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AMONG
the many, though identical, foreign inputs into the
GRP-MILF peace talks—all consistently at the expense of
Philippine territory—the most intriguing was the
proposal to use the GUS-American Indian Treaties as a
template.
We wondered what those were. We knew
that “GUS” stood for Government of the United States and
that the Indians wore feathers, but that was all.
Indeed, the only ones with any inkling were those who
took their constitutional law in the US. The American
Indian treaties are discussed in the first chapter of
every constitutional law book; the chapter never read
and always skipped except by law students with an eye to
gambling law practice. And so we prayed for
enlightenment on that score.
And, lo
and behold, out of the blue, so to speak, we were
shafted by light, and from a scholarly priest no less.
San Beda Law dean Fr. Ranhilio Callangan Aquino wrote in
his Pascalian column, ‘Pensées:’
“How the
US government has dealt with the Native Americans [oh,
so that’s what they’re called now, used to be Redskins,
interjections ours], the Indians, is also instructive,”
Father Ranhillo writes. “Indian tribes [nations, really]
are not [the usual run of white] states [in the Union];
they have a status higher than that of states, and the
reason is not difficult to fathom. The tribes roamed the
vast expanse of the North American (sic) long before the
sails of the Spanish galleons came into sight [Mayflower
boats, actually; the galleons plied the Carribbean and
Indians south of the Rio Grande—unlike those north of
it—they were not targeted for extinction, just Catholic
conversion and indentured labor as subjects, never
slaves, under the “special protection” of the Spanish
universal monarchy.]
“In
fact, for some time, the US government entered into
treaties with Indian tribes [starting with turkeys for
trinkets, but swiftly progressing to land all the way up
to Canada, down to the Rio Grande and west to the
Pacific Ocean—talk about a roaming people—for nothing
but US Cavalry sabers and bullets all the way up to
Canada, down to the Rio Grande and West to the Pacific
Ocean] until the US Congress made the tribes amenable to
federal legislation [but only after herding them into
reservations on the worst land on a continent all of
which was by historic title the Indians’ ancestral
domain]. And while the general position of American law
is that fee [title, not lagay] to land in the United
States, Indian or not, has been vested in the United
States from the time government was formed, Indian title
as against the United States is a title [good luck to
Sitting Bull’s descendants enforcing that against the
first modern military power in history] and right of
perpetual occupancy of the land with the privilege of
using it in such mode as the Indians see fit [but only
through whiskey fumes] until such right of occupation is
surrendered to the government. [Oh, okay, it is a title
until the Indians surrender it. The reason is to
establish a chain of titles from the Native Americans
straight on to the US, a chain that would otherwise be
broken by the prior, legal and historic Spanish, French
and British possessions of North America by right of
conquest].
“Other
jurisdictions then have dealt with and recognized
ancestral domains. Always, the underlying motive for
such recognition has been plain justice [genocide].”
So far,
so good; we have here, from foreign observers to the
peace process familiar with the American Indian
treaties, the patronizing suggestion that we treat our
Muslim brothers and sisters the way the United States
treated “Injuns.” Unfortunately, as Americans in space
would say, “Houston, we have a problem.”
The
problem is that our “Injuns” do not drink alcohol in
any, let alone in stupefying, quantities as the American
Indians were encouraged to do by the United States until
all they could do with their so-called ancestral
domains—really, the worst lands on the North American
continent—was sign them away to white men in the casino
business.
Indeed,
our local “Injuns” have been so obdurate in their
opposition to alcohol consumption that they wouldn’t
relent even out of camaraderie with their equally
oppressed Christian and fellow brown Filipinos, with
whom they united to drive out the Spaniards and then to
resist US aggression.
The
other problem is that when the United States finally
entered into the final version of the American Indian
treaties, it was only after a long process of
extermination, not negotiation.
First,
white settlers with rifles took over Indian ancestral
domains—the richest corn-growing and grazing lands—until
the Indians were forced out into the Great Plains where
the buffalo roamed, for a while, anyway.
Second,
the US Cavalry cleared them out of there to clear the
way for the wagon trains en route to winning the West.
Any Indians still in the way were fed dead to the
vultures.
Having
marginalized the Indians all over the continent, they
proceeded to launch extermination raids on their
scattered settlements. Finally, the survivors were told
to march north in the direction of Washington, D.C., to
pay a call on the Great White Father—and he was not
Santa Claus; he was a drunk, though a fine writer.
The
remnants of the Indian tribes never reached their
destination because (1) winter killed off a lot of
them—animal skins stiff as boards don’t insulate
well—and (2) the United States had found lands no one
wanted or would ever want because there was nothing and
could be nothing there. The Indians were herded into
these areas and left there with cases of rotgut whiskey;
the first US foreign aid, when you think of it. Then,
and only then, when the few extant Indians were either
supine or staggering on lonely roads or laughed at in
backstreets of Western towns, did the US enter into the
great and exalting Indian treaties that gave them an
autonomy superior to any enjoyed by the states of the
Union, because they were too few and and demoralized to
exercise that autonomy at all.
White
Australians did the same thing for the Aborigines,
though a streak of missionary zeal introduced the
refinement of not just killing them off or breeding them
out—as the English tried to do with the Scots—but
abducting their children from their native environment
so as to cut them off from those Songlines that linked
them to the past, when white do-gooders were not yet
around to do them harm.
Today,
the Australian government has recognized the ancestral
domains of the Aborigines in the barren outback,
provided, they do not conflict with the state’s
“radical” right to take them back. The New Zealand
government was more forthright. Since the Maoris were
fiercer than even the American Indians, the British
fought them to their deaths and established ownership by
right of conquest.
En summa
total, countries that kill off entire races should
refrain from suggesting anything about how to resolve
intranational conflicts, because we may get the wrong
idea. Although Christians far outnumber Muslims even in
Mindanao, neither one nor the other has thought of
killing the other off entirely—except for the MILF,
which just gave us an idea of how a Bangsamoro juridical
entity will treat Christians inside it. Filipinos,
Muslim and Christian, never tried to finish off the
other as they were both too engrossed—as UP professor
Melvin Magallona keeps trying to point out—resisting the
Spaniards, and then the very same US cavalry units and
commanders that exterminated the Native Americans. |
