A native man asks democrats

[Kire]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4838363

[cleanheart.396]

1. Treaty Rights

   I am a Black woman. I, unlike many of my people, do not
aspire to programs, funding, or inclusion into the mainstream.
But I know you will not be able to make any headway unless you
join with others in a massive, rank and file movement of all
people to wards a lifestyle which is the antithesis of
capitalism, etc. Obviously, this is not going to be possible
from a party perspective because most democrats still have
faith in the present system.  I, like you, do not. But it does
have a few advantages. One is that it insists on a whole
cross-section of people to fight for something before it is
won. But will there be a place for me in a Native American
country any more than it is country ruled by the descendants
of Europeans?
   I ask this, because you may not realize it, but you sound
like you believe land is something which can really be owned,
and it's not. You don't believe you've assimilated because you
don't want funding, hand-outs, etc., just your property rights
returned. But you have assimilated in the sense that you are
now mimicking the people who took your home from you. Those
treaties were a farce. I say this because they took the land
by brute force, because there is no legal way to take a home
from someone else, no matter how many contracts, treaties, or
deeds you own. The fact that you really think they will really
give them back to you by way of vote or lobby is a delusion.
Not to mention the fact that before they convinced you,
contrary to your own belief, that land could be owned, you had
no problem with sharing it. Just because someone abuses you
doesn't mean that you take into yourself the very beliefs that
caused the abuse in the first place. Instead, it becomes your
responsibility to find a better way. Why? Because based on the
beliefs which created your lifestyle, you are better equipped
to find a better way than anyone else at that time in history.
   Being of African ancestry, I realized long ago that I would
never get my home back, not in the way it was when my
ancestors were snatched from it. But letting go of this gave
me a greater vision, a vision of a different world, a world
I'd have to fashion with others based on the good that each
nation of the world has discovered in themselves, their
culture, their spiritual and practical philosophies, and the
lessons learned from their grossest errors. No one culture can
possibly design the best kind of world. It takes people from
all cultures to achieve the best possible solutions to human
problems, based on the lessons of ALL histories. This is why
cultures fail, because they are singular in nature. We must
take the good from all cultures and leave the rest. 
   At first, I didn't want to face this because working for a
world where what happened to Native Americans, Blacks, and
every single race in the world, could never happen again, was
a great deal more difficult than making demands on a political
system who had absolutely no intention of doing what was
right. But if I kept demanding, kept getting angry because
either they ignored me, or gave me something (like
integration) just to take it right back after they felt I was
pacified, then I could keep blaming them. I would never have
to see them the way they truly are, and as long as I didn't,
I'd never be able to figure out how myself and others could
design a new theory based on what we had learned DID NOT work,
along with a program which could help people to deal with the
character defects that grow out of suffering.  It is that
suffering which causes disasters like the Slave Trade; the
Slaughter, robbery, and literal incarceration of Native
Americans; The Jewish Holocaust, etc. The list is endless.
   The people who took from you came here determined never to
be on the bottom again, and racism allowed them to feel it was
alright if we were on the bottom.  But suffering was the
primary cause, and it has caused every major catastrophe in
human history. Politics, racism, classism, are just policies
people hide behind to justify the terror and rage which makes
them commit atrocities against others.
   This will not be easy for you to digest, if you digest it
at all. Because designing a better world, one better than the
one of your ancestors (it wasn't perfect or what happened
couldn't have happened)requires constructive criticism of
one's self and one's culture; and more importantly it requires
a new vision, one honed from everything you've learned about
yourself and everything else, in every lifetime you've lived.
Sadly, most of us don't have that kind of courage. I didn't
either until I saw that I had no choice; that my destiny was
perhaps not to "melt" into the melting pot, but to
create another kind of "pot" with different
ingredients, one that is not forged in all kinds of conflicts,
internal and external, which creates hatred, rage, and the
compulsion to "win" at all costs. A compulsion that
translated into religious, racial, and cultural elitism,
giving one culture the right to murder whomever they chose. So
that, the American constitution, became the American
KKKonstitution.
   A new vision on which you work with other like-minded
people of all races to achieve, has the power to restore the
land to your people in a way they never had it before. You may
not see that day in your present consciousness, but your
descendants will, and someday, so will you. You are right. You
don't need their "table." No sane, thinking person,
dedicated to caring for themselves, others, and the earth,
could even stomach trying to substitute what we have now for
real life systems created by people who are willing to change
themselves, and the faulty aspects of old perspectives before
they would even assume they could create something better than
what exists now.
   I took the time to tell you this because I feel that among
Native Americans exists the most progressive perspective in
terms of just knowing that it is absolutely suicidal for
anyone, not just Native Americans and Blacks, to mainstream
themselves into the toxic American mainstream. I hear you.

[Iktomiwicasa]

2. Check your PM's eom