A friend of the blog emails:
Recently I was in a meeting with State of Minnesota bureaucrats. They said it is now the practice for state of MN meetings to start each one with this recital.
Why is this necessary? Why not an acknowledgement for the ingenious federal republic devised to govern such a vast and varied people? Why not an acknowledgement for the free enterprise market that has done more to raise more people out of poverty than any other economic system ever invented.
I was just so floored by the Land Acknowledgement. Really.
That floors me, too.
And I have sat through Saint Paul school board meetings.
The “Land Acknowledgment” is a religious creed.
Yes, the Dakota, Ojibwa and Ho Chunk peoples were here before us and we (Europeans) more or less forced them out.
Uh-huh, but I have a question.
Who did those bastards force out of here?
Hint, at the Little Big Horn, Custer’s scouts were Arikara and Crow. It was Crow land that the Sioux, aka, Dakota, Lakota were trying to steal and as for the Arikara, the Sioux, aka, Dakota, Lakota had waged a genocidal war against them to seize the Black Hills.
But hey, tell me, who did the Arikara wage gynocidal war against to make those sacred hills their home?
BTW, I toured the Little Big Horn battlefield two years ago. It is on the Crow reservation and the Crow guide who led our group did a damned good job.
No whining, no chest-pounding, no activist bullshit, just damned good information.
Damned good insight into the native loyalties, politics and alliances.
I had no idea that there were white traders who fought with the Indians. One had a Sharps buffalo gun and was picking off troopers from well over five hundred yards away.
I highly recommend the tour. Hope they have not changed a thing.
Indians killed each other constantly. Once a tribe appeared to be getting close to being inbred, there was only one thing to do — find a weaker tribe, kill the men and bring the women back to camp.
Where I live in Wisconsin used to be Sioux (little snakes) land, then the Ojibwa (correct spelling) chased their dirty asses to Minnesota killing many.
AllenS, Historian
Some of you are probably aware of it by now, but Krapinthepants is an Indian word. Not only am I a Sicilian, but I’m also an Injun.
I can do a mob hit on you, then take your fucking scalp too.
I have never owned a peace pipe.
Uhh, no you can’t you never was broken down old man.
The Ojibwa, aka Chippewa, and Sioux, aka Lakota, Dakota were enemies for millennia.
Here is a Wikipedia description of how Sioux Lookout, a Canadian town 220 miles northwest of Thunder Bay got its name.
By the early 19th century, the Ojibwa were driving the Sioux out of Minnesota. Here is a history from Maplewood’s website.
Notice how they blame the United States for a thousand year old war.
One scalp that will never hang from my belt would be the one from Krapinthepants. Yuck.
One of my favorite stories occurred at the Angus Hotel, (now The Blair Flats). Back then the Angus was a flop house and The Oak Room bar was a place that could have used a little fixing up to hope to rate as a dive.
Anyway, it was back in the day when the American Indian Movement (AIM) was launching and the natives who frequented the bar were feeling all, well let’s just say, national.
Reviving old rivalries, a group of Chippewa were calling the Sioux, “dog eaters” and the Sioux were calling the Chippewa, “rabbit chokers”.
A Mexican then stood up and pronounced, “I am just as Indian as any of you, but we got something you ain’t got.”
“What’s that?” the crowd wanted to know.
The Mexican swayed on his shaky legs for a few minutes winding up to deliver his answer, then bellowed:
“A FLAG!!!”
interesting story closer to home; check into how Bone Lake WI got its name.
And my favorite story about how the mystically spiritual Sioux dealt with their neighbors read up on the August 5th 1873 incident at Massacre Canyon in Nebraska
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_Canyon
most Sioux I know try to bury that story down the memory hole just as they do the back story of those folks hanged in Mankato.
More white people behaving badly.
Mitch, I think it’s time you acknowledged the State of Minnesota for being a great content generator for this blog.
Or for a view of Relations between the Sioux and Chippewa it is incidentally reported in this 1832 text by Henry Schoolcraft:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64866/64866-h/64866-h.htm
If Democrats running the State of Minnesota actually believed we were living on stolen lands (violence, displacement) and built the state on slaver labor (against their will), then what are they going to do about it?
If you know you are in possession of stolen property and you are a person of high moral character, you give the property back to the rightful owner. Are we giving this state back to the tribes our ancestors took it from?
After you give back stolen property, it’s not yours to use any more. Are we all moving out of Minnesota? To where – the entire North American continent belonged to somebody else before Europeans conquered it. Where are we all going?
When is it happening? If the person in possession of stolen property doesn’t give it back immediately but instead retains possession while mouthing platitudes about how terrible the situation is, that person is no more righteous than the thief who took it in the first place and the platitudes simply add insult to injury for the victim of the thievery.
I liked the old way better. It was more honest. Our ancestors won the war so we own the land and you’re lucky to be alive because before White people came, the custom was to kill everybody. The only problem is 19th Century White people were too soft.
Joe, I totally endorse your proposed campaign to return lands stolen from the people who stole land from other people.
But let’s start with a “you first” protocol.
Let’s give back North Oaks, Crocus Hill, Merriam Park, Summit Avenue and Highland in Saint Paul, along with corresponding elite areas of Minneapolis.
All of Edina of course.
Once we see how our betters handle the process, perhaps we can turn our attention to West 7th and the East Side.
Well, I dare say, I can think of a term for the land acknowledgment, and that term is “virtue signal”. Properly used.
The Winkler private prison thing was not a virtue signal, as discussed.
During my suspension here as a commenter I did observe Mitch use “virtue signal” correctly. That I think was for Buttigieg and his 1 block bike ride from his chauffeured Suburban.
The Indians should be damned glad that Mohammad didn’t discover this land.
If the Chinese had discovered this hallowed ground, most of Minneapolis would be a giant Nike shoe factory.
Damned straight on that Allen. Keep in mind that the Muslims were the world’s primary slave traders. Not only did they (Ilham Omar’s ancestors) engage in raiding the interior of Africa to sell humans around the Gulf, but the same was done by the Turks, wholesale, in the Ukraine, Romania and Hungary – by the tens of millions.
Anyone for reparations there?
Incidentally, slaves were captured by Barbary Coast raiders in Cornwall England as late as the 19th century…..
And a little beside the above point… even native Americans owned black slaves. On the Trail of Tears, the Indians brought their slaves with them.
How does someone get ‘suspended’ from SITD?
Mitch, have you adopted Twitter’s time-out policies? Is this something different from ‘moderation?’
So, the January 6th rioters were just trying to subvert the illegitimate government of the white European colonizers?
Weren’t they heroes, then?
How can you support both the Palestinian resistance against its racist, neoliberal colonizers and not support the American resistance against its racist, neoliberal colonizers?
It’s very interesting that native Americans actually migrated here from Asia and maybe even Europe. I guess, technically, they were the first ones here, but maybe, just maybe they stole the land from woolly mammoths and other wildlife.
Just say the words. Why won’t you say the words? Everything will be much better and we’ll be able to move on, if you just say the words. Why does this have to be about you? No one else had a problem with sayng the words.
Just say the words.
Back during the religious wars of 1500-1700, people were tortured, decapitated, and burnt at the stake for not “saying the approved words.”
Depending on our own views, we might theink that they heroes or villains.
But we don’t think that they were foolish, or that they should have just gone ahead and said the words.
Instead we tend to admire them, even if we believe that they were on the wrong side.
And it is official, for the first time in the US, our armed forces have “political officers.” These are called “Diversity and inclusion officers.”
Not sure about the ranks, but it is clear that the people running the military hate the United States of America.
And right on cue, Biden’s JD is hinting that women will be included in the draft.
That is an inevitable part of the military’s “diversity and inclusion” ideology. You will never get the right (meaning arbitrary) sex and ethnicity balance in the military until it is a non-volunteer force. The fredom of people to choose is the enemy of modern progressivism.
Well said.
Back in the mid-20th century, when progressivism was an out of power fad, freedom was all the rage. But as it gains power, freedom becomes more and more a threat.
You know, it strikes me that the proper response to the wrongs of the past is not to try to undo them for the sake of those who never experienced them–and in doing so create an entirely new set of victims who did experience those wrongs–but to rejoice that we have a system that can greatly reduce the wrongs going forward in the future.
Failing that, yes, give Minneapolis to the Lakota and Ashinaabe. They can hardly do worse than the current residents.