Racism was clearly present in the land theft surrounding Fort Reno. Perhaps those that still use “Dead Indian Creek” can pretend that land theft stopped in the 1800’s, if they acknowledge it at all. Well,

"They want the land given back to them on a platter," Landow told FRONTLINE when he refused an on-camera interview. "They brought in innocent people like me. They're a bunch of goddamn uneducated Indians."

it didn’t.



(Article from 2000)

Source

Fort Reno is a research station that contains a graveyard sacred to the Cheyenne-Arapaho, but is currently under federal control. Senator Don Nickles (R-Oklahoma) currently has language in a pending bill that continues funding for the research station which would prevent transfer of the land back to the Cheyenne-Arapaho Tribe.

Source

BILL MOYERS:


Charles Surveyor was chairman of the Cheyenne-Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. In 1883 the federal government confiscated a 9,500-acre parcel of tribal land known as Fort Reno. Today there is speculation there may be oil and gas beneath it.

CHARLES SURVEYOR:


We don't want no $100 million for our land or nothing. We want our land back, what's rightfully ours. That was all we wanted. That's still what we want.

Archie Hoffman was the former tribal secretary, who tried to help in the return of Fort Reno to the Cheyenne-Arapaho Tribes. Here’s what Hoffman told Moyers.

ARCHIE HOFFMAN, Former Tribal Secretary:


We knocked on every Senator's and Congressman's door in Washington, D.C. We went in there asking for help. Nobody said, "We'll help you." How are we going to get somebody's attention, you know?

Then he asked me, "Do you have any important thing to say?" I got to our Fort Reno deal, and I talked and started going to a little history about that. And he asked his secretary, "Do you have anything on that?" She said yes, she had the whole package here and all that. And he said- "Well, we"- I can't quote the right words, but it was something like, "We'll look into it and see what can be done," or something to that effect, right there.

RETURN FORT RENO

Mr. President, my people face terrible hardships. Everyday, we confront poverty, hunger and high unemployment. And even more terrible is the high rate of teen suicide. The current tribal land base, consisting of 10,405 non-contiguous acres, is remotely situated and not conducive to economic development. With the tribal population now at over 11,000, we have outgrown this land base. The reclamation and development of the Ft. Reno property presents the Cheyenne-Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma with a critically important opportunity. It offers us the chance to build economic, political, and cultural stability within our tribes, and even more importantly, it offers us the chance to work together, to rebuild our pride and self-confidence, to establish our independence and to seize our future.

The Cheyenne-Arapaho Tribes have produced a comprehensive conceptual prototype of land use development which offers a creative and economically viable plan for the utilization of the Fort Reno property. This land holds great potential for economic development in the form of businesses which would serve the Native American community and the local non-Native community. Tribal plans for the land also include agricultural development which would provide not only food and employment, but a very real opportunity to work hand in hand with the Department of Agriculture in a way that would be beneficial both to the Agricultural Experimental Station and to the Tribes.

- snip -

Mr. President, it is my duty to inform you that the principles which you outlined in your "MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES" of April 29, 1994 concerning "Government-to-Government Relations with Native American Tribal Governments" have been violated every step of the way in the case of the Fort Reno land transfer. The Cheyenne-Arapaho Tribes have made every effort to surmount every bureaucratic requirement with which we have been confronted, only to be continually frustrated in our efforts.

Source

ARTICLE VI


This Constitution, and Laws of the United States which shall be made Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United Stated, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding
.

Between two worlds

"I don't really have anyone to talk to any more in my language, other than my wife,” Pewo said. "Our language is almost gone. I'm now the oldest one around here. There's nobody I can go see. I get lonely. I cry."

Here it is!


Carter Camp's personal account:

McCain and the Cross of Coal: GOP Front-Runner Tied to Theft of Navajo Lands

I spent a month in DC trying to get LP's pardon finalized after the White House led us to believe he had a very good chance at being pardoned. On thankgiving I stood in front of the white house all day long fasting for him and the other ndn political prisoners. The last day was hell when we had to phone my brother Leonard and tell him we had failed and Clinton had lied to us all along. To make it worse our main contacts were in Hillary's office so I know for sure she was part and parcel of lying to his supporters and the final decision to deny his pardon. I'll never vote for her or support her or forgive her.

Edward Markey, Mass

No one should vote for this bill. It is a fatally flawed bill. We should be able to deal with this issue simultaneously with letting the big boys get all they need. We should take care of what ordinary people
need for their families as well.

David Obey, Wis

Madam Speaker, this bill is consumer fraud masquerading as financial reform. There is nothing wrong with modernizing financial institutions. It is nice to see that my colleagues are going to try to
set up one-stop shopping services for financial services. But returning 1999 to 1929 is not reform in my book.

Maxine Waters, California

Madam Speaker, I have spent hours on this bill. I served on the conference committee. I am the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Domestic and International Monetary Policy of the Committee on Banking and Financial Services. I have spent hours on this bill, and I am absolutely surprised that the Members of this House can support a bill that would do what this bill is about to do to working people and poor people.

This is a one-man vendetta that took place on the conference committee. We should never have negotiated with them, but the negotiations took place in the back room, not in public.

Carrie Meek, Florida

Madam Speaker, I am sure that those of my colleagues who have come to the floor and applauded this bill have tunnel vision, and their vision is directed toward the large banking institutions. Because their blindness does not let them see to the right and left of them, they do not really see the people that are being affected by this bill most. I am opposed to this bill, that this bill brings in a strong element of discrimination, particularly in fair housing.

Marcy. Kaptur, Ohio

This bill is pro megabank and it is against consumers. And I would say to the people listening tonight, Are you tired of calling banks and getting lost in the automated phone system, never locating a breathing human being? This bill will make it worse.

Are you fed up with rising ATM fees and service fees that now average over $200 a year per account holder? This bill will make it worse.

Are you skeptical about banks that used to be dedicated to safety and soundness and savings but are now switching to pushing stocks and insurance and debt? This bill will make it worse.

Are you tired of the megafinancial conglomerates and mergers that have made your community a branch economy of financial centers located far away, whose officers you never know, who never come to your community? This bill will make it worse.

Maurice Hinchey, NY

We have 1 hour to debate the most comprehensive change in financial services legislation in the Nation in the last 65 years. This is one of the most important bills to come before this Congress in decades, and we are going to spend 1 hour this evening debating here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

And that 1 hour is divided thusly: two-thirds of that hour go to the people who are for the bill; only one-third of the hour goes to the people who are opposed to it. That is wholly consistent with the objectivity and fairness contained within the bill itself.

This is a farce, it is a mistake, it is a day that we will rue. We are constructing here an apparatus that will come back and bite us severely.

In human society, all violence can be traced back to these seven recurrent blunders: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principles.

The leading presidential candidates in both parties--Democrats Al Gore and Bill Bradley and Republican George W. Bush--all have obtained massive contributions from the financial industry. This issue is the best litmus test of whether any of them can muster the gumption to bite the hand that feeds them. If they can't, when it comes to the most decisive consumer issues, it doesn't really matter which one becomes president.

This issue is the best litmus test of whether any of them can muster the gumption to bite the hand that feeds them.

Compare and contrast the rise of slavery in the Americas, with the description of modern-day slavery [in several newspapers, blogs, and other online pieces I gave them].

[The Agha] is also a Sufi by religious profession; and both of these circumstances should make for respectability; for the Mudir is put there to keep order, being lowest on the scale of local governors, and Sufis are usually supposed to be quiet mystics. Many of them are so in fact, and most interesting religious philosophers to talk with; but this man is noted for being on the whole the most crafty murderer in the country-side. It is of course something to rise to eminence in a profession so crowded as that peculiar one is locally; but perhaps that is not the most remarkable thing about this particular Agha. He is the only man of the writer's acquaintance who keeps a really large herd of domestic Jews. Chal village is largely populated by men of that race; and they are to all intents and purposes the serfs of the Agha--his tame money-spinners. The writer was even offered full rights in one of them for the sum of five pounds.

The societal patterns of the Kurds were mirrored by those of the mountain Nestorians. An English-speaking reader coming from a middle-class and (at least culturally) Christian background, one habitually biased toward the underdog, might tend to assume that the Nestorians were somehow "nicer" than the Kurds. This--at least at first--was the assumption of the missionaries. It is, however, a dubious proposition. "Blood for blood" was the code by which the mountain Nestorians lived, a code no different from that of [the Kurds]. Frederick Coan, D.D., an American missionary in [Kurdistan] during the last decades of the nineteenth century, loses no love on behalf of the Kurds, and yet in his memoirs (Yesterdays in Persia and Kurdistan, 1939) he gives ample evidence of both sides' willingness to engage in robbery, murder, and subterfuge. His missionary father, Rev. George Coan, wrote in 1851: "The Nestorians are continually embroiled in quarrels. My very soul was made sick by their endless strifes." Close examination of other travelers' stories reveals that they were often just as wary of the Christians as they were of the Kurds. [In fact,] the Muslims of surrounding areas were petrified by the thought of entering their domains. Asheetha, the district where Asahel Grant built his home, was notorious for its plunderers and thieves. W.A. Wigram relates that one tradition among the mountain Nestorians involved raiding Jewish villages every year on Good Friday, in retribution for the death of Our Lord. This he relates as evidence of the mountaineers' boyish energy and high spirits. The reaction of the Jews he does not record. [F&T]

Once she got to the podium, she continued, “I have no further patience for talk as I am one of those who feels and suffers from the things pictured. I move that we go on a general strike...now!” The audience rose to their feet and cheered, then voted for a strike.

A month into the strike, most of the small and mid-sized factories settled with the strikers, who then returned to work. The large factories, which were the holdouts, knew they had lost the war of public opinion and were finally ready to negotiate. They agreed to higher pay and shorter hours but refused even to discuss a closed shop (where factories would hire only union members and treat union and nonunion workers equally in hiring and pay decisions).

I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.

This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.

We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

Public officials have only words of warning to us – warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.

I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.

But first, a few realities: (1) George McGovern is so close to a first-ballot nomination in Miami that everybody except Hubert Humphrey, Gene McCarthy, Shirley Chisholm, and Ed Muskie seems ready to accept it as a foregone conclusion . . . (2) The national Democratic Party is no longer controlled by the Old Guard, Boss-style hacks like George Meany and Mayor Daley —or even by the Old Guard liberal-manque types like Larry O'Brien, who thought they had things firmly under control as recently as six months ago ... (3) McGovern has made it pain­fully clear that he wants more than just the nomination; he has every intention of tearing the
Democratic Party completely apart and re-building it according to his own blueprint ... (4) If McGovern beats Nixon in November he will be in a position to do anything he wants either to or with the party structure . . . (5) But if McGovern loses in November, control of the Demo­cratic Party will instantly revert to the Ole Boys, and McGovern himself will be labeled "another Goldwater" and stripped of any power in the party.

The pattern is already there, from 1964, when the Nixon/ Mitchell brain-trust—already laying plans for 1968—sat back and let the GOP machinery fall into the hands of the Birchers and the right-wing crazies for a few months . . . and when Gold-water got stomped, the Nixon/Mitchell crowd moved in and took over the party with no argument from anybody . . . and four years later Nixon moved into the White House.

There have already been a few rumblings and muted threats along these lines from the Daley/Meany faction. Daley has privately threatened to dump Illinois to Nixon in November if McGovern persists in challenging Daley's eighty-five-man slave delegation to the convention in Miami . . . and Meany is prone to muttering out loud from time to time that maybe Organized Labor would be better off in the long run by enduring another four yea under Nixon, rather than running the risk of whatever radical madness he fears McGovern might bring down on him.

The only other person who has said anything about taking a dive for Nixon in November is Hubert Humphrey, who has al­ready threatened in public—at the party's Credentials Committee hearings in Washington last week—to let his friend Joe Alioto, the Mayor of San Francisco, throw the whole state of California to Nixon unless the party gives Hubert 151 California delegates— on the basis of his losing show of strength in that state's winner-take-all primary.

Hubert understood all along that California was all or nothing. He continually referred to it as "The Big One," and "The Super Bowl of the Primaries" ... but he changed his mind when he lost. One of the finest flashes of TV journalism in many months appeared on the CBS evening news the same day Humphrey formally filed his claim to almost half the California delegation. It was a Walter Cronkite interview with Hubert in California, a week or so prior to election day. Cronkite asked him if he had any ob­jections to the winner-take-all aspect of the California primary, and Humphrey replied that he thought it was absolutely wonderful.

"So even if you lose out here—if you lose all 271 delegates— you wouldn't challenge the winner-take-all rule?" Cronkite asked.
"Oh, my goodness, no," Hubert said. "That would make me sort of a spoilsport, wouldn't it?"

I have never read anything that comes anywhere close to explaining the shock and and intensity I felt at that convention . . . and although I was right in the middle of it the whole time, I have never been able to write about it myself. For two weeks afterwards, back in Colorado, I couldn't even talk about it without starting to cry -- for reasons I think I finally understand now, but I still can't explain.

Because of this: because I went there as a journalist, with no real emotional attachment to any of the candidates, and only the barest illusions about the outcome . . . I was not personally involved in the thing, so there is no point in presuming to understand what kind of hellish effect Chicago must have had on Gene McCarthy.

I remember seeing him cross Michigan Avenue on Thursday night -- several hours after Humphrey had made his acceptance speech out at the stockyards -- and then wandering into the crowd in Grant Park like a defeated general trying to mingle with his troops just after the Surrender. But McCarthy couldn't mingle. He could barely talk. He acted like a man in deep shock. There was not much to say. the campaign was over.

McCarthy's gig was finished. He had knocked off the President and then strung himself out on a fantastic six-month campaign that had seen the murder of Martin Luther King, the murder of Bobby Kennedy, and finally a bloody assault on his own campaign workers by Mayor Daley's police, who burst into McCarthy's private convention headquarters at the Chicago Hilton and began breaking heads. At dawn on Friday morning, his campaign manager, a seasoned old pro named Blair Clark, was still pacing up and down Michigan Avenue in front of the Hilton in a state so close to hysteria that his friends were afraid to talk to him because every time he tried to say something his eyes would fill with tears and he would have to start pacing again.

"Stand fast! Stand fast!" the line leaders cried. "We got our right! We got our legal rights to picket!"
The cops said, "You got no rights. You Red bastards, you got no rights."

Approximately 200 shots rang out. Within 15 seconds the shooting had ended, but the violence was not over.

They began to shoot in volleys. It was wonderful sport, because these pickets were unarmed men and women and children; they could not strike back or fight back. The cops squealed with excitement. They ran after fleeing men and women, pressed revolvers to their backs, shot them down and then continued to shoot as the victims lay on their faces, retching blood. When a woman tripped and fell, four cops gathered above her, smashing in her flesh and bones and face. Oh, it was great sport, wonderful sport for gentle, pot-bellied police, who mostly had to confine their pleasures to beating up prostitutes and street peddlers--at a time when Chicago was world-infamous as a center of gangsterism, assorted crime and murder.
And so it went, on and on, until ten were dead or dying and over a hundred wounded.

As one newspaper reviewer noted, "In several instances from two to four policemen are seen beating one man. One strikes him horizontally across the face, using his club as he would a baseball bat. Another crashes it down on top of his head and still another is whipping him across the back."
The film ends with a sweaty, fatigued policeman looking into the camera, grinning, and motioning as if dusting off his hands.

The reason given by Paramount News for suppressing its newsreel of the Chicago Memorial Day steel-strike massacre is an obvious sham. Audiences trained on the Hollywood school of gangster films are not likely to stage a "riotous demonstration" in the theater upon seeing cops beating people into insensibility, and worse. Against whom would the riot be directed anyway? The Board of Directors or Republic Steel and the Chicago municipal authorities are hardly likely to be found in the immediate vicinity.
The real reason behind the film suppression is its decisive evidence that virtually every newspaper in the country lied, and continues to lie, about the responsibility for violence in the strike areas. The myth that the steel strikers have resorted to violence to gain their just ends is now the basis for the whole campaign of slander and misrepresentation against them. That is why Tom Girdler of Republic Steel refuses to confer with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, and that is why 95 per cent of the press carries on a publicity pogrom against the strikers.
Even after the St. Louis Post Dispatch performed a genuine service to the American people in breaking the story of the film (for which, though it is Pulitzer owned, it is very unlikely to get the Pulitzer award), the venal press still continued to blast away at the strikers with the same old legend. Not a comma has been changed in the editorials which, day after day, have defended the steel tycoons on the ground that there can be no compromise with labor violence.
And all this time, the film record exists--and has been described--which would enable the public to make up its own mind on this very crucial point!
- New Masses, June 29, 1937

Massillon, July 11, and strikers holding a meeting outside C.I.O. headquarters. Again, the firing starts, and in a little while there are three dead strikers and five more on their way to the hospital. Then C.I.O. headquarters is surrounded, and for an hour lead is poured into the building. And in the building, there is not one firearm.
But the newspapers said, the next day: "STRIKING MOB ATTACKS MASSILLON POLICE."