iberian Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century. (It is said
that Columbus watched the people being loaded on to ships for
deportation as he set sail in 1492).

Before this time, the concept of biological race based on blood is
not known to have existed as law or taboo in Christian Europe or
anywhere else in the world.{5}  As scapegoating and suspicion of
conversos and moriscos intensified in Christian Spain, the doctrine
of limpieza de sangre, purity of blood, was popularized, and had
the effect of granting psychological, and increasingly legal,
privileges to Old Christians, thereby obscuring the class differences
between the poor and the rich, i.e. between the landed aristocracy
and the land-poor peasants and shepherds.  In Cervantes Don Quixote,
the impoverished Sancho Panza says, I am an Old Christian, and to
become an earl that is sufficient, to which Don Quixote replies,
And more than sufficient.  And Cervantes contemporary, Lope de Vega,
wrote in his 'Peribaqez and the Commander of Ocaqa': soy un hombre,
aunque de villana casta, limpio de sangre y jam /de hebrea o mora
manchada  (I am a man, although of lowly st!

atus, yet clean of blood and with no mixture of Jewish or Moorish
blood.)

What we witness in late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Spain
is the first instance of class leveling based on imagined biological
racial differences, indeed the origin of white supremacy, the
necessary ideology of colonial projects in America and Africa.  We
see here the beginnings of the thousand year Reich of settler
capitalism/colonialism, and its characteristic tug of war over the
hearts and minds of the majority of the settlers -- the yeomanry,
and later the white working classes.  Historian David Stannard, in
his American Holocaust, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
adds to Elie Wiesels famous observation, that the road to Auschwitz
was paved in the earliest days of Christendom, the caveat that on
the way to Auschwitz the road led straight through the heart of
America.  The ideology of white supremacy was paramount in neutralizing
the class antagonisms of the landless against the landed, and in
the distribution of the confiscated lands and propertie!

s of M oors, Jews, and of Irish, Native Americans and Africans.
Kamen describes the process in fifteenth and sixteenth century
Spain:

"... a situation in which the highest and lowest classes could
maintain social mobility without great fear of social distinction
.. as with the genuine aristocracy, the concepts of honor, pride
and hidalgueda become the very foundations of action ... Insofar
as this concept of honor was identified with the virtues of the Old
Christian nobility, deference to honor became deference to the
nobility ... the Castilian nobility continued to regard their
functions as essentially the same that they had always been.  Their
task was to fight, and not to labor.  Hidalgueda would not permit
a nobleman, even the lowest rank of nobleman, to labor or to trade
.." {6}

The Old Christian Spanish, whatever their economic situation, were
allowed to identify with the worldview of the nobility.  As one
Spanish historian puts it, the common people looked upwards, wishing
and hoping to climb, and let themselves be seduced by chivalric
ideals: honor, dignity, glory, and the noble life.{7}

We can also locate the origin of genocide and its linkage to
colonialism in the late 1400s in Spain.  Two punishments were devised
to root out uncertain Christians deemed to have unclean blood: the
extermination of many -- burned at the stake -- and the social
isolation and persecution of the rest.

[End Part I of Two Parts] =========================================

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