In Take these Tribes Down, Charles Tanner Jr exposes the entrepreneurial wing of the anti-Indian movement in the US, and their current campaign to mobilize resentment against tribal governments. Following on the heels of my April 10 article at Intercontinental Cry magazine, as well as the devastating April 16 editorial at Cascadia Weekly, Tanner’s report on the national anti-Indian hate campaign, launched on April 6 in Washington state, leaves no room for doubt about either the strategy or motivations behind hate for hire.
This special report includes revelation of a scheme by anti-Indian organizers to finance a hate campaign against the Lummi Nation through funding by the Peabody-Goldman Sachs consortium behind Gateway Pacific Terminal.
As I noted in my editorial Anti-Indian History, the Anti-Indian Movement (including Skip Richards, one of the current hate campaign organizers) has a history of fomenting violence against Indian tribes. The current nationally coordinated campaign to mobilize racial resentment against tribal governments is a tried-and-true strategy. In fact, as documented in the Public Good Project special report Wise Use in Northern Puget Sound by Paul de Armond, this strategy has been used before, by the same people, in the same region.
In Paul’s 1995 report, he documents the fact that the Wise Use (industry)/anti-Indian/property rights/militia alliance in which Skip Richards played a key organizing role, was organized and funded by industry. The Wise Use Movement, initially funded by the energy extraction industry, now includes the real estate development industry, especially on public or Indian lands.
With the Citizens Alliance for Property Rights as a local activist group at the Anti-Indian Conference, Richards is in a position to bring in the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise to launder industry funding and provide Wise Use ideology to bolster the anti-Indian rhetoric. Combined with CERA legal and organizational support, Tea Party activists and white supremacists could easily inspire Christian Patriot militias to join them in creating a political climate best described as a Reign of Terror.
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