An American Indian View of Immigration

[Warph]

Got this email from a friend of mine in Texas:



An American Indian View of Immigration
By David A. Yeagley

As an Indian - a direct descendant of the Comanche warrior Bad Eagle, 1839-1906 - I've always been fascinated with foreigners. I've admired their great courage and determination. They made a perilous journey from their homeland. They learned a new language, and new ways, all in a new land. They brought the world to me.

("Indian"? Naturally, most tribes prefer their own name. But that's in their own language, and no one but themselves would know of whom they speak. There is no collective name for "Indians" in any tribal language. The modern term "Native American," created in the 1970s by leftists, is ambiguous. Most Indian people don't use it - only what I call the "university tribe," college-educated Indians led by white radical professors; and the would-be politically correct media. The name we first held, in the white man's eyes, was "Indian." That's what we have been since Columbus. That's what our most famous warriors were called. Believe me, Indians prefer the name "Indian." It is historically specific, whatever its origin. The name holds the emotional, psychological associations of the warrior. The Left, of course, wants to remove that. Hey, call me savage!)

Playing host to strangers has always been an Indian tradition—as the Pilgrims so famously learned. However, some might say that we Indians were too hospitable for our own good.

America today is making the same mistake we Indians made nearly four centuries ago. America is letting in too many foreigners. And we Indians could end up losing this country all over again. It may come as a surprise to many white people who have been brainwashed by the media to see Indians as the ultimate liberals, but there are few groups in America today who take a dimmer view of mass immigration than the American Indian.

According to ProjectUSA.org, the U.S. population will double within the lifetimes of our children, as a direct result of the massive, uncontrolled influx of foreigners who began flooding our land after passage of the 1965 Immigration Act.

All Americans will suffer. But Indians will suffer most of all.

I'm not talking about competition for jobs, land, housing, energy, water and other finite resources—though these are all important. I'm talking about something deeper. The demographic destruction of Anglo-America will bring the final catastrophe on our people.

What catastrophe? The catastrophe of waking up one day and realizing that white people no longer control this country.

Now why should an Indian care about that? After all, white people are supposedly our enemies.

Well, yes, they were. But, as warriors, we found them to be worthy and formidable adversaries. Defeat is bitter. But when you respect your conqueror, it is a lot easier to swallow.

If Anglo-America turns this land over to blacks, Mexicans, Asians, Middle Easterners and other foreign peoples, for the Indian, it will be like losing this country for the second time. We have had generations to reconcile ourselves to white America. But we do not know these new people who are coming. We fought no battles with them, made no treaties with them, and have no reason to accord them any special respect.

If things keep going the way they are, we Indians could find ourselves bowing down to foreign peoples who never defeated our forefathers in battle—and who certainly never could!

We Indians—especially the more warlike tribes such as my people the Comanches—recognize a kindred spirit in the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. He is like us in more ways than he knows.

The Comanches were one of the most intolerant of all Indian peoples. We had no use for anyone else, white, Mexican or Indian. When we came thundering down on the southwest plains, we took the land we wanted and ran everyone else off. We created the life we wanted, at the expense of other people.

The white man did the same. Only he did it on a grander scale.

In the old days, Comanches were known to honor strength in other people. Comanche warriors even adopted white captive boys, if they happened to show courage and fight.

In many ways, Indians see the white man as a kind of adopted son—naïve, reckless and destructive, at times—but nevertheless cut from the same warrior cloth as we were.

We do not see blacks, Mexicans, Asians, Arabs and others in this light. These peoples may have their own virtues and traditions, but they have no history with us. They are strangers.

If they want to rule us, they must conquer us the way the white man did—on the battlefield, by force of arms. That is the only honorable way for a warrior.

The white man seems to have lost his spirit, and we Indians see it. We see that he is giving this country away to others. And this fills our hearts with fear. For we are part of the land he is giving away. He is turning us over to strangers the way medieval barons turned over their serfs when they sold their land.

But we are not serfs. We are warriors. And we will not be ruled by people who have never fought us.

The white man must regain his warrior soul and take back his land.

In that fight, I will stand by his side and offer whatever strength I have to ensure his victory. * Ha tu vi chat! *

* Comanche for, "It will all work out." *

Dr. David A. Yeagley [email him] is an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation, Elgin, Oklahoma. His articles appear in TheAmericanEnterprise.com,  FrontPageMagazine.com, and on his own Web site BadEagle.com, and he is a regular speaker for Young America's Foundation. David Yeagley's columns for VDARE.COM include An American Indian View of Immigration, and To Deport or not to Deport. David Yeagley is the author of Bad Eagle: The Rantings of a Conservative Comanche.

[redcliffsw]

I agree. 

[pamagain]

Barreiro: Immigration issue sparks American racism
By Jose Barreiro, guest editorial

Story Published: Aug 18, 2008

(Story Updated: Sep 11, 2008 )

Perhaps the flare-up of the immigration issue started out more legitimately. Certainly there are serious problems with waves of hundreds of thousands of people entering any country illegally. But like the head of a monstrous snake coming out of a thorny bush, the issue has grown its own nasty viper. Immigration has become the new magnet of American racism.

It's time to recognize this evil trend, and confront it.

From the oh-so-patriotic "Minutemen," with their potential overlap to vigilante violence, to the actual rise in incidents of race crime against dark-skinned Mexican and other Hispanics, the evidence is that a climate of disdain and potential race and/or ethnic hatred is being generated in North America. This is very evident in the type of language and self-definition put up by not-so-unconsciously race-based pundits and politicians.

The issues generated by the inevitable trend to northern migration among people from Mesoamerica and South America are complicated. As usual, the North American mass media is loath to dig too deeply into its roots. Images of Mexican Indians jumping fences and crouch-running across open desert fields permeate the senses while the public is bombarded with way too many ill-informed and ill-conceived reports of major "threats," all designed to keep viewers and readers titillated. Ignorant ire seems to dominate as a result. In this age of super-vigilance, the issue of Mexican Indians coming north in waves of humanity whose bottom line or social safety net has been ripped out is ripe for alarmist warnings by pundits and politicians alike, too many of whom like to charge Mexican and other Latin American migrants with causing all kinds of malignancy to America's economy, culture and social character.

Legitimate debate points include the inherent right of countries to secure their borders; reading the actual impacts of a million new Latin American immigrants per year for the next 20 years on various job sectors, on costs of additional social services, on crime rates and criminal justice systems, very specifically on border communities; and considering what would constitute a humane, fair and sound long-term solution to the situation of the many undocumented migrants already in-country. When these types of questions are thought about rationally and fairly, progress can be made toward resolutions.

Tragically, this is not the trend of the national discourse. Instead, the knives are flying. In the national discourse, the migration north is equated with the threat of terrorist violence, with crime, with all manner of potential diseases and, worst of all, with the threatened disintegration of the national culture. Thus, the proponents of the English-only movement, who perceive the English language to be under assault by, primarily, Spanish, but by extension, all other languages – Native and non-Native – spoken by families in neighborhoods across the United States. In an era when most of the world has already accepted English as the lingua franca of business and science, and at a time when all immigrants to the United States clearly understand the importance of speaking English even though it is difficult for many adults, the rising wave of anti-Spanish language hysteria is indeed troubling.

Racism within the immigration issue is primarily directed at Latin American migrants coming north in search of economic opportunity. The shorthand language used has to do with the sense by Anglo-Americans that the country is changing as so-called Hispanics or Latinos make up an ever-larger proportion of the minority population which, combined with blacks and Asian-Americans, now threatens to become established as the "new majority" and make the Euro-American population essentially the minority. Thus one can hear the likes of pundit and erstwhile presidential contender Pat Buchanan bemoan the fact that "we are losing our country," shorthand in this case being that crucial "we" and all that such possessiveness implies.

Xenophobia directed at Mexicans has a long history in America. Anglo-America, after all, warred first with Spain and, later, Mexico for a century over more than a third of present-day U.S. territory. Stereotype and racial hatred, ethnic insults (Mexicans as a "mongrel race," etc.) – apparent requirements of war – layered into the social consciousness of Anglo-Americans.

Salient points of this history not told by the conqueror were articulated in a recent New York Times essay by Tony Horwitz. To be faulted for too brazenly bypassing the indigenous perspective, Horwitz recounts accurately that North America's first European explorers and settlers were not English-speaking, but were from Spain. Horwitz: "Four of the sample questions on our naturalization test ask about Pilgrims. Nothing in the sample exam suggests that prospective citizens need know anything that occurred on this continent before the Mayflower landed in 1620."

So who led the first confirmed European landing on North America? Horwitz: "A Spaniard, Juan Ponce de Leon, who landed in 1513," more than a century before the Pilgrims, "at a lush shore he christened La Florida." Horwitz reminds us that "the Spanish became the first Europeans to reach the Appalachians, the Mississippi, the Grand Canyon and the Great Plains. Spanish ships sailed along the East Coast, penetrating to present-day Bangor, Me., and up the Pacific Coast as far as Oregon."

There is much history – centuries old and some quite recent – that does not enter the national discourse. Fast-forward to 2006, 12 years after NAFTA. It was the North American Free Trade Agreement, memory recalls, which ushered in the Zapatista Army of Indian peoples in 1994. The Zapatistas challenged even the federal army of Mexico militarily, while pointing out that loss of lands was displacing Indian peasants, who were migrating north in droves.

What's the connection? Since the advent of the lopsided, so-called free trade agreement, where U.S. corn and bean producers get to keep their government subsidies while poor and modest Mexican Indian farmers lose theirs, the bottom has fallen out of the regional and local farming villages. While these Indian villages have always experienced poverty, most have been self-sufficient, at least in producing and providing and sustaining from the basic Indian foods of corn, beans and other produce, chicken and pigs, the occasional cattle. That's the traditional Indian homestead for most of southern Mexico, Guatemala and elsewhere among agricultural communities in Mesoamerica and South America. This is the stalwart bastion of the mostly self-sufficient safety net upon which the people have depended for millennia. Indian people, real Mexican Indians – Maya, Zapoteca and other indigenous peoples, with distinct languages and varieties of ethnicity and oral tradition – have been severely displaced and dislocated over the past decade. U.S. trade policy has a whole lot to do with it.

These are the bulk of the millions of new migrants inexorably making their way north. These are the Indian refugees displaced from their lands by the destruction of the old ejido systems, the privatization of water and lands, and the demolishment of a national economy that, up to 10 years ago, could make sense of the ancient Indian agricultural and gastronomic complex of the corn tortilla and the bean, grown and consumed locally and regionally. This is the dislocation of replacing this kind of agriculture – as foundation and safety net of rural peoples – with export-oriented agri-business, such as is more possible in the north of Mexico where, generally, the mestizo and Spanish identity have rolled over most of the Indian consciousness of land self-sufficiency.

The climate of fear and loathing in the United States against this mass of dislocated humanity – a direct result of one-sided trade deals that dismiss the needs of whole regions – is presently fueled nightly most prominently by CNN's Lou Dobbs. Dobbs' program is regularly preoccupied with the troublesome illegality of the northward migration and its growing demographic. Dobbs' reporting is mostly accurate, but his tone and point of view heighten the potential for virulence. With violence against Mexicans and other Hispanics on the rise in the United States, it behooves commentators of Dobbs' caliber to provide the fullest possible understanding of the forces at work that drive so many Mexican Indian people to migrate at this time in history.

Dobbs reports on opinion and impacts in the United States but has yet to wonder on the causes of this constant northbound stream of people, how it originates in the indigenous southern region of Mexico and into Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. And, most importantly, why? Why are these American indigenous people – traditionally attached to their places of origin – so driven these days to pick up and trek north in larger and larger numbers, consistently facing violence, starvation, dehydration and death? What are the conditions they are leaving behind? Who caused those conditions that callously condemn whole peoples to severe economic misery?

We say a better understanding of this complex issue is required before we allow racists to pit good people against good people, as if different mother tongues must necessarily be a source of insult and injury.

This editorial, by Jose Barreiro, originally appeared in Indian Country Today on July 19, 2006 [Vol. 26, Iss. 6]. It received a 2007 Unity Award in Media in the Editorial Writing in the Minority Audience division. The awards are given annually by Lincoln University. The former senior editor of ICT, Barreiro is now director of the Office of Latin America at the National Museum of the American Indian.

[pamagain]

AIM WEST
SB 1070 Arizona  PDF   | Print |   E-mail 
Thursday, 20 May 2010 16:42 



First Nations United

All Saints Church

3044 Longfellow Avenue South

Minneapolis, MN 55407

www.firstnationsunited.com

PRESS RELEASE

April 26, 2010



"While the power of the Europeans has continued, I see the other part of the Ghost Dance prophecy coming true today. So-called 'Hispanics,' with faces that sure look like Indians to me, are returning to repopulate North America. We cannot always speak to each other because we have learned the languages of different colonial powers. But these Indians have as much right to come and go on our land as the geese when they migrate north and south. No one would dare to ask them for their passports and visas as they cross manmade borders.

Instead of seeing 'Hispanics' as outsiders who do not belong here, we need to start seeing them as ancestors of the original inhabitants of these lands. They are the living fulfillment of the Ghost Dance prophecy."

-Chief Billy Redwing Tayac, Piscataway Nation

First Nations United, an Indigenous organization largely made up of members of the Red Lake/Ojibwe and Dakota nations, would like to formally express its outrage and disagreement with the SB 1070 ("Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods") Bill passed last week by the state of Arizona. This bill is extremely detrimental to the indigenous communities (including indigenous peoples of Latin American origin), which reside in the state of Arizona as well as those who live throughout the country. The language of the bill states that if there is "reasonable suspicion" that a person is an illegal immigrant, a "reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable" to check for documents. Such language purposefully promotes the racial profiling of brown-skinned people, and in particular, of people of American indigenous background. As an indigenous organization, which stands for the civil and human rights of indigenous peoples throughout the continent, we are concerned that this bill will promote the unfair and discriminatory arrests, prosecution, and deportation of people of American indigenous descent-not only of those who belong to federally recognized tribes, but also of the hundreds of thousands of indigenous people who have migrated from South/Central America and Mexico to what is now called "the United States." Indigenous peoples across the continent do not recognize the borders established by the settler colonialist state on our lands, and, we do not agree with the malicious and dehumanizing way in which the settler colonialist government wants to enforce them.

As an Indigenous organization, we recognize that indigenous peoples from Latin America have every right to migrate up and down the continent as they please and as they have done through trade and communication routes since time immemorial. The native peoples of the continent should be the ones establishing immigration laws and enforcing them. However, because we were disempowered through genocide and colonization, and because we have consistently treated "foreigners" in a more humane and hospitable way, we respect peoples' rights to migrate. If we did enforce such power, only tribal identifications from throughout the continent (including documentation identifying peoples from Latin American indigenous ancestry) would be recognized as legitimate, and we could very well racially profile people of Caucasian descent as the true and eternal foreigners.

As the first peoples of this continent, we pose this question to Governor Brewer, Senator Russell Pearce, and law enforcement in the state of Arizona, "Who are you to check for documents?" We remind them that the power they have taken to legislate was established by an immigrant and illegal settler colonialist government, which has consistently relied on the genocide and mistreatment of the original peoples of this continent.



First Nations United greatly objects to SB 1070 and denounces Governor Brewer, Senator Pearce, and the State of Arizona as anti-Indigenous, cruel, and racist. We call for an Indigenous boycott of the State of Arizona until this bill is repealed or found unconstitutional as it will gravely violate the civil and human rights of indigenous people in the state and throughout the country.

[pamagain]

    I posted these as an example of the fact that Indians, Native Americans, indigenous..whatever you want to use as a name........are just like everybody else they fall on all sides of the spectrum when it comes to politics and policy...to use one guys opinion as a bellwether of what ALL think is simply retarded.

The issue of tribes whose reservations straddle the borders is a very real one. Not that I figure it means anything to any of you all but immigration is not a simple throw em on a bus and ship em out of town situation. My feelings about the subject of immigration are many and complex....some of them are contradictory.......am in the process of sorting them out withOUT predjudice.