Oh, before someone jumps my case for saying “queer” it’s a line from a Dead Milkmen song 
–
I have over 2000 posts, dammit! Show some respect.
http://fathom.org/opalcat/showmerespect.jpg
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com
Down with Injuns!
Ha! I was imagining the same damn thing - funny image, that. I would have loved to see the expression on Columbus’ face when he pulled into Hispaniola Harbor and spotted 100 mad, painted injuns on jet skis thundering out to intercept his little exploratory party in their dinky 'lil wooden row boats!! My guess is that’s the same expression the trout have.
danielnsmith has a good point. Contemporary American Indians will have you believe their ancestor’s spirituality and love for nature enabled them to live off the land in peace and harmony. Bullshit.
The main reason they didn’t completely lay waste to the continent was their sparse population and low level of technology. Many of the nomadic tribes DID destroy the land they passed through (slash & burn et. al.), but there were so few natives, the land would heal before anyone else passed though that area again. A little different now 'adays. The native americans were no different than the native europeans or any other indigenous population. They just had cooler art and better drugs.
Yet to be reconciled with the reality of the dark for a moment, I go on wandering from dream to dream.
Yeah, this is utter baloney. (Nothing against Native Americans. They’re just people like the rest of us.)
I believe Head-Smashed-In is not the only place where Native Americans used the hunting practice of driving herds of bison over a cliff. Before the arrival of horses and guns, this was the most efficient way to kill the critters. There was a lot of waste involved in the technique, obviously.
Also, there is certainly circumstantial evidence that Native Americans wiped out the megafauna in North America, or at least contributed to their demise. Where are the giant ground sloths today? What about the giant armadillos? The mammoths? We know Native Americans hunted these animals, and we also know that they were long gone by the time the white man arrived. Hmmmm.
Let’s face it. We have been propagandized on the subject of Native Americans. Films and television (in the 60s and 70s especially) constantly preached to us about how noble Native Americans were before Europeans arrived. From “Little Big Man” to “Dances with Wolves” we were told how “the Indians lived in harmony with nature before the arrival of the white man,” and how “only the white man kills more than he needs.”
Again, Native Americans are people like the rest of us. They were not “noble savages” as we have been led to believe. They were (and are) capable of the same levels of thoughtlessness, recklessness, cruelty and for that matter, kindness, nobility and honor, as the rest of our species.
If certain tribes are harvesting fish in the manner described in the OP, it ought to be stopped. Period.
Argumentum ad absurdium. They are destroying as much of the environment as they can get their hands on as long as it profits them. And they, not the woodpeckers are clearcutting the forests on their land.
IT doesn’t matter because they didn’t have the weapons to do it nor did they have a market to sell their refrigerated buffalo meat or cedar wood to. They were just trying to survive.
And it doesn’t fucking matter what the white man did to them. My family land in Lithuania was taken by the communists. I am 1/16th Mohawk. Do past injustices to my ancestors give me a right to wipe out an endangered species?
While we are at it, there is strong evidence showing that native americans are descendants of the Ainu of Japan. If your argument is taken to its logical conclusion, native Japanese have a right to all of our resources.
The US government owes the Native Americans exactly dick! The Native’s roamed the land with the buffalo and now they don’t. It’s too bad, it really is. Can ANYONE make amends for a century of slaughter? You don’t see Jews getting reservations in Germany. The Inca ancestors don’t have a lobbying party in Chilean government (at least I don’t think so). Native American may be their race, but they are AMERICAN. Brings to mind the separate but equal issues the US has struggled with before. What’s wrong with a person getting additional rights because of their race? Plenty.
Let me tell you where I am coming from. I am part indian as stated above and always bought the shit about the spirituality and earth worship of the native americans. I grew up being taught that they were somehow superior to the destructive, evil white culture that was destroying mother earth.
When I saw those guys wiping out a fish run by the thousands, I realized what a load of shit it all was. The indians (yes I know it is not PC) are not a different species. THey are just as destructive as we are.
I am not saying they have the right to wipe out a species because they were ripped off by the government! Do you see that statement anywhere in my posts?!? If you read them a bit more carefully, you will see that I said what they are doing is NOT right. And I have said it numerous times!
Eve and TomnDeb:
I am sorry, I should have clarified that I meant races, not groups. And TomnDeb, I will grant you white men. 
Everyone please read Pooch’s post. I was not trying to start a debate on how NAs hunted before white men came. I admit I do not know the exact history of it, only what I have been taught in school. So I shouldn’t have said some of what I said about that; however, I was really calling Mr.Z on his bigotry, and incredibly accusatory post. He is blaming a group who is definitely not helping matters, but in no way is solely or even mostly responsible!
I find it offensive that he is singling out NAs as if what they have begun doing recently (since their hunting rights were reinstated) has not already been done by other groups of people. The NAs that are killing unreasonable amounts of game are not right for what they are doing, but you never would have heard a peep if they had been in there doing it with everyone else when it was acceptable.
I think they deserve their land back, when it is possible to return it, and I believe that they deserve their rights to hunting and religious ceremonies back. I agree that their right to hunt should not extend past reasonable limits, as it appears it has done in some circumstances. They have made some bad, irresponsible choices about limits, but I am not ever going to accept the blanket statement that “indians are destroying the environment.”
As for your statement about the Japanese having the rights to all our land, that is just silly. You know exactly what I am saying here. Numerous tribes had their land taken away from them because the government was greedy, and wanted what was on the land. Many of those tribes had close ties to the land for different reasons, and they think it fair that the government give it back if possible. We aren’t talking about theories here. Just rights, and facts.
Rather, I was in the position of a spore which, having finally accepted its destiny as a fungus, still wonders if it might produce penicillin.
–Ayi Kwei Armah
Yes, their land was taken from them. All land was taken from someone else. I want my family farm in Lithuania back. It was taken by greedy people who wanted it for their own use. I am sure that in the history of the Americas, Ainu stole land from Siberians, who stole it from mongols. Mohawks beat the crap out of the Senacas and other Iroquois and took their land.
Sin, you are going back to an arbitrary point and sayign that we have to restore the land ownership at that point.
Ultimately, the only place where any of us were “native” was Africa.
WHat happened, happened and is done. I do not support giving the indians their land back for the same reasons that I don’t support redrawing all of the borders in Europe to match thier location in 1670.
And why is it “bigoted” to say that the indians are raping the land but downright cool to insist that white men are (a la Al Gore)?
Just to throw some technical points in here:
No one has decided to give back some rights or privileges because the Indians were persecuted in the past. (I’m assuming the situation in the Northwest is comparable to the situation on the Great Lakes.)
What has happened is that the Indians have started sending their kids to law school and hiring lawyers when they felt they needed outside support. They have gone back into Federal Court and demanded that the treaties (legal documents, binding on the government) be enforced as written. Many of those treaties have language that permitted the displaced Indians to hunt or fish certain areas without hindrance in perpetuity. When an Indian Nation goes to court, produces the treaty (signed by the president and ratified by the Senate), and demands that the U.S. honor its obligations, the courts have no legal recourse except to grant them their demands.
Since we are a nation of laws (more or less) we are hoist by our own petard. The only solution that I can see would be for the U.S. to insist on re-negotiating the treaties or to unilaterally abrogate them. The latter course will be difficult to maintain in our own court system, and if it got far enough for Rhenquist to go along with it, it would then go to the World Court with all the hoopla that would cause.
(I suppose we could declare war on each of the nations that we are disputing, then demand a new treaty after our “victory.”)
I do not have any good resolution to this problem. I did want to point out, however, that this was not just some attempt at PC by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The gill-netters are doing what they do because they have called for the enforcement of U.S. laws (treaties) in Federal courts.
Tom~
Good point. I was responding Sis’a statement that they should be “given back their land” which is different than honoring a treaty.
THe state in WA still alots the proportion of the catch that goees to the native americans. This year they got 95% of the steelhead. They have to report it and it is monitored. That is why they threw away the clams. They didn’t want to go over quota.
My solution is simple. They can hunt and fish as much as they want, but they have to use traditional methods. Bows, canoes, spears, bot no nylon gill nets. That way the word and spirit of the treaty in honored.
How ironic… They pretty much had that stuff to defend themselves while we had guns. Sure made it easy to take the continent from them, after all…
Just a question: Why does it matter that it’s Indians? (See, I’m not politically correct, I don’t say Native Americans; I just try not to be an asshole). I have trouble seeing the OP saying, simply, “a bunch of people did this.” Is the environment somehow more destroyed if a nasty Indian does it as opposed to, say, any other ethnic groups?
I really do hope that the next time an oil tanker breaks up, you complain about the “white ship captain,” or whatever race the captain might be, fucked up the environment. I mean, you have to be consistant, right?
Yer pal,
Satan
Thank you Satan, you said what I was somehow trying to get at. And you did it much more eloquently than I would have, as is your way.
Rather, I was in the position of a spore which, having finally accepted its destiny as a fungus, still wonders if it might produce penicillin.
–Ayi Kwei Armah
One issue that causes anger regarding Indian fishing rights is that they have, on several occasions, re-introduced techniques (notably gill nets) after they had been banned for environmental reasons. They are using the “without hindrance” clauses of the ancient treaties to deliberately use methods that they had given up in the middle of this century.
The tanker question is not really a good analogy. Indians are now beginning to exploit things such as oil fields on their lands (as well they should) and they are as likely to have fires and spills as anyone else. The fishing is different because the specific methods were banned, regardless of who used them, to prevent the destruction of fisheries and now the Indians, and they alone, are allowed to go back in and practice those destructive methods.
In the Michigan UP, where unemployment runs high in the best of times, the Indians make the case that this is the only way they can guarantee making a living. I’m not inclined to go to war against them to save some whitefish. On the other hand, if they continue their current practices, they are going to destroy their own livelihood, anyway.
Tom~
I hope to get back into the fray when I return Monday. I leave you with ‘Fractured OP’s’ until then.
I just got back from New York, NY and was horrified to see dead bodies stretched across the river. The Italians were driving the Colombians into the river by scaring them with shot guns. They do this in every drug related gang war including the Jamaicans, which are an endangered species. The front page story in the Paper the day I was in NY was that the Mob had dumped 700,000 stiffs into the river because they were ‘out of line’.
My conjecture is that the Italians are destroying the city. The only reason that there was any drug business left when the Colombians got here was because the mob felt drugs were bad business. Can ayone tell me why the hell Italian Americans are allowed to destroy New York City? What could possibly by the reasoning?
Um, no, not the horses we find today. There were ancestors of horses in North America millions of years ago, but the horses you see today are from the wild horses of Asia (and Europe, not too sure).
Horses are not native to NA, which is why i find it funny when people think the wild horses in the US should be free, when they’ve only been established in NA for just a few hundred years (brought by the Spanish).
Doobieous, that was sort of the point. Prior to the arrival of humans 13,000 or 23,000 or 30,000 years ago (depending on when the anthropologists finally set an arrival date), there were, indeed, varieties of equus along with a number of other large animals. They appear to have been wiped out in the invasion of the Americas by Homo sapiens. There are animals that went extinct in the Americas millions of years ago, but there are a large number of animals that survived until they met humanity.
Tom~
Mr Zambezi:
Why do you leap to condemn an entire people because of the actions of a few?
Re: the OP
I think most “Injuns” today, having been the only people in the history of this country targeted for genocide, would tell you “fuck a bunch of clams”
(Well, Scientology critics might say that too, about the clams…)
Boomer,
I’m trying to make a case here. Don’t agree with me.
There is a difference between intentionally killing a species and having an accident (such as spilling oil.)
You can’t justify these intentional acts by saying that other people also harm the environment. That doesn’t make their acts any less harmfull. I am not to fond of the commercail fishing industry as a whole. I just wonder why the indians, who are touted as being concerned about mother earth, are engaging in such acts.
Does anyone remember that TV commercial with the indian that got a tear in his eye when he saw trash on the ground? Pretty ironic.