Is Willie Nelson a Pretendian?

Yeah, a lot of Texans may shoot me for even venturing this, and Willie doesn't shove his alleged American Indian ancestry in your face, let alone try to grift off it, that I'm aware of.

Nonetheless, let's take a look at the nutgrafs of this Observer piece about Willie and Native American golf courses.

Some, including me, count Cut ‘N Putt, purchased in 1979, as yet another early Native-owned course. Willie Nelson, after all, was twice named Outstanding Indian of The Year by the American Indian Exposition. In 2014, he and Neil Young were presented with buffalo robes for their work with Farm Aid and the Keystone Pipeline protests by the Oceti Sakowin, Ponca, and Omaha nations. 

But, as it is for others who believe they have Native roots in Arkansas and Texas (the states where Willie’s family lived), proof can be elusive. Nelson is on record saying his mother—Myrle Marie Greenhaw Harvey Nelson—was three-quarters Cherokee. 

In the Story of Texas, the Bullock Texas State History Museum reports this as fact. In an interview reported in The Encyclopedia of Arkansas, however, Nelson’s mother’s sister, Sybil Greenhaw Young (1923–1999), claimed it was her mother, Bertha Greenhaw (Willie’s grandmother), who was three-quarters Cherokee. In the same interview, Young also said her grandmother (Willie’s great-grandmother) was “full-blooded Cherokee” and that Willie’s great-grandfather was “half Cherokee and half Irish.” The encyclopedia separately reports that while Cherokees were known to live in that same area, Willie’s maternal grandparents were listed in U.S. Census records as white. 

I know that due to small size, and small money in part due to shooting itself in the foot in various ways, the Observer might not be able to investigate this too much, and, that Mark Wagner is not a regular contributing writer (it's actually his first piece), but still. That said, Wagner supplies the answer himself

None of these ancestors appear in the Dawes Rolls, a historic federal record from 1909 to 1914 that documented the enrollment of members of five tribes including Cherokees, and neither they nor Willie have ever been a citizen of the federally recognized Cherokee Nation, which enjoys tribal sovereignty and determines its own membership. Willie himself was born the year before the The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, the New Deal act (written by John Collier) that led most tribal constitutions in ensuing decades to develop a criteria for claiming Native heritage. 

Given this history, and considering the social milieu that Willie came out of, it is perhaps not surprising that the Greenhaws and Nelsons did not formally demonstrate descent from an enrolled ancestor. Nevertheless, as late as a 2024 interview with Robert Sheer, Nelson again recounted the family stories that establish, for him, his mother’s Cherokee ancestry. Given this, the accolades from the tribes themselves, and Willie’s embrace of Native causes, I include Cut ‘N Putt as an early Native-owned golf course and one worth our pilgrimage.

The answer is that a lot of non-identitarian librulz continue to give librul icons a pass on pretendianism. Sadly, he continues to get a certain amount of a pass on it. I think even pretendian-hunting individuals and websites give people like Nelson a pass if they're not grifting and they're simpatico with American Indian causes.

As for the why? Well, Willie's white family roots are in Arkansas, just like another country music legend who had a disturbed younger adult life and was also a pretendian. I'm of course talking about Johnny Cash.

In both cases, more with their family ancestors than themselves, perhaps, I think the claim was a way of adding a bit of spice to a life that was otherwise straight up "poor white" — or other terms you can insert. Many others in Arkansas, and Oklahoma, were or are in the same ship.

Science news roundup on human origins: White Sands footprints, Neanderthal hunting, Heidelberg man houses

Multiple new items on homo sapiens in the news, some directly or indirectly via Carl Zimmer.

First, we have more confirmation for those human footprints at White Sands National Park and their age. They do appear to date to 21-23,000 years before present. This is a final nail in the coffin of the already dead Clovis theory of humans in the "new world." Of sidebar interest? It may just be a hole in the rock next to a footprint, or maybe, one footprint demonstrates polydactyly.

I just don't get the push-back scientists. This all seems pretty solid now, and there's plenty of other evidence in both North and South America that goes back at least 5,000 years before Clovis. Clovis is dead. Be open-minded about the growing accumulation of pre-Clovis evidence.

At least to my mind, I can't figure out anything besides, if not a full Clovis, a "Clovis-lite" or whatever, that is driving the continuing, but lingering, animus toward the White Sands footprints.

Frankly, an older "entrada" also allows for multiple entradas. We have the post-Clovis-theory traditional American Indian one, pushed back, then the later Na-Dene one, then the later yet Inuit-Aleut one. If the original entrada is set 25K years before present, that allows room for multiple "American Indian" entradas. We have evidence for that with Homo sapiens' attempts to enter Europe, after all.

==

The newest evidence that Neanderthals were more like Homo sapiens than once thought? Their hunting skill, refuting earlier ideas:

An academic paper published on Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports proposes that our long-extinct ancestors not only were the first humans to kill and butcher large predators, but that they also used the hides for cultural purposes and perhaps even dressed in them.

Interesting.

Neanderthals are now thought to have been more sophisticated and multitalented than imagined. Evidence is mounting that they used a complex language and even, considering the ritual interment of their dead, some form of spirituality. They made sticky pitch to secure their spear points by heating birch bark; stalked bison, wild cattle and straight-tusked elephants, and ambushed hibernating cave bears as the animals woke from their annual slumber.

And, per the new story, add cave lions to the hunting targets.

==

Heidelberg Man or similar ancestor was creating wood structures nearly 500,000 years ago.

Another name for "American Indian" is "person"

I've long said here, and even more on my other blog, that being an atheist is no guarantor of moral or intellectual superiority to the rest of humankind, and occasionally said the same about being a scientific skeptic.

Well, the same is true of being an American Indian. From potlatch tribes of the US Pacific Northwest killing slaves on the flames as part of potlatch destruction events, through Aztecs ripping out bleeding human hearts, and on to today's Ute's not only drilling for but refining oil, being an American Indian is no guarantor of being humanistic or environmentalist.

Latest proof on not being humanist? A tribe in Wisconsin, in a case before the Supreme Court, loan-sharking people with higher interest rates (and apparently tougher dunning) than the state of Wisconsin allows, and wanting exemption from Wisconsin laws as a sovereign nation. Update: SCOTUS'  hearing is here.

Happy Indigenous People's Day

Some thoughts here, about the reality of American Indian lives, via The Conversation.

At the same time? More thoughts here, here, and here, largely focusing on High Country News' "wrongful wokeness" about American Indians, as a reminder that they're human beings who put their pants on one leg at a time, like anybody else.

Potlatch slavery and culture murders and Aztec sacrifices of still-beating hearts aside (yes, all true), racism, tribalism (pun intended), less than perfect environmentalism, are all parts of being an American Indian. 

As for the "native land" of the top link? WHOSE native land? The Sioux were just moving west of the Missouri River in numbers the same time as Lewis and Clark were going up it, having been booted out of Wisconsin by the Ojibwa / Chippewa. The Navajo? The western half of the Arizona part of their reservation and the Utah sliver weren't occupied by them until the 1800s, either. Those are just two of many examples. Do the Sioux want to "neutralize" the Black Hills or even give it to the Shoshone or Arapaho? Do the Navajos want to give land back to the Utes?

There's also a petard-hoisting here. Most American Indians stress that they didn't believe in the past in individual land ownership. True enough. For that matter, if we're using the word "ownership," they didn't believe in tribal land ownership, either. Control? Yes. Ownership, in the "rule of law" sense or even a rough equivalent? No.

Oh, and no, and contra what a non-skeptical leftist like James Loewen says, the Iroquois weren't behind the U.S. Constitution and Chief Seattle didn't say that.

Reality, on this one? Per this extensive and pretty exhaustive piece, the Iroquois Confederation probably had somewhere between a modest and moderate influence on the Articles of Confederation. It almost certainly had very little influence on the Constitution — and that lack of influence, given the reality, not the legend, of the Iroquois Confederation, is pretty much for the good, not the bad, overall. Given that the Iroquois leaders of the Grand Sachem under the Great Law were all hereditary, that's one good reason to be grateful for the lack of influence.

The Conversation, via Pocket, posted wrongfully woke nuttery, from academics, a week ago. Here's my Twitter thread start.

#WrongfullyWoke for #IndigenousPeoplesDay is problematic at best, false at worst, per this piece, which has 2 big wrongs 1/x https://t.co/8WbfvIM4sC
1. It implies static locations for Indian tribes.
2. It implies land ownership, when tribes say their individual members reject it

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 12, 2021

And carry on. You don't need the whole thread, but I'll give you one more tweet:

Details of what Elisa J. Sobo, Michael Lambert, Valerie Lambert get wrong, re pt 1:
Are you going to ask the Ojibwa to do a land acknowledgement ceremony for the Sioux? The Navajo for the Ute? The Comanche for the Apache? The Iroquois for tribes they dispossessed? 2c/x

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 12, 2021

There you go. That deals with the static locations and hints at the land ownership issue.

National Public Lands Day, High Country News woke version

National Public Lands Day is a good day for celebrating our public lands, even though Ken Burns was wrong and they're NOT "America's greatest idea" or that close, and even though, as Olympic National Park shows, as I blogged earlier today, the Park Service looks good only when compared with the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife Service. I forgot that six years, ago, in the run-up to the NPS centennial, I had tackled various other shortcomings of the Park Service.

So, it's nice of High Country News to have staffers reminisce about access to public lands.

Or, when I clicked the link, I found out it was "nice."

Two problems with noting the American Indians who once had possession of the land.

First, as Al Runte noted years ago, and I blogged about, being American Indian is no guarantor of being a good environmentalist.

Second, the American Indians in possessions of the land at the time the U.S. government made treaties with them, then broke them, weren't always the possessors. In fact, in the case of Comb Ridge, it was NEVER part of any Navajo Reservation, not the main part and best known part in Utah, vs the southern tip in Aridzona. It's arguably got a better claim from Utes. And Sarah Tory should know that, and she specifically mentions the Utah portion.

Runte also tackled that, quoting T.H. Watkins:

In short, if compensation in 1974 was the proper policy, why limit it to people of European descent? For example, Watkins asked: “If the descendants of nineteenth-century white Americans have a moral obligation to the descendants of nineteenth-century Navajos, do not the Navajos have a similar obligation to the descendents of the Pueblo Indians, whom they forced from their lands in the thirteenth century? If white Americans have a moral obligation to the Chippewas (or Ojibways), do not the Chippewas have a moral obligation to the Lakota Sioux, whose lands they appropriated by warfare in the seventeenth century? If white Americans have a moral obligation to the Blackfeet, do not the Blackfeet have a moral obligation to the Shoshoni, who were driven out of their hunting territory by the Blackfeet in the seventeenth century? If white Americans have a moral obligation to the Cherokees, do not the Cherokees have a moral obligation to the Shawnees, whom they vanquished in the early nineteenth century in a war over which tribe would have a monopoly selling Indian slaves to the South?”

There you go.

I think this is about Reason No. 116 why I haven't, and won't, renew an HCN subscription that's been lapsed for years. (This also is not the first time it's gotten American Indian land issues wrong.)

Sidebar: I do NOT agree with everything Runte writes at National Parks Traveler and elsewhere about preservation in the modern U.S. in general and the modern NPS in particular. I do NOT want light rail, let alone light rail run by traditional rail companies, in the parks, contra his plea. Instead, I want more buses at sites that already have them, with smaller buses running more frequent routes, and buses at places that don't already have them, and I want these buses to be all-electric. No more propane buses. His critics are right that his idea almost certainly means "more development." They're also right about the worrisomeness of him first writing that piece for a "more development in the parks" site. Things like that undercut some of his other insights and make them look politically motivated.

The noble American Indian vs COVID — reality vs myth

Two new pieces, one from Native News Online and the other from High Country News, both peddle myths that all we have to do is look to American Indians of the past to get past the novel coronavirus.

First, Native News Online. It claims that American Indians, unlike Dan Patrick, Glenn Beck and other wingnuts, would never sacrifice elders for the economy.

Really?

(First really is that Chief Seattle didn't say that.)

So, the Inuit leaving elders on ice floes to die when they couldn't keep up? It wasn't common, contra the semi-legend that thinks it was, but, especially in bad times, like famines, yes, it really happened. More here. In other cases, they were knifed or walled into igloos, not abandoned on the ice. And, it's not just Inuit; other cultures have practiced senicide of various sorts around the world at various times.

Derp.

Now, High Country News. Starting here:

Indigenous peoples who have lived sustainably in the same territories for thousands of years have important knowledge systems that can productively intervene in the destructive social structures currently orchestrating our downfall.

No, most American Indians didn't stay in the same place for thousands of years. They might, or might not, have stayed in the same region. Even that, though, was usually only for hundreds of years. The Navajo and Apache, exactly whenever they migrated from Canada, arrived at the eastern edge of the greater Southwest about 1350 CE. I reject some eccentrics in the world of archaeology who claim to have solid evidence of the Navajos not only in the area earlier, but west of the Rockies a century or so earlier. Even that, though, would be less than 1,000 years ago and certainly not "thousands."

The Sioux and "their" sacred Black Hills? They only moved west of the Missouri in numbers 200 or so years ago, the same time Lewis and Clark were going up the river. And, they only moved because the Ojibwa kicked them out of Wisconsin.

Within a region? The Anasazi abandoned most their villages every 35 or so years. They had to. They had hunted out the land of meat that supplemented their farming, and at least as much, had probably winnowed thin plants they added to their diets as the gathering half of hunter-gatherer work. Anthropologists and archaeologists today know that the corn-beans-squash farming trio alone didn't, and couldn't, sustain the Anasazi.

Colossal population growth has happened outside of "the West."

And, let's get to brass tacks. Like:

Indigenous societies, on the other hand, are based on worldviews where human needs are balanced with the needs of other life forms.

Really? So those mastodons and mammoths just disappeared on their own 10,000 years ago? That arroyo cutting in Chaco and elsewhere happened by magic? Or, per a claim on HCN's Facebook page, those mastodon exterminators weren't American Indians? Or, did the needs of mastodon and mammoth suddenly run dry?

And, hey, they were noble savages, but also scientists!

When the integrity of an ecosystem is guarded, the integrity and very existence of human communities are guarded as well. 

American Indians of "yore" didn't know about "ecosystems," let alone guard them. (Neither did other cultures of centuries or millennia ago, of course, including those of Europe.) "Ecosystem" understanding didn't come until modern science development. Tis true that said sciences have exploited American Indians just like pioneers and missionaries. But, scientists have generally (but not perfectly) moved beyond that, and certainly more than uninformed descendants of pioneers and missionaries.

You want more? Slavery of course existed back then. And, sometimes (though not as much as with Euro-Americans) it was even hereditary. Slaves, as property and therefore a measure of wealth, were reportedly even killed at potlaches. Here's a Google search.

And here's T.H. Watkins, being blunt about the issue of noble Indians today in general.

As for capitalism? The Spaniards, and other Europeans, were indeed gold-crazed. But, the Aztec and Inca weren't totally innocent in the first place, were they? And, those potlaches were around before the first Spaniard or Englishman explored today's Washington State and British Columbia.

American Indians, or First Nations if you're up in Canada, weren't and aren't dirt. But, they weren't and aren't Rousselian noble savages, or New Agey saints, either. That's true whether you're a modern Anglo or a modern American Indian. (Oh, American Indians, like any people, can be racist, too.)

It's not just the folks above. By name, this is part of why I deblogrolled Wrong Kind of Green.

Things like this are why I keep the word "skeptical" in front of "leftist" on my blog header and elsewhere. Yes, today, wingnuts will exploit some of this. But, New Agers will exploit the backlash for various versions of social and social media shaming as exemplified by the two pieces.

Again, let's treat American Indians as people — the good, the bad and the ugly. And, that applies to American Indians themselves. I blocked one Canadian First Nationer over this issue at HCN's Facebook page.

And, yes, it matters today, as I said in reply to another commenter on that T.H. Watkins link. It matters for exactly these reasons.

Sadly, the week before, HCN published this piece explicitly about not misrepresenting American Indian knowledge during the coronavirus pandemic.

That, in turn, shows larger unevenness in recent years in editorial management. By that, I'm talking about the overall tone or tenor becoming more and more fuzzy, not copy editing or style issues.

It's not just HCN. A number of political journals have this problem more and more. Jacobin can be all over the place, for example. But, this is another of the effects of the Internet, in my opinion. Lack of focus plus an overly expanded editorial mission killed Pacific Standard, in my opinion.

Real Cherokees vs Elizabeth Warren, VERSUS Black Cherokees vs. Real Cherokees

I'd been threatening to do this on Twitter since Wednesday morning, when the issue of Warren and her American Indian false moves, plural popped up.

I've blogged and Tweeted about Warren plenty, from the exposure of her claims to American Indian ancestry to the stupidity of her doing a DNA test, then over-interpreting it while publicizing it, and all sorts of things in between.

But, I'd also referenced, on Twitter, black Cherokees from time to time.

And now, with Oklahoma's primary coming up on Tuesday, and folks behind a Medium site called "ewarrenisnotcherokee" writing her an open letter about these issues, it's time to fire back.

Since I'm a deliberate contrarian (I'm also at times a troll on Twitter, but columns like this are deliberate contrarian stuff, not trollery), this is right up my alley.

That's in part because the "real Cherokees" behind some of this stuff hoist themselves by their own petard, and most of them know the history they're swimming upstream against when they do this.

Let's start here:

While the average American thinks of Native Americans as a racial category, we are actually political groups.

So, that means you can't exclude black Cherokees on blood quantum grounds. At least not logically and non-hypocritically.

What? What? What? you may be telling yourself. Who are these "black Cherokees" and why have they been excluded from anything and why can't they be?

Well, Wikipedia calls it the "Cherokee freedmen controversy." I'll give you the nickel version.

Slave cabin kitchen, Chief Vann House.

The Cherokees, like others of the white-labeled "Five Civilized Tribes," practiced chattel slavery of Africans, just as did whites. (Set aside that many American Indian tribes, including the Cherokees, practiced other types of slavery before the Columbian contact. It was different in large part because slave status was not generally heritable.)

Chief Vann, the owner of the slaves who lived in that cabin, owned more than 100 by the year 1800. That put him in the top 10 percent of all slaveowners in the U.S. Son Joseph Vann had more than 200.

This also led to things like slave codes in Indian Territory and above all, in Cherokee lands there, just as in southern states. HNN has the details.

Of course, after 1865, this was illegal. These tribes had fought as co-belligerents with the Confederacy. Post-Civil War treaties generally required them to give their freed slaves tribal citizenship.

Starting in the 1980s, the Cherokee, along with Creek and Seminole, started tightening tribal rolls. See more here for "Black Indians" in general. (Specifically, in 1983, Black Cherokees lost voting rights because they were "not Cherokee by blood.")

The hypocrisy grows deeper with the Cherokees, because the efforts to exclude the freedmen used blood quantum as a tool. This process was completed under the (great, or "great") Chief Wilma Mankiller.

In a long and messy legal process with multiple parts that eventually moved from the Cherokee court system to the federal court system, the federal judiciary eventually restored freedmen's citizenship.

Here's my analogy, and where we're going to hear those petards further.

If the Cherokee (and other tribes) are sovereign nations, it is still and nonetheless under a certain aegis of the federal government. That would include the Fourteenth Amendment. As black slaves, sub specie slavo, were members of the Cherokee Nation, I think a correct extension of the Fourteenth Amendment supports the federal court ruling. Wiki also notes that the 1866 agreements, if the Cherokee want to play up the sovereign nation angle, have treaty status and there's an argument to be made that they can't be unilaterally broken. (OTOH, the USofA did just that regularly.)

Beyond that, as Wiki also notes, the Cherokee have willingly incorporated other people, whether individuals or groups, in the past.

This particular issue also seems to be fueling intra-Cherokee conflect between the Cherokee Nation, incorporated after people of the tribe got back full tribal election rights, and the old United Keetoowah Band. The UKB does use, and require, a blood quantum (one-quarter) but, at the same time, offers honorary associate memberships. And, to square the circle, a number of signatories of the open letter specifically identify as UKB members.

Cherokee Chief John Ross,
not a Cherokee if one
follows UKB blood quantum.

And, to throw the circle into total disorder, famed principal Chief John Ross wouldn't meet the one-quarter blood quantum.

In all of this, as some Cherokees also admit, there's a certain amount of racism. What? Racism by Indians? Yes, and click that "black Indians" link above for more, and it exists among Indian tribes who never had slaves, either.

And, given that the court ruling was just six years ago and final acceptance just three years ago, this is still an open issue.

So, I challenge every signatory of that letter to declare his or her personal stance on the Cherokee freedmen issue. That goes double for any hypocrite signatories identifying as UKB.

I've already asked one directly. On Twitter earlier, I responded to a tweet from a friend who had responded to Rebecca Nagle, a signatory of that letter:

Rebecca Nagle is a real Cherokee my dude. Why should she wait to hold politicians accountable?

— Dave Schwab 🌻 (@FreeDaveSchwab) February 26, 2020

Having since, via Memeorandum, seen that letter, I went back to the Tweet, rechecked the name, and of course, did a search down the page on Medium and found her name.

So, I Tweeted back to her, Dave and the other two:

That said, having also seen that letter on Medium, I'm just going to be direct and ask Rebecca what she thinks about:
1. Black Cherokees;
2. The Cherokee Nation's treatment of them.

— I'll Be Biden Time in South Carolina primary 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 26, 2020

And, I'll either have a response or not. As of the time this went live, I did not.

Yeah, Twitter's low signal-to-noise ratio means one shouldn't read too much into it, if Nagle doesn't respond.

On the other hand, I'm not just tagging her, I'm responding to part of a dialogue. 

So? If she doesn't say anything? Per the old proverb: "Silence gives assent."

Meanwhile, another signee, Santee Dakota Kim TallBear, writes a piece about this for High Country News. Hypocrisy from her for not mentioning the black Cherokees, and what I will only take as willful ignorance from HCN, and not the first time from it on identity politics. This one, with Instagram Influencers in the great, capitalist-invested outdoors, claiming they were being picked on because racism, not capitalism, was a doozy. (And HCN has never pulled back on it.)

Per this New Scientist profile piece about her, it appears the Santee, like the UKB Cherokee, use a blood quantum.

So, both among the Santee and among many Cherokee, we gots us a bunch of fricking hypocrisy.

I want to get back to pre-Contact versions of American Indian slavery, which continued post-Contact. In many such cases, slaves were eventually adopted into the tribe. Which means, of course, no blood quantum for the new adoptee.

I don't agree with Dawes-type termination, but all of this indicates that the federal government would be best behooved by having a uniform policy, not just on tribal membership, but on many other things, with all tribes/nations.

It's true that tribes have had to jump through hoops at times with the federal government, as the modern Cherokee Nation essentially replacing the UKB shows. Having grown up in the Southwest, I know this. That said, in a general sense, the feds have not forced specific methods of tribal membership determination on particular tribes except in cases like this where other legal issues were involved. Nor did Southerners, whether individuals or state governments, force the Cherokee or others of the "civilized tribes," whether qua tribes or qua individuals, to adopt chattel slavery in addition to older non-heritable versions of slavery.

Once again, I agree that fictitious appropriation of American Indian history — whether by Elizabeth Warren or someone else, and Cherokees or another tribe involved — is a real problem.

But, we need to talk about the actual forms of such history, not whitewashed or New Agey versions of such.

And, as for the racism? It's real. Growing up next to the Big Rez, I know plenty a Navajo expressed anti-black comments.

As for HCN? This is just another log on the smouldering fire of why I let my subscription lapse and have no current plans to renew it.

Imagine no American Indians

Per a Quora question about the most important single issue in "American" history, the header says what this is about.

Imagine a "New World" that would indeed be new by, as well as for, Euro-Americans because nobody came here from Siberia 20,000 or more years ago.

Think of how different the New World is with no pre-European population. (I’m setting aside whether or not Polynesians sailed to South America; if they did, it seems unlikely they left permanent genetic descent, and besides possibly bringing the sweet potato [history still disputed], left little cultural descent.)

First, a bunch of charismatic megafauna would have stayed alive, such as larger-sized bison, Columbian mammoth, New World camels and maybe even saber-toothed cats, among others.

Now, humans.

Erik the Red left Greenland mainly because of the end of the Medieval Warm Period, but early Inuit helped speed him along. Would he have stayed otherwise? Maybe.

Leif was sped off by people who were likely Algonquin-speaking Indians as well as climate, just like Erik, plus being that much further from Europe and European supplies. (As far as we can tell, neither Norse settlement made their own iron.)

Probably climate would have driven both away.

So, Columbus would have come to an unpopulated world. Without the help of Caribbean natives, he would have found no gold.

Would he have made a second trip? Unlikely.

So, next? Pedro Cabral gets blown off course just as in reality. Do the Portuguese stay with no American Indians? If so, do the Spanish follow? Are the French and English then likely to follow?

With no easy New World gold or silver and nobody to tell them where to look, no natives to enslave, and less reason to enslave Africans, the New World is populated and developed but slowly.

And, without American Indian crops? No corn, tomatoes, chiles or potatoes, among other things, in the Old World. No Irish peasantry because of no potatoes. Etc. etc.

===

Contra Brains, and some people from the SJW world, there's no reason to be so PC as to cross out "American Indians and replace that with "Indigenous Americans."A plurality of the people prefer American Indian, including activists like Russell Means, a former leader of the ... American Indian Movement. Indigenous American is preferred by a few, though we'll see if that catches on. "Native American" has been seen as white-foisted by many American Indians, among other things.

That all said? With an individual, if one knows their tribal heritage, use that reference.

An American analogy to Israel and Palestine

Let us say that the United States Government admitted the error of its ways on the Black Hills.

Let us ALSO say, though, that it knew the Sioux were no newer to the Black Hills than Lewis and Clark going up the Missouri.

So, it gave joint custody to the Sioux (Lakota, Dakota) and the Crow.

Let us say that the US Government kept a form of trusteeship for a few years of transition.

Let us then say that this was not acceptable to the Sioux. That Sioux leader Crazy Bull, considered a terrorist by the US Government, put a bomb in the Roosevelt Inn. The government expedited its pullout.

After the Sioux attacked the Crow, let us say that the Arapaho, Shoshone and Pawnee rallied to the side of the Crow. And that the, say, Arapaho eventually annexed the Crow land.

Twenty years later, the Arapaho, after first thinking better, joined the Shoshone, Pawnee and Winnebagos in a new war against the Sioux. And lost the Crow lands to the Sioux.

Fifty years later, the Crow were fighting for their independence from the Sioux.

Let us then say that some Sioux accused all non-Sioux and non-Crow of Crow-splaining.

That's where we're at.

For those who don't get it, substitute Great Britain and League of Nations Palestine mandate for the US and work forward.

Hypercapitalism, Yosemite, the National Park Service and lawsuits

Early this month, I blogged about how Yosemite National Park needs to get "greener," noting specific things like lack of modern water facilities, no solar panels on buildings, etc. This is a hit-and-miss issue, as I noted; Zion, for example, is an exemplar of sorts within the whole National Park Service.

Speaking of ....

Yosesmite's parent was sued two months ago by the Delaware North concessionnaire company.

Why?

(It) claims it was owed big-time for its intellectual property investments at Yosemite. These include the historic Ahwahnee hotel, Curry Village and Badger Pass, names for which the company holds trademarks. 

 Formally known as DNC Parks and Resorts at Yosemite Inc., the Delaware North subsidiary argues that the government mishandled the intellectual property question, breached a contract and likely cost the company its shot at keeping the Yosemite business.

Now, regular readers know that I reject over-the-top claims of “privilege.”

But, there are real issues of privilege, or to put it another way, in this case, cultural appropriation.

Let's look at this more.

To be frank?

It's bullshit that DNC claims it owns name like "Ahwahnee" unless it can prove that this is an uninterrupted chain of custody from builder of hotel and that this is a made-up name by that person.

Rather, since it's an actual American Indian word, and an everyday one, the trademark to me seems questionable; and if there's any suing, the Yokuts should sue DNC, which I would love to see.

The other names? 

Given that Badger Pass Ski Area existed before DNC took it over, and that "Badger Pass" itself is a generic name for a place name, I'm not sure how that's trademarkable, even if some court granted it. That said, if it WAS trademarkable and the NPS has been dumb enough here and elsewhere, to give vendors inside national parks such trademarks, rather than retaining ultimate rights itself, we have another problem, Houston.

Let's not have #ColumbusDay OR #IndigenousPeoplesDay

I personally view the trend of seemingly politically correct cities replacing the former with the latter.

First, as we push back the date of first human migration to the Americas, it's clear that it came in multiple waves.

Therefore, the first "indigenous people" were either assimilated or killed off by later migrants. Yes, said later migrants didn't have Columbus' and other Europeans' advantages of "Guns, Germs and Steel," but, they still killed off predecessors in some cases. The story, the actual truth, about Kennewick Man is a good illustration.

Other pre-Columbian myths, per the likes of "1491," also aren't quite so true. (Charles Mann shoots down a few post-Columbian myths in "1493."

The ancient Americas weren't a pristine ecological Eden, for example. Fire and other tools were used to extensively manage lands, to help drive and capture deer and other game, and more. That's apart from the times when American Indians were being environmentally wasteful or leaving trash laying around themselves.

Columbus and post-Columbians enslaving Indians? They enslaved each other both before and after 1492.

Deliberate genocide? No, not by Columbus. As far as claims by others, like Ward Churchill, they've been almost entirely refuted. Churchill himself has told those whoppers as part of a whole pack of PC lies about American Indians vs. Euro-Americans. Nor was European Christianity a cause of genocide; yes, padres as well as soldiers overworked Indians even after the Spanish Crown put an end to their enslavement; I shot that down as part of shooting down a broader bit of Gnu Atheist nonsense that religion was in general genocidal. (Besides, per the below, it's not always and only Western monotheism that can be religiously troubling.)

The Columbian Contact, because of the "germs" part of Diamond's book, was tragedy-laden from the start. And, there were a number of individual bad actors. But, it wasn't a systemic genocide. And, because issues of intent aren't always clear, and sometimes didn't exist, I prefer not to use the word "genocide." There's a difference between manslaughter and murder, even if the manslaughter is somewhat voluntary, and definitely if it's not. The same should apply to genocide, establishing it as mass murder for particular religious, ethnic, or similar reasons, rather than mass manslaughters.

As for the seven or eight, or innumerated, myths about Columbus? Not all of the refudiations of the myths are themselves correct. And, the refudiations that depend on Howard Zinn depend on Zinn at his non-academic worst, although he did have a fair amount correct.

Tackling some of this, off that list of eight.
1. Yes, Columbus did that
2. Not true, unless you're parochial enough to be using "America" for the "United States." Columbus was on mainland South America in his third voyage. If you are that parochial, then you've got a PC petard hoisting. If you're restricting yourself to his first voyage, why did you say "not ever"? More on Columbus' voyages from Wiki.
3. No, Columbus' own language showed he did not portray natives badly, at least not initially, other than the cannibals allegation
4. Not all of Columbus' men were; blanket statements aren't accepted here. And, that some, some Indians were rapists and murderers, too.
5. Columbus' original slaving action was for slave resale, not for gold miners. And, he certainly didn't kill 250,000 for gold. Disease, etc., along with overwork did that, but Columbus didn't kill 250,000.
6/7 True. Again, Indians did
8. Pardoned, but not restored to all pre-arrest rights, which led to his sons later legally battling the Spanish throne.

Otherwise? Cannibalism, infanticide and whatever else you want to name: Europeans, Asians and Africans from the Old World, and Amerinds from the New, committed them all alike. Rape? Murder? Ditto. So, even if some of Columbus' men were some of these things, so were some indigenous peoples. And, try as much as some PC types will, it still appears that syphilis was an import from the New World to the Old, not the other way around.

Dogs of war had been used by Europeans against other Europeans. (And, occasionally, Asians against other Asians.) Spaniards, in places like the Battle of Toro, cut each others' hands off.

Even in early contact days, while the Caribbean natives were largely peaceful, that wasn't true elsewhere. Don't forget that Cortes' conquest of Mexico was helped by vassals of the Aztecs revolting against them. (Aztecs who committed living human sacrifices by ripping still-beating hearts out of people's chests.)

I "get" that this isn't about Columbus, but about Euro-Americans, and for some, Christianity, in the New World. But, again, this wasn't a genocide. Also, there's been plenty of non-European "bad actors," and non-Christian ones. Think Stalin and Hitler among the non-Christian ones. (Uninformed comments about "Stalin went to seminary" will not be posted.) Think Jinggis Khan, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and many others on the former. Or, American Indians not named.

Speaking of, for the alleged barbarity of Christianity as a religion vs. Native American "spirituality" and alleged nobility?

Go stick skewers under your breast muscles while getting someone else to lacerate your skin. Have that other person tie the skewers to the top of a pole outside in the summer. Then, go dance the Sun Dance until you pass out and the skewers rip through your body. Or self-sacrifice your own heart to the gods of the Aztecs.

Then get back to me about the nobility of American Indian "spirituality," OK?

If you're a PC liberal, or just someone trying to think globally while accepting the muddled reality of humanity, instead of Indigeneous Peoples' Day OR Columbus Day, push for Oct. 24 to be a U.S. holiday.

In case you're drawing a blank? United Nations Day.

We can kill Columbus Day, NOT replace it with a PC alternative, get some PC liberals to think outside America and decommercialize Halloween, all in one fell swoop.

Or, if that's too much, do like Latin American countries on Columbus Day and have something like "La Raza Day," celebrating the good, the bad and the ugly of both cultures, since both had all of that, and both exchanged all three with the other.

Anyway, this "Columbus" = "devil" nonsense is a good exemplar of why I call myself a skeptical left-liberal. Columbus wasn't perfect. He wasn't close. It's arguable as to how much more bad than good he was, whether in specific dealings with Indians, his gubernatorial abilities, his relations with the Spanish crown, or his actual navigation skills aside, his broader sailing mindset.

But, he wasn't the devil. And, while the original Caribbean contact natives were generally peaceful, indigenous Americans in general weren't angels. And, I don't want to replace one set of myths with another.

Dear Obama: Really want to do good by visiting a federal prison?

Your trip to the El Reno, Oklahoma, prison is nice, but ...

If you want to go "long," beyond battling the worst effects of the War on Drugs (and addressing federal laws on marijuana might be better than a PR trip courtesy of Vice, anyway)

Go to the Coleman Unit in Florida.

Address what the early 1970s version of the National Security State you love so much today did wrong then with COINTELPRO.

And free Leonard Peltier.


Peltier's own artwork is funding his release efforts.

For more on why Peltier should be freed, and how COINTELPRO arguably sabotaged the American Indian Movement more than any other vehicle of the 1960s and early 1970s civil rights movement, "The Unquiet Grave" is a must read. Peter Matthiessen's classic "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse" is good, but, as my review of it notes, he sometimes looks at AIM's leadership through rose-colored glasses.

Otherwise, your actions right now continue to be symbolic. You've done very few pardons, and you blame a Bush holdover for this, even though you took more than five years to replace him. And, your commutations are limited to only first-time nonviolent offenders.

Beyond that, freeing Peltier might continue the discussion on improve relations between different tribes and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Wanted: Your new name for the #Redskins

For illustrative purposes only. As content on blogs is generally
considered opinion, Dan Snyder & the Washington Redskins
have no enforceable authority for this to be removed. Ditto if
I Photoshopped a "Washington Palefaces" helmet, etc.

Now that Danny Boy Snyder and the Washington Redskins have lost a suit in the U.S. Patent Office — a ruling that, if upheld, means all of his team's trademarks of the "Redskins" are null and void — maybe the name will be changed to something else.

The team thinks it will win that appeal:

"We are confident we will prevail once again, and that the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board's divided ruling will be overturned on appeal," team attorney Robert Raskopf said in a statement. "This case is no different than an earlier case, where the Board cancelled the Redskins' trademark registrations, and where a federal district court disagreed and reversed the Board."

However, the early case's overturning was on a technicality, not "merits." The legal concept is known as "laches." That technicality doesn't seem to be an issue in the new suit, according to a good overview by Vox. Actually, since I looked on Wiki, per the link for "laches," it could still apply, in a vacuum. As for the "you weren't offended enough" part of the district court's ruling in 2004, on the 1999 case? In the real world, the cultural and social landscape in the US on such issues has changed a lot in 15 years. And, the plaintiffs have a lot more evidence to present this time.

Given the likelihood the ruling sticks this time, and the way the mouth-breathers are already populating sports websites' discussion of this issue, I'm lining up suggested name changes.

No. 1?
"Washington Wingnuts."  It even has alliteration. Wouldn't make for the best logo, though.

No. 2?
"Washington Palefaces." It's got the petard-hoisting angle. Helmet would have a pasty-faced Snyder as logo, mayhaps.

No. 3?
"Washington Rednecks." Keeps the "red" in the name, hoists the petard higher than the "Palefaces" does. Would satisfy wingnuts because a stereotypical picture of one of their own would be the new logo.

No. 4? 
"Washington Gasbags." Snyder could put Rush Limbaugh on the helmets. Or Glenn Beck, if he wanted a younger angle.

No. 5?
"Washington Lobbyists." After all, who's the biggest winner in DC? Dollar bill on helmets presages the NFL eventually having NASCAR-style unis.

No. 6?
"Washington Snyders." Danny Boy's wet dream comes true.

No. 7?
"Washington Hymies." The offensiveness issue punches Snyder right in the personal nut sack.

Anyway, if you've got anything else, write it in.

I'll even accept comments from wingnuts just for the fun of rejecting them like a weak Dwyane Wade layup.

As for what this ruling would mean when upheld? Other people could not only sell items with a straight-up Redskins logo without violating copyright. They could sell stuff with something like my "No" slash through it, or worse. And, Danny Boy, since "Redskins" would no longer be trademarked, couldn't win a copyright suit OR a product disparagement suit. 

That said, in a good explainer, near the bottom, Sports on Earth links Forbes to say that Danny Boy could sue under state laws or common law statutes. State courts in non-mouthbreathing areas would surely rule against him, though,  unless a state law very, very explicitly compelled a ruling otherwise.

As for what's at stake financially?

A quick teh Google says, without the Dallas Cowboys counted separately, since Jethro Jerry Jones finagled himself out of revenue sharing, that the NFL sold $2 billion-with-a-B of merchandise in 2010. Since the Redskins are fairly popular, I'll divide by 30 rather than 32, and round up just slightly. That's $67 million gross in Redskins money; at a 10 percent profit for licensing fees, that's $6.7 million, as a guesstimate. Now, that said, would they lose all of that? No, Danny Boy would, if he wants to keep fighting, stamp an "Authorized Washington Redskins™ logo on products that were still paying him for the branding, and appeal to mouthbreathers to "stick it to liberals" and diehards to buy only "authorized." But, would he lose half of that? I think that's reasonable.

Veterans Day — too bad it's needed this much

True liberals and left-liberals among regular readers of my blog know my feelings on American exceptionalism, and recently, what I've also called Texas exceptionalism (and since then, learned that similar thought runs even among academic historians).

Well, it should be no surprise that this spills over to Veterans Day. Most of the wars the United States has fought have been unnecessary at best and imperialist at worst.

That starts, of course, with our various wars against Indian tribes. We could have been like Tsarist Russia versus its Siberian aborigines, and simply killed people without the "benefit" of first making treaties then breaking them. That, at least, would have been honest.

Mexican War: Sorry, Texas exceptionalists, but when Tejas was a province of Spain, then of Mexico, its normal boundary was the Nueces, not the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo del Norte. A Congressman named "Spotty" Lincoln was right about President Polk wanting, and pushing for, and conniving for, this war when Mexico refused to sell California, and using Texas issues as the cornerstone of his conniving. Also, El Paso never was a part of old Tejas, either.

Spanish-American War: President McKinley is on record before the 1896 election as wanting the Philippines. Spain requested a third-party investigation of the Maine explosion, arbitration, etc., Nope. We then had a three year imperialist war in those newly-American Philippines after the Spanish-American War itself was done.

World War I: President Wilson was a Britain-leaner far before April 4, 1917. And, the British blockade by extension (blockading Sweden, Denmark, etc., to no more than pre-1914 foodstuffs so they couldn't trans-ship to Germany) was just as illegal under international law as was German submarine warfare. We should have let both sides beat themselves senseless.

Vietnam: "Old hands" in the State Department knew the 2,000 years of Vietnamese-Chinese animosity, and knew that the domino theory was dumb on that account alone.

The Gulf War: I still believe April Glaspie that we set up Saddam Hussein in some way, egging him on in invading Kuwait. Even if we didn't, we have no doorknob-guaranteed right to cheap oil.

There was only one war that we really "underfought" in a sense. That's the Civil War, or actually, Reconstruction. Instead of 20,000 troops in the South for a decade, we should have had 200,000 for a generation, at least.

That said, it's fun to watch and hear "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" sung at Veterans Day and Memorial Day events in the South, since it was a Union-based Civil War song, as stanza 2 makes abundantly clear.

And, for Christians who love to selectively quote Romans 8, you might want to ponder further the issue of "obedience to the governing authorities" in light of both the Revolutionary War and Obamacare. That's you, dominionist Ted Cruz.

==

Update: I totally agree with this Salon piece.

Most of our "freedoms" are constitutional ones, not from foreign enemies. True, a foreign enemy might want to overthrow them, but, outside of war, the Center for Constitutional Rights, or the ACLU (second to the CCR in my book for the past several years) defends those freedoms more than the military. Also agreed that the fusion of sports and "Patriotism(TM)" pretty much makes me ill. 

California: running out of water as seen from space

California water districts appear (for "good" selfish reasons) loth to accept what a pair of satellites is showing: the state is running low on groundwater.

How bad is it? Over the 2003-2010 period, California drew down nearly enough groundwater to fill Lake Mead, and I'll assume that's full-capacity, pre-bathtub-ring Lake Mead.

Looking at the map, some areas in the southwestern part of the Central Valley, around Tulare, look like they don't have a lot of life left.

That said, I wish the Times had produced a similar map for the Ogallala Aquifer. I doubt West Texans would totally wake up, even then, to the severity of water issues, but maybe some would.

Where data has been presented, though, and not just in California, it's been resisted:

In other areas of the world, like northern India, the novelty of the gravitational measurements — and perhaps the story they tell — has led to pushback, scientists say. ...

John Wahr, a geophysicist at the University of Colorado and his colleague Sean Swenson faced opposition for a study on aquifer depletion in northern India. As Dr. Swenson explained, “When in a place like India you say, ‘We’re doing something that is unsustainable and needs to change,’ well, people resist change. Change is expensive.”

In places on high-tension, water-focused borders, like India-Pakistan, Israel-Palestine-Jordan-Syria and such, this is understandable in a way, but still lamentable.

An interesting sidebar is that the satellites were launched from Russia and some of their data would have been considered classified before the end of the Cold War. A peace dividend!

GOP gets one right in DC

The House of Representatives' Natural Resources Committee will now have a newly formed subcommittee on Indian and Alaska Native Affairs. More details here. And, yeah, Don Young won't be bad as a chairman.

Obama - Indian lover or Indian giver?

Don't believe all the rhetoric about President Obama's recent "Indian summit." His pledge to never forget Native Americans only applies to federally recognized tribes. If you ain't one of those, and can't get through the federal government's byzantine hoops (hoops that the Obama Administration has given no indication it plans on making easier), you're still just as SOL as before.

Official federal nonrecognition is probably most common in California, I am guessing, followed by New England, but it happens all over the country. And, no, it's not just about the right to build an Indian casino. It covers Indian Health Service issues and much more, such as issues over traditionally sacred sites.

Here's a specific example of a tribe that's hurt by nonrecogition. The Houma of Louisiana are state-recognized but NOT federally, and so can't (so far) get any special help for Deepwater Horizon-related damaged.

And, the idea that the federal government has ultimate power over this? It's a bit like old Southern state governments defining people as black on the one drop of blood rule, except now, it's defining that people aren't Indians.

And, it's "ironic," at least, that America's first black president apparently doesn't have a big problem with this.

RIP Wilma Mankiller — but no hagiography

A great activist for both women's and Native American rights has passed away.

That said, even Wilma Mankiller wasn't perfect.

Descendants of Cherokee-owned black slaves remain excluded from tribal rolls, despite many of them having Cherokee blood, analogous to descendants of white-owned black slaves, and also despite many a Cherokee having a dash — or well more than a dash — of white blood.

Unfortunately, Salon's story says nothing about the struggle of the slave descendants for recognition, nor about Mankiller's role in denying them this status.

The story has its complexities, in that the "white father" government in Washington, after forcing the Cherokee to accept that slavery was over (in 1866! the Cherokee remained holdouts!) also tried to push them into accepting the freedmen as part of the tribe. That said, due to the amount of racial commingling already among the Cherokees, why they resisted this already back then, I don't know, other than to say this is yet more evidence that racism is not confined to Caucasians.