Minnesota: A history of the land documentary at University of Minnesota Bell Museum
You mean the Republican party that fought against slavery? Western civilization is beyond simple duality.
No I was merely referring to the reinvention of history to support modern narratives.
@Curt Wuollet Support is kind of an ironic word in this context. "In the 1780s John Jacob Astor, founder of the American Fur Company [AFC], started out trading trinkets to Indians for fur, making a 1000% profit. Astor was also Freemason Master of the Holland Lodge No. 8 in New York
City. In less than ten years Astor was the second richest man in the U.S. By the 1820s Astor had vertical integration by shipping the goods from Europe that were traded to the Indians, thereby increasing his profit ratio to almost
5,000%. Astor then encouraged Indians to take trade goods on credit so that more profit was made from financing interest payments while also forcing the Indians to continue trading with the AFC to repay the debt. In the 1830s
Astor introduced steam boats to increase speed and in 1837 the AFC steamboat St. Peters carried smallpox up the Missouri river, killing more than 17,000 Indians. By the 1840s Astors' wealth was $20 million." George and John
Steiner, Business, Government and Society: A Managerial Perspective (McGraw-Hill, 2005), pp. 47-54.
“The fur traders had always chafed under the restriction on selling alcohol to Indians since it was one of the most highly desired trade items, and they generally found ways around the rules....The traders discouraged Indians from hunting muskrats and eventually refused to take any more. This change in the fur trade had the duel effect of impoverishing the Indians and reducing their economic importance enough to eliminate AFC [American Fur Company of John Jacob Astor] objections to their removal. Their only interest in the Indians was in collecting
accumulated debts, and they expected, and eventually received, payments from the Indians annuity money. Moreover, the interest of individual traders turned to land speculation, which required the Indians' removal and aligned the traders with the squatters.” The Eviction of the Squatters from Fort Snelling, 1998 Eric Ferguson.
“In 1836 I visited the fur hunters south of the site of Fort Ridgley, and found them living chiefly on muskrats. They themselves pronounced them unfit to be eaten.” Samuel William Pond, Dakota Life in the Upper Midwest (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002), p. 56.
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States: Revisioning American History By: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World is a 1988 non-fiction book by American Professor Jack Weatherford.
All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life
Book — Non-fiction. By Winona LaDuke. 1999.
Native American activists provide testimonies to indigenous efforts to resist oppression and fight both cultural and environmental degradation in the face of U.S. colonialism.
Jack Weatherford, Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America (New York: Random House, Inc., 2010).
“The treaties of 1851 had promised the Dakota lump sum payments in exchange for land, but eleven years later the Dakota had still not received the funds....Most of the money was given directly to creditors contrary to treaty terms and to federal law.” Carol Chomsky, “U.S.-Dakota War Trials”, Stanford Law Review, November 1990.
“If any shall escape extinction, the wretched remnant must be driven beyond
our borders,” stated Governor Alexander Ramsey in a special legislative session. “Newspapers across the state called for extermination of the entire Dakota nation.” Major General John Pope wrote to Colonel Sibley that no treaty should be made with the Dakota and “to exterminate them all, if they furnish the least occasion for it.” Major General Pope also wrote to Sibley: “It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so and even if it requires a campaign lasting the whole of next year.”
Professor Mary Lethert Wingerd, North Country: The Making of Minnesota (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 315. The Stillwater, MN Stillwater Messenger newspaper headline read “DEATH TO THE BARBARIANS is the sentiment of our people.” Stillwater Messenger, November 11, 1862, cited by Carol Chomsky, “U.S.-Dakota War Trials”, Stanford Law Review, November 1990
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@Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang All I'm saying is either don't " sanitize" or "sanitize" both ways. No apologies, people felt the way they did for reasons that made sense to them in the context of their times and acted accordingly. To look through a modern liberal lens is to demean the pioneers and the natives.
@Curt Wuollet I got a master's degree in Liberal Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2000. Is that what you mean by "liberal"? Do you consider a "modern liberal lens" to be a twisting around of what native intentions are? For example consider the below: "Among the report’s findings is the fact that, due to reduced deforestation rates, territories owned collectively by Indigenous Peoples have avoided up to 59.7 million metric tons (MtC) of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions each year across Bolivia, Brazil, and Colombia – the equivalent of taking up to 12.6 million vehicles out of circulation for one year.
At the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) World Conservation Congress in September 2021, an umbrella group representing more than two million Indigenous Peoples across nine South American nations succeeded in having a resolution passed to protect 80% of the Amazon by 2025. Finally, the UN-backed Science Panel for the Amazon, comprising 200 experts and researchers from the region, has highlighted Indigenous rights as central for the protection of the Amazon.
But there is work yet to be done. Next week’s UN Climate Change Conference must recognize and support the more than 476 million Indigenous Peoples living in 90 countries and the vital role they play in protecting our natural resources and helping us to reach climate goals."
Indigenous groups fight climate change by getting their 'land back’ l ABC News
Populist alliances of ‘cowboys and Indians’ are protecting rural lands
Published: May 16, 2019 6.43am EDT
2008 “Indigenous Nations Responses to Climate Change” article in American Indian Culture and Research Journal (AICRJ) Vol. 32, No. 3.
2005 “Unlikely Alliances: Treaty Conflicts and Environmental Cooperation Between Native American and Rural White Communities,” article in American Indian Culture and Research Journal (AICRJ) Vol. 29, No. 4.
2003 “Crandon mine victory won by a historic alliance,” with Debra McNutt in the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram (Nov. 2), Wisconsin State Journal, Ojibwe Akiing, Earth First, and other websites and newspapers.
2002 “Effects of White Racial Advantages in Environmental Alliances,” on Wisconsin Ho-Chunk/farmer alliances against low-level jet flights, bombing range, and Perrier, at Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual conference, Los Angeles; published in Wisconsin Geographer and Udall Foundation Collection of Essays.
They act like they didn't steal this lands for others that had community and family history on that land already. They make it seem like a fair tail story for Europeans, but not the devastion that the original land owner went through
Those "original owners" changed regularly. Especially if you are referring to native Americans. And they all changed as people moved in to other people and one way or another pushed out the former inhabitants
Those original owners you speak of were immigrants themselves from Eastern Europe and Asia. And their own oral history tells of crowding out others. That would be the earlier Europeans who crossed the ice bridge from France and Britain
actually if you watch part 1 Winona LaDuke points out that for the original people here they names themselves as "Belonging to the Land" not the "land belonging to them." So the concept of ownership was totally different indeed. I took the University of Minnesota class "environmental racism" from Winona LaDuke.
@E.R. Long The original natives in South America have their DNA traced to Australian aborigines and they even look like Australian aborigines with African traits - so by "immigrants" you really mean that 7000 generations ago all humans came from a genetic bottleneck of just a few thousand humans that left African from the San Bushmen tribe (still around today). If you really want to study your heritage then focus on the first 90% of our human modern biology from the San Bushmen culture. thanks
@Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang the origins of modern humans are traced from the Middle East, not Africa. Language, mathematics, construction styles, writing, all trace back to a single point of origin in Sumeria.
@E.R. Long you're confusing written history of ideograms used for trading agriculture - specifically wheat farming - with modern biological humans as a species. Modern biological humans as a species have been around for about 100,000 years - with the use of symbolic art and technology in Africa. "Powerful categories of evidence for symbolically mediated behaviour, variously described as ‘modern’ or ‘cognitively modern’ human behaviour, are geometric or iconographic representations. After 40,000 years ago such evidence is well documented in much of the Old World and is widely considered as typifying ‘modern human culture,’ but earlier evidence is rare. In Africa, this includes two deliberately engraved ochre pieces from c. 75,000 year old levels at Blombos Cave, Western Cape, South Africa and the greater than 55,000 year old incised ostrich egg shell from the Diepkloof shelter, located in the same province. Here we report on thirteen additional pieces of incised ochre recovered from c. 75,000–100,000 year old levels at Blombos Cave. These finds, taken together with other engraved objects reported from other southern African sites, suggest that symbolic intent and tradition were present in this region at an earlier date than previously thought."
Journal of Human Evolution
Volume 57, Issue 1, July 2009, Pages 27-47
Journal of Human Evolution
Engraved ochres from the Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa
Christopher S.Henshilwood
Francescod'Erricoc
IanWatts
a
Institute for Human Evolution, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa
b
Institute for Archaeology, History, Culture and Religion, University of Bergen, Postbox 7805, 5020, Bergen, Norway
c
CNRS-UMR 5199 PACEA, University of Bordeaux, Avenue des Facultés, 33405 Talence, France
Was this before or after slavery
Why does it matter? Shockingly enough not everything in American history revolves around slavery the way modern day likes to make it seem.
Cocoa in the U.S. today is still grown by child slaves and it's bought by Cargill the world's largest private corporation, based on Minnesota. Cargill: Our taxes, global destruction
Minnetonka-based Cargill is often noted as the world’s largest private corporation, with reported annual sales of over $50 billion and operations at any given time in an average of 70 countries. The “Lake Office” of Cargill is a 63-room replica of a French chateau; the chairman’s office is part of what was once the chateau’s master-bedroom suite.
A family empire, the Cargills and the MacMillans control about 85 percent of the stock. Not only the largest grain trader in the world, with over 20 percent of the market, Cargill dominates another 12 sectors, including destructive speculative finance, according to “Invisible Giant: Cargill and its Transnational Strategies,” by Brewster Kneen
Taking advantage of the capitalist speculative collapse of 1873, Cargill quickly bought up grain elevators. After vast cooperation with the state-sponsored railroad robber barons, central grain terminals averaged extremely high annual returns on investments of 30 to 40 percent between 1883 and 1889. Cargill hired a Chase Bank vice president to secretly help the corporation through the Depression, writes Dan Morgan in “Merchants of Grain.”
“There are only a few processing firms,” and “these firms receive a disproportionate share of the economic benefits from the food system,” states William D. Heffernan, professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri. Details of Cargill’s price manipulations at the expense of farmers worldwide was documented in the classic study, “Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity” by Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins. They report that Cargill has had a history of receiving elite government price information that should be told to U.S. farmers.
That secrecy, along with tax-subsidized market control, enables Cargill to buy from U.S. farmers at extremely low prices and then sell abroad to nations pressured under the same destructive elite corporate control. See the Institute for Food and Development Policy’s Web Site
Between 1985 and 1992, the legal entity called Cargill received $800.4 million in tax subsidies via the Export Enhancement Program, a continuation of the infamous “Food for Peace” policy, writes Kneen. Promoted by Hubert H. Humphrey and instituted as PL 480, food became a Cold War tool, i.e. “for Peace.” If we can induce people to “become dependent on us for food,” then “what is a more powerful weapon than food and fiber?” Humphrey declared, according to “Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies” by Noam Chomsky.
Actually, most of the nation recipients of tax-subsidized Cargill food dumping were, and are, net exporters of food already — policies imposed by colonial trading patterns. The food (for Peace) has been bought cheaply by neocolonial regimes, and then sold at a huge discount on the local market — in Somalia, for example, at one-sixth of the local prices. Many examples of these misguided policies can be found in “Betraying the National Interest: How US Foreign AID Threatens Global Security by Undermining the Political and Economic Stability of the Third World,” by Frances Moore Lappe, et al.
Cargill’s undercutting wipes out the local farmers’ self-reliance, while the revenues (going to the elite) are tied to required purchases of U.S. weapons, writes Chomsky, citing “The Soft War” by Tom Barry, 1988. But the main beneficiary of “Food for Peace” has been Cargill. Keen writes, “From 1954 to 1963, just for storing and transporting P.L. 480 commodities, the heavily subsidized giant Cargill made $1 billion.”
Indian lawyer N.J. Nanjundaswamy reports that a Cargill motto is, “One who controls the seed, controls the farmer, and one who controls the food trade, controls the nation.” Yudof’s recently stated support of federal foreign policy Title XII is another public promotion of the University of Minnesota-Cargill partnership’s raiding of sustainable agricultural cultures.
Cargill is such a damaging threat that in Dec. 1992, 500,000 peasants marched against corporate-controlled trade, and the irate farmers ransacked Cargill’s operations. Fifty people were arrested at the partially completed — and subsequently destroyed — seed-processing plant in Bellary, India. In 1996, 1,000 Indian farmers gathered at Cargill’s office and destroyed Cargill’s records.
Cargill has been doing bio-piracy, stealing traditional products. For instance, it used Basmati, a rice from India, as its trade name, and the company continues to be one of the main promoters of corporate-driven intellectual property rights. The U.S. Trade Act, Special 301 Clause, allows the United States to take unilateral action against any country that does not open its market to U.S. corporations.
The United States, for example, has threatened to use trade sanctions against Thailand for its attempt to protect biodiversity. A bill that has been before parliament in India and promoted by Cargill, “takes away all the farmers’ rights, which they have enjoyed for generations — they will no longer be able to produce new varieties of seed or trade seed amongst themselves,” writes Nanjundaswamy.
The research center, Rural Advancement Foundation International, found that “fifteen African states, among them some of the poorest countries in the world, are under pressure to sign away the right of more than 20 million small-holder farmers to save and exchange crop seed. The decision to abandon Africa’s 12,000-year tradition of seed-saving will be finalized at a meeting in the Central African Republic. The 15 governments have been told to adopt draconian intellectual property legislation for plant varieties in order to conform to a provision in the World Trade Organization.”
Cargill, with extensive funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, is also destroying the world’s largest wetland — the Pantanal, in South America — in order to dredge a channel that’s designed for convoys of up to 16 soybean- and soymeal-carrying barges, according to the Institute on Food and Development Policy.
Cargill has been on the Council of Economic Priorities’ list of worst environmental offenders. Mother Jones magazine and Earth Island Journal report that Cargill is responsible for 2,000 OSHA violations, a 40,000-gallon spill of phosphoric solution into Florida’s Alafia River, poor air pollution compliance and record-high releases of toxic waste.
With help from the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, states have recently begun to respond to citizen pressure and revoke corporate charters. The assets of Cargill should be revoked, allowing the citizens of the United States to give farmers the benefits of fair trade instead of Cargill’s secretive policy of tax-subsidized global destruction.
well that's war. many indians still live today. they were allowed to live because europeans honor the adversary at the conclusion of war. we won they lost. would they have treated us better had they had the upper hand?
@jeffrey pierce You have a tepid imagination, and a meager sense of compassion.
Although my ancestors did not come to America in time to participate in the removal of the American Indians, it still hurts reading how they were treated. Someday I hope to restore some of this land to the way it should be. I'm on my last year of high school so I have a lot of time to do just that.
@jeffrey pierce there is no "upper hand" against Mother Nature. Western modern civilization has created today's ecological crisis. Our war was against ourselves as much as anybody else. The "biological annihilation" will continue to accelerate. The "war" never ended - it is just getting worse. You can be in denial about the war but you can't claim to be the winner. Sorry to burst your bubble. Or I mean to burst the Two-Headed Depleted Uranium Baby bubble.
What this documentary really fails to tell us is that the greatest force in the change of the Minnesota landscape was not human but glacial!
yes unless you ignore the mainstream science that has documented our modern human civilization has created the fastest rate of CO2 equivalent emissions in the history of life on Earth. The arctic is about to go ice free for the first time in 3 million years. Nuclear apocalypse threatens to wipe out the ozone layer that protects Earth from UV radiation. Certainly the "anthropocene Era" of science is too optimistic since biological annhilation is accelerating on to geological destruction as well.
T
7 months ago
One of the ways that “land” was allocated was by brutal raids and war against other clans and tribes.
The fur trade on the East Coast of North America started by the French in the early 1600s and the fur trade relied on alcohol and guns to cause the native indigenous people to attack each other. But the main force was the huge masses of white colonists flooding into Minnesota - especially the German land colonialists settling right onto Dakota reservation land. For example the Treaty of 1805 by Pike was not a real treaty - he was not an official treaty maker. He just had 60 kegs of booze and he convinced two Native males to sign on some paper.
Wow, your comment started out intelligent enough. Also, you didn't have one great, great grandfather. You had EIGHT of them!
@Anthony yeah I never really thought of how I had eight "great grandparents" - I know that one set were born in Sweden. Another set including someone 1/4 Irish. A third set was English. The Irish set was actually Palatine Germans who moved to Ireland and then Canada. The Palatine Germans arrived from Switzerland in the 1400s or 1500s. Just 7000 generations ago we were all direct cousins since humans are a genetic bottleneck from around 10,000 people who left Africa after the Mt. Toba Supervolcano explosion 70,000 years ago. So Ironically even though the "number" of ancestors doubles with each generation it then collapses back. Through our Mitochondrial DNA all modern biological humans can be traced back to ONE female in Africa.
@Anthony yeah I never really thought of how I had eight "great grandparents" - I know that one set were born in Sweden. Another set including someone 1/4 Irish. A third set was English. The Irish set was actually Palatine Germans who moved to Ireland and then Canada. The Palatine Germans arrived from Switzerland in the 1400s or 1500s. Just 7000 generations ago we were all direct cousins since humans are a genetic bottleneck from around 10,000 people who left Africa after the Mt. Toba Supervolcano explosion 70,000 years ago. So Ironically even though the "number" of ancestors doubles with each generation it then collapses back. Through our Mitochondrial DNA all modern biological humans can be traced back to ONE female in Africa.
This area "never was a Wilderness..." "The minute the Ice Melted there were people here..." sounds so Scientific!
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