NDN HISTORY--MINE
by Carter Camp
originally posted on NDN AIM list
I was asked why I fight against America's foreign wars and speak against them
so often.
My history, like many ndns, is so much different than other Americans that
they can not understand where I'm coming from... so, here's where I'm coming
from:
In the late 1880's the Americans decided my Ponca people belonged in
concentration camps (you supply the reasons, it makes no difference), so they
sent their army to round up my Grandfather, Grandmother and all the rest of my
relations from the land guaranteed to them forever and made them walk to the
concentration camp in Quapaw, Oklahoma, we stayed there for three years and one
third of my family, my clan and my Tribe died before they made us buy another
reservation and told us it was ours to live on forever.
Luckily for me my grandparents survived the death march, my Mother was born
on the new rez in Oklahoma. She was the child of genocide and I am the
grandchild. Soon after we arrived on our new land, the Americans decided we had
too much and forced our leaders to accept individual allotment of the land we
had purchased in common from the Cherokee (some people think we were given our
reservation lands but we bought ours as a Tribe). By holding the land in common
land thieves were held at bay and the Ponca could stave off starvation.
Allotment meant individuals could be pinned down by greedy white people and
robbed. All across ndn territory our leaders fought allotment and my
Grandfather resisted also, they were jailed, abused and finally defeated again.
Allotment and the white "land runs" happened, suddenly the Ponca were
surrounded by jackals in all their hues, just like the ones who had driven them
from our ancestral homelands. The land runs created a white majority, this
allowed the creation of the state of Oklahoma in 1906 and all powers of self
government were stripped from my people. The Ponca had been reduced from over a
thousand relatives to about five hundred or less, and my Grandpa had changed
from being a buffalo hunter to a farmer on the poorest dirt America could find.
Our family and my people were thrown into the very bottom of the okie melting
pot and then the great depression hit what economics we had left and forced our
people to sell their allotments, ending even farming. Need I mention the BIA
was busily trading on ndn misery by stealing the land in collusion with the
new, white, Oklahoma powerstructure. My Grandpa still lived then and would not
sell land as long as he was alive but finally he died and most of the land
quickly went to whites, my Ponca Tribe still lives on the remnants.
Ask yourself, what was your Grandfather doing when he was a young man and
what did America do to (or for) him? You now know what they were doing to mine
and to every other Ponca.
The first whiteman came among the Ponca in 1800, by 1880 we were one half dead from his disease, then by 1930 a third more had perished, and along with them our land was taken from under us twice. He stole our children and outlawed our religions, he banned our language, denigrated our history and enslaved our mentality. All this during the lifetime of my Grandfather and Grandmother. In 1908 the Ponca Chiefs were forced put away the sacred Sundance and our Clan system. In 1917 one hundred percent of eligible Ponca men volunteered to enlist for WW1. In return, in 1924 he gave us the right to vote and told us to forget our past. This is what my immediate family has lived through in America, each Tribe goes through their "time of horror" when he comes, the Ponca horror was not that long ago and we are not yet whole nor healed nor assured of a future. Some Tribes are going through it today and I hear their cries every bit as loud as I do 9-11. I think maybe only Jewish Americans, (whose parents and grandparents went through their own holocaust of death by government) can understand why it's too soon to ask us to trust the people who did this to us, just because they have moved on to loot other tribes. History has a way of coloring ones view of America, my history sees that what he has given to his chosen few in rich white America, was taken in red blood and my Grandfather and Grandmother witnessed it. My history has rendered me unsusceptible to the patriotic brainwashing needed to excuse the killing.
I am Carter Camp...Ponca.
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