The Intelligent Aboriginal News Service       Set as Hompage       Smaller Text       Larger Text       Skip to Content       This newswire may contain the images, sounds and writings of deceased persons      
 Русский   Pinoy   Español   한 글   Français   日本語   Polski   汉语   Portuguès   Thai   Dansk   Hebrew   Magyar   Suomi   Svenska   Hindi   Deutsch   Arabic   Norsk   Greek   Bahasa Indonesia   Nederlands   Viet   Cesky   Italiano   Latviešu
Opinion and Analysis from Blog-journalists of the 4th World
ESN № » :52873-071125-445870-23          Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0      Contact:      Google Talk: editor.novajoservo      

The Indigenist Intelligence Review is the Editorial/Op-Ed section of the Inteligentaindigena Novajoservo newswire.
Letters to the editors and other complimentary commentary may be submitted for publication to:



Cynthia McKinney connects Green Party values to Indigenous principles


WASHINGTON – While many people have celebrated the historic inclusion of a black man and a woman in the 2008 presidential primaries, there has been less said about the equally notable participation of a presidential candidate who is both black and a woman.

Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney and her Puerto Rican vice presidential candidate, Rosa Clemente, also represent another first – the first all-women of color ticket in U.S. presidential history.

McKinney served six terms as a Democratic congresswoman from Georgia in 1993 – 2003 and 2005 – 07. She was the first black woman to represent Georgia in Congress.

Clemente, a community organizer, journalist and hip-hop activist, is a graduate of the State University of New York at Albany and Cornell University. She has been delivering workshops, presentations and commentary for more than 10 years.

While the Green Party candidates currently are running at about 1 percent in the polls in the 40-plus states where they are on the ballot, McKinney has pledged to use her candidacy “to advance the preservation of democracy.”

The Greens advocate for social justice, peace, democracy and respect for the Earth. In an e-mail exchange with Indian Country Today, McKinney detailed how the party would apply these values to Indian country.

She sees tribal sovereignty, treaty obligations, and religious and cultural preservation as intertwined. The U.S. government has “selective amnesia” and never intended to honor the treaties, but it is obligated to do so without question, McKinney said, and also to adequately fund programs for the betterment of American Indians and affirm their religious rights.

“How can a people survive, let alone thrive, absent their religion, spirituality, culture, language and sense of place? I support and strongly encourage religious and cultural preservation in Indian country and urge protection of sacred sites, whichever side of the map boundary they fall upon.”

On IHS funding, McKinney said that the Green Party’s call for universal single-payer health care would provide medical, mental and dental benefits to everyone within the United States, including Native women and veterans. She also embraces traditional indigenous medicine and healing.

“Health care needs to be treated as a human right and removed from the economic gaming field. Until such time as indigenous peoples are covered under such a policy, we Greens support generous IHS funding, including recognition of both Western and non-Western methods of healing. Western medicine deals quite well with trauma, but has much to learn from ‘energetic/spiritual’ traditional methods recognizing the implicit agreement between seen and unseen aspects of reality.”

McKinney said that the rampant substance abuse on reservations is part and parcel of a legacy of oppression and dispossession.

“It offers the hollow promise of filling the void left by cultural obliteration. The sacred has been replaced by the profane. ‘Treaty’ dictates have enforced a substantial and abrupt end to traditional lifeways. For all of these reasons, it is incumbent upon the U.S. government to support IHS.”

Tribal sovereignty and the government-to-government relationship are bound in the issues of independence, legal recognition, respect and the treaty obligations that have been denied and eroded, McKinney said: “Tribes must now regain their political authority.”

That applies to all Native peoples, she said, including those not formally recognized as tribes by the U.S. government.

American Indians are not “minorities” to be assimilated or to have their traditions terminated. “Rather than take power away, even with the apparent good intent of keeping Indians from selling off their lands and dissolving (e.g. Johnson’s and Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh, 1823), the real problem of there being no truly independent powerful political entity to enforce the original treaties has never been addressed.

“Greens value decentralization and local control, but the catch with self-determination and tribal control over mineral resources, education and energy is that it is not and must not be a substitute or bargaining chip further erasing original obligations of the U.S. under original sovereignty agreements.”

She urges Native peoples to continue to acquire acumen in legal and economic matters, and to leverage their original sovereignty into enforceable protections of hunting and fishing rights, access to water and other resources and provisions in anticipation of environmental changes due to global warming.

“In short, then, tribes must continue to be as self-reliant as possible, to develop sustainably and outside the disconnected ‘wage pay’ way of life in which people are not connected to their localities. A return to fair, traditional local governance; traditional values; a selective taking of modern methods of energy-efficient, sustainable design of housing and water treatment, and a tribal insistence on local organic agriculture (including wind-tolerant green; houses) will go a long way toward helping tribal people live well into
the future.”

In education, Greens support language revitalization, culturally oriented curriculum and funding for both.

McKinney reiterated the party’s unequivocal support for workers’ right to organize, but questioned the National Labor Relations Board decision that employees on sovereign tribal land are subject to federal labor law.

“It leaves one to wonder where the U.S. federal government will draw the line upholding sovereignty. As a sovereign nation, the affected tribe is not subject to federal labor laws, as the U.S. Supreme Court may one day need to correctly argue. In setting legal precedents, one needs to support, not undercut, the independence afforded by sovereignty and avoid that ‘slippery slope’ of taking yet more away from tribes, even if ‘well-intentioned.’

“While I support any efforts by the National Labor Relations Board, hobbled though it may be by [the] Taft-Hartley [Act], to protect the right to organize workers, I fear that any decision on the union at Foxwoods [Resort Casino] in that the organization is testing the bounds of its jurisdiction.

Labels: , ,


Add This Post To:

Posted by: Ojibway Migisi Bineshii  ⇔   cecelia.lapointe@gmail.com  
Permalink   17.10.08   1960632185109218777   2008_10_01_archive.html#1960632185109218777   Links to this post
Return to Top

Links to this post:

Create a Link








Recent Editorials

The Aboriginal News GroupIIN is a member of the Aboriginal News Group (ANG), the Internet´s only guild for Indigenist bloggers.

Interested independent bloggers and writers are invited to get involved by uniting with other Aboriginal activists calling awareness to the issues and struggles the colonial and Vichy Indigenous news machines choose to ignore. We strongly encourage our readers to contribute their Indigenous news stories and action alerts by visiting:
http://aboriginalnewsgroup.blogspot.com/



Smart Aboriginals read Inteligentaindigena Novajoservo



Front Page - IIN



Press Releases - ANG



Understanding Genocide


Read Across the 4th World:


Subscribe Now and stay informed


IIR Editorial Policy:

"We called for the creation of a network of independent media, a network of information.... We need this network not only as a tool for our social movements but for our lives: this is a project of life, humanity -- humanity which has a right to critical and truthful information.."


Subcomandante Marcos (January, 1997)

Editorial Staff

Editor-in-Chief: The Angryindian

Essays, edicts, editorials and other sobering mental activity by the Angryindian may also be found at Radio Utopie, FTP Movement, AllTop, La Reyna's Journal, Seattle Indymedia, Model Minority, NowPublic, NewsCloud, Newsvine, Out of Iraq Bloggers Caucus and Black Blogs Watch.

Associate Editors, Blog-Journalists and Correspondents

  • UK/Middle-East Bureau-Chief:
    Cem Ertür
  • Victoria, BC Bureau Chief:
    John S.
  • Investigative Blog-Reportage:
    John John
  • American African Affairs:
    Sister Karen
  • International Struggles & Affairs:
    Ahni


World News



Aboriginal Health



Aboriginal Women



Podcasts

Blogroll



Alt-Media



Impressum

Inteligentaindigena Novajoservo / The Intelligent Aboriginal News Service is produced by Intelligent Aboriginal Publishing (IAP), and is an Internet publication of the Aboriginal News Group (ANG).

All editorial text, posted news items and related article images employed within this newsblog are published under a CC: Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 license unless otherwise stated. Meaning, any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or the much needed elucidation of the masses without monetary profit is duly permitted and encouraged provided credit is given where credit is due to all parties concerned. It is believed that this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

Accordingly, said material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving similar information for research and educational purposes.

Opinions expressed by columnists are published uncensored and are not necessarily endorsed by or fall under the responsibility of Inteligentaindigena Novajoservo, it´s associate editors, blog-journalists or Intelligent Aboriginal Publishing.

Information contained in this newswire is made available for universal availibility use without regard to ethnicity/race, religious affiliation, gender, national origin or political affiliation. This publication is in no way responsible for the content of externally linked web links nor does it accept paid advertising or donations.



Newswire Archive

© Inteligentaindigena Novajoservo / The Intelligent Aboriginal News Service
Creative Commons

Return to Top