While at the April 9th Cross Politic event in Rapid City, South Dakota, I participated in a political forum with three Republican candidates: Steven Haugaard, a member of the South Dakota House of Representatives, representing District 10, running for Governor; State Representative Taffy Howard, also a member of the South Dakota House of Representatives, representing District 33, running for the U.S. House to represent South Dakota’s At-Large Congressional District; and Bruce Wayne Whalen running for the U.S. Senate against John Thune (R).
Mr. Whalen is Native American. He knows the Reservation system in the United States and what it has done to Native Americans by creating dependency and subservience to the government in the name of security. He mentioned several times in the forum that our nation is becoming a national Indian Reservation. The policies that destroyed Native Americans are becoming national policy, and it’s not only the Democrats. Consider Mike Gibbons, a leading Republican Senate candidate from Ohio, who said last fall in 2021 that middle-class Americans don’t pay “any kind of a fair share” of income taxes. And what do these taxes do? Create programs that enslave nearly half the American people.
God and Government
In 1982, the three-volume God and Government series fanned the flames of a national worldview awakening, establishing that the character of a nation and its people depends on their relationship with God as revealed in Holy Scripture. Relying on clear historical and biblical research, author Gary DeMar demonstrated how America had been great and how she could be great again.
Buy NowInterventionism by governments has crippled generations of Native Americans.
What our nation has done to Native Americans on their lands, the Democrat Party wants to do everywhere, and many Republicans are joining in the transformation. They might not desire to wreck our nation’s economies (although some do), but their foolish “good intentions” will certainly accomplish a similar end.
Do you want to see a microcosm of what Government intervention has done to people, then pay close attention to the works of Rousas J. Rushdoony (1916–2001) who served for eight and a half years as a missionary to the Shoshone and Paiute Indians on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in a remote area of Nevada beginning in 1944. It was his time on the reservation where he deduced correctly that the State “is the giver of all things, the source of power, of land, and (having built a reservoir for irrigation here) even of water… The government hospital delivers the children, and the government army taketh them away, and blessed is the name of the government each Memorial Day and Fourth of July.”
The government’s “management” of Native Americans ruined their lives. Rushdoony told about the impact of this process in a prescient article published in 1954 in Essays on Liberty, a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). As you read it below, note how Rushdoony’s reservation experience has broadened in scope to include most Americans who are now on a much larger national reservation. — Gary DeMar
________________________________
The reservation Indian is becoming less self-sufficient and more dependent upon what he calls “the Great White Father in Washington.” Instead of freedom, the Indian has government-guaranteed “security.” Instead of individual responsibility, he has a government bureau to handle his personal affairs. There are special laws governing his right to own land and to spend tribal money. Under that system of bondage, it would surprise no one to find that many thousands of Indians have remained uneducated, hungry, diseased, and mismanaged. —FROM [Dean Russell] Wards of the Government
As a missionary to the Indians, [Rushdoony writes] I find your warnings underscored by my daily experience. One of the surest consequences of a government of “welfare” and “security” is the rapid decline and death of responsibility and character.
Whatever the pre-reservation Indian was — and his faults were real — he was able to take care of himself and had a character becoming to his culture and religion. He was a responsible person. Today he is far from that. The wretched security he has had, beginning with the food and clothing dole of early years, designed to enforce the reservation system and destroy Indian resistance, has sapped him of character. The average Indian knows that he can gamble and drink away his earnings and still be sure that his house and land will remain his own; and; with his hunting rights, he can always eke out some kind of resistance.
Government men too often hamper and impede the man with initiative and character. This is because their program inevitably must be formulated in terms of the lowest common denominator, the weakest Indian. In addition, the provisions of the government for the “welfare” and “security” of the Indians remove the consequences from their sinning and irresponsibility. The result is a license to irresponsibility, which all the touted government projects cannot counteract.
And I believe the results would be no better for the best hundred or thousand persons selected from any society, after a generation or so of the same kind of “welfare” and “security” government.
There are many men in the Indian Service who are sincerely and earnestly trying to improve the Indian’s welfare. They are, however, faced with this constant dilemma: All their zealous and patient efforts to help the Indian simply tend to become another crutch that the Indian depends on. Those Indians who have become progressive and independent apparently have done so because of personal and religious factors totally unrelated to the government program.
By What Standard?
An introduction into the problems of Christian philosophy. It focuses on the philosophical system of Dr. Cornelius Van Til, which in turn is founded upon the presuppositions of an infallible revelation in the Bible and the necessity of Christian theology for all philosophy. Basic to this study is the belief that presuppositions of human thought in every field must be basically one in order to arrive at any concept which both validates biblical faith and human knowledge.
Buy Now