On The Res
A group of us white folk went up to the Flathead reservation yesterday to see a film called Idaho's Forgotten War and to listen to old Russell Means give a talk about "what is next for Indian activism". The so-called war occurred in the 1970s when a small band of Kootenai indians who had not signed the Hellgate Treaty found themselves starving in northern Idaho ( Means called it genocide) and made some demands on the US government by officially declaring war. They specified it was non-violent "war" to be fought with "pens and paper". After a giant over-reaction by Idaho State troopers, the Big White Father ended up giving the band a casino and a little land to build a tribal headquarters.They have grown from 67 to 140 or so.
Russell Means described the woman elders behind the movement (who were there being honored) as greater heroes than Ghandi, Mandela or MLKing. In fact everything he said was hyperbole delivered in over-dramatic style. In my view, Means mostly rambled incoherently about all the same old themes. His only advice about the future of Indian Activism was that young braves should become responsible fathers if they get women pregnant, sort of the Bill Cosby approach.And that language/culture must be preserved.
Interestingly, all of the liberal/leftists I went up there with thought he was nothing short of brilliant, mesmerized,in my view, by the persona and celebrity. If he still has a radical critique he didn't share it with that crowd but he did sell a lot of autobiographies about his AIM glory days. He glorified Evo Morales as well, obviously unaware of his administrations conflict with indigenous people over natural resource extraction.
The question which never was asked, much less answered, is: How does an American Indian movement( if there is such a thing) fit into a global struggle by indigenous peoples? What destructive practices are they resisting and how? And then somebody needs to ask: How does that indigenous resistance here, in Mexico and Latin America, in Hawaii and Australia and Canada, anywhere, fit into the even broader struggle for human liberation?
posted by troutsky @ 6:46 AM
26 comments
26 Comments:
How does that indigenous resistance here, in Mexico and Latin America, in Hawaii and Australia and Canada, anywhere, fit into the even broader struggle for human liberation?
Demands for more bribes from the pale faces, of course.
A group of us white folk went up to the Flathead reservation
Bwah-ha-ha. The comedy continues, I see. How many remakes of that old flop is Uncle Sam likely to produce?
Russell Means? You mean to tell me that old motherfucker is still alive? At his age I bet he's more incoherent than ever.
Do me a favor, the next time you see him do the tomahawk chop, then slap your hand on and off your mouth while you go "WA-WA-WA-WA-WA-WA-WA-WA"!
I bet deep down he gets a big kick out of that shit. You might even get a smile out of him.
Tell him I might start marketing a new product, called "Crazy Horse Firewater". I would appreciate his endorsement and would pay him big bucks. See what he says.
Didn't Andy Warhole paint Russell Mean' portrait back in the sixties for the Left?
I suspect that THAT is where the Left's infatuation w/"branding" came from. The cattle rustlers were given away just too many times with THAT paleface trick!
Ask Means about your Sandinazi cumwads gunning down Indians with helicopters and Psuedostinian mercenaries while Ed Assner, Mike Farrel and every commie feigned ignorance. Ask Capo Ren what leftist have demanded Daniel Ortega and his cohorts go on trial for these crimes against humanity.
Indians died and commies sold them out for the party line. Indigenous people only matter when they are contrived out of thin air and are on lands that dem Joooos are indigenous upon.
a..hey guys.. don't you have anywhere else to be?
Your brand of humor would be more appreciated over at Firedog Lake or something. They would really be annoyed and argue with you and shit.
Who was being funny, Troutsky? Russell Means represents that old stereotype of the Indian as the perpetually wronged noble savage who never did anything to deserve his fate. There wasn't no shared blame, it was all the white man's fault. They never raped, pillaged, and plundered on behalf of the French during the French And Indian War, or for the British during the American Revolution and the War of 1812.
Do you even comprehend that during the heyday of the Indian Wars in the late nineteenth century, there were still people living who remembered Indian atrocities committed during the War of 1812, and even more who knew about them by way of their fathers and grandfathers?
Russell Means never seemed to get that, but of course bringing up blood-thirsty Indian massacres of white settlers and their families wouldn't exactly fit with his narrative, would it?
Thanks for turning me on to Firedog Lake. I checked them out, not too bad for a bunch of looney leftists. At least I haven't seen them calling Tea-Partiers racists for disagreeing with the Holy Lord God Obama, at least not yet. I might even do a diary there, just to see what kind of reaction I get.
Didn't Andy Warhole paint Russell Mean' portrait back in the sixties for the Left?
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Probably, the studio was an assembly line by then.
Why do you say "for the left". Other than the fact that the left understood what Warhol was doing, I don't see the fit.
Why do you say "for the left". Other than the fact that the left understood what Warhol was doing, I don't see the fit.
Hammer & Sickel
Lenin
Mao
McGovern
Beirut
See it yet?
The word for the day kids is "irony".
Yeah, I think the Mao series was some of his best colorization. He really absorbed Albers.
You do realize that he stripped these symbols of any meaning and effectively neutered them, I assume.
Was Jasper Johns being patriotic with his American flag series, Farmer?
Was he being political at all?
How did we go from making sport of moonbat Russell Means to an art discussion?
Isn't anybody at least going to accuse me of being insensitive by calling them "Indians" as opposed to the politically correct "Native Americans (ROTFLMFAO).
You do realize that he stripped these symbols of any meaning and effectively neutered them, I assume.
No. He made them (negative images) palatable for capitalist mass consumption and transformed socialist causes into causes celebre. It became "fashionable" and "trendy" to embrace socialism.
Saul Alinsky, "Rules for Radicals"
11. "If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside..."
In other words, Warhol didn't "stop" at neutral. He kept "pushing" till he arrived in "Beirut" the "City of Luv".
Jasper Johns wasn't producing or selling his art in the USSR, was he? Because they would have sent him to the gulag.
But he was disempowering American Symbols in the sense that they revealed the "artifice" inherent in "Nationality". And in so doing, revealed the weakness and vulnerability of all such man-made constructs.
The "caprice" that a map represents, for one example.
...and "blurring brands" is just another way for cattle rustlers to muddy the waters and obscure their theft. Pretty soon, every small hatted cattleman will want a blurred brand on his cow and the rights to graze her on the "commons".
You always card the wool before twisting/re-spinning.
The metamorphosis of a nobody into a somebody.
If Warhol painted him... he had to have done something worthy of celebrity... NOT!
The completely manufactured AND undeserved birth of a new pop icon.
...and so with Warhol, the Left finally starts catching up with Madison Avenue.
How empowering it must have dawned upon the "artistic" Marxist hordes to discover that their greatest fear, that the governments of capitalist states could only serve the singular causes of the oppressive capitalist class, were in error. That any idea could easily be sugar-coated and shoved down the people's throats, even something as repugnant and destructive as communism.
Warhol and John are "communist".
You channeling, Beak or something?
Any work that contains a leftist symbol is "leftist". Yup, you sound like someone whose theory stopped with Aristotle. Come on, Farmer.
So when Warhol painted Nixon in '72, he WASN'T schilling for the McGovern campaign, mr. ducky?
I know, he was just trying to "Neutralize" him...
*rolls eyes*
...and if Warhol and John weren't left-leaning, then their reputations for "genius" should forever be discarded and their pictures in future forever associated with the most ignorant blunderers in American history... for their fame would now be attributable purely to serendipity, not nothing to actual genius.
In other words, you can't have it BOTH ways, mr. ducky. Either they were genius OR they were idiots. Pick one and stick with it. Or spin the wheel and try and guess the next letter. :)
minibus reklamlari
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