#indigenous american genocide

[crystalsandbubbletea]

What should have been

(CW: Anti-Indigenous themes mention, racism, genocide)

This is basically a ramble about the effects of how my grandmother did not grow up in the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma

We're doing a weaving project in my art class and I'm feeling this emotion that I can't describe-

It's a positive emotion, I know that, it comes whenever I'm beading, smudging, learning Ponca, or at Pow-Wow's.

I can only describe this emotion as a mix of euphoria and feeling like I'm floating.

Is this emotion positivity? Joy? Or happiness that I'm reconnecting with something that was stolen from me.

My grandmother and her brother, my uncle, could have grown up in the Ponca Tribe, could have been adopted by a family in the tribe, yet my grandmother was born a year before ICWA was passed, and my uncle two years before ICWA was passed, so they were adopted by a white family. They were a good family from what I heard, but that doesn't change that we were robbed from growing up in the Ponca Tribe, our tribe, our family.

My grandmother and uncle wouldn't know about their biological family until around 2018, when I was eleven.

My grandmother and my mother took DNA tests, and that's how we found out.

My grandmother had a Ponca father, and a white mother, and many siblings and cousins, all of whom were still alive.

We would be able to meet up with them, although my uncle only met them via video call.

At first, I thought this was normal, didn't think anything of it.

I realize now exactly how much was stolen from me.

I should have grown up with my culture. I should have been beading, and weaving, and learning the language, and attending Sundance, and going to Pow-Wow's, yet I didn't.

When I attended Sundance last year, I ended up crying. How couldn't I cry? After all, I was doing something I should have been doing my whole life.

I should be able to enroll in the Tribe, yet I can't, neither can my mother, because of blood quantums. My grandfather is a white man, so is my father. Although the elders are discussing letting people of lineal descent enroll.

... Then there's this other side of me.

Every time I wear my ribbon skirt, or smudge, I have this voice in my head, it says to me "You will never be indigenous enough. Look at your skin, you're too white, Rian. Your name is also too white. And look at your hair! You have your father's hair, and he's white! And that ribbon skirt, it's just cosplay! And you only bead because you just like the colors and textures!"

Would I still have that voice if I had grown up with my culture? Definitely not, this voice is the result of having the life I could have lived stolen from me.

The white people, the land stealers, they wanted the Indigenous Americans gone, so they took our children and tried to force us to be like them.

Of course, they failed.

... They can try to apologize for the things they done, but no amount of apologizing will change the fact that they stole from us, and how we are still digging up the bodies of children at residential schools.

When they say "America is the land of the free!" Don't forget the Indigenous Americans, and how we're still being oppressed, and never forget how what the white people did still affects the children that didn't grow up in their culture, and how it affects their children, and their grandchildren.

And don't forget, the genocide of Indigenous Americans is still going on.

[hussyknee]

[jewish-vents]

As a proud Jew and a member of the Iŋalit Iñupiaq people I have never felt as seen as reading a Choctaw Jew's post on here. Christian missionaries hauled my people off of our lands and killed most of us and they didn't even inhabit the land. They didn't even build shit there, they just took it to take it, and I'm supposed to go "ah yes America has no colonizers" and not laugh when these people say "Hebrew is a colonizer language"? Motherfuckers, MY LANGUAGE IS EXTINCT BECAUSE OF YOU! You know who didn't ever try and force a language on anyone? The Ashke Jewish man my great-great grandmother fell for and married. People really expect me to be onboard with their fact-free zero colonialism rewrite of history while my people's lands remain off limits to us, illegal to even visit, the US government holding onto it on the off chance there might be oil there even though they never bothered to even drill for it in over 70 years.

"No other religion acts like this" first of all please read up on Islamic imperialism and get your boot off the neck of my indigenous Middle Eastern brethren and secondly Christian-governed Alaska wouldn't let Native students attend school with "American" children - that is literally how the law phrased it - unless we abandoned our language, our clothes, our songs, our stories, our religion and even traditions as basic as sharing food with poor families in the community. You wanna know how my great-great grandmother met my great-great grandfather? They were both arrested for violating the law and "indoctrinating" children into "Native, anti-European practices" by which I mean THEY WERE BOTH ARRESTED FOR GIVING FOOD TO POOR PEOPLE. They were both arrested by CHRISTIANS!

And people mistake my brown skin for proof of goy status and want to talk shit about how the only good colonizer is a dead colonizer. You're white and you're in ALASKA, you might want to rethink the words coming out of your mouth when most of your ancestors came here to mine gold and get rich and mistreat indigenous people. Even if I accepted the idea that Israel is doing colonialism, which I do not, nobody moved to Israel to get rich and rape indigenous women with impunity to the point where there are words in Inuit languages for gangrape done by white men.

I don't want to hear another thing from a white goy in Alaska about Israel being colonizers when the US bought Alaska from Russia. We were colonized twice for you to get to be here and tell me to my face how colonizers are bad. AND THEN people want to say my Ashke ancestors were colonizers. Fleeing Russia is not colonization, one, and two, WHY DO YOU THINK THEY LEFT?! For fun? What, they heard our weather was nice and wanted to come visit?

I am going to need white goyim to learn US history before they open their mouths.

I'm sorry this is long and I yelled/capslocked but I have had to bite my tongue so many times to not cause a scene because I don't want the university to come up with an excuse not to let me graduate due to poor conduct. It is so tiring. I feel like I'm holding my breath all the time. Graduation is tomorrow. Shabbat shalom.

.

[alinahdee]

Native Children watching the massacre sequence from Little Big Man in the documentary Reel Injun.

[writingwithcolor]

Thanksgiving/Day of Mourning

Last year, I made a very quick, basic post about thanksgiving: Indigenous Day of Mourning aka Thanksgiving. if you want the sources for what I’m about to say, check there.

This post will be about why you cannot just go “fuck the pilgrims, we deserve a harvest festival no matter the origin” or anything else that tries to sanitize the holiday.

You Are Still On Stolen Land

As a result, you are still actively profiting off the genocide the pilgrims committed.

I don’t care how educated about racial issues you profess you are. I don’t care how you behave the other 364 days of the year. If you try to distance yourself from the origins of Thanksgiving simply because it makes you uncomfortable to see the blood under the tablecloth, you’re not practised in sitting with actually being anti-racist. You know what to say, but you don’t practice what you preach.

You Are Eating Our Food

Pumpkins/squash, beans, turkey, cranberries, potatoes, corn, sweet potatoes, pecans, maple syrup?

Those are all Native American foods that we taught you how to grow and harvest.

You wouldn’t have any of your traditional Thanksgiving foods without us. The ideal meal of Thanksgiving is ripped right from Indigenous practices and cannot be separated from it.

The fact that these foods have been taken out of Indigenous hands and appropriated by colonizers as the bounties they somehow deserve for landing here is a tragedy, and people need to remember where their food comes from and who had been growing it for thousands of years.

You Had So Much Because Of Massacre

Thanksgiving became an annual tradition after 700 Pequot men, women, children, and elders were killed, freeing up acres of land that colonizers promptly took over. The sheer amount of extra acreage that colonizers had because of their genocide contributed to the excess of food experienced during Thanksgiving. That land had been structured to support more people originally.

Colonizers had never, ever, deserved that much food. They were taking more than they needed, not leaving much behind for the animals that depended on a balance to be held with humans. They took far more than was needed, throwing the balance off in nature.

Maybe I’m reaching. But I think that if you suddenly had 700 less people in the area, after all of the growing and planting for the total population had been done, you’d have excess food? Or even before the growing, you’d have land set up to support 700, that I’d assume you’d still use, when you were a much smaller population?

Sit With Your Own Grief

If this makes you feel bad and that you shouldn’t celebrate Thanksgiving? Sit with that.

I’m not telling you that you have to give up Thanksgiving traditions. I’m telling you that you cannot divorce them from Indigenous people.

You are giving thanks for our massacre. You are giving thanks for stealing so much from us that you had this excess.

Yes, you can need a break; yes, you can need time with family and friends. None of this is inherently bad.

It’s not even bad to eat local food from Turtle Island! Part of having a sustainable diet is eating locally, in time with the seasons.

But remember, it is Indigenous people who first gave this to you—and then you stole far more than you ever needed from us, killing us to get what you felt you deserved.

Do not divorce Thanksgiving from Indigenous people for your own comfort.

We are still here. We must live with the aftermath of colonizers stealing from us every single day.

If you feel this way hearing about our history, imagine what we feel like living it.

Donate to a local org/Indigenous person this Thanksgiving

I (again) don’t have the spoons to compile a list of vetted charities, but look for local tribe language revival programs, COVID relief funds, and activism around the Indian Child Welfare Act currently in front of the Supreme Court.

Pay reparations for what you have taken, and remember. It is also Indigenous Day of Mourning.

Indigenous people, drop your links below.

~Lesya

[olowan-waphiya]

note the downplaying of the headline vs the reality. this is just the confirmed number.

“And the report confirms that at least 973 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children died while attending schools in the system. The Department acknowledges that the actual number of children who died while attending Indian boarding schools is likely greater.”

—

“The investigation also confirms that there are at least 74 marked or unmarked burial sites at 65 of the schools. One initiative proposed in the report is to identify and repatriate the remains of children who never returned home from the schools.”

[alfredo-zauce]

EAT A DICK @staff

[unitedfrontvarietyhour]

"I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."

- Mark Twain

Time for some star-spangled history lessons, comrades!

[bimdraws]

Turtle Island stands with Palestine 🇵🇸🌎

[didthekingdieyet]

if you are american and are celebrating thanksgiving, the least you could do is honor the people who died for the land you are on

[crystalsandbubbletea]

I am not Palestinian, I am Indigenous American.

One hundred and forty six years ago my people were forced to move to Oklahoma, this event was known as the Ponca Trail of Tears. The land my people were forcibly moved to didn't have any proper shelter or food, so my people both froze and starved to the point we are a fraction of what we once were.

The government and schools don't talk about what America has done to my people, I only know because of my great-grandfather and his sister.

The American Government tried to take our identity away, our language is dying out. All because my people weren't living the same lifestyle the land stealers were living.

I stand with Palestine because I see Israel doing what America did to my people and the many Indigenous tribes. I know what it is like to have your identity and culture oppressed and to be dehumanized, and I refuse to let history repeat itself. I will continue to stand with Palestine even when I no longer walk the Earth.

[hussyknee]

(alt included in all images)

Another thread by Senator Ben Ray Luján here.

A book on the subject (haven't read it myself):

One of the sources in another one of Alisa's furiously impassioned twitter threads have been debunked, so I didn't include that. But she claims that her own family was caught in the fallout zone when her mother was a baby, which eventually led to her and large numbers of her community developing cancer. It's human for that kind of grief to be caught up in inaccuracies. People are already being ghastly and racist to Hispanos and Indigenous people criticizing the hype for the movie. They're not attacking Oppenheimer for being Jewish, they're criticising the erasure of the human cost of these bombs and the continued valorisation of the U.S military's actions in World War II as some kind of moral saviourism.

While Oppenheimer himself believed that the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally justified (they had planned to drop them on Germany except they surrendered before they could), he also felt had blood on his hands and regretted his role as the "Father of the Atomic Bomb". He spent the rest of his career vehemently opposing further development of thermonuclear weapons and the hydrogen bomb accurately predicting the concept of mutually assured destruction. This eventually made him a victim of Senator McCarthy's Red Scare and his clearance was revoked. I haven't seen the movie (Christopher Nolan is the kind of casual white racist I avoid on principle) but people who have seen it say that it doesn't glorify nuclear weapons and depicts the man himself with the complex moral nuance that seems to be accurately reflective of his real life.

The backlash to Indigenous and Hispanos people's criticisms and to people pointing out that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocides is also frustrating because...both world wars were a clash of genocidal empires. The reason they were world wars is because the countries colonized by Japan, China, the European powers and the US were all dragged into it, whether they wanted to or not. Jews were one of the many colonized peoples that suffered in that time, who were left to die by everyone until they could be used to frame the Allied powers as moral saviours, establishing a revisionist nostalgia for heroism that powers the US military industrial complex to this day.

As early as May 1942, and again in June, the BBC reported the mass murder of Polish Jews by the Nazis. Although both US President, Franklin Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, warned the Germans that they would be held to account after the war, privately they agreed to prioritise and to turn their attention and efforts to winning the war. Therefore, all pleas to the Allies to destroy the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau were ignored. The Allies argued that not only would such an operation shift the focus away from winning the war, but it could provoke even worse treatment of the Jews. In June 1944 the Americans had aerial photographs of the Auschwitz complex. The Allies bombed a nearby factory in August, but the gas chambers, crematoria and train tracks used to transport Jewish civilians to their deaths were not targeted.

(Source)

Uncritical consumption of World War II media is the reinforcement of imperialist propaganda, more so when one group of colonized people is used to silence other colonized peoples. Pitting white Jewry against BIPOC is to do the work of white supremacy for imperialist colonizers, and victimizes Jews of colour twice over.

Edit: friends, there's been some doubt cast on the veracity of Alisa's claims. The human cost to the Hispanos population caught downwind of the nuclear tests is very real, as was land seizure without adequate compensation. However, there's no record I can yet find about Los Alamos killing livestock and Hispanos being forced to work for Los Alamos without PPE. There is a separate issue about human testing in the development of said PPE that's not covered here. I'm turning off reblogs until I can find out more. Meanwhile, here's another more legitimate article you can boost instead:

[news4dzhozhar]

[alinahdee]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/08/30/indian-boarding-schools/

For those who can't read the small texts, every purple dot you see on this map of the United States is a residential school that the U.S. Department of the Interior recognized. There are 408 of them.

The black dots are 115 MORE schools that the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition recognizes with their new criteria.

[victusinveritas]

[bfpnola]