GENERAL HOWARD AND THE HOMELAND OF THE FIRST NATIONS PEOPLES

There are 103 HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges / Universities) in the United States—just 4 percent of the total number. The premiere of these institutions, the veritable “Capstone” of Negro education, was founded by and is named after Major General Oliver Otis Howard, a white man from New England. The propagandistic biography provided by the PBS piece “New Perspectives on the West” speaking of Howard’s exploits in the campaign against the First Nations people, tells that in 1877, ten years after founding The Capstone, the founder, General Howard, was sent by the United States government “to persuade a Nez Percé band led by Chief Joseph to leave their homeland in the Wallowa Valley for the reservation assigned to them in Lapwai, Idaho. Howard found himself agreeing with Joseph that his people had never signed a treaty giving up their homeland, but in Howard's view this did not change the fact that eastern Oregon was no longer a place where Indians could roam free.”

Apparently he had a clear conscience about his right to impose the rule that “eastern Oregon was no longer a place where Indians could roam free.” In contrast, by their failure to take any action against the lawlessness of Cliven Bundy and his white supremacists, the United States government—and implicitly the goodly general—have established that white people do have the right to roam free over all of the vast territory stolen from Chief Joseph and his people, the First Nations people. On January 2, 2016, encouraged by the success of his father’s gang, Cliven’s son Ammon led a band of armed insurgents—who happen to have been Mormons—in the takeover of a federal wildlife refuge in Burns, Oregon. The federal authorities basically allowed the white insurgents to “roam free” in that section of Oregon for a full three weeks before finally taking action on January 26.