Month: April 2023

Roger Oberbeck: Solano Voices

California is considering giving reparations of $360,000 to descendants of Black slaves, at a cost of up to $800 billion.

There is a list of 69 massacres of Native Americans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_North_America), where many women and children were killed, including the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre (400 killed, 1846 Sacramento River Massacre (700 killed), 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre (250 killed), and Clear Lake Massacre (400 killed).

Native American tribes have had their ancestral land taken from them illegally. The United States made 368 treaties with Native American tribes from 1778 to 1871.

As settlers moved into the Great Lakes region the Shawnee, Lenape, Miami, Ottawa, Ojibwa and Potawatomi fought a battle at Fallen Timbers, and were forced to give up large areas of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin in the Greenville Treaty.

In 1809, the Treaty of Fort Wayne between the U.S. and Lenape, Potawatomi, Miami, and Eel River tribes, took 2.5 million acres of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Illinois for about 2 cents per acre.

While Andrew Jackson served as a federal commissioner from 1814 to 1824, he negotiated nine of 11 treaties with Choctaw, Chickasaws, Creeks, Seminoles and Cherokee southeast tribes, which gave up 50 million acres of land in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky.

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act, which the U.S. granted land west of the Mississippi River to Native American tribes who agreed to give up their homelands, which gave 25 million acres of land in the South to settlers. When many Cherokee resisted giving up their ancestral land in the southeast the U.S. signed a treaty with the Cherokee at New Echota in 1835, which traded 7 million acres of Cherokee land for $5 million. Many Cherokees…

Continue reading

3-minute read

{ // query dom only after user click if (!vdContainer) { vdContainer = document.getElementById(‘videoDetailsContainer’); vdShow = document.getElementById(‘vdt_show’), vdHide = document.getElementById(‘vdt_hide’); } vdContainer.hidden = !(vdContainer.hidden); // show/hide elements if (vdContainer.hidden) { vdShow.hidden = false; vdHide.hidden = true; } else { if (!flagCaption) { flagCaption = true; fireCaptionAnalytics() } vdShow.hidden = true; vdHide.hidden = false; } }); function fireCaptionAnalytics () { let analytics = document.getElementById(“pageAnalytics”); try { if (analytics) { analytics.fireEvent(`${ga_data.route.basePageType}|${section}|${subsection}|streamline|expandCaption`); } else { if (window.newrelic) window.newrelic.noticeError(‘page analytics tag not found’); } } catch (e) { if (window.newrelic) window.newrelic.noticeError(e); } } }()); ]]>

Ceremony at Sweetwater Cultural Center in Stony Point, NY, honors donation of sacred site

Rematriation ceremony for the Ramapo Indians split rock property.

Video courtesy of Land Conservancy of New Jersey

The Land Conservancy of New Jersey has purchased the Ramapough Indians’ sacred Split Rock Mountain (or Tahetaweew) straddling Hillburn and Ramapo, New York, on the Mahwah border and donated it to the Ramapo Munsee Land Alliance.

The conservancy raised $500,000 in donations, $290,000 to buy the 54-acre property from the Rockland County Sewer Authority in February and the rest to clean it, pay for surveys, environmental assessments and title insurance. The land was transferred to the alliance in a ceremony at the Sweetwater Cultural Center in Stony Point, New York, last month.

The purchase does not resolve access to the site, reached via a 1/2-mile footpath across private property off Split Rock Road in Mahwah. But Chief Dwaine Perry said officially taking charge of the site will allow his tribe to begin the process of “reactivating the mountain’s energy” during ceremonies there in May.

“This site is much like Mount Sinai, where our holy people went to deliberate peace and understanding among other peoples, for which we were called the Grandfather Tribe,” said Perry. “A decision of great…

Continue reading