From: "James Starkey" <wolakota4us@y...>
Date: Mon Sep 9, 2002 11:48 pm
Subject: Oyate Underground Newsletter

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO THE THREE COUSINS

Hau Mitakiapi:

Brace yourselves for the deluge. We are hours away from the inundation. Red
white and blue waved and worn in every way conceivable. It will be
difficult to separate the saber rattling from the sorrowful. Try as we may,
we will have a hard time differentiating the political from the poignant.
September 11, the day the three cousins collided.

According to the Republicans, zealots who do not like the freedom and
goodness of America attacked the United States. According to a reported
suicide note written by one of the hijackers, it was the waste and excess
of the American way of life at issue. Immediately after the fall of the
World Trade Center, President Bush was on television promising a "crusade"
against the perpetrators. Afghanistan was summarily attacked and subdued,
and the world, by and large fell in step with the U.S. wishlist for a New
World Order.

Now here we are one year later, what has really changed in the interim? We
have the Patriot Act impinging upon our electronic correspondences with
utter impunity. We have rampant jingoism masquerading as some sort of God
inspired manifest destiny. We have an attack upon the sovereign State of
Iraq looming in the imminent distance, (ironically a mere 60 days before
the upcoming elections). The warmongering stance of the United States has
been assailed by international voices as diverse as former U.N weapons
inspectors to former South African President Nelson Mandela. No American
allies other than the reliable aircraft carriers Great Britain and Israel
back an Iraqi attack. The Arab League warns of the polarizing effect of a
war upon Iraq.

Polarizing. Saber rattling. God inspired. Paternalism being stripped to
it's bare essence. The base ra-ra-pro-wrestling-meets –football- and- God
mentality of the Three Cousins at it's most refined. Demonization and
polarization. Op-ed pieces about how down homey and sweet it is for all
Americans to be waving God's own Red White and Blue as one big ol' goofy
family. America, land of the free…as long as you are marching in lock step
that is, (God help the voice of dissent, or even worse, reason). We haven't
seen this much righteous Patriotism since the McCarthy era.

Brothers and Sisters do not be fooled by the wiles of the trickster. This
entire argument is a family fight between the Three Cousins- Judaism,
Islam, and Christianity. All three of them are so off their sacred, ancient
path that they fail to recognize or be recognized by Nature herself. They
forgot how to be related and mimic the ways of Eya and Iktomi. They bask in
their dominance of Nature and revile as less than, those of us who still
hold on to our traditional matriarchal ways. They see us all as "Native
Americans" rather than People of some 500 diverse Nations. They fail to
consider our suffering even though they now have similar pain. We as Lakota
People are still in mourning over Wounded Knee, which took far more of our
People as a percentage of our population than 100 World Trade Centers could
equal to America.

The United States promises us that the People of Iraq want Saddam Hussein
overthrown. I am sure that sort of "the People's Will" logic does not
extend to the Lakota Peoples Will, or our Aboriginal Rights and 1868 Treaty
Rights. They speak out of both sides of their mouth and still find time to
consume natural resources at a disproportionate rate. Truly they are Eya,
the great consumer. Grandmother Earth will not continue to allow the Three
Cousins to run amuck. Nature has her own ways of ebb and flow. The United
States is a mere 4 percent of the World's two-legged population. She has
become the self-appointed policeman of the world, yet cannot and will not
clean up her own back yard.

As far as consolidation of rhetoric, influence, and power is concerned, the
U.S. warmongers have benefited from the tragic and unnecessary loss of life
on September 11, 2001 far more than anyone else has. They have dampened
domestic voices of dissent and spread their colonial power to the very
doorstep of Islam. Now they are preparing to kick their Cousin's door in…If
Abraham could see them now. Pray for the living, Brothers and Sisters.

Mitakuye Oyasin.
James H. Starkey
www.oyateunderground.com