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<h3 class="entry-header">“Columbus Day”</h3>
<div class="entry-body">
<div><em>By <a
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2013/10/%20http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2013/10/columbus-day.html#author"
target="_self" title="About the Author">Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz</a></em><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2013/10/columbus-day.html">http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2013/10/columbus-day.html</a><br>
</div>
<div>
<p>For
the Indigenous Nations of the Western Hemisphere "Columbus Day" is a
day of mourning. The year 1492 is an abomination. But, October 12
arrives every
year to torture the open sore of genocide, not as a reflective day of
mourning
and solidarity with Indigenous Peoples, as it should be. It is
celebrated with gusto throughout the
Americas, but no place as enthusiastically as the United States, where
it is
one of the ten official federal holidays when all federal offices and
banks are
closed. Columbus Day parades and fireworks are the main fare in towns
and
cities throughout the country. Counterintuitively, in the liberal city
of San
Francisco where I live it is the occasion of the gathering of U.S.
warships and
two days of low aerial strafing by war planes (the Blue Angels), a
whole week
of mass participation in martial events and patriotic gore called Fleet
Week. The
only good thing about the Sequester is that Fleet Week has been
canceled this
year.</p>
</div>
</div>
It’s
tempting to personalize the initial crimes committed by the <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Accusations_of_tyranny_and_genocide_during_governorship"
target="_blank"
title="Accusations of genocide and tyranny were lodged even during Columbus's lifetime.">mercenary
Christopher
Columbus</a>, no banality of evil there and easy to vilify. However,
Columbus
was commissioned by the Spanish monarchy and his voyage was only the
symbolic beginning
of the nightmare of modern colonialism that impoverished, enslaved, and
simply
eradicated hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of ancient
nations, the
results of which we still live with. It is settler colonialism, not
Columbus
per se, that is celebrated. The United States was born of colonialism’s
most
genocidal and exploitative twins: settler-colonialism and the Atlantic
slave
trade.<br>
<p>The
nearly two centuries formation of the thirteen British North American
colonies
did not disappear with the bloody war of independence that created the
United
Sates. On the contrary, the continuation and expansion of settler
colonialism/genocide and plantation slavery were the primary motives
for
separation. The first seventy years of the new “empire of liberty,” as <a
href="http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/empire-liberty-quotation"
target="_blank"
title="Monticello.org citation for Jefferson's famous quote">Thomas
Jefferson called the U.S.</a>, was devoted to genocidal wars against
the Native
agricultural nations east of the Mississippi, seizure of their lands,
and
forced mass removal of the citizens of those nations to Indian
Territory
(future Oklahoma). The appropriated land in the South was used for
expansion of
the slave-worked planation economy, while land in the Ohio Valley and
Great
Lakes area was used as the bait to entice European settlers—one-way
transport,
tools, and “free” land. The Columbus myth of the right to discovery
transmuted
into “manifest destiny,” and territories west of the Mississippi were
taken
through war and genocide during the second half of the 1800s. This then
is the
genealogy of all of us who live in the U.S. and of its institutions and
its relations
with the rest of humanity (the other 94 percent of the world's
population).</p>
<p>But,
that is not the whole story, because Native nations, through their
resistance
to U.S. colonization, survived, have land bases and governments and
languages
and demand the return of all lands not transferred through legitimate
treaties.
</p>
<p>I
have completed a book on this genealogy, <em>An
Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States,</em> which will be
published
by Beacon Press next year. In it, I
trace the U.S. origin story to the Columbus myth. Origin narratives
form the
vital core of a people's unifying identity and of the values that guide
them.
In the U.S., the specific narrative of the founding and development of
the
Anglo-American settler-state was envisaged by the Puritan settlers as a
covenant with God to take the land; that part of the origin story takes
on
legal color based on the Columbus myth and the "<a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_doctrine" target="_blank"
title="Wikipedia article for the Doctrine of Discovery">Doctrine of
Discovery</a>." According to the fifteenth century doctrine pronounced
by the
Pope, European nations acquired title to the lands they “discovered,”
and the
Indigenous inhabitants lost their natural right to that land now that
the
Europeans had arrived and claimed it.</p>
<p>The celebrations of Columbus suggest
that from U.S. independence onward, colonial settlers saw and still see
themselves
as part of a world system of colonization. “Columbia” is based on the
name Columbus (Colombo in his native Italian), rendering its Latin
form,
Columbia, as the “Land of Columbus.” It was a poetic name used
referring to the United States from its founding throughout the
nineteenth
century and was represented by a female persona that can be found in
sculptures, paintings, and place names, such as the national capitol,
the
District of Columbia, Columbia University, and the names of dozens of
towns with
many more by the name of Columbus. The 1798 hymn, "Hail, Columbia,"
was the early national anthem of the U.S., now used for the entry of
the
Vice-President of the United States. </p>
<p>And, of course, the nearest Monday to
October 12 is an official federal holiday celebrating Columbus, thereby
attempting
to validate the discredited Doctrine of Discovery. The devoted
celebration of Columbus in the United States gives food for thought
since
Columbus never came near touching any piece of land or water that has
ever or
is currently occupied by the United States. Arcane as it may seem, the
medieval “Doctrine of Discovery” remains
the basis for federal laws still in effect that control Indigenous
Peoples
lives and destinies, even their histories, maintaining a colonial hold.
Most
importantly, it controls the world view and behavior of the U.S.
government and
its citizens.</p>
<p>How about a <a
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2007/10/indigenous-peop.html"
target="_blank"
title="Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz discusses the movement to make Oct 12 a day of mourning for indigenous people.">movement
to abolish Columbus
Day</a> and bury the Doctrine of Discovery? <br>
****************************************<br>
</p>
<h1 class="post_title ">The myth of Columbus</h1>
<div class="post_by">By <em><a
href="http://www.workers.org/articles/author/stephanie-adohi/"
title="Posts by Stephanie Adohi" rel="author">Stephanie Adohi</a></em>
on November 21, 2012 </div>
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<p><em>Based on a talk entitled “</em><em>On the 520th anniversary of
the landing of Columbus: What his legacy means for Indigenous Peoples
today</em><em><strong>” </strong></em><em>given to a Workers World
forum in New York City on Oct. 12. The speaker is a long-time member
of WW and is of Cherokee, Huron, and Muskogee descent.</em></p>
<p>Sisters and brothers, comrades and friends,</p>
<p>Why is there a “holiday” for Columbus? On Oct. 12, 1995, WBAI-FM in
New York interviewed progressive Italian-American historian, Jennifer
Guglielmo, who stated that Columbus Day was promoted by backers of
Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. Italian-American
working-class socialists and anarchists fought those fascists in the
streets before and during World War II. Nonetheless, Columbus Day
became a federal holiday in 1937.</p>
<p>In 1492, Spain was able to complete the Reconquista. The royal
couple, Isabella and Ferdinand, had made war to expel “the Moors,”
northwestern African Muslims who had ruled much of the Iberian
peninsula for almost eight centuries. The newly united Spanish crown
wanted new riches, trade and colonies. The conquistadors sailed on
their orders, bankrolled by the king and queen.</p>
<p>Christopher Columbus was apparently no Italian. His name was
actually Cristóbol Colón. He was a Spanish pirate. The Spanish Queen
Isabella would have executed him had she known. There is no evidence he
was ever in Genoa, the city he claimed as his city of birth. He read
and he wrote a lot. Of his many papers none were written in the dialect
spoken in Genoa.</p>
<p>He landed in the Caribbean. He assessed the ready welcome of his
friendly hosts. He decided to attack, kill and take power. There are
stories of him cutting the arms off of Taíno men to feed to his war
dogs. He wrote to the queen immediately to convince her of the idea of
making them slaves. He invented the slave trade there:</p>
<p>“They would make good servants. … They are fit to be ordered about
and made to work … [and] with fifty men we could subjugate them all and
make them do whatever we want.”</p>
<p>Most of the slaves Columbus sent to Spain died quickly, and after a
few years, Ferdinand and Isabella sent an investigator, Bobadilla, who
arrived in Santo Domingo to find men jailed, lined up for hanging as
rebels. He ordered Columbus arrested. Columbus’ personal cook Espinoza
put the chains on him.</p>
<p>Once the first reports came from Pizarro in Peru and from Cortés in
Mexico about the gold and silver that could be plundered, and the
slavery, a steady stream of conquistadors moved out from Spain, all
bankrolled by the monarchs.</p>
<p>The conquistadors included Cristóbol Colón, Hernán Cortés, Francisco
Pizarro, Juan de Oñate, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, Hernando de Soto
and others. From their contemporary descriptions we can characterize
them as a lumpen sort of completely out-of-control mercenary force.
They were motivated by arrogance, religious superiority and greed.</p>
<p>They used the Requerimiento, a three-paragraph announcement from the
Spanish monarch and the Church in Rome. It demanded people submit to
these conquistadors as representatives of the Spanish crown, or else
knives and guns would be used. The Requerimiento was an excuse for
murder, rape, torture and robbery on a level never before seen:
enslavement of whole Indigenous nations, many or most worked to death
in gold and silver mines, all in the name of the Spanish monarchs and
the Catholic Church.</p>
<p><strong>True legacy of the conquistadores</strong></p>
<p>It’s not possible to touch on all of the crimes of all the
conquistadors tonight. But it is important to know which ones are most
hated still, which ones did the most damage.</p>
<p>Isabella wanted riches and she got wealth beyond all imagining. So
did everyone with Francisco Pizarro, butcher of the Incas. Writers
describe the Incas in different ways, sometimes as an empire and other
times as a socialist or communist society. It is known that Incan
civilization grew from ancient farming communities that held the land
in common. Incans were observed distributing stored supplies from
public warehouses to the sick, elderly, poor, widows, disabled and
anyone in need, according to Ronald Wright in “Stolen Continents.” The
ruins at Huánuco include 500 such warehouses, measuring over one
million cubic feet.</p>
<p>The Incas were highly skilled working with gold, silver and
platinum. They used much bronze. There was no source of iron available.
They were the world’s finest weavers. They domesticated llamas and
alpacas as pack animals, and for wool and meat. They were astute
recordkeepers. They made their records using intricate woven fringes of
knotted string, called quipus, and they kept their archives in
storehouses.</p>
<p>They had advanced base-ten mathematics with zeros and place
notation. They had 14,000 miles of paved roads through the Andes
Mountains (often stepped for the pack animals). Cusco had a population
of 50,000-100,000 and there were many smaller cities and towns.</p>
<p>Pizarro, described by those who knew him as ruthless and devious,
tricked the Incas, who had underestimated him based on reports the
invaders were lazy robbers. Pizarro and his men attacked and killed
10,000 in an hour and a half. The Incas at court were unarmed for they
lacked fear of these men, but they still fought to the last, even as
Pizarro’s fighters cut off their hands. Pizarro took Atahualpa, the
Incan leader, hostage.</p>
<p>Atahualpa offered the Spanish a room full of gold and two of silver
as ransom. Llamas carried gold back from stripped temples and palaces
for months. The outside walls of Cusco’s main temple alone held one and
a half tons of gold plates.</p>
<p>The entire ransom came to seven tons of gold and 13 of silver, all
of it in the form of artwork and jewelry. The total value has been
estimated at $280 million, based on $1,749 an ounce.</p>
<p>No king in Europe had ever seen or even heard of anything like this.
The conquistadors melted it all down. It took a month at a quarter ton
a day.</p>
<p>Pizarro killed Atahualpa anyway. And the Spaniards went on a rampage
of plunder for more. In some buildings they found 20-foot planks of
silver. They took jewels off mummies. They killed so many people and
llamas that the irrigation canals and other public works fell to decay
and the llamas were almost exterminated.</p>
<p>Spain and Portugal signed a treaty in 1494 to divide up Africa and
the Western Hemisphere. This document gave Portugal part of Brazil and
everything to its east.</p>
<p>Some $129 million in gold was shipped to Spain every year. This
valuable trans-Atlantic traffic became a target for English, Dutch and
French pirates. The British pirate Francis Drake captured $172 million
in Spanish gold.</p>
<p>Spain used the gold for a series of wars against France and the
Turks, and then in the war against Protestantism. By the time the
Spanish Armada, a fleet of warships, was sunk by the British in 1588,
the Spanish monarchs had spent the entire fortune, though their
programs of colonization and missionaries continued long afterward.</p>
<p>The huge amounts of gold that were stolen did not just fund wars and
more conquest expeditions, they changed Europe. The European
bourgeoisie, still subordinate to the nobility, had its role in
outfitting all of the wars. Huge quantitative change led to qualitative
change in the power of the enterprising bourgeoisie and directly led to
the rise of capitalism. And colonialism exploded in size and scope in
utterly immense robberies of previously unknown rapaciousness.</p>
<p><strong>Conquistadors in the American Southwest</strong></p>
<p>Coronado, known for wandering all over the North American Southwest
in search of the seven cities of gold and Quivira, attacked, occupied
and burned several pueblos. Less than a third of the original pueblos
still exist today. They extended all the way into the Texas Panhandle.
If you ever are in Albuquerque and drive through Bernalillo, there are
two ruins just west of town which are among those that Coronado
personally burnt down.</p>
<p>Oñate, known for working thousands of people to their death in the
gold and silver mines of Zacatecas, left Mexico to take over New
Mexico. He is hated in New Mexico to this day. He attacked Acoma Pueblo
in 1599 when it rose against the settlers.</p>
<p>Oñate’s men killed 800 children, women and men. Oñate ordered every
man over 25 to have a foot cut off and sentenced each to 25 years
slavery. Every female and male between 12 and 25 years of age got 25
years of slavery. And 60 young girls were sent to priests in Mexico,
never to return.</p>
<p>There were rebellions against Spain and the conquistadors. The
biggest rebellion in the Andes/Peru was led by Túpac Amaru II. There
are records of the Incas melting gold and pouring it down captured
conquistadors’ throats.</p>
<p>The second biggest rebellion was in New Mexico in 1680. Some say it
was the Spanish fear of snakes and dolls that led them to burn
1,000-year-old kachina dolls of the pueblos. Others say it was the
beating of Popay, who did lead the pueblos in revolt. The Indigenous
people burnt out the Spanish and kicked them out for 12 years.</p>
<p>Pedro de Alvarado worked thousands to death in Guatemala in the
mines, and hanged any local leaders who tried to protect the people. He
enslaved so many, the price of an Indian slave fell to 1/20th the price
in Mexico.</p>
<p>Hernando de Soto was Pizarro’s lieutenant. He had grown up killing
Indians in Panama in his teens, and killing Indians in Nicaragua in his
20s. His part of Atahualpa’s ransom made him a millionaire in gold. He
wanted Florida and got the grand bankroll to do so in Spain. He paid
for 600 soldiers, 200 horses, numbers of African and Mexican slaves,
war dogs, and several hundred swine (these were war pigs, they actually
flushed ambushes and rooted out fields).</p>
<p>De Soto’s expedition left Florida north to the Smokies or Blue Ridge
Mountains, then across the Mississippi to Arkansas. From town to town
to city they went, following the roads and paths, stealing food,
burning storehouses, fields and towns, kidnapping local Indigenous
people for enslavement and burning them alive if they made trouble. De
Soto cut their hands off if they didn’t lead him to gold. He abducted
the woman ruler of the city of Talomeco in the state of Cofitachiqui
(no one today knows if it was Creek or Tsalagi) and killed her for her
pearl necklace.</p>
<p>The de Soto party recorded events. They saw cities and towns newly
abandoned because smallpox was already spreading from Spanish
incursions. They were the first and last outsiders to ever see the
living Mississippian culture, today called the moundbuilders. Smallpox
and the other seven disease vectors living in the guts of de Soto’s
unleashed war pigs gone feral, spread disease everywhere through the
entire Mississippi Basin and tributary rivers system.</p>
<p>De Soto attacked the original city of Mabile and abducted the
leader, a woman. A huge battle was fought and Mabile burnt down. The
city of Mobile, Ala., is named after it.</p>
<p>The Mississippian culture fell directly as a result of de Soto’s
pigs and diseases. The mounds that remain were actually great earthen
pyramids, showing the influence of the Mayans and others. The
Mississippian culture depended on corn. They had miles and miles of
corn crops.</p>
<p>Maize corn was the first-ever selectively bred food grain in the
world. Its scientific history is still being debated, as it is so very
different from teosinte, its ancestor. Somehow, Indigenous gardeners
had changed it from a thumb-sized nearly inedible seed pod to the many
varieties of maize corn being grown in many parts of this hemisphere in
1492. Maize corn was being raised up and down the East Coast, all over
the Mississippi River valley, the Southwest and more.</p>
<p>Some 10,000 years ago, in the Chilca Canyon of Peru, the potato was
domesticated and cropped. The word used in Spanish,<em> </em>“papas,”
is the Incan word. By 1491, thousands of varieties were in existence,
with varieties developed for every altitude going down from the high
peaks to the valleys. So we have agriculture developing in the Western
Hemisphere in the same time frame as Mesopotamia.</p>
<p>The Incans preserved great masses of their papas crops by mashing
and freeze drying, which gave them a food store good for ten years in
case of a drought. They did all that with wooden tools too.</p>
<p>The stories that Native people saw and smelled these unwashed armed
men and thought they were gods is disproven over and over by
contradictory accounts. Incas thoroughly investigated the strange men,
but made the mistake of underestimating them in their disgust for their
personal behavior and filth.</p>
<p>In 1502, Colón accidentally encountered a large seagoing canoe the
length of a galley off of Honduras. It was a Mayan crew, and they
ordered the Spaniards to get out of the way. It took the conquistadors
till 1511 to figure out that the Mayans were 120 miles west. At the
first big battle in 1517, Fernando Hernández was crushed by the Mayans
at Champotón. By 1519, they began to enslave Africans and bring them to
Cuba, where subsequent Spanish excursions into this hemisphere now used
some African slaves.</p>
<p>There is a link in all of this with the fight against the racist use
of “savage” in anti-Muslim posters on Metropolitan Transit Authority
public transport in New York City. This and the word “primitive” have
been used endlessly without question for 520 years against the
Indigenous people of the world.</p>
<p><strong>The words ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’</strong></p>
<p>Colonialism is savage. Capitalism is savage. Imperialism is savage.
And there are other words to use in place of “primitive” in economic
and political discussion — “pre-class society,” “early accumulation of
capital,” “original communism” — when discussing humanity.</p>
<p>Imagine the continual effect on the consciousness of the use of
these two words over the last 200 years. People see it in literature
and accept it. People of color see it and resent it. Our youth are
affected negatively and so are our social relations with people outside
our communities.</p>
<p>The truth is that the term “hunter-gatherer” is generally wrong in
the same regard. It might be accurate for that period when people
around the world were surviving the Ice Ages, but not since then. It’s
another way of saying “primitive.” All of humanity is adaptable and
creative in learning to use the resources available in a given
environment. These societies were gardening.</p>
<p>At some time after the last Ice Age in Asia, and later in Europe,
domestication of livestock animals developed. Great varieties of plant
foods were being developed in the Western Hemisphere.</p>
<p>In 1491, what was actually going on across Great Turtle Island
(North America), and in the Land of the Condor (South America), was a
whole hell of a lot of gardening, growing of crops, even in the
forests. Over one half of all the food crops in the world by numbers of
species and by volume and weight are Indigenous to this hemisphere, and
were all domesticated by Indigenous people, from popcorn to pumpkins.</p>
<p>Tomatoes, squashes, beans, maize corn, berries, various nuts,
potatoes, chocolate, pumpkins, pineapples, cassava, various palm oils,
avocados, papaya, quinoa, amaranth, acai — too many others to name them
all here — and all the chiles taken around the world by the Spaniards
and mistakenly named “peppers” by Columbus himself.</p>
<p>What is primitive about the cultivation of so many diverse food
crops?</p>
<p>What is primitive about the Mayan and Incan development of the
concept of zero? Or of the science of astronomy developed by all the
ancient peoples of the world?</p>
<p>Between 3200 and 2500 BCE, large-scale public buildings were erected
in at least seven places on the Peruvian coast. The only other urban
center then was Sumer on the Tigris-Euphrates.</p>
<p>And then there is the fact that across this continent, people from
small villages to cities lived communally. There were 500 nations in
what is now the United States alone and most of them still had a
matrilineal structure. There is nothing primitive about a society which
is so equal and free yet completely functional on the basis of no
classes at all. Native American women today often use the term
matrilineal because it does not imply any hierarchy.</p>
<p>There are so many highly different and complex traditions of music,
storytelling, dance and theater and art forms to be found in our
history as well, and some still surviving.</p>
<p>In Amazonia’s forests, where people today can walk and pick fruit to
eat, scientists tell us these are old orchards. There were 138 crops
grown in Amazonia, half of them trees, lots of palm oils, pineapples,
papayas, cassava or manioc, calabash, acai and more.</p>
<p>There are also huge tracts of artificially built-up soil. The Amazon
basin has acidic red soil, bad for growing. By an unknown process,
people who lived there created two types of very dark nutritious —
terra preta — soil for their crops; they used charcoal, pottery and
probably animal and fish remains, which provided all the needed
nutrients for plants (phosphorus, calcium, sulfur, charcoal and organic
matter).</p>
<p>“The Amazon was being terraformed before 1492,” wrote Charles Mann
in his book, “1491. ” Conservative estimates put the extent at a few
thousand square miles at 0.1 to 0.3 percent of the Basin, which is
about equal to the size of the cropped area the Mayans had. Others
estimate up to 10 percent, which would be the size of France.</p>
<p>In original communism or communalism, the family is healthy and
vibrant. It is called the extended family. This form provides all the
support needed for the individual, for the children. Everyone knows
they belong. Unrelated people are adopted in. There is no isolation of
the self, no alienation from society, as seen today to the detriment of
many youth. By contrast, the nuclear family is just a little piece of
that extended family, cut off and lacking support.</p>
<p>The clash of cultures began with the invasion of the Spanish
conquistadors. It continued with the later European invasions — the
English and the French, the Russians on the West Coast.</p>
<p>Yet the cultural clash had many positive effects on the settlers,
some of which enabled them to survive here. These include:</p>
<p>• The adoption of nearly all of our Indigenous food crops.</p>
<p>• The gender equality of the women was not understood or accepted by
the Europeans, who had been living under feudalism for hundreds of
years. The National Women’s History Project states that many early
women’s rights leaders were inspired by what they call the Seneca’s
“matriarchal society.”</p>
<p>• Ben Franklin noted the impact of the Iroquois Law of Peace on the
U.S. Constitution.</p>
<p>• Bathing was a daily practice. The British and French are often
noted as amazed as many of them had never had a bath.</p>
<p>• Many ideas in fashion too numerous to even go into.</p>
<p><strong>The role of smallpox and communicable disease </strong></p>
<p>Up until 1492, there was very little contact between the
hemispheres. No one here had any immunity to all the European and Asian
diseases. These are diseases that jumped species from domesticated
animals or rats. Half the Aztecs, the Incas and the Mayas died before
the fighting when these societies were overthrown. It was more severe
than the Black Death was in Europe and it killed leaders, advisers,
generals and elders.</p>
<p>Cortés lost the first assault on Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital.
Then smallpox spread for 60 days, leaving everyone too sick to even
move. When it began to diminish, Cortés had returned.</p>
<p>Disease traveled out from everywhere the Spanish and later invading
forces landed, and traveled to every corner of the hemisphere. It is
now estimated that in 1491 some 112 million people lived in this
hemisphere. The Mexican plateau alone held 25.2 million people, based
on colonial records.</p>
<p>The diseases of smallpox, flu, measles and others killed 80 to 100
million people in 100 years. It works out to 20 percent of the world’s
population at that time, which by United Nations figures was 500
million in 1600. The work done by progressive scientists in the 1950s
and 1960s to achieve this realistic figure is still under attack by
racists in their fields.</p>
<p>In 1542, Bartolomé de las Casas [friar and Spanish historian]
described “a beehive of people” and “the greater part of the entire
human race in these countries.” By 1562, he estimated there had been 40
million deaths due to disease. By 1600, some 20 waves of pestilence had
swept the two continents. Less than one in ten survived. About 90
million died. That would be about the equivalent of a billion deaths
today.</p>
<p>By the time the English and the French arrived in this hemisphere,
the waves of smallpox epidemics had left numerous villages of the dead,
which the settlers found here on the Atlantic seacoast and across the
lands. Sometimes they moved into the empty villages, as the Pilgrims
did.</p>
<p>Decimated Indigenous nations at that point faced waves of settlers
anxious and mean with greed to steal the land and create wealth. The
perspective of the settlers and their view of the land, the environment
itself, was totally alien to the Indigenous peoples. The settlers saw
it as something to be used and abused to make money, as opposed to
being stewarded, cared for, to encourage the wealth of variety of
resources available previously.</p>
<p>The Indigenous nations fought back, but fighting came long after the
waves of death had shifted the balance of forces to the invaders.</p>
<p>In 1776, most of the fighting was not against the British. Over 100
Cherokee villages were razed to the ground and all the crops destroyed,
so that the settlers could steal huge tracts of territory in Virginia
and the South. The whole Cherokee nation was refuged and went into the
mountains with only the shirts on their backs in the winter.</p>
<p>Do you know that Tecumseh and a white general are currently honored
with stamps in Canada in tribute to Tecumseh’s saving Canada from a
U.S. takeover?</p>
<p>As all of us know, Marx and Engels were very excited to read the
work of Lewis Henry Morgan, who was the first to write of the
matrilineal societies and the extended families, based on the
Haudenosaunee. But most do not know how he met Tonawanda Seneca Ely
Parker when they both worked as bookshop clerks. Morgan learned
everything he knew from Parker, who later was General Ulysses Grant’s
right-hand man, the military secretary who took the surrender at
Appomattox in the U. S. Civil War.</p>
<p>In the 19th century, the U. S. declared it was “manifest destiny” to
take the West. The Trail of Tears, the California Gold Rush, the Plains
Wars — all these wars and atrocities lead up to the U. S. becoming
imperialist when it finally took on Spain in 1898, seizing Puerto Rico,
Cuba and the Philippines.</p>
<p>In 1891, Congress passed the Dawes Act to break up the communally
owned lands of the reservations, and mandated individual ownership, in
plots small enough to leave a lot of land open for the Sooners
[settlers who seized “unassigned lands” in the Midwest], plots too
small to be viable for communal use. Ironically, only the pueblos were
protected, given legal status by the Spanish land grants. The 1898
Curtis Act dissolved tribal governments and courts.</p>
<p>There are many undocumented Indigenous people, including full bloods
in Oklahoma, who are unable to be members of their nations now as their
ancestors had refused to get on the rolls. Later, their families did
not get the allotments of land.</p>
<p><strong>The resistance continues</strong></p>
<p>During World War I, when Eugene Debs was in jail under the Palmer
Raids, the biggest rebellion against the fratricidal imperialist war
this side of the Atlantic was in Oklahoma. It was called the Green Corn
Rebellion. In 1917, Indigenous, Black and white farmers and workers
fought and were suppressed by the National Guard.</p>
<p>Today, capitalist society portrays all Indigenous people as either
completely exterminated — and their supposed attire free to be used as
Halloween costumes — or only noted if a person fits the popular
stereotype from Hollywood.</p>
<p>There are so many local struggles we never hear about. There are 500
nations, each with its own history.</p>
<p>This is still Indian land. The struggle continues. This is the
significance of Day of Mourning. If you have never gone to Day of
Mourning, get on the bus and come this year!</p>
<p>You will hear from Leonard Peltier, who sends his support from
prison in Florida. You will hear about struggles across Great Turtle
Island and how Indigenous people view the current U. S. wars.</p>
<p>We salute Osceola, leader of the Seminole nation, the Creek nation
that adopted runaway slaves in Florida and who never surrendered. We
look to the Green Corn Rebellion for our inspiration in the struggle.
We salute the United American Indians of New England, whose slogan is:
“We are not vanishing, we are not conquered, we are as strong as ever. ”</p>
<p><strong>Day of Mourning</strong></p>
<p>We are building for the 2012 Day of Mourning starting tonight, and
this meeting will also be a fundraiser for the New York bus. I was able
to get some books donated to raise money for the bus, from East Bay,
California, poet John Curl, specifically, “Columbus in the Bay of
Pigs,” about the nightmare for the Taíno people following the landing
of the first conquistadors in what is now Cuba, based on the records
kept of those expeditions.</p>
<p>This pamphlet was published in 1992 in the San Francisco Bay Area in
support of the struggle against the Columbus holiday. Please get a copy
and make a donation toward the bus for Day of Mourning.</p>
<p>My professor, Betty Parent, one of the first professors of Ethnic
Studies in the U.S., and one of the founding faculty for San Francisco
State American Indian Studies, traveled with other Alaskan Athabascan
language speakers to Soviet Siberia. They found their “distant cousins”
there, other Athabascan language speakers. All had materials, books,
and college in their own language. We never had that here.</p>
<p>Since the struggle for Ethnic Studies began, more authors are also
in print today representing the oppressed nations, including Indigenous
authors.</p>
<p>We do know more now than we did 30 years ago about what happened.
Also, there are many progressive scientists and social scientists,
contemporaries of or following in the popular shoes of Carl Sagan and
Howard Zinn, who have brought new information and resulting new
analyses to public view.</p>
<p>For instance, the Siriono people in Bolivia, mistakenly seen as
paleolithic holdouts by Allen Holmberg in “Nomads of the Longbow,” were
actually the remnants of their nation, who fled a 95-percent die-off
from smallpox, flu and enforced enslavement to white cattle ranchers.
That was the reason they were impoverished in the forest.</p>
<p>We are dialectical materialists. We welcome the new information, and
we make our own analyses as well. And we take it further.</p>
<p><br>
</p>
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