USA: Somebody Else's Wealth

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Robert Weissman wrote:
> 
> Somebody Else's Wealth
> By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
> 
> Where does the vast wealth of the United States come from? It is hard to
> read the financial and popular press today without encountering stories
> that suggest the answer is the creativity of entrepreneurs in Silicon
> Valley.
> 
> To this prevailing, romanticized perspective, Winona LaDuke
> offers a jolt of reality: Many of the great U.S. fortunes are based on
> somebody else's wealth -- the natural resources of Native Americans.
> 
> In her eloquent new book, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and
> Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press), LaDuke documents the
> historic -- and ongoing -- process of Native American dispossession.
> 
> LaDuke, a member of the Anishinaabeg nation, lives on the White Earth
> Reservation, in northern Minnesota. She describes how a series of treaties
> and U.S. laws transferred land from the Anishinaabeg to incoming settlers
> and converted commonly held Anishinaabeg land into individual parcels,
> with much of it soon alienated from Anishinaabeg (and a huge chunk taken
> by the state of Minnesota, illegally, for taxes).
> 
> The big winners in the process were Frederick Weyerhaueser and the company
> he created. "Some are made rich and some are made poor," LaDuke writes.
> "In 1895, White Earth 'neighbor' Frederick Weyerhaueser owned more acres
> of timber than anyone else in the world." Today, descendant companies of
> Weyerhaueser continue to clearcut what remains of the Minnesota pine
> forests.
> 
> In upstate New York and Canada, the Mohawk nation retains land in
> scattered reservations -- a tiny fraction of their former possessions. The
> Akwesasne Mohawk Reserve borders the St. Lawrence River. Families that
> once relied on fishing and farming have been forced, she writes, to
> abandon their livelihoods because the river is so polluted with PCBs
> dumped by General Motors and air pollution depositions have poisoned the
> land.
> 
> "Many of the families used to eat 20-25 fish meals a month," LaDuke quotes
> an Akwesasne environmental expert as saying. "It's now said that the
> traditional Mohawk diet is spaghetti."
> 
> All Our Relations features another half dozen case studies of corporate
> and governmental assaults on Native American land and livelihoods.
> 
> Dispossession of Native American lands has led to what LaDuke calls
> "structural poverty." Structural poverty, she told us, "ensues when you do
> not have control over the land or any of your assets."
> 
> "It is not a question of material wealth, but having conditions of human
> dignity within the reservation," she says, citing a litany of devastating
> statistics on Native American poverty rates, crime rates and access to
> health care. "You can throw whatever social program you want at this, but
> until we are allowed to determine our own destiny, these are the problems
> we are going to face."
> 
> Dispossession has inflicted on Native Americans an intertwined spiritual
> poverty as well, she says. "You have some [Native Americans] whose whole
> way of life are based on buffalo, but we have no buffalo. This loss causes
> a kind of grieving in our community."
> 
> But LaDuke's All Our Relations is as much a hopeful as depressing book.
> She chronicles Native American resistance to incursions from multinational
> corporations, government agencies which frequently act to further
> corporate interests and a white-dominated society which too often
> maintains a settler mentality.
> 
> She profiles women like Gail Small, "the kind of woman you'd want to watch
> your back at a meeting with dubious characters." An attorney, Small runs a
> group called Native Action, which has led the strikingly successful fight
> against coal company strip mining on the Northern Cheyenne and other
> Montana reservations. Native Action has also pushed for affirmative
> development proposals, forcing the First Interstate Bank System to provide
> loans to Northern Cheyennes through use of the Community Reinvestment Act
> and helping establish a Northern Cheyenne high school.
> 
> LaDuke herself is an inspiring figure, working with her White Earth Land
> Recovery Project not only to pressure states and the federal government to
> return Native American lands (which because they are government held,
> would not require the displacement of any individual property holders),
> but also trying to enact a sustainable forest management plan for White
> Earth, supporting the development of wind power on the reservation and
> establishing a project, Native Harvest, to "restore traditional foods and
> capture a fair market price for traditionally and organically grown foods"
> such as wild hominy corn, organic raspberries, wild rice, buffalo sausage
> and maple syrup.
> 
> All Our Relations is a wonderful read, and an important book -- both for
> telling a story of plunder and exploitation too often forgotten, and
> because, as LaDuke notes, "this whole discussion is really not about the
> Seminoles and the panther" or other particular problems facing particular
> groups of Native Americans -- "it is really about America."
> 
> Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
> Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
> Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The
> Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common
> Courage Press, 1999, http://www.corporatepredators.org)
> 
> (c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
> 
> ----------------------------------------
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