Earlier: Townsman of a Stiller Town—In Memoriam Martin Rojas

VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow writes: when I learned that Martin was working on this article, I begged him to let VDARE.com publish it, but he very honorably felt obligated by his agreement with Kevin MacDonald (whose tribute to Martin is here) and it was posted on Occidental Observer (where you can leave comments) on September 15, 2021. We reproduce it here by kind permission. Originally attributed to “Christopher Martin,” we have here substituted his real name, as far as I know the only time it has occurred as a byline, because of the freedom granted him by death after it was denied by the country he loved.

Introduction

For years, I’ve wanted to go to southern West Virginia and do original reporting on what’s alternatively called “the white death” and “the opioid crisis.” It is the greatest social malady of our time, and people who read this publication should care about its resolution more than anyone else. After more than a year of false starts, I secured private funding to go there, specifically, to McDowell County, the nation’s poorest and least healthy county, just east of Kentucky and abutting Virginia to the south in what used to be “coal country.” By way of disclaimer, I told everyone the truth: That this project was taken on as a freelance project and I wasn’t sure where it would be published. I did not advertise my more controversial views. For the sake of everyone’s privacy, each person I spoke to is described and quoted anonymously.

Finally, this essay is not the end result of a research project. I leave the task of documenting the sociological and economic origins of this crisis to historians and authors capable of obtaining grants and book deals. What I set out to do here was speak to actual residents of the area. I wanted to know what they had to say about it all and what they had seen over the course of their lives.

Photo of downtown Welch in 2004 when its population was around 2500

My drive into Welch (pop. 2406 in the 2010 census, estimated to be 1904 in 2019), McDowell County’s seat, is a long one, and what’s most striking is that the last two hours of it are nothing but turns on windy country roads surrounded by mountains covered in the lushest forests I’ve ever seen. I’d read a lot about this place, but nobody ever mentioned its natural beauty—or what a hassle it is to get to.

I arrive late on a Saturday and figure my best starting point is the bar I can walk to from where I’m staying. It’s small and largely unadorned. There’s a separate room full of slot machines, and everyone’s in there except me and

With its invasion of Ukraine, Russia disproved New York Times’ pundit Thomas Friedman’s Golden Arches Theory, which posited that no two countries that have McDonald’s franchises had gone to war [What is the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention?, by Jonathon Haeber, CBS News, January 28, 2008]. But what strikes me most about the war is its ethnic dimension. Whatever the geostrategic, balance-of-power and resource-extraction considerations, beneath all that is the irrepressible identitarianism that ends in war. Ukrainians want to stay Ukrainians, and Russians want to stay Russian. Both want to defend their people, their culture, and language, extraterritorially, if necessary. History has not ended.

From Ukraine’s right-wing organizations such as the Azov Battalion, Right Sector and Svoboda, that advocate an independent Ukrainian state, to Russian nationalists who want to “regather” Russian lands, good, old-fashioned Blut und Boden nationalism are at work:

• Regathering of the Russian Lands, by Anatoly Karlin, Substack, February 26, 2022
• Azov, Ukraine's Most Prominent Ultranationalist Group, Sets Its Sights On U.S., Europe, by Christopher Miller, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, November 14, 2018
• Profile: Ukraine's ultra-nationalist Right Sector, BBC News, April 28, 2014
• Svoboda: The rise of Ukraine's ultra-nationalists, by David Stern, BBC News, December 26, 2012

For Ukrainians, this war is about its very national existence. Historically, independence has eluded Ukraine. Up until the early 20th century, Ukraine was under the control of the Kievan Rus’, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Golden Horde, the Crimean Khanate, Czarist Russia, and Austria-Hungary. Only the collapse of Imperial Russia during the Russian Revolution of 1917 offered Ukrainians an opportunity to enjoy independence.

From 1917 to 1921, Ukraine fought for independence in an attempt to prevent Soviet Bolsheviks from subjugating the Ukrainian People’s Republic [Ukraine: World War I and the struggle for independence, Britannica]. Ukraine lost. The Soviet Union absorbed the Ukrainian People’s Republic to create the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

I’m sympathetic to Ukrainian nationalism. Many Ukrainians, especially

See, earlier: Navajo Nation Doesn't Want Navajo Murderer Of Navajo Woman And Navajo Child Executed; His Lawyers Are Claiming “Jury Bias”

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has jettisoned Roe v. Wade, maybe it can revisit another decision: McGirt v. Oklahoma and its companion, Sharp v. Murphy. Or maybe Congress might, you know, DO something? McGirt declared that the Sooner State cannot prosecute crimes in almost half its territory because they are committed on Indian reservations subject to tribal or federal jurisdiction. The state’s police and courts are paralyzed; violent felonies are going unpunished. Prison inmates of Indian extraction are trying to get criminal convictions overturned because they were imposed by state courts. Indians are even trying to evade state income taxes. It’s utter madness.

That madness was brought to us two years ago by Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch (always suspect in VDARE.com’s eyes) in alliance with the court’s Leftists: Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The McGirt-Sharp decision arose from two criminal cases from the 1990s, involving child molester Jimcy McGirt (right, in orange shirt) and murderer Patrick Murphy (right, lower). They argued that their trials in state courts were illegitimate and unconstitutional because Congress did not abolish Oklahoma’s Indian reservations when the territory became a state in 1906. Only tribes and federal courts, remember, have jurisdiction on reservations.

Anyone familiar with Sooner history will tell you that what the court claimed in McGirt is nonsense.

In the 19th century, Oklahoma was indeed Indian territory, where tribes from various parts of the country had been relocated and admittedly placed on reservations. But in 1901, Oklahoma Indians were declared U.S. citizens, several decades before the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. In 1907, statehood abolished reservations, then divided the land between Indian families and public sales. Indians participated in creating the new state and attended its constitutional conventions. Everyone understood that Oklahoma was to be a society for whites, Indians and black freedmen.

Even Wikipedia refers to the “Former Indian Reservations in Oklahoma.” And while at least one map purportedly shows one reservation, that of the Osage, what it shows is not a reservation. The Osage Reservation became Osage County, although the tribe retained all underground mineral rights.

The former reservations are also called Tribal Statistical or Jurisdiction Areas, within which a tribe has small properties that feature offices, police, courts, cemeteries, assembly halls, pow wow grounds, and for the paying paleface