[IPSM] John Wayne and New Orleans Indians

[lcarle at po-box.mcgill.ca]

Can anyone remember the name of the small first nations community outside New
Orleans that was talked about in an e-mail just before this one?  I forwarded
it on to friends, but then deleted it.  need to see it again.

thanks
L

> Why Do They Hate You? John Wayne and New Orleans Indians
>
> By ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ
>
> "The Cavalry is coming!" announced a reporter on the Fox News Channel when
> finally National Guardsmen trooped into downtown New Orleans on the fourth
> day of apocalypse. I said to myself, "There they go again, racist Fox
> News."
>
> I switched channels and found reporters and government officials repeating
> the same phrase, "The Cavalry has arrived." I should not have been
> surprised; during the preceding two days, they had been referring to the
> scene in brown water-lodge New Orleans, not as genocide as I saw it,
> rather "the wild west."
>
> Racism on top of racism, revealing the scaffolding of United States'
> history, its intact structure bared, all the glitter and trappings washed
> away.
>
> New Orleans became "Indian Country," the military term for enemy
> territory. "This place is going to look like Little Somalia," Brigadier
> General Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard's Joint Task
> Force told Army Times, for an article published September 2, 2005. "We're
> going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation
> to get this city under control." The Army Times report could have been
> about Baghdad in stating: "While some fight the insurgency in the city,
> others carry on with rescue and evacuation operations."
>
> For days I have been thinking of Sitting Bull's observation that the
> United States knows how to make everything, but doesn't know how to
> distribute it. He was being generous in attributing the lack of equitable
> distribution of goods to benign ignorance rather than to design. But, he
> knew better. Once in Chicago while performing with Buffalo Bill Cody's
> Wild West, Sitting Bull spoke through his translator to the huge crowd of
> ragged white men, women, and barefoot children: "I know why your
> government hates me. I am their enemy. But why do they hate you?" The U.S.
> Cavalry, the 7th to be exact, Custer's old regiment, massacred Sitting
> Bull's unarmed, starving people in December 1890 at Wounded Knee, a few
> days after Sitting Bull himself had been shot and killed by the federal
> Indian police.
>
> The cavalry sent into the wild west of New Orleans had orders to pen in
> the starving black population that had been abandoned in order to protect
> property. It is not a sad or shameful day for the United States; it is a
> typical day in the United States for the poor, magnified.
>
> How ironic that the Superdome became a house of horrors for the
> dispossessed for five grueling days. Most of the African Americans who
> were herded into the Superdome came from the infamous New Orleans projects
> and are descendents of those evicted from their neat little homes in the
> working class district that was seized and bulldozed to build, with public
> funds, the Superdome. Their cemetery was also destroyed. Construction
> began in August 1971 and was completed four years later.
>
> I moved to New Orleans in December 1969 and lived there for more than two
> years, leaving unwillingly after being arrested and escorted to Texas,
> told never to return. I was then, as now, a social justice activist. (This
> story is told in my Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960 1975) In
> New Orleans and the surrounding area, the group I was a part of did
> unionizing, women's liberation and antiwar organizing, and community work.
> The big local issue at the time was opposition to the proposed Superdome
> and to the "urban renewal" that would make it possible, removing tens of
> thousands of working class residents and transforming them into welfare
> recipients, a process taking place during the 1960s in nearly every city
> in the United States, as well as in copycat apartheid South Africa, where
> Cape Town's mixed working class District 6 was similarly destroyed.
>
> Working with the community against the Superdome in organizing
> demonstrations, petitions, and boycotts, I learned about past hurricanes
> and floods when gates were opened to flood the poor (black) neighborhoods
> in order to spare the wealthy and white uptown. I learned to hate the
> fun-seeking tourists in the French Quarter who never bothered to notice
> the sixty percent of the poor of the city. And, once it was built, I
> harbored an abiding hatred for the Superdome.
>
> I returned to New Orleans in the spring of 1979 to give a paper at the
> annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, which was held
> at the Hyatt Hotel that is attached to the Superdome, the first time I had
> seen it. I reluctantly stayed in the hotel and never went outside while
> there, because I was well aware the surrounding area was a no-man's land
> where police did not dare to go, a low level insurgency operating from the
> day the doors had opened four years earlier.
>
> I kept warning others that they should not go out, even in taxis, because
> they would be in danger returning. I tried to explain why, to no avail.
> Sure enough, a young historian from Maine was shot and killed by a sniper
> in front of the Hyatt after returning from fun in the French Quarter.
> After that, the historians stayed inside until ready to go to the airport
> in buses.
>
> Now, New Orleans will be rebuilt as one big "urban renewal" project,
> destroying the remaining working class homes and apartments, a sort of
> Disneyland for tourists and the wealthy. It's been going in that direction
> for forty years, as have other cities like Manhattan and San Francisco.
> But, it may not be that easy with that insurgency which, hopefully, will
> not capitulate.
>
> Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a longtime activist, university professor, and
> writer. In addition to numerous scholarly books and articles she has
> published two historical memoirs, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (Verso, 1997),
> and Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960 1975 (City Lights,
> 2002). "Red Christmas" is excerpted from her forthcoming book, Blood on
> the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, South End Press, October 2005. She
> can be reached at: rdunbaro at pacbell.net
>
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