8/2/23

Eastern Oregon still embracing racist past

Because of his brutality during the 1855 Battle of Ash Hollow the Lakota called butcher and war criminal, William S. Harney, "Woman Killer." Earlier in his military career Harney beat an enslaved Black women to death with a rawhide whip but was acquitted by a white jury. 

Since that time George Custer, Phil Sheridan, George Crook and William Harney all committed crimes against humanity yet their names still besmirch numerous government and geographical features.

The French and Spanish were the first European invaders in what is now the northwest United States and when Lewis and Clark explored before it was Oregon when much of the region was inhabited by the Northern Paiute. The Malheur River Indian Reservation was created by President Ulysses Grant by executive order in 1871 for Paiutes living at Fort Harney until the Bannock War of 1878 dissolved the settlement. Harney County was split from Grant County in 1889 at the time of Statehood and Burns was named county seat. When it was admitted to the Union the Oregon Constitution even contained a clause forbidding Negroes from moving to the state. 

Members of the Wadatika band of Burns Paiute sometimes known as the Harney Valley Paiute spread from the Cascade Mountains to Boise, Idaho but didn't receive federal recognition until 1968. 

Today, white Republicans in the Northwest have clearly embraced the idea that the ground they live on was seized for them from aboriginal cultures by liberal democrat, President Thomas Jefferson through an executive order that even he believed was unconstitutional.
Even before its borders were drawn, people floated the idea of creating a slave-owning haven in what is now southern Oregon and Northern California, branding it the “Territory of Jackson,” after President Andrew Jackson. Confederate sympathizers considered several of the new state’s southernmost counties “the Dixie of Oregon.” Later, in the mid-20th century, the State of Jefferson movement emerged in the same area; it nixed owning slaves, but retained a slave owner as its namesake. [Leah Sottile, Oregon’s Greater Idaho movement echoes a long history of racism in the region]
Yes, it never ceases to amuse how Republicans paint Democrats as the party of slavery then praise the slaveowners who penned not just the Bill of Rights but the Declaration of Independence, too. 

James Wesley Rawles coined the phrase American Redoubt in 2011. From his SurvivalBlog.com he supposes Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, eastern Oregon and Washington are survivalist havens for the white christian nationalist movement.
“I’m just going to straight-up disagree,” said the other panelist, Carina Miller, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and chair of the Columbia River Gorge Commission. Throughout the night, Miller repeated one phrase — “societal gaslighting.” She described growing up Indigenous in Oregon, where she received an education that normalized racist policies toward tribes, and where a boarding school built to assimilate Native youth still operates. [Sottile]
Now, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the FBI, US Marshalls Service and state officials are warning of white christianic zealots telegraphing pending violence against law enforcement especially in Oregon and Idaho. 

Redneck crackers brand Black Lives Matter protesters as unemployed slackers but a horde of Huns that takes over a federal wildlife refuge in Harney County to hasten the End Days can call themselves patriots? 

The American Left poses no violent threat to the United States while the hate-filled extreme white wing of the Republican Party always will.
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