#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.

[reasonsforhope]

The bison.

I know this seems like old news to a lot of people but Americans slaughtered the bison to further the genocide of the indigenous peoples (who are still here) and despite that the bison have been reintroduced.

they have returned to their native grazing grounds, the ecosystems where they have returned are flourishing for it. and to top it all off it was the peoples this government tried so desperately to erradiacte that brought them back.

the day I heard Bison had been reintroduced to the plains I sobbed like a baby and began to choose hope.

!!!! The recovery of the bison is something I've been following and it's been such a source of hope and and sign healing for me!!

Especially tribally managed reintroductions and herds!!

Really impossible to understate how much of an ecological and and humanitarian and ethical tragedy and atrocity is finally beginning to be healed

[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.

[chaoticamelay]

elon "world's most dangerous antisemite" musk spoke at a far-right extremist political rally in germany and said he thinks people need to 'move beyond' the holocaust, so i've shelved my original post planned for international Holocaust Remembrance Day and instead i am going to talk about how european cities are built with jewish gravestones.

during ww2 the Nazis and their allies were in search of places to get good quality stone for building. then they realized they had countless: the cemeteries of once thriving jewish communities they were targeting. An unknown number (we will never know exactly how many, but it is high) of matzevot (jewish gravestones) were removed from our ancestor's graves and used as construction materials. even after 1945 our cemeteries kept being used as quarries. because our communities were never the same afterwards.

all over Europe, you can find roads, sidewalks, buildings, tools, christian gravestones... even a children's sandbox, made of gravestones stolen from our old jewish cemeteries. sometimes the cemetery land was 'repurposed' into something else as well, with no regard for the human remains there.

Poland

There were 1200 jewish cemeteries in Poland alone, and more than four hundred of them did not survive the war times. They were rearranged to provide sites for housing estates, sports fields, garbage dumps, or sand quarries. The sand mined from them to build houses was mixed with human remains. Only a hundred and fifty graveyards still have more than a hundred gravestones, but before the holocaust there were at between a few hundred thousand or a few million.

Between 2008-2011, photographer Łukasz Baksik documented some places in poland where Jewish gravestones were ''repurposed" during and after the war. Here are his photos: Matzevot for Everyday Use

Top left: A cowshed in Starowola by Parysów, a village in east-central Poland, made of cobbled together jewish gravestones. Top right: A children's sandbox in Szczecin, a city in the West Pomerania Province built in the 1960s/70s. Bottom left: School playing courts in Kazimierz Dolny, a town in eastern Poland. The schoolyard was built, in the 1950s, on the grounds of a Jewish cemetery, and there are fragments of matzevot in the walls. Bottom right: In the town of Brok, in eastern Poland, the interior of a workshop contains a mounted grindstone carved from a jewish gravestone.

Czech Republic and Ukraine

In the 1980s, cobblestones made from Jewish gravestones were used to pave a busy part of Prague's Old Town, a main city square called Wenceslas Square on Na Prikope, a popular shopping street. (As of 2019 they are apparently going to be returned to the Old Jewish Cemetery).

In 2018, a road in L’viv, Ukraine was being repaired when city workers found over 100 Jewish gravestones used in paving it. Matzevot have been found here in the past and brought back to the Jewish cemetery by volunteer teams.

Left: Cobblestones used to pave a busy street in Prague, taken from Jewish headstones. The Hebrew letter hey and the numbers 895 are visible. Right: Matzevot used as paving in Lviv, being rescued by volunteers.

Belarus and Lithuania

in Vilnius, Lithuania, jewish tombstones were used all over the city in construction, including for an electric transformer substation, church steps, and the grand stairway in the trade union headquarters. They are being rescued and returned to the cemetery as they are found.

In Belarus, matzevot were used for house foundations, porches, fences, backyard paving, roads, or they were turned into millstones.

Left: A man examines the memorial made from gravestones that had been used to build stairs in Vilnius. Right: 2016 photo of Jewish gravestone used as stairway of church in Vilnius.

Greece

People often forget about Sephardic Jews and the Holocaust, but Greece and especially Salonika (Thessaloniki), the "Jerusalem of the Balkans," were devastated by the Shoah. Salonika's major jewish cemetery contained hundreds of thousands of graves- when it was completely destroyed by the Nazis (with the help of Greeks who wanted the land), the gravestones were used in construction projects around the city. Aristotle University sits on the site today. Fragments of matzevot can still be found around the city in churches, buildings, even sidewalks, although now when they're found they're brought to the new Jewish cemetery.

Broken up Jewish gravestone used for construction In Thessaloniki.

Eighty years is not a long time. We are not moving on. We are seeing rising fascism, scapegoating of minorities, violent nationalism. We said never again, not for anyone, not ever - the history books are right there telling us this is wrong, and we are NOT going to ignore words written with blood.

now that i have written all this out i don't actually know how to end the post so. i guess let's go with this: i'm not naive. ordinary people do terrible, awful things and I see how it is hard to trust anyone to not do terrible things to you when it matters most. but ordinary people also do wonderful, life-affirming things! i am a sephardic jew who is here because ordinary people resisted. stood up and threw themselves into the gears of the genocidal system that tried to kill my ancestors in greece and italy during the Shoah. people hid their neighbours, became resistance fighters. in athens a police chief gave jews false id cards and an archbishop gave jews false baptismal certificates. my family always taught me and my siblings that solidarity saves lives. you can start that right now!

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! –Mario Savio

[reddeadsredhead]

One thing I feel like people don't understand is Charles shooting one of the poachers. I see so many people saying how he's only standing up against poaching and animal abuse in general. I see people say he was cruel and cold.

But they're ignoring a huge part of real-world history; the fact that bison hunting was many natives' livelihood, what kept them fed and warm in the winter. Charles even mentions at the very beginning how important bison were to not only their culture but their very survival, and the mass killing and poaching of bison was a deliberate, calculated attempt to wipe out indigenous populations. Bison hunting was strongly encouraged by the government.

And sadly, it worked.

This is why Charles's rage feels, at minimum, somewhat justified. He's staring genocide straight in the face and he feels nothing but pure disgust and seething anger. I can't blame him for reacting the way he did.

[news4dzhozhar]

[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.”

[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!

[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.

[bimdraws]

Turtle Island stands with Palestine 🇵🇸🌎

[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:

[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

[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.

[enbycrip]

I’ve just learned of a whole new act of genocide against the Navajo people during the Great Depression from this book I’m reading, “A Short History of the World According To Sheep”.

Around half a century after the majority of the Navajo had originally been forced off their land, with millions dying in a forced trek known as “the Long Walk”, and then *finally* allowed to return, the US Government basically declared “they were keeping too many sheep on their land” (which they were *not*; the Navajo bred a stunning variant of the churro sheep breed despite mass slaughter of their animals at the time of the original 19th century genocidal acts, and their husbandry of the land and their animals was reportedly superb, despite it being pretty arid even then) and, despite ongoing legal challenges, enacted a mass slaughter of these churro herds that had been revived with such love, not to mention 10,000 horses.

This destroyed the economy in the area, left the people on the brink of starvation, and broke the hearts of the Navajo.

The Navajo churro breed of sheep was on the edge of extinction until the 1970s. There are apparently still giant heaps of sheep and horse bones lying in ravines where these poor creatures were slaughtered by federal agents. The Navajo still sing mourning songs about it and all the human deaths that followed.

I’ve never even heard of this before. Not even a whisper of it.

The pointless brutality of doing that during a global economic disaster seems cartoonishly evil. And yet, of course, we know that the cruelty was the *point*.

There have been so many acts of genocide against indigenous Americans that something like this as recently as the 1920s can literally disappear. And now, of course, they are threatened just as fatally, if less directly, by climate change threatening to make the Navajo lands uninhabitable.

I cant help drawing comparisons with the IDF burning Palestinian olive groves. Wanton, pointless destruction of the living beings a culture reveres, nurtures, husbands and depends on is not one of the better-known acts of genocide, but it is both materially and spiritually a very real one.