The looming debt crush, the global gold rush, the "Bloody Ground" & little Egypt ... in Illinois.
Great links, images and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
Blue Waltz #1 Paul RESIKA 2001 Source: Onpaper
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EM borrowers ex-China face $421 bn in debt payments this year
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China Is Front and Center of Gold’s Record-Breaking Rally
Gold’s rise to all-time highs above $2,400 an ounce this year has captivated global markets. China, the world’s biggest producer and consumer of the precious metal, is front and center of the extraordinary ascent.
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And guess what! In the face of the gold rush, Zimbabwe is adopting a gold-backed currency, the ZiG
On April 5, Zimbabwe’s central bank announced the new gold-backed currency, immediately implementing changes on digital platforms with local banks converting ZWL to ZiG amounts on their systems. However, the new bank notes will become available only at the end of the month after the central bank’s governor put in place a grace period to enable the transition. … Zimbabwe has been struggling with its currency for more than a decade. The ZiG is the country’s sixth attempt to launch a new one since 2008 when the rate of inflation reached 79.6 billion percent per month before soaring to an unprecedented level of 89.7 zillion percent by November that year, according to the International Monetary Fund. The decision to move to the ZiG was an attempt to tackle inflation and also foster “simplicity, certainty [and] predictability” in Zimbabwe’s financial affairs, John Mushayavanhu, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, said at the launch. But simplicity is not what many consumers in Zimbabwe are currently experiencing. Several people in Harare and nearby towns and rural areas told Al Jazeera that despite assurances the old notes were still in use this month, government entities and the private and informal sectors were all rejecting them, leaving people in the lurch.
Source: AlJazeera
Through the Trees (yellow) by Paul Resika
The “Bloody Ground”
Even though it was only in the late twentieth century that non-Native scholars began to assign the label of genocide to the foundational violence that created the US, Native people have long possessed a discourse that labelled and critiqued the brutality of US conquest. Unearthing these Native ‘narratives of horror’ can require close attention to questions of language and interpretation. There is a need for more research into the specific Indigenous-language terms – such as Navajos’ Naahondzood (‘The Fearing Time’), the Chinook Jargon expression Polakly Illahee (‘Land of Darkness’) or the Creek word Ecunnaunuxulgee (‘People Greedily Grasping after the Lands of the Red People’) – that American Indians used to discuss colonial violence among themselves. Yet much of the Indigenous consciousness of genocide has long been hiding in plain sight, unrecognised by previous generations of scholars. During the negotiations leading up to the 1775 Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, the Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe offered a particularly evocative description of settler aggression. Dragging Canoe opposed the proposed treaty, which would transfer much of present-day Kentucky and Tennessee to white control: ‘Dragging Canoe told them it was the bloody Ground, and would be dark, and difficult to settle. Later white historians – among them, Teddy Roosevelt in his multi-volume Winning of the West – corrupted Dragging Canoe’s words into the ‘dark and bloody ground’ and assumed his phrase to be the Cherokee meaning of Kentucky (a word actually derived from the Iroquoian term for a plain or meadowland). … The notion of ‘the bloody ground’ offers a novel remapping of North American history. Not only does it speak back to other terrestrial metaphors historians have used to understand early North America (‘The Middle Ground’, ‘The Native Ground’), by highlighting how violence (‘bloody’) over land (‘ground’) formed the primary co-ordinates of the new cartography created by the birth of the United States. Dragging Canoe’s prediction that Kentucky would be ‘dark, and difficult to settle’ serves as a reminder that, from the Indigenous perspective, colonialism was not inevitable, but rather the result of conscious policies, which often unfolded in the face of considerable Native resistance. In fact, Dragging Canoe’s words proved eerily prophetic: in 1853, Lakota leaders complained that US soldiers were the first ‘to make the ground bloody’. ‘The bloody ground’ is a more accurate way to describe the violent clashes between whites and Indigenous peoples in North America than the term ‘Indian Wars’. War connotes a contest between equals, in which each views the other as a sovereign and each faces an equivalent threat. The US, however, never considered Indigenous societies to be full-fledged nations. Rather, they were ‘fierce savages’ with only a ‘right of occupancy’ to their ancestral territories.
The speech of Simon Pokagon (Potawatomi) at the Chicago World’s Fair, critiquing the violent invasion of their homelands that Native Americans suffered after 1492; printed on birch bark, a traditional Potawatomi building material.
The confrontations between the US and Native Americans resembled the asymmetrical violence that characterised colonial peripheries around the globe during the long nineteenth century. The unequal sizes of the polities involved, as well as the vast distances between the zone of conflict and the colonial power’s centres of population, production and governance, ensured that violence remained confined to Indigenous territories … The standard periodisation of US history, with its compartmentalisation of the nineteenth century into a string of discrete events – the War of 1812, the US–Mexico War, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age – obscures the ways that each of these incidents intertwined with a single, ongoing process: the invasion and dispossession of the Indigenous peoples in North America through the replacement of Natives with white settlers and the supplanting of Native homelands with the homesteads of US citizens. … an almost uninterrupted string of violence towards American Indians accompanied the Peace Policy (adopted in 1868). Each bore the misleading label of war: the Yavapai War (1871–5), the Modoc War (1872–3), the Red River War (1874–5), the Great Sioux War (1876–7), the Nez Perce War (1877), the Bannock War (1878), the Cheyenne War (1878–9), the Ute War (1879) and the Sheepeater Indian War (1879), among other conflicts.
As in prior campaigns, the army did not hesitate to attack entire Indigenous communities. In fact, its preferred tactic, especially when confronting the equestrian Indians of the Great Plains, was to wait until cold weather led Natives to collect together for the winter and then to surprise their camp at dawn. … In the years since 1890, Wounded Knee – or, as it was remembered by the Lakotas, Wichakasotapi (‘Where All Were Wiped Out’) – has come to loom large in the historical record as the definitive end point in the US conflicts with Indigenous peoples. There is good reason, however, to question the ruptures implicit in such periodisation. One can identify continuities that extend past 1890 and contribute to what could be termed the afterlife of genocide. The violence Indigenous peoples experienced in the nineteenth century still casts long shadows into the present, structuring the lives and experiences of Natives and non-Natives alike
‘The Bloody Ground’ Nineteenth-Century Frontier Genocides in the United States from Part III - Nineteenth-Century Frontier Genocides Karl Jacoby in the Cambridge World History of Genocide (2023)
Little Egypt, Illinois
Cairo, a town at the southern tip of Illinois (now a marker of urban decay in modern America) founded in the early 19th century, was given that name because it was expected to grow into a huge metropolis. Located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, it was the transport hub of a region that became known as “Little Egypt” because of its huge deltaic plains where farmers could grow anything.
Source: Economist
The most southern portion of Illinois has been known as Little Egypt at least since the 1820s, and maybe earlier. Many early European settlers viewed the Mississippi River as America’s Nile, which, coupled with evidence that the area was inhabited by an ancient civilization (earthen mounds that often looked a lot like pyramids) probably had something to do the region’s nickname. The first connection between southern Illinois and Egypt was probably the one made in 1799 by Baptist preacher John Badgley. He looked down from the bluffs over the American Bottoms (the wide floodplain that stretches from Alton to Chester) and proclaimed the area the “Land of Goshen,” an exceptionally fertile area in Egypt located in the delta of the Nile River. Badgley’s reference pre-dates all of the Egyptian town names in the region, as well as the stories of caravans of central Illinoisans traveling to southern Illinois for food after crop failures. Those crop failures rolled through central Illinois the early 1830s. The winter of 1830-31 was especially harsh, with snow on the ground from September to April; the growing season didn’t start until June, then was cut short by a September frost. The only corn that survived grew on the farms in the most southern part of the state. Farmers from central Illinois were forced to travel there to buy corn and other food, just like Jacob went to Egypt for his grain when Canaan was hit by drought. Or so the story goes.
The first place in southern Illinois with an Egyptian name was Cairo. Investors in the Bank of Cairo and City of Cairo bought land at the Ohio/Mississippi confluence in 1817, but it took a while for an actual town to be built. Thebes sprang to life in the early 1840s, and a town called Alexandria was proposed between Cairo and Thebes but never developed. Other towns with Egyptian names that survived included Dongola and Karnak.
Source: Mississippi Valley Traveler
Paul Reiska, Red Finale, 2001
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