For my brother 'Dwayne'

Well people the time has come to throw your hats into candidacy of the various offices that have opened up for election, if any of you can do it better, by all means, I could support that. A lot of people are very opinionated and critical about what Nicole Beaulieu and Greg Paquin are taking on for our people and community, their still isn't any indians standing up for us outside of tribal politics besides Nicole and Greg, and thats where most of our problems stem from. This is where our leaders learned their dastardly ways in the aftermath of the Indian Reorganization Act which robbed us of our traditional tribal governments. This is where the white politicians influence our tribal governments to undertake their bidding within our tribe, and this is where we can initiate a process of repairing the corrupted relationship between these two governments, this is where we can show our tribal leaders there is more to us then casinos, poverty, and pow wows. Take our treaty rights for instance, we have nobody speaking on our behalf, protecting our interests in those senate halls, our way of life has been utterly and completely vulnerable to the insensitivity of the white men in charge of running Minnesota without without any of our input. We have nobody standing up to run for any Bemidji Council seats, where we can institute of having tribally run business to return the native dollar to our sovereign nations instead of going to the racist business owners of Bemidji, where we can mandate cultural sensitivity training for business owners and government workers to be more understanding and compassionate toward those being victimized by systematic institutionalized racism. We have been presented with opportunities to bring about long over due change for the American Indian of Northern Minnesota, yet alot of indians remain silent unless its comes to criticizing others indians whom are brave enough to stand up for those of you who are yet to stand up for yourselves and support these Indian candidates. Internalized Oppression has allowed the white racist to sit back and watch the indians destroy themselves in a lot of instances, a lot of indians have allowed themselves to be indoctrinated into the systematic institutionalized racism victimizing their people, so it leaves me with the frustrated question of why are our people so resistant to helping and supporting those of us trying to get our people out of these messes we have allowed the white man to put us in? Some indians will claim we did this to ourselves, some of us did, but we sure had a lot of encouragement from these outside influences, so instead of blaming others, blame yourselves for your lack of logic, your lack of compassion, for your lack of strength to stand up and say 'we support you' because we support all of you. Even those of you too defeated, too indoctrinated, too ignorant, too naive, too insensitive to stand for yourselves. A lot of critizism comes from indians with credentials spewing their indoctrinated gibberish at everything we do, these people with their pompous arrogant attitudes believe their a pinnacle of knowledge of overcoming a lot of these downfalls victimizing our people. A lot of elders pretentiously regurgitate teachings with out adhering nor practicing those teachings themselves, if these people hold all this knowledge to help our people then why are our communities in the state of despair today? but no, they want to sit there belittling everything we are doing because our action might discredit a lot of their supposed stature within our community, we would appreciate it if these people would become involved, and help us build what we are attempting to create for the American Indian of Northern Minnesota. If these people stood up for us I would gladly support these people, my best friend, Clarence 'Dwayne' Meat was murdered 4 years ago, he was attending Harvard University, he had big plans of coming home and fixing our community. Besides my father, he was one of the most intelligent Indians I have ever had to opportunity of knowing, he would have had the credentials to attract these arrogant indians attention, a lot of these ideas we are standing behind belonged to him. We have talked for hours of these things we have taken up today, his spirit lives on in our actions, his voice still guides us to find hope for our people, that day we buried him was one of the hardest days of my life, but I know hes still here with us. He knows he has to see this through, I don't think he will rest until he knows his people will have the strength rise again.