TheAngryindian [3.26.2005]

‘The law of existence requires uninterrupted killing … so that the better may live’.

– Jeffery Weise quoting Adolf Hitler

I think it is a safe bet to assume that Ward Churchill is sitting at home dragging on a cigarette while watching CNN and saying to himself, “I told you so.” It seems that chickens are coming home to roost in Indian Country and no one seems to know what to make of it. Akin to how American Africans view the Malvo-Muhammad killing spree, Indians are asking the same questions; why would a young reservation Native American male embrace neo-Nazism and go on a murderous rampage killing not only his schoolmates but also a part-time security guard and his own grandfather?

The 21st century has been particularly hard on American Indians and in the arena of crime, it seems that catching up to the Jones’ has taken on a new dimension. Gang violence, the gradual emergence of a Native American crime syndicate and now White male Protestant-style angst driven mass murder despite the shill of the apologists, is clearly indicative of a particular and troubling id.

Like the self-loathing Jew who develops into an uncompromising and fervent neo-Nazi, American Aboriginal Jeffery Weise travelled along a similar road. As he expressed in a posting to www.nazi.org:

‘The Natives you’ve known to be sympathetic to the cause are probably ones who’ve experienced firsthand what kind of problems cultural and race mixing can cause. As a result of cultural dominance and interracial mixing there are barely any full-blooded Natives left. Where I live less than 1% of all the people on the Reservation can speak their own language, and among the youth wanting to be black has run rampant. Under a National Socialist government, things for us would improve vastly… That is, if we haven’t already become too soft from the way this materialistic life-style has made us, and that is why I am pro-Nazi. It’s hard though, being a Native American National Socialist; people are so misinformed, ignorant, and closed-minded it makes your life a living hell’.

Jeff Weise was living in a personal hell long before he ever found the Internet. Recently instructed by his school principal to undergo home schooling for still unspecified reasons, the 6-foot, 250-pound Weise lived according to many accounts an isolated and socially marginal life on the Red Lake Reservation. Weise grew up in the Twin Cities area, attended school in Chaska and Shakopee and for those who remember him fondly he was a normal, caring, everyday Native teenager. Perceptions vary, but reports generally describe Weise as a loner who was regarded as an oddity by nearly everyone that associated with him. There are a few who relate tales of a troubled but good-natured youngster dealing with personal tragedies and fondly remember him as a good young boy from a prominent Tribal family.

But this was all on the outside. Physical abuse at home and parental troubles with alcoholism weighed heavily on his young shoulders as evidenced by his frequent and disturbing Internet posts on nazi-themed websites. The young man also suffered personal tragedies involving both of his parents that would serve to permanently alter his world. In 1997 Weise’s father shot himself during a standoff with Reservation police. And in 1999, his mother suffered a severe brain injury when her car collided with a larger vehicle in a drunk-driving incident in Minneapolis. Following his mother’s accident, the youth was sent back to the reservation to live with his grandmother as his mother’s head injuries necessitated that she reside in a nursing home.

Many say that Weise’s move back to the reservation was not at all what he wanted and may have added on to his long list of emotional issues. According to all accounts, Weise personified the young and despondent American that the mainstream press typically writes off as problematical and inconsequential. Incessantly teased by fellow schoolmates because of his large girth, twist horns and Gothic fashion sense, Weise spent the majority of his time alone. Writing grim short stories replete with gory illustrations of violent death. The youth was not at all closeted about his feelings. Associates were fully aware of Weise’s dark visions, as were the officials of his high school including the principal who mandated that Weise undergo home schooling in light of his “issues.” And since it is obvious that those around him paid no real attention to him — other than to regard him as an outsider — he searched and finally found a place for himself with other social malcontents just as bitter, just as confused, and just as willing to resort to destructiveness as he was.

After Columbine, one would think that US society would have learned something meaningful. Here you have an obviously troubled youth struggling with issues surrounding abandonment, loss, familial abuse, social isolation and ethnic confusions displaying observable signs of potential anti-social behaviour and no one seems to have noticed anything. While the White American consciousness worries itself sick about protecting traditional ideas of marriage and imposing fundamentalist theological agendas, children like Weise serve as a self-convicting mirror to America’s deepest social ills. Young people so frustrated with their day-to-day existence that violence seems to be the only answer to addressing their problems.

But there is much more going on here that none of the reporting or commentary as of yet seems to want to focus on. Like the Malvo-Muhammad killings, such actions are puzzling in that until very recently, such anti-social activity has only been seen within the White male Christian population. In the case of Jeff Weise, an American Indian who believed he was a German soldier during World War Two in a past life, the question begs to be raised: are we colonialised so fully that now we are not only adopting and internalising not only institutional White racism, but also the instinct to express that philosophy through mass-victim violence?

The subject of racism in Indian Country is one of those unspoken realities many Native people prefer not to acknowledge. Reflecting the paradoxes seen in mainstream society, Natives, and in particular today’s Indian youth, are having a hard time navigating the often vague and contradictory waters of US race relations. For those Indians that strongly identify themselves as American in nationality, opinions on race often reflect that of the larger, European society. It is not uncommon for assimilated Native Americans to openly express disdain for Africans, sometimes Asians and towards their fellow Natives from south of the border. All the while forgetting that they too, ironically, are gesticulating and grooving to thought-paradigms and lifeways that are decidedly not Native at all.

Historically, Native Americans literally walk a fine line between two distinctly opposing dimensions. Many of us do in an ever changing world. But unlike their Eurosettler counterparts, Aboriginals suffer the psychic and physical scars of 500+ years of colonial domination and immaculate genocide that directly affects how they function as individuals and communities. Indians don’t need statistics to tell us that we as a people endure the highest rates of alcoholism, suicide, substance abuse, abbreviated life spans, preventable illnesses and systemic poverty. Traditionalist individuals and communities in particular struggle against overwhelming odds to maintain their identities while encouraging their members to strive for success in the non-Native, White world. And in attempting to navigate these rough seas, American Indians are progressively losing the ability to differentiate our ow

n ethnic identities from those visible in the dominating, media inundated ethos.

With John Ford’s legacy of righteous celluloid genocide still fresh in the minds of many Americans and Aboriginals alike, it’s easy to dismiss the psychic damage done to the Indian’s self-image. Colonialisation, the practise of sublimating populations for the unambiguous benefit of an alien power, as defined by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, is equivalent to the act of genocide. Thus, the practise of colonialism and its reinforcement policies of hierarchal racial power are continuously operational in that the populations subjected are denied by the occupying power structure the ability to recognise themselves as an entity that preexisted before the emergence of the invader. The jaundiced acclimatisation imposed upon Native Americans has resulted in such a haemorrhaging of the culture that being Indian has become more an issue of economic power rather than one of ethnic identity.

In short, Indians have long suffered a complex and implosive set of barriers to realising their full potential as a people. Indians, like other non-European ethnicities in the United States have been duped into accepting the lie that by willingly effacing their identities as First Nations people this will naturally lead to ‘progress’ and eventually “equality” with the marginalising power. This obligatory acquiescence of the Indian psyche into something both palatable and malleable for the White dominated system of exploitation and marginalization is total. The deception is so deeply conventionalised and unmitigated that we fail to realise that what we generally regard today as the Native American is in reality, the end result of European efforts to redefine, for its own purposes, what is and what isn’t, Indian.

In other words, American Indians have unconsciously, in response to White racism, cultivated a persona that reflects White perceptions of Indian people rather than Aboriginal ethnosocial realities. The self-colonialised Indian, distorted by the myth of European divinity, recognises themselves as something that must be rendered indiscernible from that of White expectations, goals and desires. Thusly, the true ethnic Indian, as an identifiable and viable entity, becomes something ethereally sinister and undeserving of human appreciation. Indigenous identity under colonialism is therefore replaced by a romanticised ‘Noble Savage’ doppelganger. One that is erroneously and calculatingly fabricated by the insecurities and fetishes of the invader. The incessantly prayerful and infinitely passive image of the ‘good’ Red Man persists. Primarily, because there are enough Indigenous people that will strive to seek love and approval, no matter how insignificant, from the great White father.

This is important to consider. But what we all tend to ignore is that along with identity conflicts, there comes the psychological necessity of the marginalised to become visible. The emphasis placed upon the American myth of racial neutrality, the insistence that race be ignored as a practical social issue, is hypocritical. Even in the United States. Everyday personal relations dictate, in practise as well as established law, that individuals are defined primarily by one’s actual or perceived ethnic affiliation. American Indian people and other Indigenous communities do not live within a bubble. We are acutely aware of how our respective histories, peoples and cultural attributes are viewed by the dominating power(s). The all-enveloping ideological protrusions of European genetic superiority versus non-White intuitive inferiority allow little room for the development of affirmatively elevating self-images that counter the rampant misrepresentations put forward as acceptable bias and social marginalisation.

Indian people are just as susceptible to viewing the world through the narrow constraints of US. corporate generated mass consumption than anyone else. Indigenous Peoples are just as driven by way of MTV to self-confusion as are all other ethnic groups in the US. American Indian sports team mascots, ‘Tumbleweeds’ cartoons and the anti-emancipation example of the unlawful incarceration of American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Leonard Peltier make it crystal clear that Indian realities and prideful self-identity are ideas that are best avoided. And while the ‘accepted’ Native leadership can always be counted on to call for prayer and moral fortitude in response to adverse community issues, addressing these problems directly by placing responsibility for American Indian social ills where they belong, makes more sense. Indians did not invade Europe. Europe invaded us. Placing the cause at the feet of the dominate European power structure is not indignation, it is merely a matter of historical accuracy. Revisionist historians can (and do) deny this reality through selective editing. But they cannot change the facts without laying bare their own inclination to conceal the truth through nefarious and subversive means.

The bottom line is that many of our young people are choosing not to identify with being Indigenous because of the obvious personal, material and psychological pressures involved in doing so. And with the greatest consumerist focus accorded to 12 to 24 year old potential consumers, the examples many Aboriginals are gravitating towards are not only self-destructive and self-denying, but are undoubtedly leading to levels of ethnic confusion that may be the undoing of what is left of Indian self-acknowledgement and self-respect at all.

No sane person likes or approves of gangs. In uniform or out. However, modern American gang culture, (an unfortunate by-product of the capitalist exploitation of marginalised urban American Africans) is gaining considerable influence among Indigenous youth everywhere. And at an alarming rate. This includes the fashion sense, the vernacular, the misogyny and the indiscriminate violence commonly associated with the subculture. This is a problem that has emerged slowly but surely over time. And not everyone sees the issue the same way. Some see a problem, some do not. Many traditionalist Aboriginal people, generally, view all non-Indigenous cultural traits as perilous activity. Gang related or not. Assimilated Native people on the other hand, who closely identify with their colonial mentors, tend to pick and choose which cultural-crossovers are a direct threat to their ‘Indian-ness’.

Weise repeatedly lamented in his Internet postings about the influence of American African culture on Indians and the general propensity for people to marry outside of the community. Pursuits that he believed weakened the racial purity of the Indian population. Sentiments such as these echo the banter bandied about by Neo-Nazi organisations and other Eurocentric volk who claim not so much to be racist but merely ‘concerned’ about crime, morality and ethnic ‘purity’.

Identifying himself as a “Nativenazi,” Weise found very little difference between 1930’s German eugenics and modern American as well as Native American racial prejudices. Anyone who doubts this should review the young man’s Internet postings on sites such as nazi.org. Spending untold hours daily online, Weise discovered a conduit for his discontent within the philosophy of Nazism, the ultimate cult of White supremacist ideology. And in spite of his Aboriginal pedigree, his commitment to National Socialism was so passionate that the racist, pro-European members of the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party allowed him to post threads on their website and referred to him affectionately as ‘Brother’.

If this seems bizarre to you, it really isn’t. In the often fluid philosophies of uber-nationalistic Eurocentric racists, such dichotomies are just par for the cou

rse in the murky world of White power politics. The international White power movement has undergone a reorganisation as of late in that the classification of Caucasian for these ethno-purists has expanded to include select Native and American Africans, most Arabs, many Castillian-Latinos and a few contrite, self-hating Jews who illogically subscribe to their basest philosophies. As LNSG head Steve Martinez remarked on nazi.org:

‘Weise participated in the forum in part because, unlike “white nationalist” or “white power” movements, the LNSG embraces all races as part of its vision of world nationalism. His statements on the site reflected a frustration with the populist politics and materialistic arrogance of modern society’.

And if the recent controversies surrounding African-Indian recognition and anti-Black attitudes can be used as example cases, then perhaps we have only seen the beginnings of an Indian alliance with the organised White supremacy movement. With one in two American Indian males dealing with the correctional system to some degree or another, this is a frightening new development. It is a documented fact that some Mexican and Asian criminal groups are forming working alliances with White Power organisations that extend their influence beyond the barriers of prison walls. American Indians, pressured to find a place to belong that leans toward the centres of power, may be heeding the message that White Power is synonymous with American sociopolitical achievement. If this is the case, will Indian Country, as a collective body, step up and face the issue at hand? Or will people try to roll treacherously with the tide?

Jeffery Weise, young, lonely, feeling persecuted and seething with antipathy finally found a way to feel in control even as the world around him rejected him In an eerie take on Hegelianism, he would hate ‘them’ back with an exacting vengeance. By quantifying himself as a superior being amongst the rabble, Weise rationalised his self-loathing as evidence of his importance, rather than as a sign of his mental/spiritual imbalance. A condition everyone around him, in particular his family and teachers, should have recognised and intercepted as a cry for help.

How an Indian kid from Minnesota came to identify with Adolf Hitler is illuminating in that there is no excuse from the Native leadership any longer for dismissing the presence of internalised Indian racism. There is no debate. Jeff Weise was concerned about Indian miscegenation and cultural loss. He clearly leaned heavily towards White supremacist values of racial purity and Eurocentric superlatives that directly conflicted with his own ethnic and cultural history. The chosen vocabulary in his online postings clearly demonstrates this. So did his dark and imposing appearance, intentionally culled from a purely European paradigm (Goth) totally out of sync with his actual reality. The morbid, combat booted, dark long coat persona Weise displayed was as far from Indian cultural norms as one could get. Especially within a reservation setting. His urban upbringing and exposure to the Gothic/Death Metal subculture was surely attained while he resided in Minneapolis and people close to those scenes readily acknowledge its White racialist undercurrent. It is a loosely organised subculture within a larger minority subculture. Almost insignificant were it not for the movement’s considerably virulent pro-European racism. An extreme that appealed to Weise’s sense of rejection and bitterness.

Like the Columbine deadly duo and all-American youths like Kip Kinkel, Weise subtlety called out for help and no one listened. Like many of us, when someone steps away from the mainstream we tend to marginalise them, which generally leads to the individual or community in question to unconsciously further the marginalisation as an act of defiance. Limiting the opportunity for compassionate intervention. Fellow students relayed accounts of Weise showing them violent drawings and talking about suicide, signs they acknowledged they didn’t take very seriously. Even as his extensive Internet activity bordered dangerously towards the fanatical. Aside from posting commentary supporting Neo-Nazi ideologies on nazi.org and some Yahoo forums, Weise even went so far as to produce a violent video showcasing murders available for streaming across the Internet. He also posted a story about surviving a school shooting and uploaded a still from the film ‘Elephant’ which was based on the 1999 Columbine High School shootings to his web profile. How no one can claim unawareness of this individual’s plight is a question for the entirety of the Red Lake community to ponder as well as for Indian Country as a whole.

The nitty-gritty of this unfortunate situation is this, Jeff Weise, an American Indian, was a victim of 500 years of state-sponsored, socially supported, anti-Indian genocide. His personal and documented psychological instabilities were merely a springboard for the underlying subject matter of why Indians live like paupers in 21st century North America. The hopelessness, poverty and lack of social parity accorded Native Americans in the past, and more so in the present, has resulted in self-hatred and sometimes extreme racialist views employed to create a focal point for pent-up aggressions and self-doubt. America and White America in particular is to blame for this tragedy.

But as most of the Native press and leadership has shown, the real issues surrounding the pain, confusion and eventual belching of violence Jeff Weise represented on the Red Lake Band of Chippewas Reservation will be ignored. I fully expect to read ‘responsible’ editorial after editorial in favour of further thumb-twirling and more pallid, disingenuous explanations citing youth disenfranchisement and boredom. The subject of Indian neo-Nazis will receive scant attention. There will be calls for more prayer, more compassion and more understanding. But there will be no calls for calling a spade a spade unless it is in abusive reference to a Black man. An ugly and common enough state of affairs. As long as Indians and other marginalised ethnic populations in America continue to play by the rules as set by the colonialiser, we will be facing more and more Jeff Weises. Be it through gang violence or randomly occurring bouts of murderous, self-hating belligerence, the implosion of the North American Aboriginal will continue.

And so must committed Indigenous resistance to invisibility and genocide.

-TheAngryindian