Joseph Brant's Slaves

On Monday morning my foot was in just as much pain as the day before and I was still limping pathetically. But when I did the sun salutation to start of my yoga it wasn’t as difficult as it had been on Sunday and it didn't take me an extra two minutes.

            During song practice I was able to play while standing with my weight shifted onto my left foot.

            I memorized the second verse of “J’etend des voix off” (I Hear Them Mouth Off) by Serge Gainsbourg and half of the last.

            I took a siesta from 9:30 to 11:00 so I would be fresh for class.

            I tried to wear my Blondo boots but the inside of the right one felt tight and uncomfortable against my puncture wound. So I wore one pair of thin socks, another of thermal socks and pulled my big woollen socks on top of those and then put on my Kodiak boots.  The Kodiaks don’t feel as firm on the bottom and my puncture wound is pretty much dead centre in the arch of my foot. Because of that I couldn't put the arch where it normally goes and so I had to pedal with my heel.

            Before class I read about Blackfoot farmers having been some of the most successful on the Prairies but the government had undermined their success.

            White announced that our reflection paper and our media presentation have not been merged but they can be on the same topic if we don’t overlap too much.

            He’s disappointed with Belanger’s coverage of Indigenous people in the military in chapter 8 of Ways of Knowing.

            A larger percentage of Indigenous people serve in the military than white people.

            Why would Indigenous people serve in the same military that fought wars against them?

            Over the weekend the RCMP raided the Wet'suwet'en camp of protesters fighting the Coastal Gas Link pipeline. Twenty First Nations band council chiefs have approved the project but the hereditary chiefs have not.

            There are always allusions to the bloodlust of Indigenous warriors and that their rite of passage was killing for the first time. Certainly one’s first kill as a hunter was a rite of passage for Indigenous warriors.

            Vengeance was unique in warrior culture. But the Great Law of the Iroquois alleviates vengeance. Well, it does so among the confederacy.

            Mourning wars were about the diminishing Iroquois population so they had to conquer in order to grow again. They took slaves from Wendat villages. Mohawk leader Joseph Brant owned about thirty slaves including some from Africa.

            He says Belanger says there was no purpose to Indigenous warfare. The first part of the chapter talks all about the purpose of pre-contact warfare.

            He says Belanger got counting coup wrong. White doesn’t really give a better explanation. He says counting coup was not about killing. Belanger never said it was.

            The European style was the war of attrition in which one would wear the other side down. That’s why castles were built. This was not the Indigenous style.

            The English and French did not readily arm Natives but the Dutch didn’t care because they weren’t seeking empire.

            European armies just lined up on each side and shot each other. But formation fighting goes back to ancient times before Europe. But in the time of muskets it was a very effective system. The first battle that Champlain witnessed had the two sides advancing on each other in the open at close ranks. But the general policy seemed to be to fight in raids that killed the enemy and preserved one’s own men.

            Most individuals want to live in peace. War causes people to live in perpetual fear and it devalues life.

            White says that among the Haudenosaunee the clan mothers decided who would fight. Of course he claims that the Haudenosaunee were very good at warfare. That doesn’t explain why the Ojibwa defeated the Haudenosaunee and sent them back to the south side of Lake Ontario.

            It’s ironic that the Navajo code was never broken and yet the language was suppressed.

            Indigenous people tend to join the military for economic reasons.

            Indigenous veterans were denied benefits.  In Canada what happened was that Indian agents had control over and micromanaged the benefits. Indigenous veterans had to jump through lots of additional hoops to get their money and sometimes didn't get it at all.

            Banks cannot recoup land given to Indigenous veterans.

            In the United States there is one veteran suicide every 22 minutes. The actual figure is one suicide every 65 minutes or twenty per day.

            In Canada the suicide rate of veterans seems to be about the same as the general civilian population.

            White says he has a bad back and collapsed arches because of his military service.

            Robin called out from the back and said that her cousin was a sniper with 378 kills. This would probably be Francis Pegahmagabow, who was the most effective sniper of WWI. He killed 378 Germans and captured 300 more. He received high military honours and left the war as a sergeant major. He was an elected chief of his band for several years but was deposed over conflicts with the local Indian Agent. He later became the supreme chief of the Native Independent Government. The novel Three Day Road was partly inspired by Pegahmagabow.

            There are also indigenous women in the military.

            White flunked college and so joined the military for a two-year stint.

            50,000 soldiers died in the Korean War and another 50,000 in Vietnam. 10,000 Natives served in Korea and 42,000 in Vietnam.

            In 1951 there were 73 Canadian First Nations soldiers enlisted.

            He says Belanger got confederacies wrong. White also says he’s frustrated that Belanger calls the weapons of Indigenous warriors minimalist. He showed a picture of a Haudenosaunee war club as an example of a non-minimalist weapon. It was a club. Unless it shot something it was minimalist. He said that considering the range of a musket and how long it took to reload them an Indigenous warrior could run in with a long club and kill the man loading the gun.

            Lacrosse was developed to resolve conflict. A student said in field lacrosse the playing area is wider than in box lacrosse and there is less hitting.

            The tomahawk has been used in modern warfare by the US as recently as Afghanistan and Iraq.

Indigenous warfare existed to expand knowledge base. 
Joseph Brant was heralded as a warrior.
Some Iroquois fought against each other in the American Revolution. The Oneida

allied with the rebels.

            Indigenous people are not a homogenous group. Different nations have different needs.

            What colonists wanted was land and resources.

            Indigenous agriculture can be superior but it does not allow for a large mechanized harvest.

            He said 5000 natives produced half a million bushels of corn.

            The government is arguing that the pipeline is for our own good. Many Indigenous groups seem to be arguing the same thing.

            The pipeline did not go through white communities because it might impact the water supply but they had no problem with Indigenous communities. I think he was referring to the Dakota pipeline in the States.

            He showed a few video clips. One is from the show Hell on Wheels and it features a negotiation between US officials and a Native chief.

            He mentioned again the Black Hills land claim and the $billion that’s sitting in the bank account of the poorest nation.

             Wet'suwet'en is unceded land.

            He shows a clip from a documentary about the Wounded Knee stand off against the FBI, the military and the National Guard in 1973 when activists from AIM took over a church. A student mentioned Thunderheart, which is a fictionalized story set around the Wounded Knee events.

He showed the footage of Sacheen Littlefeather at the Oscars.

It was forensically proven that Leonard Pelletier was falsely convicted. Two FBI agents were assassinated at Pine Ridge reserve. One of the agent’s weapons was found in a vehicle driven by Pelletier. The car was stopped by a state trooper in Oregon but Pelletier escaped after a gun battle. He took refuge in Canada. A woman named Myrtle Poor Bear said she was Pelletier’s girlfriend and that she saw him shoot the agents and based on her testimony he was extradited from Canada. He was tried and sentenced to two life terms. Later Poor Bear said she'd never seen Pelletier in her life but had been intimidated into making her previous testimony. A ballistics test showed that one of the casings found near the agents' bodies was not from Pelletier’s gun as the FBI had claimed. This information was not used during his trial. Canada’s Solicitor General at the time of Pelletier's extradition was, Warren Allmand. He has said that if he had known about the corrupted evidence he would not have agreed to allow Pelletier to be removed from Canada.

He showed CBC footage of the Oka stand off. There’s a scene of Mohawk women pushing men back on both sides. Waneek Horn-Miller, fourteen years old at the time, was stabbed by a soldier's bayonet. One assumes that this was an accident brought about by the jostling between soldiers and Mohawk warriors but the soldier was never identified. Waneek went on to become a gold medal winning water polo athlete at the Pan Am Games in 1999.

Nations throughout the country have shut down bridges and the Six Nations cut off the 403 in solidarity with Wet'suwet'en.

            He showed another clip of the Grand River land dispute and a protest in Caledonia over forty hectares of land where a developer planned to build the Douglas Creek Estates. The developer argues that Six Nations gave up their rights to the land in 1841 but they say they did not. In February 2006 the Six Nations reactivated the 1995 litigation against Ontario and Canada and occupied the land. Some locals tried to stop the march. A Six Nations chief refused to participate in the Grand River protest because he did not want to reopen old wounds. There was a $20 million settlement in 2011.

            At Wet'suwet'en the RCMP blocked the media. At Wet'suwet'en the protestors are not in camps but reoccupying their land.

            AIM began as an urban movement.

            How can you say reconciliation with a rifle? But reconciliation is a large and complex concept. None of the studies of the Truth and Reconciliation had to do with land. So what do residential schools or missing women have to do with a piece of land in the armpit of Canada?

            There is a difference between how the mainstream media covers it and how Indigenous media covers it.

            Someone mentioned that Trump congratulated the Kansas City Chiefs of the great state of Kansas for winning the Super Bowl when Kansas City is in the state of Missouri.

            Taika Waititi the Maori director did the first Oscar Indigenous land acknowledgement during his speech in Los Angeles.

            He said River Phoenix also did a rant about cows.  Of the Native

            I limped to my bike and headed for tutorial at the Centre for Indigenous Studies.

            Nicole, Robin and the other very outspoken Native woman were all very upset about the recent raid on Wet'suwet'en by the RCMP. A lot of the tutorial was taken up with them expressing their emotions and ranting. Safia lets them get away with it because she's an activist and for her Indigenous Studies is just a vehicle for protest rather than a field of study. She has also mentioned on more than one occasion that there is a big turnover among Indigenous students that take this course because they get so upset that they quit, so it seems that she gives them a lot of leeway.

            Nicole declared that she didn't think we should be in class when we should be out there with the protesters. Then she looked directly at me and said, “You guys should be there too!”

            Protesters are shutting down the railroads and so there are no GO Trains. The Native woman whose name I don't know said, “Why are we being peaceful? I'm tired of being peaceful!”

            Nicole said, “We need non Natives to be there because they are more protected!”

            She said, “Our oxygen comes from the rain forests!” Obviously trees produce oxygen but I think the idea that most of our oxygen comes from rain forests is a myth. Most of our oxygen came from the ocean millions of years ago and there would still be lots of it for millions more years even if all of the rainforests were to burn to the ground.

            She said something about hereditary chiefs versus elected chiefs and how the elected chiefs come from colonialism while the hereditary chiefs hold the traditional knowledge of the land. Some traditional Haida chiefs had their titles stripped by the band because they supported a pipeline. It also should be noted that every colonial power at the time of first contact had hereditary chiefs. The very power behind colonization came from hereditary chiefs that were our kings and queens. Colonists didn’t get elected chiefs until much later.

            Robin did a smudge and walked around with some burning sage. She didn’t bother to stop to offer me any and I guess just assumed I wasn’t into it.

            Nicole said it’s about the life or death of the planet and allowing the RCMP to raid the camp is letting capitalism win. Mother nature is getting angry. Sitting in class is tiptoeing around the problem.

            The woman that said she’s tired of being peaceful wished they had sweetgrass to burn because it’s more calming and grounding medicine.

            Nicole brought a plastic imitation wampum belt and passed it around. The white stripes are water and the purple represents spirit.

            Safia told us that both our reflection paper and our media presentation are due on March 2. For the media presentation we have to present one mainstream media source and one Indigenous source on the same topic.

            Safia tried to start the tutorial on Indigenous military traditions. She says that there are gaps in Belanger’s coverage. She asks us each speak about what is war. Everybody passed on speaking, however I would have said something but I was last and the subject got changed before I had a chance.

            Nicole is upset and thinks that everything we talk about means nothing. Robin is almost crying.

            Nicole says the word “military” is colonial. She says that since there is not treaty the RCMP raid on Wet'suwet'en was an act of war.

            Safia says Canadian mining companies have displaced communities in Africa. Some of the cobalt in every phone is mined by African children.

            Robin said that Indigenous veterans lost status and that’s true because under the Indian act at the time if you leave the reserve for more than four years you would cease to be an Indian. She also claimed they lost their medals but I can’t find any evidence of that.

            To serve in the military is to align with one’s oppressor.

            Belanger said that many residential school survivors adjusted better to the military because they were already used to regimentation.  Robin seemed to think that was insulting.

            Indigenous soldiers were put on the front lines. They were used as snipers and scouts and the snipers were concealed but of course scouts had to go behind enemy lines.

            Some Indigenous people join the military just to get better health care such as dental.

            Nicole says tiredly, “We want our land back and we want to be left alone!”

            I stopped at Freshco on my way home where I bought five bags of cherries and a big pack of toilet paper.

            I had roasted peanuts and yogourt for lunch.

            I worked on typing my lecture notes.

            I had a potato and a slice of roast beef with gravy for dinner while watching Zorro.

            In this story Basilio tries to convince Sgt Garcia to retire from the military because he has that option after twenty years of service, He tempts him with the fact that after twenty years soldiers can be given property and become dons. Basilio’s plan is to have Don Cornelio charged with treason, which would cause his property to be confiscated. He would then give it to Garcia and later have Garcia charged with treason so he could get the property for himself. Basilio and Garcia are both invited to a dinner party at Don Cornelio’s hacienda. When Garcia admires the excellent Venetian glasses in which the wine is served Basilio coaxes him to name the country of origin of some of the other items in Cornelio’s home. Garcia innocently points out some things that are from France and some that are from England. Basilio suddenly cites an obscure law that says that it is treason to trade with countries that are the enemies of Spain. Basilio arrests Cornelio for treason and praises Garcia for exposing him. Basilio tells Garcia that he will get Cornelio’s land if he is found guilty in trial. Of course Garcia does not want to incriminate Cornelio but Basilio warns him that if he admits that he knows that people have broken this law and he has done nothing about it Garcia himself will be hanged for treason. Everyone is mad at Garcia because he is going to testify. Zorro threatens to carve a Z on Garcia’s behind from the front. At the trial Garcia finally stands up and says that he himself is guilty of treason. Zorro arrives and with his sword begins to cut off different items of Basilio’s clothing and to have him state where they came from. He admits that his suit was made in England, his watch in Switzerland and the brocade on his vest from France. Basilio is forced find Cornelio not guilty unless he also finds himself guilty.