THE SACRED BUFFALO VISION, “SLOW-DEATH” OF INDIANS IN AMERICA

THE SACRED BUFFALO VISION, “SLOW-DEATH” OF INDIANS IN AMERICA

“Slow-Death Measures” Genocide was defined by the United Nations Genocide Convention in 1944: “Any policy undertaken with the intent of bringing about the dissolution and ultimate disappearance of a targeted human group, as such, as well as subjecting a people to conditions of life which, owing to lack of proper housing, clothing, food, hygiene, medical care, excessive work, or physical exertion are likely to result in the debilitation [and] death of individuals; or mutilations and biological experiments imposed for other than curative purposes; deprivation of the means of livelihood by confiscation, looting, curtailment of work, and denial of housing and of supplies otherwise available to the other inhabitants of the territory concerned and to protect any racial, national, linguistic, religious, and political groups threatened by policies aimed at destroying such groups or preventing their preservation and development”

 Author Helen Hunt Jackson wrote “A Century of Dishonor” in 1895 documenting massacres of Indian tribes by the United States Government. Author Angie DeBoo wrote “And Still the Waters Run” to document thousands of murders of Indian landowners for oil rights in the 1930’s, who were mass-murdered by border-whites, the state of Oklahoma, Secretary of the Interior, and major oil corporations.

The Sacred Buffalo Vision is a political-economic history of systematic Blackfeet genocide by the United States Government, corporations and state of Montana physical genocides of Blackfeet people causing tribal populations to drop from 7,800 Blackfeet alive in 1863 at white contact to just 1,811 endangered Blackfeet left alive by 1890.

United States Government Reports say Indian deaths were caused by border-whites massacres of Blackfeet Indian women, children and old age people, small-pox epidemics, the whiskey trade, tribal famine and many removals to smaller reservations.

In the modern era from 1913-1922 hundreds of Blackfeet landowners were starved to death by Montana border-whites, corporations and United States Government Indian Service officials and members of Congress to steal Blackfeet allotted lands, oil, water, timber and minerals. The massive Blackfeet land frauds are called “Forced Fee Patents Cases on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation” and remain unresolved despite treaty, laws, and Indian land claims preserved by Public Law 96-217, Section 2; enacted by Congress in 1982 to provide justice for 17,000 individual Indian land claimants to 100 million acres of allotted Indian lands within reservation boundaries held by treaty and managed under a federal trusteeship. Border-whites own Patent-in-Fee lands stolen from the Indian landowners and live on “reservation/county” white-apartheid state lands on Indian reservations. The unresolved forced patent claims of 17,000 Indian claimants represent white-apartheid on Indian reservations within the United States of America.  

AFRICAN-SLAVERY MORPHS TO CORPORATE SLAVERY FOR ALL AMERICANS

Author Ruth Shinsel’s Article in Mankind Magazine: “John Wilkes Booth: Man To Murderer; The Knights of the Golden Circle had, at first, been organized to uphold the ideal of a great golden empire. An aristocracy, a circle of noblemen, would hold permanent titles to large plantations and numerous slaves. An expanding sphere reaching from the Demerara and the Amazon throughout all the torrid and the more temperate zones of the Americas would be exploited. In the eyes of these feudal-minded knights, all laborers, black, brown, red, yellow, and white; were considered mudsills of society. Improvident, poverty-stricken and vicious, laborers the world over would be immeasurably better off, they contended, and far less vicious if tenderly cared for and forced to labor by kind, wise, and benevolent masters. Considering free society a failure, they called all slavery a “positive good.” President Lincoln expressed a different view, “Most governments have been based on the denial of equal rights of men…ours began by affirming those rights. They said [slave owners] some men are too ignorant and vicious to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant and vicious. We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant to grow wiser; and all better and happier together. We made the experiment; and the fruit is before us. Free labor has the inspiration of hopes; pure slavery has no hope. The power of hope upon human exertion and happiness is wonderful. The slave master himself has a conception of it; and hence the system of tasks among the slaves. The slave whom you cannot drive with the lash to break seventy-five pounds of hemp in a day, if you will task him to break a hundred and promise him pay for all he does over; he will break you a hundred and fifty. You have substituted hope for the rod. And, yet perhaps it does not occur to you, that to the extent of your gain in the case, you have given up the slave system and adopted the free system of labor. When we were the political slaves of King George and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that ‘all men are created equal’ a self-evident truth; but now that we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim, a self-evident lie.”

Immigrant slaves and corporate plantations transplanted upon your town, U.S.A.

‘Methland’ is a book by Nick Reding: “Within the population of illegals [immigrants] streaming across the border to work in the meatpacking plants throughout the Great Plains, in the fields of the California Central Valley, and in the orchards and orange groves of the Southeast, there was unlimited potential for a narcotic retail and distribution force. It was nationwide, mobile, undocumented, and protean, was almost impossible to track by law enforcement. Five Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations [D.T.O.’s] controlled the manufacture of meth by following the practice of importing precursors into Mexico, thereby achieving business’s holy trinity; dominance of the entire value chain. In one fell swoop, the Mexican drug traffickers directed every aspect of what was now a major international narcotics phenomenon-in the same way that Cargill, Tyson, and ADM were taking control of the food business “from plow to plate” as the marketing slogan went. The link between the agriculture business and meatpacking, and illegal immigration would appear to be self-evident in the connection between meth, immigration and the food & drug industry lobby. Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wanted proof from the DEA that pseudoephedrine was used to make meth. The bill to banish pseudoephedrine imported from China languished in Hatch’s committee for over a year-while the Mexican D.T.O.’s production of crystal meth from pseudoephedrine went unhampered. One-half of the ingredients needed to manufacture pseudoephedrine for cold medicines is imported from China and used by Mexican D.T.O.’s for production of meth. A government study found that 40% of agricultural workers in the United States are here illegally. Immigration and Naturalization Services estimate that one in four meatpacking workers in the Midwest is illegal. As meatpacking plants and big-agriculture employed illegals at abysmally low wages, [$5 per hour], the economies of towns like Ottumwa, Iowa suffered still more. Meantime, DEA had a continued lack of success fighting the meth industry thanks to the powerful Pharmaceutical lobby allowing pseudoephedrine imports from China, a precursor to meth distribution, by allowing illegal Mexican immigrants packing meth into the country for the D.T.O.’s. Illegals take [low-wage] agricultural jobs while distributing meth to immigrant workers and local meth heads. But there is a more subtle connection between meth, immigration, and the food & drug industry. That relationship is driven by the conceit that drugs, like viruses, attack weak hosts. Or, to put it another way, narcotics and poverty-along with the loss of hope and place-mutually reinforce one another. Consider what used to happen in Oelwein, Iowa, before the largest consolidation in the 1980’s and 90’s of almost every niche of the food-production chain. Corn farmers would have bought seed from the local seed company. Once harvested, that corn would be shipped to a small feedlot in order to fatten cattle raised in Nebraska, Wyoming, Florida, or Arizona; or perhaps it would go to a dairy in northern Missouri, a chicken farm in Indiana, or a pork outfit in Kansas. The variables were infinite, and the market was dynamic. The barge, truck, or railroad car that carried the grain was likely independently owned too, as would have been the cows, pigs, and chickens it fed. A few companies would come to control most of the food business. The ability to [politically] influence the governmental decision-making process is something the U.S. food and pharmaceutical corporations share with the five Mexican D.T.O.’s. Unfortunately, the same American illegal immigration policy that provides a low-wage workforce ideal for the meat-packers, food industry, and big-agriculture is what keeps the Mexican D.T.O.’s in business. The [economic] interests of the Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations are aligned with the likes of the Pharmaceutical Industry, Cargill and ADM and all are served by illegal immigration, and unrestricted free trade agreements with China and Mexico.”

Cattle ranchers and cowboys no longer the symbol of freedom and independence

            The book “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser documents the demise of the family ranch economy, once the symbol of American independence; “Ranchers and cowboys have long been the central icons of the American West. Traditionalists have revered them as symbols of freedom and self-reliance. Revisionists have condemned them as racists, economic parasites, and despoilers of the land. The powerful feelings evoked by cattlemen reflect opposing views of our national identity, attempts to sustain old myths or create new ones. There is one indisputable fact, however, about American ranchers; they are rapidly disappearing. Over the last twenty years, about a half million ranchers sold off their cattle and quit the business. Many of the nation’s remaining eight hundred thousand ranchers are faring poorly. They’re taking second jobs. They’re selling cattle at break-even prices or at a loss. The ranchers who are faring the worst run two to three hundred head of cattle, manage the ranch themselves, and live solely on the proceeds. America’s independent cattlemen have truly become an endangered species. The Reagan administration allowed the four largest meatpackers to gain control of the local cattle market. ConAgra, I.B.P., Excel, and National Beef-slaughter about 84% of the nations cattle. Market concentration in the beef industry is now at the highest level since record keeping began in the early twentieth century. ConAgra and Excel operate their own gigantic feedlots, while IBP has private arrangements with some of the biggest ranchers and feeders. Independent ranchers and feedlots now have a hard time figuring out what their cattle are actually worth, let alone finding a buyer for their cattle at the right price. Meatpacking was a trailblazer in recruiting migrant labor. IBP was among the first to recognize that recent migrants would work for lower wages than American citizens-and would be more reluctant to join unions. To sustain the flow of new workers into IBP slaughterhouses, the company has for years dispatched recruiting teams to poor communities throughout the United States. It has recruited refugees and asylum-seekers from Laos and Bosnia. It recruited homeless people living at shelters in New York, New Jersey, California, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. It has hired buses to import these workers from thousands of miles away. IBP runs ads on Mexican radio stations offering jobs in the United States and operates a bus service from rural Mexico to the heartland of America. The Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates one-quarter of all meatpacking workers in Iowa and Nebraska are illegal immigrants. Poor workers without health insurance drive up local medical costs, drug dealers prey on recent immigrants, and the large transient population brings more crime. McDonalds, a fast food corporation, relies on dairy cattle for its hamburger supplies, but worn-out dairy cattle are the animals most likely to be diseased and riddled with antibiotic residues. The Reagan and Bush administrations cut spending on public health measures and staffed the U.S. Department of Agriculture with officials more interested in government deregulation than in food safety. President Reagan’s first Secretary of Agriculture was in the hog business, and his second was President of the American Meat Packers Association. Poorly trained meat inspectors were allowing the shipment of beef contaminated with fecal material, hair, insects, metal shavings, urine and vomit. Cutbacks in federal inspection seemed difficult to justify when hundreds of schoolchildren were made seriously ill by tainted hamburgers in school lunch programs. The cheapest ground beef was not only the most likely to be contaminated with pathogens, but also likely to contain pieces of spinal cord, bone, and gristle left behind by the contraptions that squeeze the last shreds of meat off bones. An NBC news report said the Cattle King Packing Company-the United States Department of Agriculture’s largest supplier of ground beef for school lunches, and also a supplier to Wendy’s fast food corporation-routinely processed cattle that were already dead before arriving at the plant, hid diseased cattle from inspectors and mixed rotten meat that had been returned from customers into packages of hamburger meat, and its facilities were infested with rats and cockroaches. An eleven year old boy became seriously ill after eating a hamburger at his elementary school, as tests confirmed the presence of E. coli. Nevertheless U.S.D.A. Food Programs continued to purchase meat from ConAgra.”         

Teddy Roosevelt unsuccessful in breaking up trusts that enslave modern Americans      

The book ‘The Titanic’ by Wyn Craig Wade documents the sinking of the “unsinkable ship” Titanic, and the aftermath written up in an article in the newspaper, Philadelphia North American, pointing to special privilege ruling over the common man. “Human rights came into conflict with vested property rights on the decks of the Titanic during those hours of darkness and final parting. And the price was paid that wlll ever be paid until the will of nations forbids special privilege from using bodies of men and women as counters in its private profit game. For that and no other is the silent message that seems to us comes from those men and women who lie murdered in the ocean depths.” Author Wyn Craig Wade writes, “The pleasures of the Gilded Age existed for the very few. They rested top heavy on a social structure ready to crumble. Luxury and excess were justified on assumption of limitlessness, both in fuel and in human suffering. This wasn’t fulfillment, but the illusion of fulfillment wrought by the oppression of the lower echelons of society whose labor materialized it. Nostalgic glorifications of this Age of Security and Splendor automatically condone its grave social injustices; and responsibility for these conditions has yet to be owned completely by Anglo-Americans in the late twentieth century. Although the organization of society is beginning to look more equitable, what we have truly managed to redress is only the tip of the iceberg.”

Blackfeet cattle industry destroyed by big-corporations conspiracy with big-government  

The big-meat corporations need pure water and natural grass to fatten cattle since American consumers may no longer eat hamburgers made of ground up cow patties and cow parts in their burgers processed by Cargill, and sold by fast-food corporations like Wendy’s and McDonalds. The additives of antibiotics and hormones, to counter infection of cattle standing ankle deep in cow piss and shit for weeks while awaiting their final demise in the Cargill beef processing plants, until ready to be butchered by meth addicted low-wage locals and illegal immigrants working two eight hour shifts enabled by the 12 hour meth high to withstand freezing, horrid working conditions; sometimes cutting off fingers, and getting stabbed on the production line, or breaking backs for $5.00 per hour. That is an economic system of slow-death corporate slavery.

In contrast, the Indian reservations are mostly unpolluted with clean water supplies and contain rich buffalo grasses to fatten cattle naturally on free-range, grass-fed grazing lands for beef production by Indian cattle ranchers. The Blackfeet Indians were self-reliant cattle ranchers by 1893 with 500 tribal brands, 25,000 cattle, 1.5 million acres of grazing lands, pure water supplies and cash for all needful things.

The Texas Cattle Kings came into Blackfoot Country by 1863 and commenced to murder the Indians and force land cessions that cover the state of Montana, Glacier Park and the Lewis & Clark National Forest; but even that was not enough land to satisfy the greed of the Montana cattlemen, Swift & Armor meat trust, Great Northern Railway and Montana cattle ranchers who bankrupted the Blackfeet Indian ranchers by 1904. Even Chicago Crime boss Al Capone came to the reservation and set up his own bank to join the officials of the government in robbing the Indians. How appropriate! 

The loss of 350,250 acres of reservation lands to border-whites in the forced patents land frauds collapsed the self-reliant Blackfeet cattle industry, just as the white ranchers are getting crushed by the political and economic power of Cargill and other food corporations taking over the cattle industry they built over the past century.

The Sacred Buffalo Vision is to point to the separation of corporations from the powers of government as much more an important issue than separation of church and state in the constitution. President Lincoln pointed to “money power” as the next threat to the unity of the American nation as a kind of corporate slavery envisioned by the Knights of the Golden Circle, to enslave laborers of all races, white, black, red, yellow and brown. In my opinion, they have done it and we are an enslaved corporate nation! 

 Please read ‘The Sacred Buffalo Vision’ a century of slow-death genocides of the Blackfeet Treaty Indians, 1863-2016, murdered for land and resources by the United States Government politicians in complicity with food and oil corporations and border-whites. Now available for purchase;  @Amazon.Com.

Bob Juneau Sr. A Blackfeet Patriot and Vietnam Agent Orange Veteran.