Category: colonialism

Our histories, ourselves, Part 2

Posted on by kathiemm
National Day of Mourning Plaque, Plymouth, MA. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

By Rev. Dr. Doe West

The story of Native Americans/American Indians continues, with some glimmers of hope for the future.

Having failed to fully record the genocide, contemporary U.S. governments have decided to recognize 562 Native American tribes. To be included on those rolls, you must have an ancestor who was processed and counted–and most likely ended up on one of the reservations created while treaties were being broken and peoples moved like cattle across lands unknown to them.

As with all people who are deemed different and set apart, a number of Native Americans, ancestors of the survivors who may not be recognized as such today, voluntarily removed themselves from that processing and relocation. Within that group were my Grandmother’s family members.

The tales my grandmother told me regarding my lineage included ancestors hiding in the woods of the Hudson Valley area and coming into newly integrated groups of various tribes surviving there (Lenape/Delaware, Mahican, Wappinger, and others who entered that area) as well as African Americans, Cajuns, French Canadian trappers, and other European traders) in villages that developed on the Hudson river. This beautiful mélange of cultures created what I consider my “true American mutt heritage.”

When the Missionaries learned that my Grandmother’s parents were both dead, they came to “save her from the Savages.” To do so, they placed her in a white woman’s home in Peekskill, NY, as a kitchen slave.

The recognition of the history that Andrés Reséndez recounts in his  recent book, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America” is growing, as more and more people learn about and recognize the truth of this aspect of a generally unreported part of “American history.  But whether or not painful facts are recognized or understood, the facts are the facts. And for my grandmother and for me, America’s historical degradation and enslavement of native peoples was and is a fact of life.

When you read this story, you may suspect that it bears a tone of anger that I did not feel in writing it. Instead, as an academic, I speak with a voice that is intended to be one of education.

November is Native American Heritage Month.

Learn the truth.
Understand what was done.
Know that tribal affiliation and lineage does not exist only on ledgers on dusty shelves in official buildings in Washington, DC.

I trust my Grandmother’s oral traditions, passed on to me along with other true tales of her life that persist above and beyond the records made by those who enslaved her.

I celebrated my heritage throughout this month and I celebrate the next steps in our attaining all the rights and privileges owed me on the basis of my citizenship and my humanity in the land of my ancestors.

And I welcome the coming waves of immigrants and invite them to learn more about the true heritage of all the peoples who have struggled to build a decent life in this land of ours.

Our histories, ourselves. Part 1.

Posted on by kathiemm
National Day of Mourning Plaque, Plymouth, MA. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

November is Native American History Month  (and they’re not over yet–not the month and not the history)

by Rev. Dr. Doe West

Seventy years ago, Native Americans could not vote.  A few weeks ago, two Native American/American Indian women created wave upon wave of celebration by achieving membership in the U.S. Congress. Are these the first Native Americans to take on this responsibility?

Not even close. Please open your minds and hearts to a little history:

  1. The first NA/AI member of Congress with recognized Tribal affiliation was elected in 1783.
  2.  A page in Wikipedia provides names and dates of previous NA/AI members of the U. S. Congress with documented tribal ancestry or affiliation. [
  3.  That list includes only members of tribes on the  48 contiguous states—not Hawaii, not Alaska. (As of now, no Alaska Natives have ever been elected or served.
  4. Upon the election of Sharice Davids of Kansas and Deb Halland of New Mexico, we will have four Native Americans serving in Congress in 2019; these new members join Tom Cole and Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma.

Those elections are important historical events, but there are other histories of personal importance to me and thousands of others.

Here’s an example: In the 1790s,  Secretary of War Henry Knox said to President George Washington:

“How different it would be if instead of exterminating a part of the human race by our modes of population  we had persevered through all difficulties and at last had imparted our Knowledge of cultivating and the arts, to the Aboriginals of the Country by which the source of future life and happiness had been preserved and extended. But it has been conceived to be impracticable to civilize the Indians of North America – This opinion is probably more convenient than just.”*

Washington and Knox were “reformers” who helped propel the concept of “civilizing the savage”;  it is pretty clear to me that their intentions reflected moral reasoning. Unfortunately,  stories that begin with decent intentions often, inevitably, lead to devastating outcomes because the intentions are based on ignorance and prejudice. In this case, the “Kill the Savage and Save the Person” campaign began.

Native American Boarding Schools (aka Indian Residential Schools) were created to provide institutionalized enforcement of intentions to “civilize.” Children were not just torn from their families and tribal communities. They were also stripped of their indigenous cultural signifiers: external signifiers were destroyed by cutting  their hair and burning  their clothing; linqual signifiers by forbidding use of their native languages; and personal signifiers by replacing their true names with European names intended to “Christianize” as well as  “civilize” them.

The history of these schools yields proof of true savagery – sexual, emotional, physical, and mental abuse in these mostly in church-run schools. Doctrine and dogma were created by those in charge to meet their interpretation of what their religion would demand (just as is found today).

Genocide took many forms in the early history of the United States and  came close to eradicating the original people of our Nation.   There is no definitive list of Tribes that inhabited this land before colonization. There are official narratives, but there are also extinct tribes, loss of original language speakers, and destruction of dwellings and artifacts, without which it is difficult to create a true history. [lightly edited]

*lightly edited

I Pray Daily to Awaken from the Nightmare of History (James Joyce) Part 2

Posted on by kathiemm
Mark Twain. In the public domain.

by Stefan Schindler

During America’s conquest of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, Mark Twain declared: “America’s flag should be a skull and crossbones.”

More recently, Martin Luther King reminded us: “Wealth, poverty, racism, and war – these four always go together.” To these four we should also add the pervasive presence of political sophistry, now culminating in the tragic triumph of the Reagan counter-revolution against The Spirit of The Sixties.

Masters of mind control, the puppeteers at the apex of world power continue to steer the planet toward economic collapse, ecological apocalypse, and nuclear holocaust. Decades ago, Noam Chomsky published an essay on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” to address these questions, thus echoing Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley. In Orwell’s words: “History is more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

The reason we are now collectively sliding back toward medieval barbarism – supported by evangelical voters of whom Jesus is ashamed – is simple. In Michael Parenti’s words: “The rich are never satisfied. They want it all. If you know that, and nothing else, you still know more than all those people who know everything else, but not that.”

Recalling Plato’s cave parable, Howard Zinn observed: “The truth is so often the opposite of what we are told that we can no longer turn our heads around far enough to see it.” Chomsky adds the Socratic twist: “The problem is not that people don’t know; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know.” And the problem is exacerbated by the moral and intellectual cowardice of most teachers in American public, private, and higher education, dazed and confused by their own historical illiteracy, and unable to comprehend George Santayana’s prescient warning that “those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

When perpetual kindness is met with constant and increasing cruelty, it’s time for some righteous ferocity. Even Jesus chased the money-changers out of the temple; and he likely did it with a bull-whip, since he knew that merely saying “please” was utterly futile. Yes, peace begins with us; and peace and justice sometimes require a ferocious roar, like the late-life speeches of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

To paraphrase Michael Parenti: It is better to swim against the current than to be swept over the cliff.

As Victor Wallis notes in his book Red-Green Revolution, the long overdue and most effective solution to our social and global crisis is the merger of resistance movements into a unified force, because this is what it will take to overcome the lunacy of those in power.

America desperately needs a news media no longer subservient to the dominant corporate elite; just as it desperately needs a civic discourse informed by informed citizens. Meanwhile, it is well to remember that individual innocence is no protection from collective responsibility.

ENLIGHTENMENT AND SOCIAL HOPE, Part 2

Posted on by kathiemm
For Enlightenment by Kathie Malley-Morrison

by Stefan Schindler

Liberation from self-imposed immaturity is liberation from social conditioning.  Liberation from social conditioning is escape from Plato’s cave.  Escape from Plato’s cave involves appreciation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s tragic dictum that “man is born free, but is everywhere in chains” – what Eric Fromm calls “chains of illusion.”

To break the chains of illusion is to become what Albert Camus calls a “lucid rebel.”  A lucid rebel engages in Promethean protest against the vast ignorance that Buddha recognized as the primary cause of suffering.  Ignorance, Buddha said, manifests primarily as greed, hatred, craving, clinging, and delusion.

To overcome such ignorance is to embrace the point made by Karl Marx: “The demand to abandon illusions about our condition is a demand to abandon the conditions which require illusion.”

For example, the primary function of the U.S. military is make the world safe for the Fortune 500.  The primary function of U.S. education is to ignorate.  To awaken people to these nefarious facts, Martin Luther King declared: “Wealth, poverty, racism, and war – these four always go together.”

Hence the only way to move from an age of enlightenment to an enlightened age is to recognize that the four vices noted by King are inextricably entwined with pervasive political sophistry, a lapdog mainstream news media, and jingoistic pseudo-history in what Gore Vidal calls “The United States of Amnesia.”

Equally relevant here is Mark Twain’s observation: “It is easier to fool people than to convince them they are being fooled.”  Also worth noting is that Emerson, Twain, and William James were members of The Anti-Imperialism League.

The point is this: The U.S. will never be the country it ought to be – and will never be at peace, either at home or abroad – until it eliminates Presidential pardons, throws corporate and Presidential criminals in prison, conscientiously repents for America’s Indochina Holocaust (euphemistically called The Vietnam War), and dismantles the American empire (the largest and most globally devastating in world history).

It is therefore also necessary to transfer most of the Pentagon budget to an educational system in which schools and universities are gardens and palaces of self-actualization, artistic expression, authentic historical literacy, sophistry-detecting critical thinking skills, and cooperative creative evolution.