Wampum

Periodically MB asks me what are my differences with Juan Cole. I reply that for Juan, the firing of Qassam rockets, powered by sugar and potassium nitrate (the same fuel mix I used as a teen rocketeer), with payloads of TNT and urea nitrate (which I passed on), ranges less than 10km, and payloads of less then 10kg, from Gaza, or the firing of 122 mm Katyusha artillery rockets, ranges less than 30km, and payloads less than 30kg, from ad hoc launch points in Lebanon, are sufficient to excuse or justify or ... limited and unlimited response by a sophisticated combined-arms military with effectively infinite depth.

Juan calls them terrorists. I call them opfors.

We don't talk alot about WK2. We don't talk about the balance of forces. We don't talk about what happened twenty five years ago as if it happened in someplace under a "friendly regime", attacked by a Soviet proxy. Or as a failed attempt at "popular liberation" by armed forces, Soviet proxy or organic to some remote, exotic peoples. We don't even talk about what happened twenty five years ago as if it were "terrorism", state-sponsored or otherwise.

A few days ago Tim Giago wrote No celebrating at Pine Ridge Reservation. Tim grew up in Wounded Knee. However, no where in his thousand words is there an awareness that a military operation was planned, and executed, within the boundaries of his childhood.

To Tim, his childhood was flooded by foreigners who had no claim on the boundaries of his childhood. I know I could have written a similar piece too, 99 people out of 100 can't trace their ancestry in California to when the Lembkes came to grow beans in pre-irrigation Los Angeles. But I don't think I ever have, or ever will. Age is experience remembered, not title to land.

Not long after, Richard Powers wrote a reply Defending the AIM occupation.

This is where I have to raise something, an empty hand will suffice, and point out that no one is writing history, Tim, and everyone, including myself, are writing politics. The AIM/NAIM split is still present, and even those who damn both the AIM/NAIM factions, can damn the pre-split AIM/NAIM, and external to that is the tribal vs (the 4th) pan-tribal conflict, and even beyond that is the ... are urban mix-bloods Indians question.

I fall somewhere within that mass of fissures of a thousand practices of accommodation and resistance.

Richard correctly places WK2 in a militarized context. There was a "dirty war". About a company strength of men and women were killed by gunfire during the sporadic exchanges of fire. Most of the casualties were inflicted by the US and its proxy, the Dick Wilson "Guardians of the Oglala Nation", whom we all called "GOONS", then and now.

Richard also correctly places Tim's piece in a larger universe of Anti-AIM writings, and he also correctly places the composition of the pre-split AIM's cadres, armed and unarmed, in the pan-Indianism of 1969-1971 occupation of Alcatraz. A Cherokee died at the Knee. A Mic'mac also died at the Knee.

Tim errs, whether he rejects that, inherently armed pan-tribalism, or the present legalistic pan-tribalism, in alienating the armed, unarmed, and other, including non-Indian, who came -- from most directions -- into the boundaries of his childhood. Wounded Knee does not belong to those who camp, or throw up buildings, roads, and business on a massacre site. Monk's Mound does not "belong to" the Indian living closest to it, and if it does, "accommodation and resistance" does not encompass the totality of continuity and transcendence.

Tim supports Chad Smith. I don't. But that is just theft and graft over several administrations. Not life, and death, in and around Pine Ridge, the Rosebud, and so on.