Part 1 of 3
A lot of people, myself included, think that the US exploitation and oppression of Native Americans was all ancient history. Once they moved all the Native Americans into tidy reservations, they lived autonomously and happily ever after. Genocide and wars were now behind them. The book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee reveals that this is not true and exploitation and oppression has continued all the way up to the 1990’s and likely beyond. “Between 1973 and 1992 alone, audits show that the BIA stole or lost more than $2.4 billion of Indian money – from oil, gas, timber, and grazing leases.”
The Indian Appropriation Act of 1871 eliminates independent Indian nations and treats all Indians as wards of the federal government, like a delinquent kid whose parents are incapable of taking care of him. Then there is the Dawes Act of 1887 that partitions tribal lands into individual plots where the author claims “as much as 95 percent of allotted Indian land would pass into white ownership.” Between 1887 to 1934, “Indian landholdings had dropped from 138 million to 48 million acres.” One simple act successfully stole 90 million acres of land from Indians, almost two-thirds of their land.
It is therefore no surprise to learn of more injustices against the Native Americans in this book. “The government owed the [Osage] tribe annuity payments for the sale of its Kansas land but refused to distribute them until able-bodied men like Ne-kah-e-se-y took up farming. And even then the government insisted on making the payments in the form of clothing and food rations.”
One of the worst crimes was forcing the Native American children to leave their families and attend US assimilation boarding schools where there was rampant abuse and even murder. These schools were run from 1860 to 1978. Not only did they destroy Native American culture, but they alienated children from their parents whom many would then consider backwards and uncivilized. There would now be few people to pass on Native American culture and traditions, and many new generations of ‘assimilated’ Native Americans who remained impoverished and unemployed living in a culture they had been trained to look down upon.
You’ll never read this in US history textbooks but the US government essentially placed many Native Americans under the financial control of white people. “The US government, contending that many Osage were unable to handle their money, had required the Office of Indian Affairs to determine which members of the tribe it considered capable of managing their trust funds. Over the tribe’s vehement objections, many Osage, including Lizzie and Anna, were deemed “incompetent,” and were forced to have a local white guardian overseeing and authorizing all of their spending, down to the toothpaste they purchased at the corner store.” You can only imagine the abuses that occurred under this arrangement. This reminds me of the conservatorship of Britney Spears and the incentive of the conservators to constantly spread rumors of how unfit the people under the conservatorship are. It’s odd how many US politicians will demand a two-state solution to Israel and the Palestinians while essentially maintaining the Israeli occupation system here in the US with Native Americans.
“But in 1921, just as the government had once adopted a ration system to pay the Osage for seized land… Congress implemented even more draconian legislation controlling how the Osage could spend their money. Guardians would not only continue to oversee their wards’ finances; under the new law, these Osage Indians with guardians were also “restricted,” which meant that each of them could withdraw no more than a few thousand dollars annually from his or her trust fund.” ($1000 in 1921 would be about $16K today)
“It wasn’t only the federal government that was meddling in the tribe’s financial affairs. The Osage found themselves surrounded by predators – “a flock of buzzards,” as one member of the tribe complained at a council meeting. Venal local officials sought to devour the Osage’s fortunes. Stickup men were out to rob their accounts. Merchants demanded that the Osage pay “special” – that is, inflated – prices. Unscrupulous accountants and lawyers tried to exploit full-blooded Osage’s ill-defined legal status.”
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It seems to me that not only did Europe conquer the world because they were embroiled in a life-and-death military struggle in Europe with competing nations, but they were also embroiled in a life-and-death financial struggle. Financial sophistication also meant the ability to raise funds for military conquest, imperialism, and colonialism. New financial institutions and mechanisms needed to be invented to keep one step ahead of the competition, and most of these mechanisms were debt-financing allowing nations to raise huge militaries over the short term and then paying off the debt by stealing assets from neighbors or colonies overseas. Of course, if you failed to defeat a neighbor or acquire natural resources overseas, you went bankrupt.
In totality, however, bankers in Europe realized that one nation had to win whereby they would recoup the losses of investing in other nations that lost. Europeans had to be cutthroat, and they exported this lifestyle and culture to the Americas. Even European language is oriented toward direct action and goals whereas other languages are oriented toward relationships. For example, the active voice is, “I went to the restaurant and ate a sandwich.” Whereas, the passive voice is, “A sandwich is what was eaten by me at the restaurant.” The active voice tends to be more focused on the individual whereas the passive voice is focused more on the activity. There was a recent article about how language can either help or hinder the bond between therapist and patient. This can be extended to all types of relationships. In the West, people simply tend to be more egocentric and less relationship-oriented.
There have also been studies of children playing a game where they can either compete and deprive the opponent of any reward, or they can cooperate and split the rewards in half. American kids are much more likely to compete resulting in neither side getting any reward.
The Europeans not only achieved dominance through military and technological superiority, but they achieved dominance through all sorts of sophistication allowing them to outwit, deceive, manipulate, and steal from less sophisticated people. To this day, more sophisticated financiers and bankers are exploiting and stealing from less sophisticated fund managers, government bureaucrats, and anyone who happens to come into sudden fortune. We’re not just talking about sophisticated financial schemes like derivatives but sophisticated grifts of all types.
In this sense, it behooves people in this culture of sophisticated grifts and cons to become as sophisticated if not more sophisticated than the grifters. This doesn’t happen when you’ve been indoctrinated for 12 years in an obedience school where you’re trained to simply absorb information without criticism, question, or dissent. And ultimately, one of the best ways to uncover a grift is to develop a social support network that can place multiple eyes on a wolf among sheep as well as develop the social skills to assert and protect one’s rights, and uncover a harmful, deceptive, untrustworthy person of ill-intent.
The fact that so many Americans blindly support Biden or Trump is proof that most Americans have absolutely no ability to uncover a grifter and be good judges of character and intention. Fact is, when Europeans and European-derived countries dominate the world, one should learn their language, culture, laws, institutions, technology, and sophisticated grifting mechanisms in order to protect themselves. The only caveat here is that when you learn their culture, it’s easy to fall prey to the grifting that is embedding in their culture, the consumerism, materialism, elitism, etc. Then you have an infected host that brings back all this to their native countries. None-the-less, if your country embraces the sophisticated grift culture, along with understanding their tricks and mechanisms, you have a much better chance of protecting yourself from them than countries that altogether reject both Western culture and their grifting technology.
In nature, when organisms collaborate, they become much more powerful and effective than individuals. In order for organisms with higher cognitive powers to collaborate, they must have an incentive to collaborate like biochemical rewards like serotonin and oxycontin. For highly intelligent creatures like humans, they must also develop an enforceable moral code. But then you have one step further where groups of organisms collaborate to trick, deceive, manipulate, exploit, and harm others. How can you do this when you receive biochemical rewards for collaborating and possess moral codes that frown upon lying, exploiting, and harming others. The Europeans developed the solution. They invented racism, and categorized certain humans as essentially, sub-human and not deserving of the same protections of their moral codes. Their egotism knew few bounds as they contended that not even animals or babies had the capacity to feel emotions or pain and therefore when they performed surgery on animals and babies, they didn’t use anesthesia. I am sure they knew that human adults could feel pain and felt emotions, but because they were sub-humans, they often experimented on human adults without anesthesia. The great irony is that in abusing nonhuman animals and other humans, they became the sub-humans.
Perhaps the only place where you are taught to think critically, to question or even challenge authority, and to view yourself as above authority in some cases, is private schooling. Having attended both public school through the 8th grade and then four years of private high school, I know the differences in teaching style and culture. In public school, students view themselves as below the teacher, and the teacher commands unquestioned power and authority. In many cases, they treat their students derisively, just as almost every government bureaucrat treats customers, ignorant of whatever ridiculous and endless forms are needed to acquire the minimal amount of government services.
It’s the difference between clerks at a two-star motel and a four-star or higher hotel. There’s a strict social hierarchy in public schools with the affluent, preppy, popular kids at the top. They’re followed by the jocks who rule by sheer size and intimidation. While the nerds are mocked for their intellect, those at the very bottom are the poorest, and believe it or not, when I went to school in Oregon, they were literally called, ‘scums’. This also included Southeast Asian refugees.
Bullying is rampant and unchallenged. You get the feeling that you are pretty much set in life, the American dream of elevating yourself through social classes is a myth. You know your place, and you are punished if you try to change your station undeservedly. Gatekeepers for the popular, affluent kids are especially brutal and vicious in their rumors and verbal bullying of anyone who dares try to enter the realm of the popular kids. Even popular kids can be bullied and harassed for socializing outside of their station. Nobody is larger or stronger than the system, and there is nothing you can do about it. Everyone suffers from learned helplessness. If you can’t handle it, you go see a doctor who prescribes you anti-depressants, anti-anxiety pills, Ritalin, or Adderall, and you just hope not to get suicidal or homicidal ideations.
In private school, you all understand that you are above the teachers and even the administrators. Coaches don’t yell at you, they encourage and support you. They are friendly like your chauffeur or tutor or personal trainer would be. Teachers encourage you to contribute to class discussions and even mildly reproach you for not contributing enough. They act like they care about and want your ideas and input. When you cover books and lessons, they don’t want you to just ignorantly accept everything without question. They want you to question things, to criticize, to think critically, and to think independently. They encourage you to develop your own opinions and beliefs without judgment. They only criticize you if they think that you’re not using your own judgment to evaluate something and just copying whatever someone else said.
While they do keep grades, they don’t want you to fail and drop out. That’s lost revenue. Obviously, if you’re not making any effort, they need to inform your parents, but if you’re a friendly student who doesn’t cause any problems, they’ll be generous and patient when grading you. I went to a private school on the west coast. Perhaps on the east coast, they push their students more knowing that their parents are highly ambitious and driven by wealth and social status. At my school, it seemed that they were more interested in helping students find the secrets to happiness, creativity, and an independent mind. They truly cared about the students well-being, although, they were also careful enough not to delve too deeply into family problems as they’d likely encounter the root of the problem in the affluent parent’s lack of parenting skills. After all, it’s the parent that is paying tuition and not the student.
In public school, anyone who fraternized with teachers was considered a brown-noser, a status almost as bad as a narc. In private school, many students befriended teachers and hung out in the teachers’ offices. Something I learned in college that I never took much advantage of was professor’s hours where you could just sit and chat with your professor. This is where you could develop a relationship where they might invite you to special lectures, meetings, even cocktails. They could even provide you with important job contacts. I never realized this in college, especially high-level ones, that grades are nowhere as important as ‘social hustling’. College is not just an institution of higher learning. It is an institution for social business networking. In fact, this networking is more important than what you learn in the classroom.
Joining a fraternity or sorority at an elite college is perhaps the sole reason many affluent students go there. In the past, for women, it was the guaranteed way to meet an affluent man. For men, it was the guaranteed way to enter the elite good old boy’s network. Some universities have even higher level, elite groups like Skull and Bones to further advance your career. I was incredibly naïve and antisocial in college and took very little advantage of the social networking scene so crucial and critical to success after college.
In fact, if any nonwhite person truly wants to crash the glass ceiling and level up to the highest levels in their field, it is essential for them to develop the social skills necessary to join the right elite social groups at the top. Even for tech students, if you want easier and quicker funding for your startups, you find them by joining these elite social groups where a friend’s uncle or father may be an angel investor or on the board of a large tech firm. And unless you go to grad school, nobody really cares about your grades in college. For the elite, it’s one big social networking party that lasts four years. Of course, because there was racial gatekeeping for elite social circles, many nonwhites or even non-WASPs learned that the only path to success was the less social one of technical expertise and excellence. Over time, we have the dynamic of a highly social white or WASP executive building the business through networking while using a cadre of less social nonwhites doing all the technical work behind the scenes.
Although I’ve always mistrusted indoctrinating institutions like fraternities, you can’t underestimate the value of their trust-building mechanisms. For some, it may feel invasive and deindividuating and hive-minded, but it’s necessary for the groups to screen members who may have alternative and often selfish agendas. The elite have a lot of wealth and power, and they need to be able to stop interlopers from ‘weaseling’ into their tightknit groups to take some of their wealth and power through deceptive and manipulative means. It’s a lesson the Osage would learn. How do you tell if someone is trying to weasel themselves into your group to con you out of wealth and power?
Few con-artists have the patience to play the long game, so one powerful method is time. It’s better to trust someone who has been in your fraternity and has hung out with your sons and daughters most of their lives than strangers. Or you simply test them. Often a poor man who tries to marry your daughter can be bought off for relatively cheap, $10K or $100K, in any event, more money than they’ve ever seen their entire lives. Or you hire someone to ply them with drugs and booze, maybe even prostitutes to see their true colors and blackmail them. The rich and powerful have had generations to learn these skills to protect their wealth and power from shady interlopers.
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