Christoffa Corombo

The right likes to complain that Wikipedia is a misinformation, propaganda and brainwashing tool of the socialist, liberalist left. Ha! Wrong again Capital-istas! The description in the Wikipedia article of Cristoffa Corombo (yes, that was his real name in his native Genoese language) states that he was an “navigator, colonizer and explorer”.

If Wikipedia was so lefty, they would have added “terrorist” to the list, don’t you think?

No offense to all my Italian, Genoese, Spanish and Portuguese friends who celebrate Corombo as a great explorer and Columbus Day in his honor.

While the U.S. is presently engaged in its “War on Terror” and we recently observed the day when terrorists attacked us “for our freedoms”, many may take offense at my use of that word, but Wikipedia’s Wiktionary has two definitions for “terrorist”: “One who governs by terrorism or intimidation…” and “Any one who uses terror as a weapon in a political struggle…”

Wiktionary’s usage notes for “terrorist” adds, “The use of the label "terrorist" is often controversial or subjective, since one person's terrorist may be another's freedom fighter, and vice versa.”

And there you have it. Those who won, celebrate Corombo as a hero, but those who lost, namely between 9 and 20 million native inhabitants of the New World see him as something else. And their vision of him is based on his actions, not on the propaganda of the victor.

Would you believe it was more than mere coincidence if I told you that the origin of the word “genocide” is “Genoacide” to honor Corombo’s origins?

Just kidding! But what a wonderfully ironic, almost fateful, coincidence it is.

Islamic terrorists refer to us as “unbelievers”. That is exactly how Corombo and the Spanish Crown saw the Taino and Arawak. We rightly condemn the beheadings of American contractors in Iraq, but we revere a man like Corombo even though he and those under his command have done far worse.

Many Columbus apologists like to say that’s just the way it was back then, expecting humanitarianism 500 years ago is ludicrous. It would be if 1500 years before Christoffa Corombo there wasn’t another man who embodied humanitarianism and who Corombo’s first name derives from? You know who I mean. But more than that, Corombo came from that religion and yet his actions suggest he was the unbeliever.

If you think this is harsh, wait until you read my Thanksgiving post. The sooner we de-mythologize people and our history which does not reflect the most sacred, truly sacred, of American ideals like pursuit of happiness and everyone created equal, the sooner we can rebuild America into a country where free health care for all is a reality. If not, George Bush may one day be Saint George.

The right claims the media in America has a liberal bias. But if the media had a liberal bias would we not see more stories about issues in Indian communities on CNN and MSNBC? Not necessarily. Why? Because most liberals don’t care and aren’t aware of the realities in Indian Country.

This seems to me to be the power of Corombo in America. Human rights abuses in foreign lands are high on liberal agendas, but human rights abuses with regard to Indians in America are not.

It’s obvious that conservatives have bought the bullshit. The sad, tragic reality is that even many liberals have been brainwashed not to think outside this little box. As the Anarchist of Ann Arbor will tell you, many libs are just knee-jerk reactionaries, people playing on the other team with no real desire for change, just difference.

I used to work as a dishwasher in a Beverly Hills hotel. We had a Mexican cook who would tease me about being American by accusing me of having stolen land that once belonged to Mexico. Instead of guilt and an apology, my response was, “Yeah? And who did Mexico steal it from? Do you even know the name of the people to who this land really belonged?”

He couldn’t answer. But I’m sure he’d heard of Christoffa Corombo.

A Little Known Anniversary of the Roots of Our Freedom and Democracy

One afternoon in 1988 I jumped into the St. Lawrence Seaway and was totally unprepared for the shock that went through my body caused by the cold of the water. The panic on my face must have been evident because of few of my Mohawk friends, notably Lorraine Canoe, grabbed me to make sure I did not drown. I remember trying to force the words from my mouth that I was okay but I don’t think those words were intelligible.

That happened at Akwesasne, the Mohawk Reservation in upstate New York, where I was for a function for the Akwesasne Freedom School headed back then by Mohawk Chief Jake Swamp who I interviewed for the WBAI-Pacifica radio show mentioned in the “About Me” paragraph to the right.

What may send a similar shock through America’s body is discovering the little-known, non-white history of the origins of our democratic freedoms. While we have always been taught that our democracy was founded by our white land owning and slave holding Founding Fathers, the historic fact is that American democracy as we know it would not have happened without borrowing it from American Indians.

That’s right, 867 years ago yesterday one of the giant cornerstones of America’s democracy, our “More Perfect Union” federalism and many facets of the structure of our government, many of our freedoms and various European democracies owe its creation to the Five Nations Haudenosaunee (pronounced Haudeno-shonee), which is the confederation of the Onondaga, the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Oneida, the Mohawk and with the addition of the Tuscarora later, becoming the sixth nation in the Haudenosaunee.

On August 31st, 1142, three hundred fifty years before the conquest of Columbus, the Haudenosaunee, otherwise known as the Iroquois Confederacy, was founded through the Great Law of Peace—the Iroquois Constitution.

What the Iroquois Constitution inspired in our own Constitution are many and fundamental. The two Houses of our legislature, our Congress, are taken from the Haudenosaunee not the Greeks; the three branches of our government are taken from the Haudenosaunee not the Romans; veto power, impeachment and the procedure for when a leader becomes sick were taken from the Haudenosaunee not the British.

All of this and more was borrowed and used by America—the same America which attempted to kill off or assimilate, the bulk of its entire indigenous population, even though it owed a major part of its “democratic experiment” to people who many American military, political, religious and business leaders thought were not even human, or were devils, or were simply beneath whites in all aspects. The term “ignorant savages” as used back then was not nearly as derogatory as it is today.

Founding Father Benjamin Franklin told colonial delegates in 1754, “It would be a strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming such a union and be able to execute it in such a manner that it has subsisted ages and appears indissoluble, and yet, that a like union should be impractical of ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary and must be more advantageous, and who cannot be supposed to want an equal understanding of their interest.”

Moreover, Europe was inspired to throw off the suffocating shackles of monarchies by the Haudenosaunee through the Myth of the Noble Savage. The French took inspiration to end the reign of Louis the XVI because they saw how the Haudenosaunee lived in harmony with one another and with their surroundings and wanted the same for themselves.

One major difference of the freedoms or the Haudenosaunee and America lies in the intrinsic rights of women—existent among the Haudenosaunee but absent at the founding of America.

According to the book “Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World” by Jack Weatherford, Karl Marx was also inspired by the Myth of the Noble Savage to invent communism to reflect the liberty enjoyed by the Iroquois and how their community took care of all of its members without class distinction or structure with equality for all.

So, the founders of the two Cold War enemies inspired by American Indians to want greater control over their own freedoms and personal liberties.

The Great Peacemaker, whose name was Deganawida, and Hiawatha, his spokesman, would perhaps be bewildered at how badly the superior white race comprehended peace, given that the descendents of Marxism and American democracy could not forge a peace between themselves so many centuries after the Haudenosaunee did and that they nearly brought the world to nuclear war—a worse fate of war than the Great Peacemaker would ever have known or imagined in 1142.
On October 21, 1988 the US Senate passed a Concurrent Resolution to acknowledge the contribution of the Iroquois Confederacy in the development of the U.S. Constitution. So, if America says its true, you cannot doubt it.

However, there have been Christian attempts to diminish or deny the influence of the Haudenosaunee on the US Constitution and our freedoms. This is an example of one attempt which, in this link, is roundly refuted. Some Christians can barely get Christian history straight, let alone American history.

What I find fascinating about this is the Birthers, Deathers, Gun Nutters and typical Repubs and Dems are having trouble enough with America being lead by a black president, how much would they hate finding out that their freedoms, the ones that we still fight the “war on terror” to preserve, were created by Indians.

I promised to use this blog to educate about Indians. If you think the Birthers, Deathers, and others mentioned above are bad now, just read a little American Indian history.

And if you believe we can’t get health reform care from our government so easily, just remember, it was once very easy for them to give out small pox.

Just kidding.

Indian Health Dis-Service

As Obama and Congress, the health insurance industry and the AMA debate about what America’s public health care should be, American Indians and Alaskan Natives are provided health care as part of the government’s trust responsibility for them. However, this health care is not to be envied by non-Indians and hopefully is not to be an example of what Obama has in mind for non-Indian America.

On May 8, 2009, Dr. Yvette Roubideaux was confirmed by a unanimous vote of the U.S. Senate as Director of the Indian Health Service. She will oversee the administration of a proposed $4.3 billion budget. Obama requested a 13 percent increase over the 2009 budget. Despite this hefty dollar amount, the quality of medical care on the reservations the IHS serves has been less than adequate in many cases.

Last month, the Associated Press ran a story about the death of the little girl whose photo graces the top of this blog. Her name is Ta’Shon Rain Little Light. She was a 5 year old little Crow girl from Montana. She died of cancer and her lung collapsed, according to the AP story, which you can read in full here. The Crow Agency IHS clinic in Montana told Ta’Shon’s parents there was nothing wrong with her except that she was depressed. Obviously, there is a big difference between terminal cancer and depression.

Many health care horror stories have taken place in Indian Country since the advent of Manifest Destiny. After all, it was our government who handed out smallpox-infected blankets in winter so long ago.

Indians have the worst health statistics in America. According to the AP story when Obama was a candidate campaigning on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations, where Dr. Roubideaux is a member, he cited the statistic that Indian men at Pine Ridge and Rosebud have the lowest life expectancy in the Western Hemisphere after Haiti. That’s Haiti.

Reportedly, American Indians have an infant mortality rate 40 percent higher than whites, twice the rate of diabetes, 60 percent more for strokes, 30 percent more for high blood pressure and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease. Obviously there is quite a need for good health care.

Although the AP story suggests money is the problem, the IHS website for the Crow Service Unit states that its hospital provides health care for the Crow and the Northern Cheyenne and employs 200 plus doctors, nurses, LPN’s, lab technicians, and all service personnel necessary to adequately staff a 24-bed health facility.

But perhaps the problem with health care on the reservations throughout the U.S. is not only with poor quality or lack of money, but with contaminates that cause the diseases for which Indians are receiving less than quality treatment. Between now and August 2011 a study through a grant from the EPA to Montana State University will be conducted on the Crow Reservation to assess the potability of drinking water.

A map of the Crow Reservation shows the heavy amount of surface coal mining on and around the reservation that would affect the drinking water and cause such rapid cancer development in little Ta’Shon Rain Little Light.

A Montana Fish & Wildlife report that states “CBM [coalbed methane] discharged water can contain high levels of ammonia, selenium, boron, iron, radium, and fluoride, as well as the most significant problem— sodium salts. Sodium levels in discharged water render it unsuitable for irrigation. Increased sodium bicarbonate levels in water are lethal to fish and all aquatic and riparian vegetation”.

Radium in drinking water has been known to cause bone cancer. Boron hydrogen compounds are toxic dependent on structure. Hydrogen is two-thirds of water.

Stomach cancer is associated with excessive levels of sodium salts as may be found in CBM discharged water. I’m no toxicologist or doctor, but the possibility that CBM discharge-contaminated drinking water caused little Ta’Shon’s cancer is heightened by the fact that she complained of stomach pains.

This reminds me of the film “Thunder Heart” with Val Kilmer and Sam Shepard, where the character Maggie Eagle Bear discovers that the drinking water is contaminated with uranium due to mining on the res. It also reminds me of is “Erin Brockovich”.

So the story here isn’t ineptitude or under funding at IHS clinics, it’s a story of lax EPA standards and mineral resource exploitation on reservations versus tribal health. It’s an old problem on the reservation. The Indian nation needs income. They have coal or uranium or other minerals. They allow them to be mined to make money. But because of relaxed EPA standards and mining company shyster lawyers, the Indian nation is stuck with the long-term problem of with the mining residue getting into ground water and rivers.

Perhaps the most famous instance was at the Laguna Pueblo Reservation back in 1979 where a hundred million gallons of radioactive water spilled into the Rio Puerco from a Kerr-McGee and United Nuclear Corporation mine. According to Wikipedia, approximately 1,100 tons of uranium mine waste contaminated 250 acres of land and up to 50 miles of the Rio Puerco. There was another story recently of homes at Navajo built with uranium-contaminated materials which are being torn down and replaced with new homes by the Navajo EPA.

Minnesota’s new Senator Al Franken told reporters last week that he asked to be placed on the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. I doubt there are many Senators who have requested to be on that committee, so it will be interesting to see what Franken does.

Back in the day, when I was producing Sequoyah, my weekly Native American news program for WBAI, I was also the weekly feature correspondent for the nationally-syndicated weekly half-hour, First Person Radio and the New York-based correspondent for the nationally-syndicated daily five-minute feed, National Native News.

One of the reports I produced was a 1988 interview with Sharon Esotoya, then Executive Director of the Native American Community Board on the Yankton-Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. She spoke about the forced sterilization of Indian women in Indian Health Service clinics.

Esotoya discussed how the forced sterilization practice worked and how the doctors got away with it by not documenting the conversation between doctor and patient, doctors telling the women the procedure could be reversed if they changed their minds and using scare tactics against the young women who didn’t know, saying if they don’t have the procedure they could get cancer, if they had another child they could get cancer.

The use of the contraceptive depo provera on Indian reservations was the subject of Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs and cited only 35-40 cases. Esotoya disagreed, saying many women were taking depo provera. While it was supposed to be illegal in most states, Esotoya said if you called any HIS pharmacy and asked them if they had depo provera they would say yes.

For that report, I called the Indian Health Service office in South Dakota for a comment about the use of depo provera and the forced sterilization and was referred to a series of IHS personnel until finally being referred to the main IHS office in Maryland where that person was also unavailable for comment.

Esotoya mentioned one woman who changed her mind about having her tubes tied only to have IHS doctors try to wrestle her down onto the table to administer the anesthetic until the anesthesiologist refused.

So, when insufficient health care is combined with poisonous conditions on reservations, a deadly set of circumstances is created like that which allowed little Ta’Shon Rain Little Light to die.

The worst thing for a parent is to lose a child. My heart goes out to Ta'Shon's family.

Obviously not much has much changed at the IHS in twenty years.

Peltier, Coler and Williams

John McCain said recently in the context of President Obama not pressing the Iranians enough on the rigged election and the violent crackdown on the protests in Tehran, that “America is the moral leader of the world”. Well, there are many, many examples to refute that piece of propaganda—or is bullshit a better word?

One of them is the case of imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier. From the beginning of this blog two weeks ago, I decided to use it to make non-Indians aware of Indian issues past and present.

Thirty-four years ago today, one day after the 99th anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn and the death of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, FBI Special Agents Jack R. Coler and Ronald Williams were killed at point-blank range on the Jumping Bull Ranch on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Two years before, AIM members Dennis Banks and Russell Means, along with many others, held the U.S. Government at bay in the town of Wounded Knee, made infamous in 1890 for the massacre of innocent Lakota elders, and men, women and children, and recounted in the Dee Brown book, “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” and the 2007 HBO original production by the same name, starring Aidan Quinn, Anna Pacquin and Adam Beach, who I had planned to work with when producing the film I mentioned in my very first blog.

Pine Ridge was a war zone during that time thanks to then-Pine Ridge Tribal Chairman Dick Wilson and his Guardians of Oglala Nation, otherwise know as the “goon squad”. On many reservations, the FBI also serve as the police force, although Indian nations in America are supposed to have sovereign status, therefore, being legally entitled to have their own police force like the Navajo and others have. I guess that’s what happens when your reservation is very near to gold and uranium like Pine Ridge is.

This was back in the early 70s when J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was running rampant, in part due to Hoover’s paranoia. Fred Hampton had been assassinated just a few years before. The Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall book, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, from South End Press is a thorough account of this dark chapter in American law enforcement.

AIM member Leonard Peltier was charged with being one of three AIM members, armed with AR-15 guns that killed the agents. Peltier fled to Canada, was apprehended and extradited back to the U.S. allegedly with fabricated evidence. The other two men charged with the murder, Dino Butler and Bob Robideaux, stood trial and were acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. Leonard’s fate would not be the same. For more on Peltier’s case, there is the Robert Redford-produced documentary Incident at Oglala and there is much online. It’s been nearly twenty years since I did anything on Peltier. In fact, my last Sequoyah interview was with Peltier. But I have forgotten much of his case because it happened before I was even aware, whereas the Eddie Hatcher case happened before my eyes.

I had interviewed Peltier several times while producing Sequoyah. The first time I interviewed the legendary civil rights attorney William Kunstler was about Peltier. It was about 6:00 pm on a Tuesday, I trekked down to his office in the basement at 13 Gay Street and sat and waited. He was in court. And there was an elderly Chinese couple also waiting. Kunstler walked in and spoke with the Chinese couple for about twenty minutes and then summoned me. He let his secretary go home and I sat alone with Kunstler in his office, asking him questions about Peltier’s case that he must have answered a million times before without frustration or fatigue. He was a true gentleman.

Before first interviewing Kunstler, there was a Lakota man named Two Elk helping me produce Sequoyah. He had the tape recorder I used and I wanted it back to interview Kunstler. He tried to talk me out of it. I insisted. He brought the recorder back and gave it to me and I never saw or heard from him again. He was afraid of the FBI. Me? I was so naïve back then to any reprisals or surveillance.

I remember once when I wanted to interview Leonard (I realize I’m calling him Leonard now, which is how I used to refer to him) about his artwork. I called the prison official at Leavenworth as you always had to do because prisoners had to call you collect. I had interviewed Leonard a few times before about his case—the political stuff. This was about artwork. Suddenly, the prison official did not want to grant permission. I was perplexed. He thought Leonard would be making money. I assured him that I wasn’t making any money and certainly wasn’t paying Leonard. The official was afraid that because I was publicizing Leonard’s artwork, Leonard would be making money from the sales of his artwork. I told the official I had no control over that. Finally, the official relented and Leonard called. It’s been a long time since I’ve really listened to any of those reports.

Today, while looking up Leonard to prepare for this blog, I saw that he had been moved from Leavenworth to Canaan Federal Penitentiary in Waymart, Pennsylvania where, this January, he was attacked by a gang of youths and beaten severely, put in solitary and his diabetes dietary requirements were not met. It was, to my thinking, obviously a set-up by those who wanted Leonard dead and he was left to die.

Many consider Leonard to be America’s foremost political prisoner in the sense that the conditions under which Leonard was convicted, the allegedly falsified ballistics report that Kunstler referred to and what many believe to be essentially prosecutorial misconduct. Since Butler and Robideaux were found innocent for reasons of self-defense, someone was going to pay for the execution style killings of Coler and Williams, the U.S. Government was determined to make someone pay.

Throughout the years, Leonard has gotten the support of Nelson Mandela, Amnesty International, the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights, the Dalai Lama, the European, Belgian and Italian Parliaments, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and others.

The FBI hates Leonard, protesting outside the White House in 2000 to protest the possibility that Clinton would pardon him. When Clinton did not, it has been reported that David Geffen withdrew his support for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and turned his support to Barack Obama. Maybe Obama will pardon Leonard at the end of his presidency, whenever that will be.

I do not condone or celebrate the killing of Coler and Williams, which is why I included there names at the top of this piece. The FBI report states that Williams had a bullet wound in his hand as the bullet passed through his hand to his head, obviously held up in terror. Coler, the FBI said, had been incapacitated by bullet wounds and was shot twice in the head, execution style.

A few points: the FBI has obviously been known to lie, Pine Ridge was a war zone and many innocents died. The murder rate at Pine Ridge prior to Coler and Williams’ deaths was the highest per capita in the United States. The FBI was perceived to be on the side of Wilson’s goon squad, which terrorized traditional elders, if memory serves, resulting in many deaths and homicides which were not investigated. That does not mean Coler and Williams deserved to die, especially the way they seem to have. That also does not mean that Peltier did it. The ballistics evidence, I remember Kunstler saying in 1987, had been fabricated.

There are perhaps more questions than will ever be answered. One of those questions is, while Peltier’s supporters and anyone familiar with the case and the times can tell you the names of the two dead FBI agents, can anyone of Peltier’s enemies within law enforcement tell you the names of any of the 50 innocent victims of Dick Wilson’s goons who used intimidation, drive-by shootings and murder? No. It was a war zone. Reportedly, one member of the goon squads, Duane Brewer, stated that the FBI had assisted the goons, even giving them armor-piercing ammunition.

Is this an example of America’s moral example and leadership that McCain and Graham believe we exhibit around the world? Like I said, it’s bullshit, sick-making bullshit.

Regardless, Leonard is up for parole this coming July 27th. I’ll have more information about his case then.