Date: Sun, 4 Jan 1998 09:59:25 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: Re: M-I: Native American land claims



Lou Proyect:

>Leave it to Lou Godena to go off on a reactionary tangent. Confederate
>agitation in Minnesota? Are you trying to say that Minnesotans were going
>to invade the Union states from the West? That the Lakota and Teton tribes
>were going to march across Wisconsin into Michigan and put all the freed
>slaves in the North back into bondage? 


I am rather surprised at the ferocity of Lou's response.  I was writing in
*support* of his contention that Native American struggles should be
integral to any Leftist program.  Moreover, I view American Indians (of
which I am one) not as a virginal, undifferentiated, sinned-against mass,
but as a participating, pro-active, developing element of a larger American
history.  I do not subscribe to the "passive theory" of history, be it
blacks, Jews, Native Americans, or whatever, where essentially whole peoples
sit abjectly back and wait for history to happen to *them*, wholly innocent
of any initiating drive of their own.  It is interesting that, through each
of these groups, we experience the whole panolopy of "God's Chosen People",
"Master Race", "Manifest Destiny", and other bogus apparitions of the Unseen
Hand in human affairs.  May I continue to passionately argue against this?

Lou Proyect has much sympathy with the sufferers in the Native American
Holocaust; if you are a humane person, you do.  However, there are certain
undeniable concomitant facts of that experience of our national history that
have to be taken into account.  One such fact is that the American West
during the Civil War -- and especially the gold fields of California--
provided a large and potentially decisive resource to whichever side in the
conflict was most able to exploit it.  Lincoln's policies in the West during
1862-1864 rested upon this salient logistical feature.  The movement east
into New Mexico (including, then, Arizona) by the California Column of
northern volunteers vitiated what was then an all but certain march of the
American southwest (including Colorado) into the Confederate camp.
Simultaneous campaigns against the Indians in the West -- particularly those
against the Navajos, Cheyennes, and Sioux -- must be seen in this context;
as a deliberate attempt to keep the far west from falling into the hands of
the southern enemy.

Louis Godena



     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---