The Invasion Of America

How The U.S. Took Over An Eighth Of The World 

See the rapid disappearance of Native American lands with this interactive map from eHistory.org.

In treaty discussions, US troops often intimidated the negotiators, federal agents misrepresented the terms of agreement, and land speculators bribed participants. In desperate times, Indians signed away their homes in order to feed themselves and their families. In the 1850s, US presidents began using a second legal instrument to secure land, the executive order, and this prerogative grew in importance after 1871, when the federal government unilaterally stopped making treaties with native peoples. The power of the president to seize land by executive order may appear contrary to the sanctity of private property, one of the great legacies of the American Revolution, but white Americans never set Indian land title on the same footing as their own. Nor did they recognize the irony of their presumptions.

Christians Murdered Indians

500 Years Of Manifest Destiny

Even in the initial stages of contact between European Christians and Native Indians people the stage was set for ethnocentrism, and the attitude towards the Indians was that of Christian superiority. The Indians were read a proclamation in Spanish which they had no hope of understanding. They had no hope of understanding the death sentence they were being read, and it went something like this.

"We ask and require you to acknowledge the church as the ruler and superior of the whole world and the high priest called pope and in his name the king of Spain as lords of this land. If you submit we shall receive you in all love and charity and shall leave you, your wives and children free without servitude, but if you do not submit we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you, we shall take you and your wives and your children and shall make slaves of them and we shall take away your goods and do you all the harm and damage we can."

2000 years ago we were all tribal.
Then came the missionaries with their fucking bible.
1492 began the termination.
The holocaust of our Indian nation.

Yeah with Christian love and a moral authority,
they killed our medicine men and stole our country.
I never claimed this shit was poetry,
it's just the fucking lies of Christianity.

You will pray to the lord and get down on your knees.
Here's a cross for your back and the coughing disease.
Though you helped us survive we will laugh while you bleed,
then deny what we did, write our own history.
We will kidnap your children and cut off their hair.
Silence their language and outlaw their prayers.
Beat them blind until they believe
in the blood of Jesus Christ our king.

Christians murdered Indians!

Columbus murdered children and now we have a holiday.
Still you want to deny your history?
Look to the sky for your god to justify,
as you commit cultural genocide.
Christians came and the natives they did hang
13 at a time for Jesus and his gang.
We are the ones you had to dehumanize,
so your murder and greed could be justified.

The belly of the church is full
with the blood of all those heathen fools.
Who would not receive the gift of Christ?
So we burned them as a sacrifice.
To our baby killing god above,
to our mother church and all her love,
we will steal their gods and subjugate.
Those who don't believe we'll annihilate.

"The Spaniards made bets as to who could slit a man in two or cut off his head with one blow. They tore babies from their mother's breast by their feet and dashed their head against the rocks. They hanged Indians by thirteen in honor and reverence for their redeemer and their twelve apostles. They put wood underneath and with fire burned the Indians alive."

Christians murdered Indians!

We believe in the earth, the sky and dreams.
The universe and the creator who gave us these.
The sacred gift of life and human beings.
That makes you perpetrate the hate to annihilate.
So here I am the savage, civilized.
Voice of the dead and my ancestor's cries.
And like the ghosts of this land you can't erase,
I see blood on the hand's of the master race.

500 years of manifest destiny.
500 years of manifest destiny.
500 years of manifest destiny.
500 years of resistance to the enemy.

You have faith in the rivers, the mountains, the trees.
We've a murdering god to replace all of these.
With the blood of forgiveness you too can be free.
Or the wrath of Jehovah you're sure to receive.
We will baptize you with the blood of the lamb.
With the sword and the gospel we will conquer your land.
You will join our church and be glad to be saved.
Or we'll slaughter your children and your women we'll rape.

Christian's murdered Indians!

I see blood on the hand's of the master race
I see blood on the hand's of the master race
I see blood on the hand's of the master race
I see blood on the hand's of the master race

Artist: Corporate Avenger
Album: Freedom Is A State Of Mind

I Stand In Solidarity With The People Of Palestine

Janene Yazzie, CEO of Sixth World Solutions in Lupton, Arizona, writes in the Navajo Times: 

“It should not shock or surprise us that our Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly has taken an unexpected trip to visit Israel, a government that has committed itself to carrying out genocidal practices against its population of indigenous Palestinian peoples. To hear that our president believes the apartheid government of Israel has more to offer than the Diné people in his homeland fighting against his policies is hurtful and unbelievably ignorant. I stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine and those indigenous nations and non-indigenous peoples fighting against continued corporate, religious, and political exploitation.”

Dina Gilio- Whitaker in the largest circulation weekly, Indian Country Today: 

“This week Muscogee Creek scholar and literary diva Joy Harjo ignited a firestorm of controversy when she announced on Facebook that she was leaving for a trip to Israel where she was scheduled to perform on Monday, December 10 At Tel Aviv University.

The controversy came when friends and fans challenged her decision to go in light of the US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) and the Palestine Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), as part of a larger boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

“Critics contend that her actions are equivalent to crossing a picket line and are tantamount to tacit support of the Israeli apartheid state. It is hard to know what Harjo is thinking and where her loyalties lie in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. It is also hard to know how President Shelley would justify his alliance with Israel in light of its ongoing genocide and theft of Palestinian lands.

“The problem with someone as high profile as Joy Harjo collaborating with an institution like Tel Aviv University (which is built on top of an ethnically cleansed Palestinian village) is that it sends a message that she as a Native American represents all Native Americans in support of apartheid Israel’s domination of Palestinians. I, for one, don’t want to be associated with that.”

Native American Indians Stand With Gaza

The parallels to the plight of the Palestinian people and Native Americans have been drawn by many. Speaking in San Francisco, Tony Gonzales of the American Indian Movement (AIM), ”with a common legacy of bantustans (homelands) – Indian reservations and encircled Palestinian territories – Native Americans understand well the situation of Palestinians.”

While there are certainly diverse views on nearly every political issue imaginable within Native American communities, a growing number are beginning to empathize with and see a disturbing parallel between what happened to the First Peoples of North America, and Palestinians in the Levant.

The Native American and Indigenous Studies Association made news back in December of 2013 for being one of three academic groups based in North America to endorse the Palestinian campaign for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

In January of 2013, the Jerusalem Post ran a telling article, entitled: “Native Americans turning on Israel?” The article focused on an anecdote of Muscogee Creek scholar and literary diva Joy Harjo, who ignited a “firestorm of controversy when she announced on Facebook that she was leaving for a trip to Israel where she was scheduled to perform.”

But most revealing was the article explaining just how much opposition there was within her Native community and others: opposition to her support for the Israeli State and its relationship with the Palestinian people.

Gyasi Ross, writing “Why I, As A Native American, Support The Palestinian People,” explains the following:

As a Native person of this country, I’ve come to the conclusion that I must support the Palestinian people and the pursuit of an autonomous Palestinian state.

Although many view both Native Americans and Palestinians as “indigenous and displaced people,” this is not the reason that I feel a sense of kinship with Palestinians.

Instead, this fraternal feeling for my brothers and sisters in Gaza and on the West Bank is due to a much more basic and primal feeling of fear: the realization that what befalls one oppressed group inevitably befalls others.

Indigenous people, as well as other oppressed groups worldwide, regardless of race or religion, have a vested interest in learning from the genocidal atrocities that the U.S. government initiated on Native Americans. Every person who strives for humanity also has a strong interest in preventing those same atrocities from occurring in another place at another time to another group of people — in this particular situation, to the Palestinians.

Palestinians, like Natives, are captives in their own lands. They, too, have no place to go, no geographical recourse. Lebanon, Syria and Egypt have all shown their callousness to Palestinian people and have used them like human chess pieces against Israel.

Short on options, Palestinians, like Natives, have no choice but to continue to be a thorn in the side of the oftentimes apathetic and oppressive governments that have come to power by whatever means available.

Native American peace activists are becoming an increasingly visible presence at protests against the War in Gaza. For many, Ross’s words sum up the motivation and reasons for support.

(Article by Mike Ahnigilahi)

Lakota Man

The Lakota people (pronounced [laˈkˣota]; also known as Teton, Titunwan (“prairie dwellers”), Teton Sioux are an indigenous people of the Great Plains of North America. They are part of a confederation of seven related Sioux tribes, the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ or seven council fires, and speak Lakota, one of the three major dialects of the Sioux language.

The Lakota are the westernmost of the three Siouan language groups, occupying lands in both North and South Dakota. The seven bands or “sub-tribes” of the Lakota are:

- Sičháŋǧu (Brulé, Burned Thighs)
- Oglála (“They Scatter Their Own”)
- Itázipčho (Sans Arc, Without Bows)
- Húŋkpapȟa (“End Village”, Camps at the End of the Camp Circle)
- Mnikȟówožu (“Plant beside the Stream”, Planters by the Water)
- Sihásapa (“Black Feet”)
- Oóhenuŋpa (Two Kettles)

Notable persons include:

- Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake (Sitting Bull) from the Húnkpapȟa band;
- Touch the Clouds from the Miniconjou band;
- Tȟašúŋke Witkó (Crazy Horse),
- Maȟpíya Lúta (Red Cloud),
- Heȟáka Sápa (Black Elk),
- Siŋté Glešká (Spotted Tail),
- Billy Mills from the Oglala band.

[Info via: Wikipedia... Provided by CZ]

By Erik-Stitt

The Suppressed Speech Of Wamsutta

This is the Suppressed speech of Wamsutta (Frank B.) James, Wampanoag. that was to be delivered at Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1970.

The Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoag Indians to select a speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' arrival, and the first Thanksgiving.

Three hundred fifty years after the Pilgrims began their invasion of the land of the Wampanoag, their "American" descendants planned an anniversary celebration. Still clinging to the white schoolbook myth of friendly relations between their forefathers and the Wampanoag, the anniversary planners thought it would be nice to have an Indian make an appreciative and complimentary speech at their state dinner. Frank James was asked to speak at the celebration. He accepted. The planners, however , asked to see his speech in advance of the occasion, and it turned out that Frank James' views — based on history rather than mythology — were not what the Pilgrims' descendants wanted to hear. Frank James refused to deliver a speech written by a public relations person. Frank James did not speak at the anniversary celebration. If he had spoken, this is what he would have said:

I speak to you as a man -- a Wampanoag Man. I am a proud man, proud of my ancestry, my accomplishments won by a strict parental direction ("You must succeed - your face is a different color in this small Cape Cod community!"). I am a product of poverty and discrimination from these two social and economic diseases. I, and my brothers and sisters, have painfully overcome, and to some extent we have earned the respect of our community. We are Indians first - but we are termed "good citizens." Sometimes we are arrogant but only because society has pressured us to be so.

It is with mixed emotion that I stand here to share my thoughts. This is a time of celebration for you - celebrating an anniversary of a beginning for the white man in America. A time of looking back, of reflection. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People.

Even before the Pilgrims landed it was common practice for explorers to capture Indians, take them to Europe and sell them as slaves for 220 shillings apiece. The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod for four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors and stolen their corn and beans. Mourt's Relation describes a searching party of sixteen men. Mourt goes on to say that this party took as much of the Indians' winter provisions as they were able to carry.

Massasoit, the great Sachem of the Wampanoag, knew these facts, yet he and his People welcomed and befriended the settlers of the Plymouth Plantation. Perhaps he did this because his Tribe had been depleted by an epidemic. Or his knowledge of the harsh oncoming winter was the reason for his peaceful acceptance of these acts. This action by Massasoit was perhaps our biggest mistake. We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people.

What happened in those short 50 years? What has happened in the last 300 years? History gives us facts and there were atrocities; there were broken promises - and most of these centered around land ownership. Among ourselves we understood that there were boundaries, but never before had we had to deal with fences and stone walls. But the white man had a need to prove his worth by the amount of land that he owned. Only ten years later, when the Puritans came, they treated the Wampanoag with even less kindness in converting the souls of the so-called "savages." Although the Puritans were harsh to members of their own society, the Indian was pressed between stone slabs and hanged as quickly as any other "witch."

And so down through the years there is record after record of Indian lands taken and, in token, reservations set up for him upon which to live. The Indian, having been stripped of his power, could only stand by and watch while the white man took his land and used it for his personal gain. This the Indian could not understand; for to him, land was survival, to farm, to hunt, to be enjoyed.

It was not to be abused. We see incident after incident, where the white man sought to tame the "savage" and convert him to the Christian ways of life. The early Pilgrim settlers led the Indian to believe that if he did not behave, they would dig up the ground and unleash the great epidemic again.

The white man used the Indian's nautical skills and abilities. They let him be only a seaman -- but never a captain. Time and time again, in the white man's society, we Indians have been termed "low man on the totem pole."

Has the Wampanoag really disappeared? There is still an aura of mystery. We know there was an epidemic that took many Indian lives - some Wampanoags moved west and joined the Cherokee and Cheyenne. They were forced to move. Some even went north to Canada! Many Wampanoag put aside their Indian heritage and accepted the white man's way for their own survival. There are some Wampanoag who do not wish it known they are Indian for social or economic reasons.

What happened to those Wampanoags who chose to remain and live among the early settlers? What kind of existence did they live as "civilized" people? True, living was not as complex as life today, but they dealt with the confusion and the change. Honesty, trust, concern, pride, and politics wove themselves in and out of their [the Wampanoags'] daily living. Hence, he was termed crafty, cunning, rapacious, and dirty.

History wants us to believe that the Indian was a savage, illiterate, uncivilized animal. A history that was written by an organized, disciplined people, to expose us as an unorganized and undisciplined entity. Two distinctly different cultures met. One thought they must control life; the other believed life was to be enjoyed, because nature decreed it. Let us remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white man. The Indian feels pain, gets hurt, and becomes defensive, has dreams, bears tragedy and failure, suffers from loneliness, needs to cry as well as laugh. He, too, is often misunderstood.

The white man in the presence of the Indian is still mystified by his uncanny ability to make him feel uncomfortable. This may be the image the white man has created of the Indian; his "savageness" has boomeranged and isn't a mystery; it is fear; fear of the Indian's temperament!

High on a hill, overlooking the famed Plymouth Rock, stands the statue of our great Sachem, Massasoit. Massasoit has stood there many years in silence. We the descendants of this great Sachem have been a silent people. The necessity of making a living in this materialistic society of the white man caused us to be silent. Today, I and many of my people are choosing to face the truth. We ARE Indians!

Although time has drained our culture, and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts. We may be fragmented, we may be confused. Many years have passed since we have been a people together. Our lands were invaded. We fought as hard to keep our land as you the whites did to take our land away from us. We were conquered, we became the American prisoners of war in many cases, and wards of the United States Government, until only recently.

Our spirit refuses to die. Yesterday we walked the woodland paths and sandy trails. Today we must walk the macadam highways and roads. We are uniting We're standing not in our wigwams but in your concrete tent. We stand tall and proud, and before too many moons pass we'll right the wrongs we have allowed to happen to us.

We forfeited our country. Our lands have fallen into the hands of the aggressor. We have allowed the white man to keep us on our knees. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we must work towards a more humane America, a more Indian America, where men and nature once again are important; where the Indian values of honor, truth, and brotherhood prevail.

You the white man are celebrating an anniversary. We the Wampanoags will help you celebrate in the concept of a beginning. It was the beginning of a new life for the Pilgrims. Now, 350 years later it is a beginning of a new determination for the original American: the American Indian.

There are some factors concerning the Wampanoags and other Indians across this vast nation. We now have 350 years of experience living amongst the white man. We can now speak his language. We can now think as a white man thinks. We can now compete with him for the top jobs. We're being heard; we are now being listened to. The important point is that along with these necessities of everyday living, we still have the spirit, we still have the unique culture, we still have the will and, most important of all, the determination to remain as Indians. We are determined, and our presence here this evening is living testimony that this is only the beginning of the American Indian, particularly the Wampanoag, to regain the position in this country that is rightfully ours.

Wamsutta September 10, 1970

Stomp Dance

Artist: Brulé

The Practice Of Pre-Emption

By Paul Balles

We’re now living and dying in an age of pre-emptive actions.

The practice of pre-emption has an early history in America. According to the Concise Encyclopaedia U.S. policy allowed the first settlers, or squatters, on public land to buy the land they had improved.

Since improved land, coveted by speculators, was often priced too high for squatters to buy at auction, temporary pre-emptive laws allowed them to acquire it without bidding.

The Pre-Emption Act (1841) gave squatters the right to buy 160 acres at $1.25 per acre before the land was auctioned.

The Homestead Act (1862) made pre-emption an accepted part of U.S. land policy. By 1900, 600,000 homesteaders had claimed 80 million acres.

Fast forward to Israel. The connection should be clear:

American homesteaders took land that should have remained in the hands of the indigenous tribes of American Indians.

Is there any stronger excuse for Israeli settlers to misappropriate land that rightfully belongs to the Palestinians?

Who in America can deservedly fault Israeli settlements for committing the same type of seizures of property that Americans stole from the Indians?

Israelis are guilty of the same crime that should haunt Americans in their own settlement history.

The idea and practice of pre-emption have become a social disease including pre-emptive defence, pre-emptive assassinations, pre-emptive security, pre-emptive judgments, pre-emptive laws and pre-emptive wars.

Pre-emptive killing is a daily event in occupied Palestine. The Israeli occupation forces have murdered 1,518 Palestinian children from the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000 to April 2013. That’s the equivalent of one Palestinian child killed by Israel every 3 days for almost 13 years.

If settling Indian Territory in America wasn’t enough for western cowboys, it hasn’t satisfied the mock settlers in Israel. Both have adopted pre-emptive actions on multiple fronts.

Just as America has established 700-1000 military bases around the world to pre-empt any strategic advantage from nuclear countries like Russia or China, Israel has established its own pre-emptive defences.

Apart from its unwarranted attacks on Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, Israel has threatened Iran as a pre-emptive measure against Iran’s potential development of nuclear arms.

Israel used its lobbyists and governmental followers in America to support its paranoid fears of an imagined Iraq developing WMDs that might be directed toward Israel.

To fulfil that pre-emptive Israeli wish, America slaughtered 1,455,590 Iraqis, 4883 Americans and 3323 International Occupation troops at a total cost of $1,443,877,869,222, according to Information Clearing House.

Scholars have argued that “the concept of pre-emptive war can be used to start a war by claiming that the nation would soon be under attack and therefore had to defend itself. The concept is controversial because it can be used and abused as a justification to start a war on questionable grounds.”

Justification attempts supported America’s war on Iraq, though America was defending Israel. The same argument is regularly used by Israel to defend its attacks on Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.

In America and Israel, the idea of pre-emption has been used frequently to justify attacks on others.

The same arguments have been used to justify sanctions against Iran. Both American and Israeli governments continue to justify current actions and future potential for engaging in a war against Iran.

Lois Becker points out that even the NRA has been pushing for “pre-emption” laws to block cities from enacting their own gun policies, effectively requiring cities with higher rates of gun violence to have the same gun regulations as smaller towns.

Pre-emption is a disease that is part paranoia and part the war-mongering insensibilities of both Israel and America.

This Is What American History Looks Like

By Alice Walker

I don’t know why, given where we are with dronefare, but I didn’t expect the man making the announcement about Assata Shakur being the first woman “terrorist” to appear on the FBI’s most wanted list to be black. That was a blow. 

I was reminded of the world of “trackers” we sometimes get glimpses of in history books and old movies on TV. In Australia the tracker who hunts down other aboriginals who have, because of the rape and murder, genocide and enslavement of the indigenous (aboriginal) people, run away into the outback. 

He shows up again in cowboy and Indian films: jogging along in the hot sun, way ahead of the white men on horseback, bending on his knees to get a better look at a bruised leaf or a bent twig, while they curse and spit and complain about how long he’s taking to come up with a clue. And then there were the “trackers” who helped the pattyrollers during our four hundred years of enslavement. When pattyrollers (or patrols) caught run-away slaves in those days they frequently beat them to death. 

I’ve often thought of the black men whose expertise at tracking fugitives helped bring these terrors, humiliations and deaths about. When I was younger I would have been in a rage against them; not understanding the reality of invisible coercion, and mind and spirit control, that I do now. 

Today, only a few years older than Assata Shakur, and marveling at the unenviable state of humanity’s character worldwide, I find I can only pray for all of us. That we should be sinking even below the abysmal standard early “trackers” have set for us: that the US government can now offer two million dollars for the capture of a very small, not young, black woman who was brutally abused, even shot, over three decades ago, as if we don’t need that money to buy people food, clothes, medicine, and decent places to live.

What is most distressing about the times we live in, in my view, is our ever accelerating tolerance for cruelty. Prisoners held indefinitely in orange suits, hooded, chained and on their knees. Like the hunger strikers of Guantanamo, I would certainly prefer death to this. 

People shot and bombed from planes they never see until it is too late to get up from the table or place the baby under the bed. Poor people terrorized daily, driven insane really, from fear. 

People on the streets with no food and no place to sleep. People under bridges everywhere you go, holding out their desperate signs: a recent one held by a very young man, perhaps a veteran, under my local bridge: I Want To Live. 

But nothing seems as cruel to me as this: that our big, muscular, macho country would go after so tiny a woman as Assata who is given sanctuary in a country smaller than many of our states.

Night Songs

By Navajo

A School For Savages

3,000+ Deaths Linked To Indian Residential Schools

At least 3,000 children, including four under the age of 10 found huddled together in frozen embrace, are now known to have died during attendance at Canada’s Indian residential schools, according to new unpublished research.

While deaths have long been documented as part of the disgraced residential school system, the findings are the result of the first systematic search of government, school and other records.

“These are actual confirmed numbers,” Alex Maass, research manager with the Missing Children Project, told The Canadian Press from Vancouver.

“All of them have primary documentation that indicates that there’s been a death, when it occurred, what the circumstances were.”

The number could rise further as more documents — especially from government archives — come to light.

The largest single killer, by far, was disease.

For decades starting in about 1910, tuberculosis was a consistent killer — in part because of widespread ignorance over how diseases were spread.

“The schools were a particular breeding ground for (TB),” Maass said. “Dormitories were incubation wards.”

The Spanish flu epidemic in 1918-1919 also took a devastating toll on students — and in some cases staff. For example, in one grim three-month period, the disease killed 20 children at a residential school in Spanish, Ont., the records show.

While a statistical analysis has yet to be done, the records examined over the past few years also show children also died of malnutrition or accidents. Schools consistently burned down, killing students and staff. Drownings or exposure were another cause.

In all, about 150,000 First Nations children went through the church-run residential school system, which ran from the 1870s until the 1990s. In many cases, native kids were forced to attend under a deliberate federal policy of “civilizing” Aboriginal Peoples.

Many students were physically, mentally and sexually abused. Some committed suicide. Some died fleeing their schools.

One heart-breaking incident that drew rare media attention at the time involved the deaths of four boys — two aged 8 and two aged 9 — in early January 1937.

A Canadian Press report from Vanderhoof, B.C., describes how the four bodies were found frozen together in slush ice on Fraser Lake, barely a kilometre from home.

The “capless and lightly clad” boys had left an Indian school on the south end of the lake “apparently intent on trekking home to the Nautley Reserve,” the article states.

A coroner’s inquest later recommended “excessive corporal discipline” of students be “limited.”

The records reveal the number of deaths only fell off dramatically after the 1950s, although some fatalities occurred into the 1970s.

“The question I ask myself is: Would I send my child to a private school where there were even a couple of deaths the previous year without looking at it a little bit more closely?” Maass said.

“One wouldn’t expect any death rates in private residential schools.”

In fact, Maass said, student deaths were so much part of the system, architectural plans for many schools included cemeteries that were laid out in advance of the building.

Maass, who has a background in archeology, said researchers had identified 50 burial sites as part of the project.

About 500 of the victims remain nameless. Documentation of their deaths was contained in Department of Indian Affairs year-end reports based on information from school principals.

The annual death reports were consistently done until 1917, when they abruptly stopped.

“It was obviously a policy not to report them,” Maass said.

In the 1990s, thousands of victims sued the churches that ran the 140 schools and the Canadian government. A $1.9-billion settlement of the lawsuit in 2007 prompted an apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The research — carried out under the auspices of the commission — has involved combing through more than one million government and other records, including nuns’ journal entries.

The longer-term goal is to make the information available at national research centre.

These estimates are extremely low. These attempts to Christianize & “civilize” this group of children irreversibly scarred thousands of people in Canada, stripping them of their language, traditions & heritage. 

Sadly, Canada isn’t the only country that had these kinds of schools; so did the US. I’d recommend reading “Ojibwa Warrior” by Dennis Banks for more on the boarding schools Indian children were sent to in order to become “civilized.”

Via: "CTV News"

Our Spirits Don't Speak English

Thousands of girls and boys were raped and tortured, and many were murdered, in Canada's aboriginal boarding schools. In Canada, up until 1985, Christian churches ran around 100 boarding schools for aboriginal children. Between 100,000 and 200,000 children were forced to attend these boarding schools. Reportedly, around 50,000 aboriginal children died in these schools. Documents show a death rate of 50%.

“The report says church officials killed children by beating, poisoning, electric shock, starvation, prolonged exposure to sub-zero cold while naked, and medical experimentation, including the removal of organs and radiation exposure.” […] Children also suffered forced sterilization, medical experimentation, starvation, rape as well as various other forms of sexual abuse, and murder….. Some spoke of young girls becoming pregnant as a result of rape, or nuns becoming pregnant after sexually abusing boys…’”

In British Columbia, the first Indian Residential School was established in 1861 at Mission and was operated by the Roman Catholic Church. It would also become the last operating school in the province, finally closing in 1984.

Elsewhere in Canada, Indian Residential Schools dotted the nation. Around 130 residential schools herded aboriginal children like cattle to teach them how to become productive members of “white society.” The former Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Matthew Coon Come, calls this system genocide.

“Basically, the goal was to take the Indian out of the Indian,” he says.

This bold state-funded enterprise was for the most part carried out in western Canada with tremendous bureaucratic and missionary zeal for over a century. Christian ideology insisted it was acceptable to “obliterate” indigenous peoples’ distinct cultural “habits and associations” while simultaneously fostering the colonial “process of nation building.”

“After a lifetime of beatings, going hungry, standing in a corridor on one leg, and walking in the snow with no shoes for speaking Inuvialuktun, and having a heavy, stinging paste rubbed on my face, which they did to stop us from expressing our Eskimo custom of raising our eyebrows for ‘yes’ and wrinkling our noses for ‘no’, I soon lost the ability to speak my mother tongue. When a language dies, the world it was generated from is broken down too.”

Mary Carpenter  1995

Department of Indian Affairs’ policy that aboriginal children must not be educated “above the possibilities of their station”, were upheld. As such, the schools’ curriculum included moral training (through physical labour), academic training (although many teachers were insufficiently educated) and industrial training (for farming and menial jobs). Engaged in the classroom for only half a day, the children were responsible for the complete maintenance (cooking, cleaning, laundry, grounds keeping, farming, etc.) of the school for the remainder of their day. Grade three was the acceptable standard of education.

Psychological and emotional abuses were constant: shaming by public beatings of naked children, vilification of native culture, constant racism, public strip and genital searches, withholding presents and letters from family, locking children in closets and cages, segregation of sexes, separation of brothers and sisters, proscription of native languages and spirituality. In addition, the schools were places of profound physical and sexual violence: sexual assaults, forced abortions of staff-impregnated girls, needles inserted into tongues for speaking a native language, burning, scalding, beating until unconscious and/or inflicting permanent injury.

They also endured electrical shock, force-feeding of their own vomit when sick, exposure to freezing outside temperatures, withholding of medical attention, shaved heads (a cultural and social violation), starvation (as punishment), forced labour in unsafe work situations, intentional contamination with diseased blankets, insufficient food for basic nutrition and/or spoiled food. Estimates suggest that as many as 60% of the students died (due to illness, beatings, attempts to escape, or suicide) while in the schools.

“The Sisters didn’t treat me good. They gave me rotten food to eat and punished me for not eating it. I was locked in a room, fed bread and water and beaten with a strap, sometimes on the face, and sometimes [they] took my clothes off and beat me. This is the reason I ran away.”

Christine Haines, St. Joseph’s  1995

Despite having signed the United Nations genocide convention 40 years before the last residential school closed, Canada continued to commit acts of genocide:

“with the intent to destroy in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: … (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” (United Nations Convention on Genocide, 1946)

In 1948, despite a joint (House of Commons and Senate) committee recommendation that the schools be abolished, the churches’ vigourous lobbying for the system to continue and the fact that it was being used as a social welfare placement kept the schools alive for 40 more years. By the 1970s, when the Native Indian Brotherhood called for native control of native education, the federal government had begun to wind down the residential school system.

Today, approximately 90,000 survivors in their thirties and older are trying to understand, heal from, and move beyond this devastating experience. About 14% are involved in some form of litigation while the other 86% are living out their lives as best they can.

“What I remember of that time was passing Muncho Lake on the trip up north, [to residential school] and imagining I was drowning. That is where I left my life; I drowned in Muncho Lake. I haven’t forgiven my parents to this day because…they weren’t there to protect me.”

Survivor, Kamloops School 2000

It is generally accepted that the forced removal of children from their families was devastating for Aboriginal individuals, families, communities and cultures. This is regularly being confirmed by researchers today.

First Nation communities experience higher rates of violence: physical, domestic abuse (3x higher than mainstream society); sexual abuse: rape, incest, etc. (4-6x higher); lack of family and community cohesion; suicide (6x higher); addictions: drugs, alcohol, food; health problems: diabetes (3x higher), heart disease, obesity; poverty; unemployment; illiteracy; high school dropout (63% do not graduate); despair; hopelessness; and more.

Via: "Indian Residential School Survivor's Society"

From The Lakota To Gaza

The Deep Wound Of Wounded Knee

By JOHNNY BARBER
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

December 29^th marks the 122^nd anniversary of the Massacre at Wounded Knee. It is a story that remains fresh in the lives of many indigenous peoples across America. Each generation is taught to never forget.

In 1891, reviewing the history leading up to the massacre, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Morgan said,

“It is hard to overestimate the magnitude of the calamity which happened to the Sioux people by the sudden disappearance of the buffalo. The boundless range was to be abandoned for the circumscribed reservation, and abundance of plenty to be supplanted by limited and decreasing government subsistence and supplies. Under these circumstances it is not in human nature not to be discontented and restless, even turbulent and violent.”

Commissioner Morgan was not empathetic about the plight of the indigenous people. He was just stating facts. One year prior to the massacre, in Oct 1889, he issued a policy paper stating his convictions regarding the native population.

“The Indians must conform to “the white man’s ways,” peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must. They must adjust themselves to their environment, and conform their mode of living substantially to our civilization. This civilization may not be the best possible, but it is the best the Indians can get. They cannot escape it, and must either conform to it or be crushed by it. The tribal relations should be broken up, socialism destroyed, and the family and the autonomy of the individual substituted.”

The Wounded Knee Massacre is still commonly depicted as a “battle” that no one can be blamed for, but if blame is assigned it is always made clear that a Lakota fired the first shot. This is the justification for all that followed. A century after the murders, Congress issued an apology, expressing “deep regret” for the events on that day in 1890 when upwards of 370 men, women, and children were gunned down as they fled for their lives. But the Wounded Knee Massacre was not an anomaly, nor was it an accident. Wounded Knee is the entire history of indigenous peoples relationship with Imperialism made manifest in a single event.

“I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.” Black Elk.

The ancestors of the victims commemorate the massacre in order to honor those who have fallen and to foster healing of their still devastated communities. The ancestors of the perpetrators ignore inflicting the wound and the wound festers.

From Wounded Knee, where just days after the massacre a young newspaper editor named Frank Baum (later to become famous for the children’s story “The Wizard of Oz”) opined, “The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.“

To Vietnam, where Lyndon Johnson’s call to win hearts and minds of the civilian population was corrupted by GI’s to, “When you have them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.”

To Iraq, where Madeline Albright was asked if the deaths of ½ million children during sanctions was worth it, she replied “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

To Gaza, where Dov Weisglass said, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

To Iran where a new sanctions regime is in place and the state department claims, “The sanctions are beginning to bite,” and dozens of places in between, the wound festers.

In each case, the power with the superior military claims that the occupied and oppressed are dangerous and threaten the very existence of the state, even as the state starves the population, restricts their every move and denies them the most basic rights under the guise of “security”.  All attempts by the “enemy” to seek peace are ignored or derided as “lies” while the theft of land and/or resources continue unabated. Each time the oppressed demand their rights or dare to strike back against their oppressors, the oppressor claims that the people are motivated by hate and seek the annihilation of the state. Negotiations are viewed as a sign of weakness and are rarely pursued unless they can be used as a tool to further oppression. The oppressors continually talk about “pursuing peace” as they systematically destroy any and all opposition.

We kill by starvation, we kill by denying medicine, and we kill by isolation. When that doesn’t silence dissent of the “malcontents” we do not hesitate to kill with bullets and bombs. Remember Commissioner Morgan’s words, “This civilization may not be the best possible, but it is the best they can get. They cannot escape it, and must either conform to it or be crushed by it.”

One day we too will be crushed by this flawed concept of civilization.

The Dahiya doctrine is a military strategy in which the Israeli army deliberately targets civilian infrastructure as a means of inducing suffering on the civilian population, making it so difficult to survive that fighting back or resisting occupation are no longer practical, thereby establishing deterrence. The doctrine is named after a southern suburb in Beirut with large apartment blocks. Israeli bombs flattened the entire neighborhood during the 2006 Lebanon War. But this doctrine is not a modern strategy for controlling populations. Nor is putting the people of Gaza on a “diet” new- subjugating an entire population through a combination of poverty, malnutrition, a struggle over limited resources, and violence is the American way, adopted by our closest allies, (and “the only democracy in the Middle East,” with the “most moral army in the world,”) the Israelis.

Dec 27th marks the 4^th anniversary of the beginning of Operation Cast Lead, (the name derives from a popular Hannukah children’s song about a dreidel made from cast lead.) During this attack on Gaza, 1,417 people were killed (330 children), 4336 were wounded. 6,400 homes were destroyed. Hospitals, mosques, the power plant, and the sewage system were deliberately targeted.

Israel accuses Hamas of war crimes for shooting rockets without guidance systems indiscriminately into Israel. Israeli officials claim that “Hamas hides behind civilians” as a justification to bomb civilian population centers and infrastructure. Killing civilians in Gaza using precision munitions, is a war crime, no matter who is hiding behind them.

After the recent killing of 20 children in a Newtown, Connecticut grade school, President Obama, wiping tears from his eyes said,

“This is our first task — caring for our children.  It’s our first job.  If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right.  That’s how, as a society, we will be judged. And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we are meeting our obligations?“

The just completed eight-day Israeli operation against Gaza called the Pillar of Cloud (The name is derived from a Biblical passage) saw three generations of the al-Dalu family wiped out in a single bombing, including 4 children between the ages of 1 and 7 years old. The surviving son does not speak of surrender, relinquishing the families land, or disappearing. He demands justice. His tears are mixed with fury. Can he be blamed?

As the ceasefire went in to effect there was one consistent message from the people of Gaza. We are here. This is our home. We will never leave. They will have to kill every one of us.

Upon cessation of the bombing, our Congress immediately voted to replenish Israel’s bombs and munitions in order for Israel to “protect itself”. The wound festers.

In his speech the President went on to say,

“If there is even one step we can take to save another child, or another parent, or another town, from the grief that has visited Tucson, and Aurora, and Oak Creek, and Newtown, and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that — then surely we have an obligation to try.”

Wounded Knee has not disappeared. The Lakota people remain. Gaza has not disappeared. The Palestinian people remain. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia people grieve for the loss of their children. The violence wrought upon them in our name continues.  If we can take one step to save another child, we have an obligation to try.

It’s Not A Sudden Madness

It’s Not A Sudden Madness, But A Long History Of Mass Murder Come Full Circle.

By Glen Ford,
Courtesy Of "Black Agenda Report"

As a native-born American, I grew up watching cowboy and Indian shoot-em-ups in which the highlight of the movie was when the white guys in the circled wagon train shot the Indians off their horses until all the red men were dead, and very silent. Indians didn’t do a lot of screaming in pain when they were shot; they just expired.

 Same thing with buck-toothed Japanese, line after line of them, charging into U.S. machine guns, falling instantly silent and dead. It was somehow quite clean, almost antiseptic, these cinematic rituals of death, all staged for the broadest popular consumption to demonstrate the inevitability - and cosmic justice - of ultimate white victory over the darker races.

This was mother’s milk to the white American nation - which is why Richard Pryor and kids like me rooted for the Indians. Mass murder is at the core of the American national religion, which is a celebration of a genocidal march across a continent filled with other, doomed human beings.

America’s contribution to European culture was to invite “all the nations of Europe” to come to these shores and become fellow “white” citizens, whose status was defined by the enforced inferiority of Blacks and the remnants of the Indians. Ritual burnings of Blacks were organized as great public festivals, attended by thousands, staged in order to affirm whites’ collective right to commit murder. This monopoly on violence was what made them white Americans.

U.S. foreign policy reflects the nation’s origins and ghastly evolution into a globe-strutting mob, that empowers itself to kill at will.

A million dead Filipinos at the turn of the 20th century; aerial bombing of Haitian villages less than a generation later; the totally unwarranted nuclear annihilation of two cities at the very end of World War Two; two million dead Koreans shortly thereafter; three million dead Vietnamese in the next decade,; and, since 1996, six million Congolese - all, and many, many more, slaughtered in the name of U.S. civilizational superiority - the ghastly opiate of the white American masses.

What kind of human beings does such a culture produce? To paraphrase the Bible, “By their massacres, ye shall know them.” The modern mass American murder is overwhelmingly a white phenomenon. Yet few whites ask the question, “What’s wrong with white America?” It is seems that white America lacks the capacity for self-examination. It cannot grasp the simple truth, that a culture that celebrates the annihilation of whole peoples, casually and without guilt or introspection, is devoid of human values at its very core.

In the end, it turns against itself. That is the simple lesson of Newtown, and Columbine, and Aurora. The same cultural deformity creates a huge market for games like the very popular Assassin’s Creed, whose latest version integrates individual and group murder with events of the American Revolutionary War. American kids can simulate mass murder all day long, and feel patriotic and smart while doing it. Assassin’s Creed features an inter-racial cast of killers - possibly in deference to the brown guy in the White House who owns the ultimate Kill List. It’s the modern equivalent of the cowboys and Indians movies of my youth. The same sickness.