Eie Lidgan Dait Eighty-one years of editorial freedom Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan quixotic quest A time to be public, a time to be private pr~ikperioff A 0 f I 420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, Mich. News Phone: 764-0552 Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 7, 1971 NIGHT EDITOR: CARLA RAPOPORT he cas for the Indians THE CHIPPEWA, Ottawa, and Potowa- tomy Indians have found a treaty to add prestige of history and legality to what has long been a plaintive cry to improve Indian educational opportuni- ties. In a lawsuit initiated by Paul Johnson, grad., the Indians have charged the University with violating its 1817 Ft. lI\iegs Treaty promise to educate Indian children in return for 3,840 acres of land. Johnson is asking the court to force the University to account for the profit it has received from this land in the past 154 years and that this money be chan- neled into two funds - one for college scholarships and the other for elemen- tary and secondary school financial aid for the tribes' descendants. Scattered in pockets of reservations that they don't even get to administer, the Indians are too poor to raise big funds to finance their own movement. The prosecuting team must try to arouse Indians who've been co-opted into being so highly urbanized they've forgot- ten to agitate for the brothers they've left behind. Another problem is the lack of enough Indian students within the University. If the Indians in the Uni- Indian students enrolled now instead of 30. Having decided to employ the 1817 Ft. Meigs Treaty, the Indians have armed themselves with an extremely adequate, superbly relevant instrument to probe the open wound. The Ft. Meigs Treaty, signed by Lewis Cass, governor of the territory of Mich- igan and by President James Monroe, ceded one tract of land to the University and another to St. Anne's Church of De- b' I dri-i alt tg Editorial Staff ROBERT KRAFTOWITZ Editor JIM BEATTIE DAVE CHUDWIN Executive Editor Managing Editor STEVE KOPPMAN . ..Editorial Page Editor RICK PERLOFF .... Associate Editorial Page Editor PAT MAHONEY .... Assistant Editorial Page Editor LYNN WEINER . . Associate Managing Editor LARRY LEMPERT . Associate Managing Editor ANITA CRONE ............... Arts Editor JIM IRWIN ,. . .............. Associate Arts Editor JANET FREY ...... .......... Personnel Director ROBERT CONROW .. ...... .. Books Editor JIM JUDKIS'. ......... . , . . . ... Photography Editor troit. In 1825 the University acquired the land given St. Anne's Church, and with that tract combined the church's pre- vious committment to furthering the education of Indian youngsters with its own inherent promise to further Indian education on the college level. That the Indians have had to resort to a legal battle over a human rights and historical issue is the crown- ing indictment of a University too ob- livious to the plight of a significant num- ber of its state's population. The University's legal adviser, Roder- ick Daane, has said that the Indians gave the 3,840 acres of land to the University as a gift, with "some hopeful language" regarding Indian education mentioned. WHETHER THE suit is successful or not, the principle remains. The In- dians, with their 1817 land grant to the University, endowed it with more money than either the founding fathers of Har- vard or Yale gave their universities, ac- cording to a statement by former Michi- gan Supreme Court Justice John Cooley in 1888. These Indians have not gotten their just due from the University. In- dians are underrepresented in the stu- dent population. Indian-oriented courses are of a backward looking anthropolo- gical type. Indians throughout the area are often too poorly educated to envision later going on to college. Historically, the, Indians relinquished valuable land to the University, the Uni- versity has profited from this land, and it must have the grace and the obliga- tion to help the Indians who've helped them. This is why Paul Johnson, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Great Lakes Indian Alliance, is insisting the suit be followed all the way through the courts as a matter of principle. The Indians are asking for justice, not handouts. THE LAWSUIT should force a profound re-examination of University consid- eration of the Indians. The Indians have stepped out from the background now: Their rights best be recognized lest ig- noring them or moving too slowly pre- cipitate retrenchment into a hate-whites bitterness that isn't necessary. "EVERYONE WANTS to b e happy. But you aren't going to be happy until you see t h a t we're all together. We're brothers and sisters in this world and we got to be open and loving with each other. Most of us are afraid to be open with our brothers and sisters because we're afraid to give of ourselves. But we got to give. We got to give everything we have." We gave. We talked to men we wouldn't call brothers, to women who couldn't be sisters, to psy- choanalysts who weren't even friends. We talked about love, lust, dreams and despair w i t h people we didn't know before the puff of a joint, or a night in bed, or an evening in church praying to Jesus. But we wanted to be open, so we talked. We spilled out our lives into the sink of another person who usually wasn't listening since he was trying to pour out him- self into us. We needed to talk so we did. When it was over, we felt as drained and empty as a man who howls at the desert - as strange as the desert were o u r comrades, but comrades they were supposed to be. . . . "Every man is your broth- er, every woman is your sister. We got to be open with every- body." And why we should be as open with strangers as we are with our friends went unasked since one had to be open . . talking, con- fessing . . . talking like Americans who accost you in the bar on lonely evenings: "Sit down a mo- ment. You think you got prob- lems?" AND IT MAY all be a natural reaction to a society in which love and warmth and emotional contact come in droplets. And it may be natural when you've grown up among countrymen who insist they're individuals before they're people, individuals and in:; dividuals. and more self-sufficient individuals, so self-sufficient they cannot depend on anyone or love anyone for fear the coarse edge of their personality wil slip away- proudly proclaiming "I am a rock" in defiant denial of the satire the authors of the song. Simon and Garfunkel, had sought to portray since to these Ameri- cans being the Gibralter of in- dividuality is the highest form of nobility one can achieve because to them emotions are a feminino form of weakness which means the only way to communicate w i t h other people is through the brit- tle fabric of individuality - ex- cept when you have so many individuals, each an individual in his own individualistic w a y, you have a world of islands which share only the sea. WE REACT. .We sense t h i s crazy emphasis upon individual uniqueness; and detecting t h e abundance of secrecy in society. disgusted by the notion that a person is his mind before his body, we cry: Enough. "People got to learn to com- municate. They got to understand none of us is any better or worse or different than the other. We're all people. And we got to be open with each other." Women dress braless. People skinny dip at rock concerts. Nu- dist camps multiply. Everyone is One. We are The People, T h e Third World, the Youth Culture. In short, our public eye has grown more public. Not so fast. If the goal here is a society which not only per- mits, but actively encourages, us to live nude in the streets while we talk about the most intimate aspects of our private lives w it h strangers simply in the spirit of being open, then what of our bod- ies can we reserve for those we love: and what conversations can be spoken untainted to the private ear? Everything, after all, is com- mon. We are all presumably equal in the jungle. But we must not become so pre- occupied with Equality, in the wild rejection of individualism, that we lose any notion of peo- ple's differences. There are peo- ple within The People and youth among the Culture. If not, we are as guilty as liberals who would' sacrifice each other to some amorphous Humanism, Demo- cracy or Freedom. THERE HAS BEEN an over- reactionamong us to standards of propriety, and the aristocratic sense of what is private. Some- how, what is private smacks of discrimination against The Pub- lic, but this confuses matters. One can still support The Pub- lic yet maintain a notion of pri- vacy. There is something quite dignified about preserving a sense of private self which obtains its honor precisely because it's pri- vate. What is common to all, pro-- claimed Nietzsche, is tainted for that reason. We are houses, but the door need not stay open for every visitor. If the door lets in al) the public, our house will become but a barn - our pride a com- modity. Let us open our doors. but reserve our right to close them. I Seeing astronauts as super-robots By JIM JUDKIS Photography Editor ALL HUMAN BEINGS know the moon. It's gentle light turns night into a fantasy world. The moon's rhythms move the tides and transform straight average men into hairy raving werewolves. Astrol- ogically, the moon exerts the main cosmic force upon human emotions. It is associated with fertility, the female, and romanticism. However, science has proven that the moon is little more than a huge cold ball of rock, broken out with a bad case of craters. Before a man can set his space-boot onto that cosmic territory, a lot of high-brow technology must be developed. Also trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, And reverent, and do their duty to God and country and obey the scout law. Not only that, they must be handsome air force pilots and pretty intelligent, too. David Scott, Al- fred Worden, and James Irwin meet all the above criteria, but while listening to them talk and watching them sitting and standing around, I asked myself, "How much do these guys really have it all together?" MY FIRST IMPRESSION was that none of the astronauts had that much going for them, at least as far as one's choice of friends goes. They seemed like over sophisticated robots, incapable of show- ing any emotion other than patriotism. They displayed as much enthus- iasm about going to the moon as they would when taking out the garbage. What's so great about travelling to the moon, anyway, all they had to do was follow some step-by-step instructions. How much creativity was displayed? They may have walked on the moon but, would any of them give a few minutes to talk with a wino on a street corner? However, there is another side to the astronauts, a much brighter, more positive side. These men do what they do with the absolute highest standards of perfection. When viewed aesthetically, their trip has a cold, lucid type of beauty unlike any previous human experience. Their moonscape photographs have a clarity and sur- realistic beauty to match an ancient Chinese landscape scroll. .. -MARCIA ZOSLAW Bangladesh: Genesis of a crisis By MUZAMMEL HUQ ON MARCH 25, the occupation forces of the Pakistan Army unleashed a well-planned Gestapo- style terror on the 75 million people of Bangladesh (formerly known as East Pakistan or East Bengal) whose only crime w a s their unanimous support of the demands for more autonomy and self-determination. The Bengalis overwhelmingly voted for t h e Awami League, a political party. which won 167 out of 169 National Assembly seats allotted to Bang- ladesh in the only free General Election ever held in Pakistan's 24 year old history. The result of the Pakistan Army's "Cleansing Operation" is well known to news- paper readers. The Pakistan Army has so far: -Killed one million people in Bangladesh in addition to loot- ing properties, buring villages and raping girls. (The Globe and Mail, July 20, 1971). -Driven out over nine million "fellow East Pakistanis" to India. of which 10,000 already died of cholera and many more are dy- ing. (Time, August 2, 1971). -Created artificial famine amongst the remaining 67 million people in Bangladesh so t h a t about 20 million will die of star- vation in the next 3 to 4 months. The surviving Bengalis will then be docile enough to be colonized permanently by West Pakistan. never again to speak of inde- pendence. INDIA WAS RULED by the British from 1757 to 1947. Bengal, one of the provinces of the un- divided India, was the first vic- tim of, and the great opponent to. British colonization. A prominent Indian leader once said, "What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow." The Muslim League which was founded in Dacca in 1905 exploit- ed this sentiment of the Muslimi in Bengal as well as in other parts in India. Its demand for a separate and independent home- land for the Indian Muslims cul- minated in the historic Lahore Resolution. This resolution, which is considered to be the basis for the creation of Pakistan, w a s proposed by a veteran Bengali leader A. K. Fazlul Hug and un- animously passed in 1940. In 1947, Pakistan was carved out of In- dia with two wings i.e., East and West Pakistan, separated by over 1,000 miles of Indian territory and linked only by the common, but very loose, bond of religion. The Lahore Resolution s a y s, "... the areas in which the Mus- lims are numerically in a major- ity - as in the North-Westerr. and Eastern zones of India - should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be auto- nomous and sovereign." SINCE THE BIRTH of Pakis- tan, the people of Bangladesh have been raising demands for provincial autonomy and self-de- termination in accordance with the Lahore Resolution. Sadly, a small group of big capitalists and feudal landlords in West Pakis- tan, in collusion with the Pun- jabi dominated Army, have ruth- lessly suppressed the legitimate demands of Bangladesh in order to perpetuate, in the name of Islam and the integrity of Pakis- tan, their exploitation and dom- ination of the Bengali people. Sta- tistics from Pakistan Government publications point out the astro- nomically high proportion of dis- !oarities in the two wings of Pakistan. The conspiracy of destroying the political, economic, cultural cent of the population of what was formerly Pakistan. THE RULING CLIQUE in Wes1 Pakistan ultimately recognized Bengali as one of the two na- tional languages, but only after killing hundreds of Bengali stu- dents and innocent people in 1952. This incident gave the necessary impetus to the demands of Ben- gali people for more provincial autonomy and self-determination, The West Pakistani military-in- dustrial complex was using the Muslim League as a tool for suck- ing the blood of Bangladesh. In the 1954 provincial election, the Muslim League was completely obliterated by the overwhelming victory of the United Front of sev- eral Bengal-based political par- treme political instability and corrupt bureaucracy which ulti- mately led the Coup d'E tat, stag- ed in 1958 by the notorious Gen. Ayub Khan. He opened a new chapter of unprecedented exploi- tation of Bengladesh through his infamous 'Basic Democracy'. The Punjabi military fascists e v e n planned to kill Sheitkh Mujibur Rahman and other Bengali poli- tical leaders because of their de- mands for provincial autonomy and fabricated a totally false case, known as the 'Agartala Con- spiracy'. The Bengalis protested in one voice and Gen. Ayub Khan not only withdrew the 'Conspiracy Case' against Sheikh Mujib and others, but was also forced to re- sign. But this was not the end THE MILITARY regime of Yahya Khan could not resist the demands of the Bengalis for a free general election. He prom- ised to hold the election in De- cember, 1970. One month before the election, Bangladesh was swept over by the worst cyclone of the century, killing an estimated one million people. This tragedy horrified the whole world, but not Yahya Khan and his West Pakis- tani accomplices. Even a few weeks after the cy- clone, no relief work had b e e n organized by the central govern- ment. The utter indifference and extreme callousness of the West Pakistani rulers greatly upset the Bengalis, who -verwhelmingly vot- ed for the Awami League of the Sheikh Mujib in the December election. The landslide victory of A.wami League greatly displeased the mil- itary generals and political lend- ers of West, Pakistanis who fear- ed that they would not be able to milk Bangladesh dry as they had done for the last 24 years. They outlawed the Awami League, branded Mujib as a trait- or, put him in jail in W e s t Pakistan and started systematic mass m'urder of the Bengalis on the night of March 25. They killed 10,000 people in Dacca on that night alone and be- gan to wipe out Bengali intelli- gensia and political leaders. This was the first time in the history of mankind that a majority pro- vince had been forced to secede and declare independence. The result of Pakistan Army's brutal oppression is well known, Despite the terror, the Bengalis are fighting with whatever arms they have. The resistence by the Mukti Bahini or Liberation Artn is rapidly taking on the earmarks of a classic guerrilla war. 4 I 4 U $} .................................. ........_,....._.. .. fi i.