The following article was published in the Mille Lacs Messenger. It is also posted on Care2.

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Evil doctrine

On June 17, Indigenous Peoples Literature (IPL) posted an (online) article of mine titled "Proposals to heal the genocidal wounds of indigenous peoples." In the article, I quoted a statement made by Louis Stanley Schoen in a Star Tribune article.

"What if a public commission were to begin to examine the American (and European) history of white supremacy - and, here, how that doctrine shaped the formation of Minnesota and its public and private institutions?

"What if such a commission learned how to offer leadership and resources to dismantle this evil doctrine?"

After this quote, I wrote that the "evil doctrine" that needs to be dismantled is the 15th century Papal Bull Inter Caetera. After reading my IPL article, Steve Newcomb, a writer for Indian Country Today and an internationally renowned leader of the movement to dismantle the Inter Caetera Bull, contacted me and said, "Thanks Thomas, Good Work!"

In my IPL article I also wrote: "I recently sent a proposal to Griff Wigley, the project leader of the Minnesota Sesquicentennial Advisory Committee for Native American Partnering (SACNAP) and blogger for the SACNAP's blog, wherein I asked him to post Louis Stanley Schoen's article on the blog. And do so, because it is a good article and also because I could then, in response to Schoen's posted article, post a comment with a link to a petition of mine where tribal leaders and prominent non-Indian Minnesotans could add their names and comments to this petition, a petition that asks our Governor [Tim Pawlenty] to establish a public commission to accomplish the goals that Schoen proposed in his Star Tribune article."

Mr. Wigley not only posted a link to Louis Stanley Schoen's article, he also presented a new addition to the SACNAP blog, titled: Does Minnesota need its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission? This new addition to the blog includes a number of links to associated articles and quotes from these articles. A link to my article that was published in Winona, Minnesota's daily newspaper [Winona Daily News] was one of the links included in the blog's new addition. Its title is "State looks to settle up with the past."

Also, after contacting Indian Country Today, the world's leading American Indian news source, I was interviewed for an article about our state's Sesquicentennial Commission's acknowledgement that our state committed ethnocide and genocide against American Indians during its early history. The article was published and also displayed on the SACNAP blog. A paragraph in the article was about my movement to change the name of the Rum River back to its sacred Dakota name, Wakan.

Nick Coleman, a writer for the Star Tribune, recently called me. He is going to write an article about the Rum River name-change movement.

Thomas Dahlheimer

Wahkon