While the star-studded A-listers fawned over Barry Obama and everyone spoke eloquently about this or that, and Obama talked about a world where politics wasn’t so contentious (despite being the great divider), a dirty little secret and an open lie went underreported. Jackson Park and the 19-acre “campus” surrounding that ugly-ass building include an Indigenous land acknowledgment.
Just a few feet from the center’s landmark museum tower and near the Obama statue, visitors encounter a permanent display, “Acknowledging Indigenous Peoples’ Land and Territory.” ..
The sign states that the Obama Foundation acknowledges “the sovereign Indigenous peoples who have, since time immemorial, inhabited and stewarded the lands many of us call home.”
But that land stolen for Obama’s Lie-Barry, groomed campus, and the new home of the Obama Foundation was never populated by anyone but the descendants of Americans.
“People here in future years are going to hear about how this land was stolen from the Native Americans,” Illinois GOP Chair Bob Grogan told Fox News Digital outside the center last week. “But, underneath, you should all be reading into this, that it was actually stolen from the citizens of Illinois, not from the Native Americans.”
The indigenous people Obama, Inc. stole the land from are probably the descendants of colonial Americans.
Grogan said visitors should view the display through the lens of the center’s own history. He argued the land was created after the Great Chicago Fire through landfill and public works projects and belongs to Chicago taxpayers.
“This land actually was recaptured from the Great Chicago Fire. They took a bunch of rubble and actually created this land,” he said. “So, it has nothing to do with the Native Americans, but it has everything to do with stealing it from the taxpayers of the city of Chicago.”
I can’t actually find any “concrete” evidence to confirm this, but you can look up the history of the Cook County area and find what you typically do. Those who came before were inevitably conquered and killed, made into slaves, subjugated, or dislocated by those who followed. There is evidence of occupation by paleo-“Indians,” Mound Culture, the Woodland and Mississippian tribes, and handfuls of tribes after that.
It reminds me of the Lakota Man, who cursed us for desecrating a sacred Mountain (Mount Rushmore). But the Lakota were not “indigenous” to that land until the late 18th century. The Lakota’s claim overlaps with the timeframe of the American Revolution (which included peoples who had been on those lands as long as 100 years before the Lakota laid claim to where Mount Rushmore sits.
No one labels the Lakota colonizers or occupiers on stolen land. And yet, that is the history of the entire planet everywhere human beings happen to be.
In the case of the Barry Center, you could dispute the pandering claims of erecting one of the ugliest buildings of the 21st century on “native land,” but it’s definitely stolen. The Obama Foundation benefited from a sweetheart deal that leased all 19-plus acres for 99 years, for the one-time payment of 10.00.
The taxpayers you took it from can’t even buy wampum or whiskey for that cheap.
