Some Views On Thanksgiving From Native Americans and sympathetic illegal aliens

[Peter Lemkin]

Thanksgiving: A Native American View


For a Native American, the story of Thanksgiving is not a very happy one. But a member of the Dineh Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux finds occasion for hope. An AlterNet Thanksgiving classic.



December 31, 1999 |



I celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving.This may surprise those people who wonder what Native Americans think of this official U.S. celebration of the survival of early arrivals in a European invasion that culminated in the death of 10 to 30 million native people.Thanksgiving to me has never been about Pilgrims. When I was six, my mother, a woman of the Dineh nation, told my sister and me not to sing "Land of the Pilgrim's pride" in "America the Beautiful." Our people, she said, had been here much longer and taken much better care of the land. We were to sing "Land of the Indian's pride" instead.I was proud to sing the new lyrics in school, but I sang softly. It was enough for me to know the difference. At six, I felt I had learned something very important. As a child of a Native American family, you are part of a very select group of survivors, and I learned that my family possessed some "inside" knowledge of what really happened when those poor, tired masses came to our homes.When the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock, they were poor and hungry -- half of them died within a few months from disease and hunger. When Squanto, a Wampanoag man, found them, they were in a pitiful state. He spoke English, having traveled to Europe, and took pity on them. Their English crops had failed. The native people fed them through the winter and taught them how to grow their food.These were not merely "friendly Indians." They had already experienced European slave traders raiding their villages for a hundred years or so, and they were wary -- but it was their way to give freely to those who had nothing. Among many of our peoples, showing that you can give without holding back is the way to earn respect. Among the Dakota, my father's people, they say, when asked to give, "Are we not Dakota and alive?" It was believed that by giving there would be enough for all -- the exact opposite of the system we live in now, which is based on selling, not giving.To the Pilgrims, and most English and European peoples, the Wampanoags were heathens, and of the Devil. They saw Squanto not as an equal but as an instrument of their God to help his chosen people, themselves.Since that initial sharing, Native American food has spread around the world. Nearly 70 percent of all crops grown today were originally cultivated by Native American peoples. I sometimes wonder what they ate in Europe before they met us. Spaghetti without tomatoes? Meat and potatoes without potatoes? And at the "first Thanksgiving" the Wampanoags provided most of the food -- and signed a treaty granting Pilgrims the right to the land at Plymouth, the real reason for the first Thanksgiving.What did the Europeans give in return? Within 20 years European disease and treachery had decimated the Wampanoags. Most diseases then came from animals that Europeans had domesticated. Cowpox from cows led to smallpox, one of the great killers of our people, spread through gifts of blankets used by infected Europeans. Some estimate that diseases accounted for a death toll reaching 90 percent in some Native American communities. By 1623, Mather the elder, a Pilgrim leader, was giving thanks to his God for destroying the heathen savages to make way "for a better growth," meaning his people.In stories told by the Dakota people, an evil person always keeps his or her heart in a secret place separate from the body. The hero must find that secret place and destroy the heart in order to stop the evil.I see, in the "First Thanksgiving" story, a hidden Pilgrim heart. The story of that heart is the real tale than needs to be told. What did it hold? Bigotry, hatred, greed, self-righteousness? We have seen the evil that it caused in the 350 years since. Genocide, environmental devastation, poverty, world wars, racism.Where is the hero who will destroy that heart of evil? I believe it must be each of us. Indeed, when I give thanks this Thursday and I cook my native food, I will be thinking of this hidden heart and how my ancestors survived the evil it caused.Because if we can survive, with our ability to share and to give intact, then the evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving day in the land of the Wampanoag will have come full circle.And the healing can begin. Jacqueline Keeler is a member of the Dineh Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux. Her work has appeared in Winds of Change, an American Indian journal.

[Peter Lemkin]

Native American Genocide

The American Indian Holocaust, known as the "500 year war" and the "World's Longest Holocaust In The History Of Mankind And Loss Of Human Lives."

GENOCIDE AND DENYING IT: WHY WE ARE NOT TAUGHT THAT THE NATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA WERE EXTERMINATED

Death Toll: 95,000,000 to 114,000,000

American Holocaust: D. Stannard (Oxford Press, 1992) - [COLOR=#FF0000][FONT=inherit]"over 100 million killed" "[Christopher] Columbus personally murdered half a million Natives"

"Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination by starvation and uneven combat of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity."
P. 202, "Adolph Hitler" by John Toland

Native Americans have the highest mortality rate of any U.S. minority because of U.S. action and policy. The biggest killers though were smallpox, measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. All imported by the Europeans colonists.

Smallpox was instrumental in killing the American Indians

GENOCIDE OF NATIVE AMERICANS: A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW

The term Genocide derives from the Latin (genos=race, tribe; cide=killing) and means literally the killing or murder of an entire tribe or people. The Oxford English Dictionary defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group" and cites the first usage of the term as R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, (1944) p.79. "By genocide' we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group."
The U.N. General Assembly adopted this term and defended it in 1946 as "….a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups." Most people tend to associate genocide with wholesale slaughter of a specific people. However, "the 1994 U.N. Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, describes genocide beyond outright murder of people as the destruction and extermination of culture." Article II of the convention lists five categories of activity as genocidal when directed against a specific "national, ethnic, racial, or religious group."


These categories are:

• Killing members of the group;
  
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of group;
  
• Deliberately infliction on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
  
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
  
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
  

Genocide or the deliberate extermination of one ethnic group by another is not new, for example in 1937 the Pequot Indians were exterminated by the Colonists when they burned their villages in Mystic, Connecticut, and then shot all the other people including women and children who tried to escape. The United States Government has refused to ratify the U.N. convention on genocide. There are many facets of genocide which have been implemented upon indigenous peoples of North America. The list of American genocidal policies includes: Mass-execution, Biological warfare, Forced Removal from homelands, Incarceration, Indoctrination of non-indigenous values, forced surgical sterilization of native women, Prevention of religious practices, just to name a few.
By mass-execution prior to the arrival of Columbus the land defined as the 48 contiguous states of America numbered in excess of 12 million. Four centuries later, it had been reduced by 95% (237 thousand). How? When Columbus returned in 1493 he brought a force of 17 ships. He began to implement slavery and mass-extermination of the Taino population of the Caribbean. Within three years five million were dead. Fifty years later the Spanish census recorded only 200 living! Las Casas, the primary historian of the Columbian era, writes of numerous accounts of the horrendous acts that the Spanish colonists inflicted upon the indigenous people, which included hanging them en masse, roasting them on spits, hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog food, and the list continues.
This did not end with Columbus' departure, the European colonies and the newly declared United States continued similar conquests. Massacres occurred across the land such as the Wounded Knee Massacre. Not only was the method of massacre used, other methods for "Indian Removal" and "clearing" included military slaughter of tribal villages, bounties on native scalps, and biological warfare. British agents intentionally gave Tribes blankets that were intentionally contaminated with smallpox. Over 100 thousand died among the Mingo, Delaware, Shawnee and other Ohio River nations. The U.S. army followed suit and used the same method on the Plains tribal populations with similar success.

FORCED REMOVAL FROM HOMELANDS
For a brief periods after the American Revolution, the United States adopted a policy toward American Indians known as the "conquest" theory. In the Treaty of Fort Stansix of 1784, the Iroquois had to cede lands in western New York and Pennsylvania. Those Iroquois living in the United States (many had gone to Canada where the English gave them refuge) rapidly degenerated as a nation during the last decades of the eighteenth century, losing most of their remaining lands and much of their ability to cope. The Shawnees, Miamis, Delawaresm, Ottawans, Wyandots, and Potawatomis watching the decline of the Iroquois formed their own confederacy and informed the United states that the Ohio river was the boundary between their lands and those of the settlers. It was just a matter of time before further hostilities ensued.

"Indian Boarding School" - Cultural Genocide

FORCED ASSIMILATION
The Europeans saw themselves as the superior culture bringing civilization to an inferior culture. The colonial world view split reality into popular parts: good and evil, body and spirit, man and nature, head and hear, European and primitive. American Indians spirituality lacks these dualism's; language expresses the oneness of all things. God is not the transcendent Father but the Mother Earth, the Corn Mother, the Great Spirit who nourishes all It is polytheistic, believing in many gods and many levels of deity. "At the basis of most American Native beliefs is the supernatural was a profound conviction that an invisible force, a powerful spirit, permeated the entire universe and ordered the cycles of birth and death for all living things." Beyond this belief in a universal spirit, most American Indians attached supernatural qualities to animals, heavenly bodies, the seasons, dead ancestors, the elements, and geologic formations. Their world was infused with the divine The Sacred Hoop. This was not at all a personal being presiding ominpotently over the salvation or damnation of individual people as the Europeans believed.
For the Europeans such beliefs were pagan. Thus, the conquest was rationalized as a necessary evil that would bestow upon the heathen "Indians" a moral consciousness that would redeem their amorality. The world view which converted bare economic self interest into noble, even moral, motives was a notion of Christianity as the one redemptive religion which demands fealty from all cultures. In this remaking of the American Indians the impetus which drove the conquistador's invading wars not exploration, but the drive to expand an empire, not discovery of new land, but the drive to accumulate treasure, land and cheap labor.

CULTURE
Culture is the expression of a people's creativity everything they make which is distinctively theirs: language, music, art, religion, healing, agriculture, cooking style, the institutions governing social life. To suppress culture is to aim a cannonball at the people's heart and spirit. Such a conquest is more accomplished than a massacre. "We have seen the colonization materially kills the colonized. It must be added that it kills him spiritually. Colonization distorts relationships, destroys and petrifies institutions, and corrupts….both colonizers and the colonized."
Strategies of targeting American Indian children for assimilation began with violence. Forts were erected by Jesuits, in which indigenous youths were incarcerated, indoctrinated with non-indigenous Christian values, and forced into manual labor. Schooling provided a crucial tool in changing not only the language but the culture of impressionable young people. In boarding schools students could be immersed in a 24 hours bath of assimilation. "The founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania , Capt. Richard H. Pratt, observed in 1892 that Carlisle has always planted treason to the tribe and loyalty to the nation at large. More crudely put, the Carlisle philosophy was, "Kill the Indian to save the man." At the boarding schools children were forbidden to speak their native languages, forced to shed familiar clothing for uniforms, cut their hair and subjected to harsh discipline. Children who had seldom heard an unkind word spoken to them were all too often verbally and physically abused by their white teachers. In short, "there was a full-scale attempt at deracination the uprooting or destruction of a race and its culture." A few American Indian children were able to run away, others died of illness and some died of homesickness.
The children, forcibly separated from their parents by soldiers often never saw their families until later in their adulthood, after their value-system and knowledge had been supplanted with colonial thinking. When these children returned from boarding schools they no longer knew their native language, they were strangers in their own world, there was a loss, a void of not belonging in the native world, nor the white man's world. In the movie "Lakota Women," these children are referred to as "Apple Children [red on the outside, white on the inside]" they do not know where they fit in, they were unable to assimilate into either culture. This confusion and loss of cultural identity, leads to suicide, drinking and violence. The most destructive aspect of alienation is the loss of power, of control over one's destiny, over one's memories, through relationships past and future.
Jose Noriega's well-documented historical account of the forced indoctrination of colonial thought into the minds of American Indian children as a means of disrupting the generational transmission of cultural values, clearly demonstrates the cultural genocide employed by the U.S. government as a means of separating the American Indians from their land.

FORCED REMOVAL
The "Indian Removal" policy was implemented to "clear" land for white settlers. Removal was more than another assault on American Indians' land titles. Insatiable greed for land remained a primary consideration, but many people now believed that the removal was the only way of saving American Indians from extermination. As long as the American Indians lived in close proximity to non-Native American communities, they would be decimated by disease, alcohol, and poverty. The Indian Removal Act began in 1830. Forced marches at bayonet-point to relocation settlements resulted in high mortality rates. The infamous removal of the Five Civilized Tribes the Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Seminoles is a dismal page in United States history. By the 1820′s the Cherokees, who had established a written constitution modeled after the United States Constitution, a newspaper, schools, and industries in their settlements, resisted removal. In 1938 the federal troops evicted the Cherokees. Approximately four thousand Cherokees died during the removal process because of poor planning by the United States Government. This exodus to Indian Territory is known as the Trail of Tears. More than one hundred thousand American Indians eventually crossed the Mississippi River under the authority of the Indian Removal Act.

STERILIZATION
Article II of United Nations General Assembly resolution, 1946: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such: (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. In the mid-1970s a Choctaw-Tsalagi Indian Health Services doctor was approached by a 26-year-old American Indian woman who desired a "wonb transplant." She had been sterilized when she was 20 at the Indian Health Service hospital in Claremont, Oklahoma. It was discoverd that 75 percent of the Claremont sterilizations were non-therapeutic, that women American Indians were being prompted to sign sterilization forms they didn't understand, that they were being told the operations were reversible, and that some women were even being asked to sign sterilization papers while they had yet to come out of birthing sedation.
Common Sense magazine reported that the Indian Health Service "was sterilizing 3,000 Indian women per year, 4 to 6 percent of the child bearing population…Dr. R. T. Ravenholt, [then] director of the federal government's Office of Population, later confirmed that surgical sterilization has become increasingly important in recent years as one of the advanced methods of fertility management'." Ravenholt's response to these inquires "told the population Association of America in St. Louis that the critics were a really radical extremist group lashing out at a responsible program so that revolution would occur'."
From the beginning of European control there has been an unrelenting drive to commit genocide over another culture. The American Indians were a majority so the Europeans called them an enemy. One of the major facts the United States Government has failed to understand is that the spiritual aspect of life is inseparable from the economic and the political aspects. The loss of tradition and memory will be the loss of positive sense of self. Those reared in traditional American Native societies are inclined to relate events and experiences to one another, they do not organize perceptions or external events in terms of dualities or priorities. This egalitarianism is reflected in the structure of American Indian literature, which does not rely on conflict, crises, and resolution for organization.

INTELLECTUAL RICHES
American Indians felt comfortable with the environment, close to the moods and rhythms of nature, in time with the living planet. Europeans were quite different, viewing the earth itself as lifeless and inorganic, subject to any kind of manipulation or alteration. Europeans tended to be alienated from nature and came to the New World to use the wilderness, to conquer and exploit its natural wealth for private gain.
But for American Indians, the environment was sacred, possessing a cosmic significance equal to its material riches. The earth was sacred a haven for all forms of life and it had to be protected, nourished, and even worshipped. Chief Smoholla of the Wanapun tribe illustrated American Native reverence for the earth when he said in 1885:

"God said he was the father of and earth was the mankind; that nature was the law; that the animals, and fish and plants beyond nature, and that man only was sinful.You ask me to plow the ground! Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom?Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.You ask me to dig for stone! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones?Then When I die I cannot enter her body to be born again.You ask me to cut grass And make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men!But how dare I cut off my mother's hair?

American Indians' agricultural and medical wisdom had been ignored by the European invaders. In their rush to control the land and people much has passed them by and much has been destroyed. Sadly, what seems to have been almost totally ignored is the American Indians' knowledge that the Earth is their mother. Because their mother continues to give us life we must care for and respect her. This was a ecological view of the earth.
"There are tens of millions of people around the world who, within only the last few centuries and some cases only the last few years have seen their successful societies brutally assaulted by ugly destructive forces. Some American Indian societies have been obliterated. Some peoples have suffered separation from the source of their survival, wisdom, power, and identity: their lands. Some have fallen from the pressure, compromised, moved to urban landscapes, and disappeared, but millions of American Indians, including tens of thousands here in the United States, have gained strength in the face of all their adversity. Their strength is rooted in the earth and deserves to succeed."
Books used for references and internet addresses:

1. Mander, Jerry, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations," Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1992: 349.
   
2. Mankiller, Wilma and Wallis, M., A Chief and Her People, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1993: 8.
   
3. Memi, Albert, The Colonizer and the Colonized, Boston: Beacon Press, 1965: 151.
   
4. Olson, James and Wilson, R., Native American, In the Twentieth Century, University Press, 1988, 11.
   
5. The Reader's Digest Association, Inc., Through Indian Eyes, Pleasantville, New York/Montreal, 1995: 338.
   
6. Susan Brill, Bradley U. (brill@bradley.edu) Discussion group regarding the genocide of Native peoples.
   
7. http://www.igc.apc.org/toxic/
   
8. http://conbio.bio.uci.edu/nae/knudsen.html
   
9. Federal Indian Policy http://mercury.sfsu.edu.cypher.genocide.html.#children
   
10. Trail of Tears http://ngeorgia.com/history/nghisttt.html
    

[...] The National Council of Churches adopted a resolution branding this event [the landing of Columbus] "an invasion" that resulted in the "slavery and genocide of native people." In a widely read book, The Conquest of Paradise (1990), Kirkpatrick Sale charged the English and their American successors with pursuing a policy of extermination that had continued unabated for four centuries. Later works have followed suit. In the 1999 Encyclopedia of Genocide, edited by the scholar Israel Charny, an article by Ward Churchill argues that extermination was the "express objective" of the U.S. government. To the Cambodia expert Ben Kiernan, similarly, genocide is the "only appropriate way" to describe how white settlers treated the Indians. (Source)

The North American Indian Holocaust

BY
KAHENTINETHA HORN

The "final solution" of the North American Indian problem was the model for the subsequent Jewish holocaust and South African apartheid
Why is the biggest holocaust in all humanity being hidden from history? Is it because it lasted so long that it has become a habit? It's been well documented that the killing of Indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere since the beginning of colonization has been estimated at 120 million. Yet nobody wants to speak about it.
Today historians, anthropologists and archaeologists are revealing that information on this holocaust is being deliberately eliminated from the knowledge base and consciousness of North Americans and the world. A completely false picture is being painted of our people as suffering from social ills of our own making.
It could be argued that the loss of 120 million from 1500 to 1800 isn't the same as the loss of 6 million people during World War II. Can 6 million in 1945 be compared to 1 million in 1500?

School children are still being taught that large areas of North America are uninhabited as if this land belongs to no one and never did. The role of our ancestors as caretakers is constantly and habitually overlooked by colonial society.
Before the arrival of Europeans, cities and towns here were flourishing. Mexico City had a larger population than any city in Europe. The people were healthy and well-fed. The first Europeans were amazed. The agricultural products developed by the Indigenous people transformed human nutrition internationally.
The North American Indian holocaust was studied by South Africa for their apartheid program and by Hitler for his genocide of the Jews during World War II. Hitler commented that he admired the great job Americans had done in taking care of the Indian problem. The policies used to kill us off was so successful that people today generally assume that our population was low. Hitler told a past US President when he remarked about their maltreatment of the Jewish people, he mind your own business. You're the worst.

Where are the monuments? Where are the memorial ceremonies? Why is it being concealed? The survivors of the WWII holocaust have not yet died and already there is a movement afoot to forget what happened.
Unlike post-war Germany, North Americans refuse to acknowledge this genocide. Almost one and a quarter million Kanien'ke:haka (Mohawk) were killed off leaving us only a few thousand survivors.
North Americans do not want to reveal that there was and still is a systematic plan to destroy most of the native people by outright murder by bounty hunters and land grabbers, disease through distributing small pox infested blankets, relocation, theft of children who were placed in concentration camps called "residential schools" and assimilation.

As with the Jews, they could not have accomplished this without their collaborators who they trained to serve their genocidal system through their "re-education camps".
The policy changed from outright slaughter to killing the Indian inside. Governments, army, police, church, corporations, doctors, judges and common people were complicit in this killing machine. An elaborate campaign has covered up this genocide which was engineered at the highest levels of power in the United States and Canada. This cover up continues to this day. When they killed off all the Indians, they brought in Blacks to be their labourers.
In the residential schools many eye witnesses have recently come forward to describe the atrocities. They called these places "death camps" where, according to government records, nearly half of all these innocent Indigenous children died or disappeared as if they never existed. In the 1920′s when Dr. Bryce was alarmed by the high death rate of children in residential schools, his report was suppressed.

"Indian boarding school" - cultural genocide

The term "Final Solution" was not coined by the Nazis. It was Indian Affairs Superintendent, Duncan Campbell Scott, Canada's Adolph Eichmann, who in April 1910 plotted out the planned murder to take care of the "Indian problem".
"It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem". (DIA Archives, RG 10 series).
In the 1930′s he brought German doctors over here to do medical experiments on our children. According to the study the majority of the lives of these children was extinguished. School children are taught his poetry with no mention of his role as the butcher of the Indian people.

Those who carried out this annihilation of our people were protected so they could declare full-scale war on us. North Americans as heirs of the fruits of this murderous system have blood on their hands. If people are sincere about preventing holocausts they must remember it. History must be told as it really happened in all its tragic details.
It's not good enough to just remember the holocaust that took place during the lifetime of some of the survivors. We have to remember the larger holocaust. Isn't it time to uncover the truth and make the perpetrators face up to this?

In the west there are a whole series of Eichmanns. General Amherst ordered the distribution of small pox infested blankets to kill of our people. But his name is shamelessly preserved in the names of towns and streets. George Washington is called the "village burner" in Mohawk because of all the villages he ordered burnt. Villages would be surrounded. As the people came running out, they would be shot, stabbed, women, children and elders alike. In one campaign alone "hundreds of thousand died, from New York across Pennsylvania, West Virgina and into Ohio". His name graces the capital of the United States.
The smell of death in their own backyard does not seem to bother North Americans. This is obscene.
By Kahentinetha Horn, MNN Mohawk Nation News, kahentinetha2@yahoo.com
First published in Akwesasne Phoenix, Jan. 30, 2005 issue

"Indian Boarding School"

Excerpted from Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly newsletter, #671, "Columbus Day, 1999," by Peter Montague (National Writers Union UAW Local 1981/AFL-CIO), with added section titles and notes where indicated.

The Beginnings of the Native Genocide

Columbus made four voyages to the New World. [1] The initial voyage reveals several important things about the man. First, he had genuine courage because few ship's captains had ever pointed their prow toward the open ocean, the complete unknown. Secondly, from numerous of his letters and reports we learn that his overarching goal was to seize wealth that belonged to others, even his own men, by whatever means necessary.
Columbus's Spanish royal sponsors (Ferdinand and Isabella) had promised a lifetime pension to the first man who sighted land. A few hours after midnight on October 12, 1492, Juan Rodriguez Bermeo, a lookout on the Pinta, cried out in the bright moonlight, he had spied land ahead. Most likely Bermeo was seeing the white beaches of Watling Island in the Bahamas.
As they waited impatiently for dawn, Columbus let it be known that he had spotted land several hours before Bermeo. According to Columbus's journal of that voyage, his ships were, at the time, traveling 10 miles per hour. To have spotted land several hours before Bermeo, Columbus would have had to see more than 30 miles over the horizon, a physical impossibility. Nevertheless Columbus took the lifetime pension for himself. [1,2]

Columbus installed himself as Governor of the Caribbean islands, with headquarters on Hispaniola (the large island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic). He described the people, the Arawaks (called by some the Tainos) this way:

"The people of this island and of all the other islands which I have found and seen, or have not seen, all go naked, men and women, as their mothers bore them, except that some women cover one place only with the leaf of a plant or with a net of cotton which they make for that purpose.
"They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they capable of using them, although they are well-built people of handsome stature, because they are wondrous timid…. [T]hey are so artless and free with all they possess, that no one would believe it without having seen it.
"Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts; and whether the thing be of value or of small price, at once they are content with whatever little thing of whatever kind may be given to them." [3, pg.63; 1, pg.118]

Added note:
In an ominous foreshadowing of the horrors to come, Columbus also wrote in his journal:

"I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men, and govern them as I pleased."

After Columbus had surveyed the Caribbean region, he returned to Spain to prepare his invasion of the Americas. From accounts of his second voyage, we can begin to understand what the New World represented to Columbus and his men it offered them life without limits, unbridled freedom.
Columbus took the title "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" and proceeded to unleash a reign of terror unlike anything seen before or since. When he was finished, eight million Arawaks virtually the entire native population of Hispaniola had been exterminated by torture, murder, forced labor, starvation, disease and despair. [3, pg.x]
A Spanish missionary, Bartolome de las Casas, described first-hand how the Spaniards terrorized the natives. [4] Las Casas gives numerous eye-witness accounts of repeated mass murder and routine sadistic torture.
As Barry Lopez has accurately summarized it,

"One day, in front of Las Casas, the Spanish dismembered, beheaded, or raped 3000 people.
Such inhumanities and barbarisms were committed in my sight,' he says, as no age can parallel….'

"The Spanish cut off the legs of children who ran from them. They poured people full of boiling soap. They made bets as to who, with one sweep of his sword, could cut a person in half. They loosed dogs that devoured an Indian like a hog, at first sight, in less than a moment.' They used nursing infants for dog food." [2, pg.4]

This was not occasional violence it was a systematic, prolonged campaign of brutality and sadism, a policy of torture, mass murder, slavery and forced labor that continued for CENTURIES.

"The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world," writes historian David E. Stannard. [3, pg.x]

Eventually more than 100 million natives fell under European rule. Their extermination would follow. As the natives died out, they were replaced by slaves brought from Africa.
To make a long story short, Columbus established a pattern that held for five centuries a "ruthless, angry search for wealth," as Barry Lopez describes it.

"It set a tone in the Americas. The quest for personal possessions was to be, from the outset, a series of raids, irresponsible and criminal, a spree, in which an end to it the slaves, the timber, the pearls, the fur, the precious ores, and, later, arable land, coal, oil, and iron ore was never visible, in which an end to it had no meaning."

Indeed, there WAS no end to it, no limit.
As Hans Koning has observed,

"There was no real ending to the conquest of Latin America. It continued in remote forests and on far mountainsides. It is still going on in our day when miners and ranchers invade land belonging to the Amazon Indians and armed thugs occupy Indian villages in the backwoods of Central America." [6, pg.46]

In the 1980s, under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the U.S. government knowingly gave direct aid to genocidal campaigns that murdered tens of thousands Mayan Indian people in Guatemala, El Salvador and elsewhere. [7]
The pattern holds.

Added note:
And still, in 2003, the genocide continues in Colombia, El Salvador and Guatemala.
Continuing the gruesome tradition of the 1980s, which also terrorized the people of Nicaragua, U.S. government-funded fascist paramilitaries mass-murder Indians in Central and South America to this day. The bestial carnage committed by Uncle Sham's proxy armies includes countless disappearances, epidemic rape and torture. The Colombian paramilitaries have even made their own gruesome addition to the list of horrors: public beheadings.
This latest stage of the American Indian holocaust is enthusiastically supported by the cocaine-smuggling CIA, the Pentagon and all the rest of the United States Corporate Mafia Government.

The English/American Genocide

Unfortunately, Columbus and the Spaniards were not unique. They conquered Mexico and what is now the Southwestern U.S., with forays into Florida, the Carolinas, even into Virginia. From Virginia northward, the land had been taken by the English who, if anything, had even less tolerance for the indigenous people.
As Hans Koning says,

"From the beginning, the Spaniards saw the native Americans as natural slaves, beasts of burden, part of the loot. When working them to death was more economical than treating them somewhat humanely, they worked them to death.
"The English, on the other hand, had no use for the native peoples. They saw them as devil worshippers, savages who were beyond salvation by the church, and exterminating them increasingly became accepted policy." [6, pg.14]

The British arrived in Jamestown in 1607. By 1610 the intentional extermination of the native population was well along. As David E. Stannard has written,

"Hundreds of Indians were killed in skirmish after skirmish. Other hundreds were killed in successful plots of mass poisoning. They were hunted down by dogs, blood-Hounds to draw after them, and Mastives [mastiffs] to seize them.'
"Their canoes and fishing weirs were smashed, their villages and agricultural fields burned to the ground. Indian peace offers were accepted by the English only until their prisoners were returned; then, having lulled the natives into false security, the colonists returned to the attack.
"It was the colonists' expressed desire that the Indians be exterminated, rooted out from being longer a people upon the face of the Earth.' In a single raid the settlers destroyed corn sufficient to feed four thousand people for a year.
"Starvation and the massacre of non-combatants was becoming the preferred British approach to dealing with the natives." [3, pg.106]

In Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey extermination was officially promoted by a "scalp bounty" on dead Indians.

"Indeed, in many areas it [murdering Indians] became an outright business," writes historian Ward Churchill. [5, pg.182]
Indians were defined as subhumans, lower than animals. George Washington compared them to wolves, "beasts of prey" and called for their total destruction. [3, pgs.119-120]

Andrew Jackson whose [innocent-looking] portrait appears on the U.S. $20 bill today in 1814:

"supervised the mutilation of 800 or more Creek Indian corpses the bodies of men, women and children that [his troops] had massacred cutting off their noses to count and preserve a record of the dead, slicing long strips of flesh from their bodies to tan and turn into bridle reins." [5, pg.186]

The English policy of extermination another name for genocide grew more insistent as settlers pushed westward:
In 1851 the Governor of California officially called for the extermination of the Indians in his state. [3, pg.144]
On March 24, 1863, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver ran an editorial titled, "Exterminate Them."
On April 2, 1863, the Santa Fe New Mexican advocated "extermination of the Indians." [5, pg.228]
In 1867, General William Tecumseh Sherman said:

"We must act with vindictive earnestness against the [Lakotas, known to whites as the Sioux] even to their extermination, men, women and children." [5, pg.240]

In 1891, Frank L. Baum (gentle author of "The Wizard Of Oz") wrote in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer (Kansas) that the army should "finish the job" by the "total annihilation" of the few remaining Indians.
The U.S. did not follow through on Baum's macabre demand, for there really was no need. By then the native population had been reduced to 2.5% of its original numbers and 97.5% of the aboriginal land base had been expropriated and renamed "The land of the free and the home of the brave."
Hundreds upon hundreds of native tribes with unique languages, learning, customs, and cultures had simply been erased from the face of the earth, most often without even the pretense of justice or law.
Today we can see the remnant cultural arrogance of Christopher Columbus and Captain John Smith shadowed in the cult of the "global free market" which aims to eradicate indigenous cultures and traditions world-wide, to force all peoples to adopt the ways of the U.S.
Today's globalist "Free Trade" is merely yesterday's "Manifest Destiny" writ large.
But as Barry Lopez says,

"This violent corruption needn't define us…. We can say, yes, this happened, and we are ashamed. We repudiate the greed. We recognize and condemn the evil. And we see how the harm has been perpetuated. But, five hundred years later, we intend to mean something else in the world."

If we chose, we could set limits on ourselves for once. We could declare enough is enough.

NOTES

1. J.M. Cohen, editor, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus
London: Penguin Books, 1969; ISBN 0-14-044217-0
2. Barry Lopez, The Rediscovery of North America
Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1990; ISBN 0-8131-1742-9
3. David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World
New York: Oxford University Press, 1992; ISBN 0-19-507581-1
4. Bartolome de las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account
translated by Herma Briffault
Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992; ISBN 0-8018-4430-4
5. Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present
San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997; ISBN 0-87286-323-9
6. Hans Koning, The Conquest of America: How The Indian Nations Lost Their Continent
New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993, pg. 46.; ISBN 0-85345-876-6
7. For example, see Mireya Navarro, "Guatemalan Army Waged Genocide,' New Report Finds,"
NEW YORK TIMES, February 26, 1999, pg. unknown.
The NY Times described "torture, kidnapping and execution of thousands of civilians" most of them Mayan Indians a campaign to which the U.S. government contributed "money and training."
SOURCE OF THIS ARTICLE
The following narrative is by Arthur Barlowe (1584, p.108), describing American Indians.

We found the people most gentle loving and faithful, void of all guile and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the Golden Age,…, a more kind and loving people there can not be found in the world.'
His description well fits our categories of Eastern cognitive styles: affiliative, personal, understanding, non-discursive. With predominance of the affective-cognitive belief system making one to marry for love, as contrasted with the cognitive-affective system typical of mental calculations prior to bestowing affection on the loved one.' Closeness associated with the tactile contact mode. Suspended critical appraisal and present time orientation, acting as limiting factors in carrying hatred beyond the grave.'

General Philip H. Sheridan was the commander of the United States forces [...] he had plans of exterminating the buffalo. He thought this would kill the Plains Indians. "Kill the buffalo and you kill the Indians" he said.
David Stannard in his scholarly American Holocaust (1992, p. 232) writes:

From the earliest days of settlement, British men in the colonies from the Carolinas to New England rarely engaged in sexual relations with the Indians, even during those times when there were few if any English women available. Such encounters were viewed as a "horrid crime" and legislation was passed that "banished forever" such mixed race couples, referring to their offspring in animalistic terms.
The estimates of the number of victims of the American Holocaust differ. However, these differences show remarkable similarity with the controversy surrounding the Holocaust deniers who do not deny that Holocaust occurred, but try to diminish its extent. Thus, for instance, R. J. Rummel in his 1994 book Death by Government estimates the number of victims of the centuries of European colonization as low as 2 million.

Among the contemporary Holocaust deniers is also Gary North, who in his Political Polytheism (1989, pp. 257-258) asserts:

Liberals have adopted the phrase "native Americans" in recent years. They never, ever say "American natives," since this is only one step away from "American savages," which is precisely what most of those demon-worshipping, land-polluting people were. This was one of the great sins in American life, they say: "the stealing of Indian lands". That a million savages had a legitimate legal claim on the whole of North America north of Mexico is the unstated assumption of such critics. They never ask the most pertinent question:
Was the advent of the Europeans in North America a righteous historical judgment of God against the Indians?

The European colonization of the Americas forever changed the lives and cultures of the Native Americans. In the 15th to 19th centuries, their populations were ravaged, by the privations of displacement, by disease, and in many cases by warfare with European groups and enslavement by them. The first Native American group encountered by Columbus, the 250,000 Arawaks of Haiti, were enslaved. Only 500 survived by the year 1550, and the group was extinct before 1650.
Europeans also brought diseases against which the Native Americans had no immunity. Chicken pox and measles, though common and rarely fatal among Europeans, often proved fatal to Native Americans, and more dangerous diseases such as smallpox were especially deadly to Native American populations. It is difficult to estimate the total percentage of the Native American population killed by these diseases.
Epidemics often immediately followed European exploration, sometimes destroying entire villages. Some historians estimate that up to 80% of some Native populations may have died due to European diseases.

WOUNDED KNEE MASSACRE

Sacheen Littlefeather
On March 27, 1973, a young woman took the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, California, to decline Marlon Brando's Best Actor Oscar. She said that Marlon Brando cannot accept this award because of the treatment of American Indians by the film industry and the recent happenings at Wounded Knee.
Brando had written a fifteen-page speech to be given at the awards by Cruz, but when the producer met her backstage, he threatened to physically remove her or have her arrested if she spoke on stage for more than 45 seconds. The speech she read contained the lines:

Hello. My name is Sasheen Littlefeather. I'm Apache and I am president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee.
I'm representing Marlon Brando this evening, and he has asked me to tell you in a very long speech which I cannot share with you presently, because of time, but I will be glad to share with the press afterwards, that he very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award.
[...]
What kind of moral schizophrenia is it that allows us to shout at the top of our national voice for all the world to hear that we live up to our commitment when every page of history and when all the thirsty, starving, humiliating days and nights of the last 100 years in the lives of the American Indian contradict that voice?

In his autobiography Songs my Mother Told Me (1994, pp. 380-402) Marlon Brando, devotes several pages to the genocide of the American Indians, excerpted as follows:

After their lands were stolen from them, the ragged survivors were herded onto reservations and the government sent out missionaries who tried to force the Indians to become Christians. After I became interested in American Indians, I discovered that many people don't even regard them as human beings. It has been that way since the beginning.
Cotton Mather compared them to Satan and called it God's work and God's will to slaughter the heathen savages who stood in the way of Christianity.
As he aimed his howitzers on an encampment of unarmed Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864, an army colonel named John Chivington, who had once said that thelives of Indian children should not be spared because "nits make lice," told his officers: "I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians." Hundreds of Indian women, children, and old men were slaughtered in the Sand Creek massacre. One officer who was present said later, "Women and children were killed and scalped, children shot at their mother's breasts, and all the bodies mutilated in the most horrible manner. The dead bodies of females were profaned in such a manner that the recital is sickening.
The troopers cut off the vulvas of Indian women, stretched them over their saddle horns, then decorated their hatbands with them; some used the skin of brave's scrotums and the breasts of Indian women as tobacco pouches, then showed off these trophies, together with the noses and ears of some of the Indians they had massacred, at the Denver Opera House.

Alcohol-Attributable Deaths and Years of Potential Life Lost Among American Indians and Alaska Natives United States, 20012005

Excessive alcohol consumption is a leading preventable cause of death in the United States (1) and has substantial public health impact on American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) populations (2). To estimate the average annual number of alcohol-attributable deaths (AADs) and years of potential life lost (YPLLs) among AI/ANs in the United States, CDC analyzed 20012005 data (the most recent data available), using death certificate data and CDC Alcohol-Related Disease Impact (ARDI) software.* This report summarizes the results of that analysis, which indicated that AADs accounted for 11.7% of all AI/AN deaths, that the age-adjusted AAD rate for AI/ANs was approximately twice that of the U.S. general population, and that AI/ANs lose 6.4 more years of potential life per AAD compared with persons in the U.S. general population (36.3 versus 29.9 years). These findings underscore the importance of implementing effective population-based interventions to prevent excessive alcohol consumption and to reduce alcohol-attributable morbidity and mortality among AI/ANs.
ARDI estimates AADs and YPLLs resulting from excessive alcohol consumption by using multiple data sources and methods.† AADs are generated by multiplying the number of sex- and cause-specific deaths (e.g., liver cancer) by the sex- and cause-specific alcohol-attributable fraction (AAF) (i.e., the proportion of deaths attributable to excessive alcohol consumption). For deaths that are, by definition, 100% attributable to excessive alcohol consumption (e.g., alcoholic liver disease), the total number of AADs equals the total number of deaths. For deaths that are <100% attributable to alcohol, ARDI uses either direct or indirect AAF estimates to generate the total number of AADs. Direct AAF estimates typically come from studies that have assessed the proportion of persons dying from a particular condition (e.g., injuries) at or above a specified blood alcohol concentration (e.g., 0.10 g/dL) or from follow-up studies that have assessed alcohol use of the decedents, based on medical record review and interviews with next-of-kin. Indirect AAF estimates are calculated from pooled risk estimates obtained from meta-analyses of mostly chronic conditions, examining the relationship between various alcohol-related health outcomes (e.g., liver cancer) and the population-based prevalence of alcohol use at consumption levels (i.e., low, medium, or high).
For this analysis, death certificate data for 20012005 were used to determine the average annual number of deaths from alcohol-related causes for all AI/ANs in the United States and for the U.S. population as a whole. Population-specific, direct AAF estimates for motor vehicle traffic crashes were obtained from the Fatality Analysis and Reporting System§ by averaging 20012005 data for AI/ANs and the U.S. population. Population-based prevalence estimates of alcohol consumption were obtained by averaging 20012005 data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System¶ and were used to calculate all indirect AAFs. AADs were analyzed by cause and stratified by sex and by age, using standard 5-year age groupings. YPLLs were generated by multiplying the age- and sex-specific AADs by the corresponding life expectancies. Death and life expectancy data were obtained from the National Vital Statistics System.** Death records missing data on decedent age or sex were excluded from this analysis. Bridged-race population estimates from the U.S. Census were used to calculate death rates. Death rates were directly age adjusted to the standard 2000 U.S. population using the age groups 019, 2034, 3549, 5064, and >65 years.
During 20012005, an average of 1,514 AADs occurred annually among AI/ANs, accounting for 11.7% of all deaths in this population (Table). Overall, 771 (50.9%) of average annual AADs resulted from acute causes, and 743 (49.1%) from chronic causes. The leading acute cause of death was motor-vehicle traffic crashes (417 AADs), and the leading chronic cause was alcoholic liver disease (381). The crude AAD rate among AI/ANs was 49.1 per 100,000 population (25.0 for acute causes and 24.1 for chronic causes). Of all YPLLs, 60.3% resulted from acute conditions, and 39.7% resulted from chronic conditions. The leading acute cause of YPLLs was motor-vehicle traffic crashes (34.4% of YPLLs), and the leading chronic cause was alcoholic liver disease (21.2%).
Overall, 68.3% of AAD decedents among AI/ANs were men, and more AADs occurred among men than women in all age groups (Figure 1); 65.9% of AADs were among persons aged <50 years, and 6.9% were among persons aged <20 years. Of the YPLLs, 68.3% were among those aged 2049 years.
By Indian Health Service statistical region, the greatest number of AADs occurred in the Northern Plains (497 AADs), South West (315), and Pacific Coast (230) regions, and the fewest AADs occurred in Alaska (86) (Figure 2). Age-adjusted AAD rates were highest in the Northern Plains (95.2; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 86.5103.9), Alaska (92.6; CI = 72.4112.8), and the South West (80.2; CI = 70.889.6), and were approximately four to five times higher than the rate in the East (19.2; CI = 15.822.6).
Age-adjusted AAD rates and the relative contributions of AADs to total deaths and total YPLLs were substantially higher for AI/ANs compared with the U.S. general population. The age-adjusted AAD rate per 100,000 for AI/ANs was 55.0 (CI = 52.157.9) versus 26.9 (CI = 26.727.1) for the U.S. general population. Furthermore, AADs accounted for 11.7% of total deaths among AI/AN versus 3.3% for the U.S. general population, and alcohol-attributable YPLLs accounted for 17.3% of total YPLLs for AI/ANs and 6.3% of total YPLLs for the U.S. general population. The average number of YPLLs per AAD also was higher for AI/ANs compared with the U.S. general population (36.3 years versus 29.9 years, respectively).
Reported by: TS Naimi, MD, Zuni Public Health Svc Hospital; N Cobb, MD, Div of Epidemiology; D Boyd, MDCM, National Trauma Systems, Indian Health Svc. DW Jarman, DVM, Preventive Medicine Residency and Fellowship Program; R Brewer, MD, DE Nelson, MD, J Holt, PhD, Div of Adult and Community Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion; D Espey, MD, Div of Cancer Prevention and Control, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion; P Snesrud, Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities; P Chavez, PhD, EIS Officer, CDC.
Editorial Note:
[FONT=inherit]This is the first national report of AADs and YPLLs among AI/ANs; the results demonstrate that excessive alcohol consumption is a leading cause of preventable death and years of lost life in this population. During 20012005, AI/ANs were more than twice as likely to die from alcohol-related causes, compared with the U.S. general p

[Peter Lemkin]

THE

REAL

STORY OF THANKSGIVING

by Susan Bates

Most of us associate the holiday with happy Pilgrims and Indians sitting down to a big feast. And that did happen - once.
The story began in 1614 when a band of English explorers sailed home to England with a ship full of Patuxet Indians bound for slavery. They left behind smallpox which virtually wiped out those who had escaped. By the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay they found only one living Patuxet Indian, a man named Squanto who had survived slavery in England and knew their language. He taught them to grow corn and to fish, and negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Nation. At the end of their first year, the Pilgrims held a great feast honoring Squanto and the Wampanoags.
But as word spread in England about the paradise to be found in the new world, religious zealots called Puritans began arriving by the boat load. Finding no fences around the land, they considered it to be in the public domain. Joined by other British settlers, they seized land, capturing strong young Natives for slaves and killing the rest. But the Pequot Nation had not agreed to the peace treaty Squanto had negotiated and they fought back. The Pequot War was one of the bloodiest Indian wars ever fought.
In 1637 near present day Groton, Connecticut, over 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Tribe had gathered for their annual Green Corn Festival which is our Thanksgiving celebration. In the predawn hours the sleeping Indians were surrounded by English and Dutch mercenaries who ordered them to come outside. Those who came out were shot or clubbed to death while the terrified women and children who huddled inside the longhouse were burned alive. The next day the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared "A Day Of Thanksgiving" because 700 unarmed men, women and children had been murdered.
Cheered by their "victory", the brave colonists and their Indian allies attacked village after village. Women and children over 14 were sold into slavery while the rest were murdered. Boats loaded with a many as 500 slaves regularly left the ports of New England. Bounties were paid for Indian scalps to encourage as many deaths as possible.
Following an especially successful raid against the Pequot in what is now Stamford, Connecticut, the churches announced a second day of "thanksgiving" to celebrate victory over the heathen savages. During the feasting, the hacked off heads of Natives were kicked through the streets like soccer balls. Even the friendly Wampanoag did not escape the madness. Their chief was beheaded, and his head impaled on a pole in Plymouth, Massachusetts -- where it remained on display for 24 years.
The killings became more and more frenzied, with days of thanksgiving feasts being held after each successful massacre. George Washington finally suggested that only one day of Thanksgiving per year be set aside instead of celebrating each and every massacre. Later Abraham Lincoln decreed Thanksgiving Day to be a legal national holiday during the Civil War -- on the same day he ordered troops to march against the starving Sioux in Minnesota.
This story doesn't have quite the same fuzzy feelings associated with it as the one where the Indians and Pilgrims are all sitting down together at the big feast. But we need to learn our true history so it won't ever be repeated.

[Peter Lemkin]

The True Story Of Thanksgiving

[COLOR=#696969 !important]Posted: 11/25/10 10:04 AM ET

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The first Thanksgiving Day did occur in the year 1637, but it was nothing like our Thanksgiving today. On that day the Massachusetts Colony Governor, John Winthrop, proclaimed such a "Thanksgiving" to celebrate the safe return of a band of heavily armed hunters, all colonial volunteers. They had just returned from their journey to what is now Mystic, Connecticut where they massacred 700 Pequot Indians. Seven hundred Indians - men, women and children - all murdered.
This day is still remembered today, 373 years later. No, it's been long forgotten by white people, by European Christians. But it is still fresh in the mind of many Indians. A group calling themselves the United American Indians of New England meet each year at Plymouth Rock on Cole's Hill for what they say is a Day of Mourning. They gather at the feet of a stature of Chief Massasoit of the Wampanoag to remember the long gone Pequot. They do not call it Thanksgiving. There is no football game afterward.
How then did our modern, festive Thanksgiving come to be? It began with the greatest of misunderstandings, a true clash of cultural values and fundamental principles. What are we thankful for if not - being here, living on this land, surviving and prospering? But in our thankfulness might we have overlooked something? Look what happened to the original residents who lived in the area of New York we have come to call Brooklyn. A group of them called Canarsees obligingly, perhaps even eagerly, accepted various pieces of pretty colored junk from the Dutchman Peter Minuet in 1626. These trinkets have long since been estimated to be worth no more than 60 Dutch guilders at the time - $24 dollars in modern American money. In exchange, the Canarsees "gave" Peter Minuet the island of Manhattan. What did they care? They were living in Brooklyn.
Of course, all things - especially commercial transactions - need to be viewed in perspective. The nearly two-dozen tribes of Native Americans living in the New York area in those days had a distinctly non-European concept of territorial rights. They were strangers to the idea of "real property." It was common for one tribe to grant permission to another to hunt and fish nearby themselves on a regular basis. Fences, real and imagined, were not a part of their culture. Naturally, it was polite to ask before setting up operations too close to where others lived, but refusal in matters of this sort was considered rude. As a sign of gratitude, small trinkets were usually offered by the tribe seeking temporary admission and cheerfully accepted by those already there. It was clearly understood to be a sort of short-term rental arrangement. Sad to say, the unfortunate Canarsees apparently had no idea the Dutch meant to settle in. Worse yet for them, it must have been unthinkable that they would also be unwelcome in Manhattan after their deal. One thing we can be sure of. Their equivalent of today's buyer's remorse brought the Canarsees nothing but grief, humiliation and violence.
Many Indians lived on Long Island in those days. Another Dutchman, Adrian Block, was the first European to come upon them in 1619. Block was also eager to introduce European commercialism and the Christian concept of "real estate" to these unfortunate innocents. Without exception, these Indians too came out on the short end in their dealings with the Dutch.
The market savvy unleashed by the Europeans upon the Indians constituted the first land use policies in the New World. In the 17th Century it was not urban but rather rural renewal. The result was of course the same. People of color with no money to speak of got booted out and the neighborhood which was subsequently gentrified and overrun by white people.
Not far from Manhattan, one tribe of about 10,000 Indians lived peacefully in a lovely spot on a peninsula directly along the ocean. There they fished in the open sea and inland bay. They hunted across the pristine shoreline and they were quite happy until they met a man - another Dutchman - named Willem Kieft. He was the Governor of New Netherland in 1639. These poor bastards were called the Rechaweygh (pronounced Rockaway). Soon after meeting Governor Kieft, they became the very first of New York's homeless.
The people of New Netherland had a lot in common with the people of Plymouth Colony. At least it appears so from the way both of these groups of displaced and dissatisfied Europeans interacted with the local Indians. The Pilgrims in Plymouth had a hard time for the first couple of years. While nature was no friend, their troubles were mostly their own doing. Poor planning was their downfall. These mostly city dwelling Europeans failed to include among them persons with the skills needed in settling the North American wilderness. Having reached the forests and fields of Massachusetts they turned out to be pathetic hunters and incompetent butchers. With game everywhere, they went hungry. First, they couldn't catch and kill it. Then they couldn't cut it up, prepare it, preserve it and create a storehouse for those days when fresh supplies would run low. To compensate for their shortage of essential protein they turned to their European ways and their Christian culture. They instituted a series of religious observances. They could not hunt or farm well, but they seemed skilled at praying.
They developed a taste for something both religious and useful. They called it a Day of Fasting. Without food it seemed like a good idea. From necessity, that single Day became multiple Days. As food supplies dwindled the Days of Fasting came in bunches. Each of these episodes was eventually and thankfully followed by a meal. Appropriately enough, the Puritans credited God for this good fortune. They referred to the fact they were allowed to eat again as a "Thanksgiving." And they wrote it down. Thus, the first mention of the word - "Thanksgiving." Let there be no mistake here. On that first Thanksgiving there was no turkey, no corn, no cranberries, no stuffing. And no dessert. Those fortunate Pilgrims were lucky to get a piece of fish and a potato. All things considered, it was a Thanksgiving feast.
Did the Pilgrims share their Thanksgiving meal with the local Indians, the Wampanoag and Pequot? No. That never happened. That is, until its inclusion in the "Thanksgiving Story" in 1890.
Let the Wampanoag be a lesson to us especially in these troubled economic times. These particular Indians, with a bent for colorful jewelry, had their tribal name altered slightly by the Dutch, who then used it as a reference for all Indian payments. Hence, wampum. Contrary to what we've been shown in our Western movies, this word - wampum - and its economic meaning never made it out of New England.
Unlike wampum, Thanksgiving Day has indeed spread across the continent. It would serve us well to remember that it wasn't until the victorious colonial militia returned from their slaughter of the Pequot that the New Americans began their now time-honored and cherished Thanksgiving.

[Peter Lemkin]

A Nation Built On A Lie
By Judith Moriarty
noahshouse@adelphia.net
11-24-4 [TABLE="width: 555"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 601%"]A GIFT from the Matrix (red pill or blue pill? Choose) America: Land of Denial-Myth-Pharisees - Self-Righteous Elitists - Intolerance-Hypocrisy. We are a 'People of the Never-Ending Lie' (and the people love it so). We are the people of the LIE. "The history of any country presented as the history of a family conceals fierce conflicts of interest. And in such a world of conflict-a world of victims and executioners, it is the JOB of thinking people, NOT to be on the side of the executioners. In the long run the oppressor is also the victim. In the short run, the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims." Howard Zinn - The People Speak. Note: The true history of our nation - 20 years in the writing - told from the voice of the "other." The Disney World Lie will be perpetuated in churches across America as preachers pontificate "The Pilgrims brought GOD to these shores". Judging by the barbaric-atrocious behavior of these Pilgrims-God must have hitched a ride back to England shortly after He arrived here! The Puritans, benefactors, who welcomed them and helped them to survive their first years here, were massacred by these Godly Puritans-setting whole villages a fire (we use bombs-napalm today). Cotton Mather, one of the more odious and obdurate Pilgrims wrote: "It was supposed that no less than 600 souls were brought down to Hell that day" Mather in his Annals of Christ in America, wrote" I do, with all conscience of truthreport the wonderful displays of His infinite power, wisdom, goodness, and faithfulness, wherewith His divine providence hath irradiated and Indian wildereness." A Dobson-Falwell-or Robertson (evangelical cult leaders) proclaim this same self righteous hypocrisy in ridding the world today of SINNERS-(all ilk' not themselves) "towel heads-rag heads-camel jockeys-evil"-ungrateful of Christian liberation! http://members.fortunecity.com/gwolf2/thanksgiving.html My friend took a trip to Montana a few years back. Upon her return, she remarked on the venom-vindictiveness-prejudice-and hatred exhibited vocally by the 'white' population towards Native Americans residing there. I asked her how she had responded to this bias-labeling-and venom; of a people robbed of their land with wholesale genocide-caged in reservations. She replied, "I didn't say anything-being a visitor, but if I lived there I'd speak out". We are no less removed and detached today-towards "others" far off-in distant lands. Surely if we lived there we would speak out? No-probably not, for this would set us apart-separated from the herd mentality of political correctness. And so the Lie continues. "..every redskin must be killed from off the face of the plains before we can be FREE from their molestations. They are of no earthly good and the sooner they are swept from the land the better for civilization. I do not think they can be turned and made good law abiding citizens any more than coyotes can be used to shepherd dogs". Major John Lauderdale. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian"---this prejudicial quote was said not only by politicians and military officials but echoed throughout many old western movies (our leader an imposter cowboy with his "Wanted dead or alive"). Even President Theodore Roosevelt said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians; but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian." Redskin is a derogatory word for Indian. It holds the same weight as calling someone a 'spick' or a 'nigger'. Squaw-the true meaning of this world is 'Indian whore' or an obscene term referring to female genitalia. Idaho ruled against removing the derogatory word 'Squaw' from 93 places within their state. Lawmaker Harwood said," I don't think the word id derogatory. It's the way it's being said that would make'em take it that way" Representative Twila Hornback said, "Just because people take it as offensive doesn't make it offensive". Remember the Lone Ranger and his faithful sidekick 'Tonto?' What does it mean? It is the Spanish word for FOOL. I suppose that "queer-spic-wetback-nigger-trailer trash-geek-gook-slant eyes-vermin-rag head-hillbilly-simpletons-Jesus freaks-holy rollers-et al" are all just a matter of how people take it? Only a joke-eh? Thank you (respondent) for your "positive affirmations/ Scripture"; and the fairy tale story of the First Thanksgiving-a perversion of truth. It is NOT my "take" on the non-existent first Thanksgiving-but the history not told in this nation. It's not "negative" to show the myth and lie that our nation was built on and continues to live to this very day. Thursday should be a day of mourning-not gorging. This fairy tale was allowed to exist until 1970 the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims. This is when Frank B. James, president of the Federated Eastern Indian League prepared a speech for a Plymouth banquet that exposed the Pilgrim for having committed, among other crimes, the robbery of the graves of the Wampanoags. He wrote: "We 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". James was not permitted to give his speech that day.instead hundreds of Indians protested. A Harvest feast did take place in Plymouth-but the Indians who attended where not even invited. Though it later became known as "Thanksgiving" the Pilgrims never called it that. Amidst the IMAGERY of a picnic of interracial harmony is some of the most terrifying bloodshed in New World history. The Pilgrim crop had failed miserably, but the agricultural expertise of the Indians had produced twenty acreswithout which the Pilgrim would have perished. The Pilgrims relied almost exclusively on handouts from the generous Indians-thus making Pilgrims the western hemisphere's first class of welfare recipients. There were no black hats or buckled shoes-these are the silly inventions of various myth makers. The Pilgrims consumed a good deal of home brew. In fact each Pilgrim drank at least a half gallon of beer a day which they preferred to water. This daily inebriation led Gov. William Bradford to comment on his people's "notorious sin" which included their "drunkenness and uncleanliness" and rampant "sodomy". The Pilgrims were no friends to the local Indians. Pilgrim Myles Standish pretending to be a trader beheaded an Indian man named Wituwamat-he brought his head to Plymouth where it was displayed on a wooden spike for years as a symbol of "white power". Standish had the Indian man's young brother hanged from the rafters for good measure. From that time on the whites were know to the Indians of Massachusetts by the name "Wotowquenange" which in their tongue meant cutthroats and stabbers. Thomas Jefferson who himself advocated the physical extermination of the American Indian-said of Europe, "They (Europeans) are nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of labor, property and lives of their people" By mid 1630, a new group of 700 Europeans calling themselves Puritans arrived. In one incident (ordered by Christian, William Bradford-Governor) 1637, the whites trapped some seven hundred Pequot Indians mostly women, children, and the elderly, near the mouth of the Mystic River. Bradford says his diaries: "To see them frying in the fire, and the streams of their blood quenching the same, and the stench was horrible; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice and they GAVE PRAISE THEREOF TO GOD." This event marked the first ACTUAL Thanksgiving. In just ten years 12,000 whites had invaded New England and as their numbers grew they pressed for all out extermination of the Indian. European disease had reduced the population of the Massachusetts nation from 24,000 to less than 750. In 1671, the white man ordered Metacomet to come to Plymouth to enforce upon him a new treaty (every treaty-some 350 with the Indians has been broken!) which included the humiliating rule that he could no longer sell his own land without prior approval from whites. Eventually Captain Benjamin Church tracked down and murdered Metacomet in 1676, his body was quartered and parts were "left for the wolves". The great Indian chief's hands were cut off and sent to Boston and his head went to Plymouth, where it was set upon a pole on the real "day of public Thanksgiving fro the beginning of revenge upon the enemy". The Chief's nine year old son was shipped to the Caribbean to spend his life in slavery. As the genocide continued several official Thanksgiving Days were proclaimed. Governor Joseph Dudley declared in 1704 a "General Thanksgiving for God's infinite Goodness to extend His favors---In defeating and disappointing.the Expeditions of the Enemy (Indians) against us, And the good Success given us against them, by delivering so many of them into our hands".Just two years later rewards were offered in Massachusetts for the scalps of Indians---demonstrating that the practice of scalping was a European tradition. According to one scholar, "Hunting redskins became a popular sport in New England, especially since they were worth good money" When smallpox struck Puritan Gov.Bradford wrote; "It pleased God to visite these Indeans with a great sickness, and such a mortalitie that of a 1000 and a halfe of them dyed, and many of them did rott above ground for want of burial." With Bible passages in their hands to justify their every move, the Puritans began their march inland from the seaside communities-joined by British settlers, they seized the land, took the strong and young Natives as slaves to work the land and killed the rest. Villages were set on fire with sleeping Natives burned alive-many were sold into slavery (something you don't hear of). The Dutch and Puritan joined forces to exterminate all Natives from New England (they still don't want outsiders-or those not of their persuasion)-village after village was destroyed. Following an especially successful raid against the Pequot in what is now STAMFORD, CONNETICUT (where I lived) the churches of Manhattan announced a day of "thanksgiving" to celebrate victory over the heathen savages. This was the 2nd Thanksgiving. During the feasting, the hacked off heads of Natives were kicked through the streets of Manhattan like soccer balls. Each TOWN held thanksgiving days to celebrate their own victories over the Indians until it became clear that there needed to be an order to these special occasions. It was George Washington who finally brought a system and a schedule to thanksgiving when he declared one day to be celebrated across the nation. It was Abraham Lincoln who decreed Thanksgiving Day to be a legal national holiday during the Civil War---on the same day and at the same time he was ordering troops to march against the Sioux in Minnesota. .and subsequently ordered 38 Santee Sioux hung on Christmas Eve for leaving the 'reservation' in search of food. Most of our history as we know it is myth - much of it Disney World cartoon-romanticism. Ask one person you know what they think of the years long battle going on with the Native American Indians and the Department of the Interior - over the BILLIONS of missing Indian Trust Fund monies - I bet none could answer you. Ask them about the conditions of many Native American Indians living in shacks on reservations (really concentration camps) with no plumbing-water etc. Worse than many Third World countries and Bush cutting housing by multi millions (but money for a Presidential yacht has been appropriated). I don't see the first Thanksgiving celebrations any different these generations later. Here we are still killing the HEATHEN in the name of GOD - quoting Scripture to back it up - and corpses rotting in the streets of Fallujah - burning (now by bombs-napalm) of whole villages. Some have remarked to me: "So what, this is just negative, etc". Yes - killing, robbing, and plundering people's lands is pretty darn negative - and lest we forget all of this is done under the auspices of ONE NATION UNDER GOD. I did ask a native New Englander today just what she thought of the lie told down through the years of the noble-heroics of the people who populated this area and the myth of Thanksgiving. I wasn't surprised that she didn't know---check out (if they even have one) your kids history books-see for yourself. Better yet instead of killer video games buy them Howard Zinn's-The People's History before it's burned.[/TD]
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[Peter Lemkin]

Readings in History : The Feel Good Fable of Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Dinner, celebrated every year on the last Thursday in November, is an iconic holiday in USA much as 4[SUP]th[/SUP] of July is celebrated as the Independence day. On my South West flight on Tuesday last (23[SUP]rd[/SUP] November) from San Francisco to Phoenix, there was a halt at Los Angeles to drop off and pick up flyers. As the plane got near empty with disembarkers leaving and embarkers yet to step in, a steward who looked to me of Chinese extraction came and cheerfully enquired, "Getting home for Thanksgiving?" Incomprehension visibly spread to his face when I asked in response "What is Thanksgiving?" He was happy to answer once he was sure that this weird response was not an outcome of some tomfoolery but of genuine ignorance of an alien coming from India. He solemnly declared that it is an occasion to express gratitude to god for the bounty of nature "he" has showered upon us and remember the native Indians for some (vague) help they had rendered in the early days of the arrival of Europeans (& Christianity) in Americas. I wondered silently how come a US citizen of Chinese extraction is dutifully celebrating Thanksgiving, only to check myself by remembering what Historian Zinn wrote about the Chinese workers who were brought & drafted in the construction of rail-roads network a long ago. Later in Phoenix I was invited to a Thanksgiving dinner along with my hosts, who have immigrated here from India, by a couple, who and other invitees too were first generation immigrants from India. When I asked the host what is Thanksgiving, his daughter 12 something eagerly got up & declared she would tell. I was more than happy. But instead of the verbal narrative I imagined I will be treated to, she disappeared upstairs only to reappear sometime later with a single page in her hand, which she gave to me to read. When I started reading I realized it was an assignment she had prepared as homework and it was already corrected by her teacher. Her homework mentioned "The Separatists" & a native Indian "Squanto", who belonged to Pawtuxet Indians. He helped the pilgrims of Plymouth Colony after his flight back to freedom from Malaga-Spain where he had been sold as a slave by arranging their friendship with neighbouring Wampanoag Indian tribesmen. He & these tribesmen helped the colonists by teaching them how to raise corn, fish & to hunt. Coming as it did after a hard winter when the colonists had starved & half of them perished, they expressed their gratitude by inviting the Indians for a feast of harvest festival later on when food was bountiful. According to one account this was the first Thanksgiving dinner. Another story she recounted was about those, who arrived later in USA & celebrated the feasting as a religious festival by thanking the god for his mercy. By all means these two versions seem to have taken hold of the popular US consciousness. The following video captures these narratives (click here to watch) :



All popular myths and legends are often monopolized by the ruling classes to serve their interests and agendas by imbuing them with "nationalistic fervour"; and thus widening the appeal of their policies and securing a broad based support for them even if these have very little in them for the common women and men. Thanksgiving was no exception. In 1777, Continental Congress (congregation of the rich & powerful in the colonies who saw greater benefit for themselves by separating from the British rule), decreed that all the 13 states would celebrate the Thanksgiving as a holiday to commemorate the defeat of the British colonial army at Saratoga. Later in 1963, Abraham Lincoln saw the unifying potential of the Thanksgiving amidst the civil war and decreed in 1863 after the victory of unionists at Gettysberg that it would be celebrated as a national holiday on the last Thursday of November. Still later it was adopted by the industry to promote consumerist culture and Thanksgiving officially opened the Christmas shopping season. The following day - called Black Friday is becoming the greatest day for the massive US retailing industry. The"Black" attached to "Friday" is a misnomer as the day actually denotes the biggest celebration of consumerism "shop till one drops dead" - and massive, often unruly crowds gather at the gates of the store to hunt bargains queuing up in the night for long.


I was not content with these fables, which had a notoriously "flimsy" feel good factor embedded in them. I have been reading the "People's History of the United States of America" by Howard Zinn, who has painstakingly researched how the dominant narrative popular in US imagination has clearly omitted many inconvenient truths and chose to emphasize only those "truths" which buttress its own position. Zinn may not be very widely known in USA, nor is he a "popular" authority on US History because his book is unabashedly subversive of "popular myths" promoted in official history. But he still has substantial following at least among those who are fade up with fairytales masquerading as history. David Horsey is one such individual. He in his blog has eloquently captured the take of Howard Zinn on Thanksgiving. It deserves reproducing at great length.


Thanksgiving: A celebration of the friendly dinner that came before the genocide.
Put succinctly, that is how Howard Zinn might describe our most solemn national holiday. In his book, A People's History of the United States, the leftist historian tells America's founding stories from the vantage point of Indians, African slaves, indentured servants and exploited immigrants and what he describes is enough to kill your appetite for turkey and cranberry sauce.

The understanding many Americans have of their country's early history is stuck at the level of Thanksgiving pageants and childish rhymes about Columbus sailing "the ocean blue." The truth is more complicated and less edifying. The Europeans who came to the Americas were not meek refugees; they were conquerors. Some came for freedom, many came for gold and most came for land. They took what they wanted and justified their merciless methods in the same way today's jihadists justify theirs: God willed it.
In recounting the vicious warfare that ensued in the years not long after the first fabled Thanksgiving, Zinn quotes Puritan leader William Bradford's description of an English raid on a Pequot village. Bradford recalled how the Indians who managed to escape from their burning homes were slain with swords, hacked to pieces and run through with rapiers. Few in the village got away. At least 400 -- and, perhaps as many as 600 -- were killed.
Bradford wrote:

It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and (the English) gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemies in their hands...

This was just one of many reciprocal atrocities that ended only when the natives were driven from their land and nearly exterminated.

Reaching back a century before Plymouth Rock to our seminal foundation story, Zinn quotes men who witnessed the slaughter that Christopher Columbus oversaw after he opened the New World in 1492. Returning to Spain from his first voyage, Columbus made wild promises to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, telling them he would bring back shiploads of gold and hordes of slaves if they would finance a second expedition. He got 17 ships and 1,200 men who proceeded to murder their way through the Caribbean islands.
They found very little gold and thousands of the enslaved natives died, but Columbus and his men kept trying. In the process, they wiped out entire populations of the people who had naively greeted Columbus with gifts and hospitality.
Zinn contends rightly that the way we understand history has consequences in contemporary life and politics. If that were not the case, there would be no fights in local school boards over history texts and curriculum. Zinn's purpose in writing his own version of the American story was to fill in the huge gaps that left out women, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, laborers and poor immigrants while giving white, male presidents, generals, adventurers and capitalists most of the credit for building the nation.
The selective representation of convenient "truths" by the dominant class is not isolated just to USA, but is a recurring motif in every dominant narrative of history or even contemporary politics. In India, the 15[SUP]th[/SUP] of August is celebrated as the national independence day that marks the freedom from British colonial yoke. The dominant narrative demands that each Indian should feel "equally patriotic" on this day and always. But has independence influenced the life of every Indian in more or less the same way. The answer is an emphatic no. In fact some seem to have cornered the benefits of freedom highly disproportionately, while many have been left by the way side. Yet, demands made on the "patriotic duties" of her citizens, whatever those are, and which are yet again defined by the rulers, are the same.

[David Guyatt]

The foregoing goes some way to explaining the warlike nature of the USA today.

It was born through war - civil and indigenous.

[Keith Millea]

And still,to this day,they have to fight for their treaty rights.Also,there are always some tribal members who will take money and sell out their people.I was watching this exchange yesterday with the Cheyenne River Sioux,who are trying to keep the tars sands pipeline out of their territory.Three tribal members invited oil execs.to the rez.BAD MOVE!!!