Thursday, July 4, 2024

Stealing Native land for a good 4th of July

"Turn in your arms: The government will take care of you" (ironic billboard)
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Map of the independent tribal nations
First, we (New Americans) settle on the East Coast. Take a little land here, a little land there, establish a beachhead at Plymouth Rock then construct a fort, order some guns from England and Europe, drop some diseases on these savages, and in no time, we'll own everything up to the Mississippi.


We can "purchase" the rest for our Manifest Destiny because Catholic Rome says by the Pope declared a Doctrine of Discovery, so white Christian men can claim any savage land for God, which becomes Vatican property by default but is lent to those who find it as regents on behalf of the papal god-king.

The Doctrine of Discovery (1493) is preserved in international law and used by settler colonial states (US, England, Israel) to justify and excuse their violence and genocides.
BOOK: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
American author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has 4.7 out of 5 stars with 4,925 ratings. This is the first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples.

Today in the United States, there are more than 500 federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly 3,000,000 people, descendants of the 15,000,000 [with some estimates saying 100 million] Native people who once inhabited this land.

The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial project has largely been omitted from American history books.

Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.

Native American woman, child, 1930
With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present.

In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing, eliminating, and erasing them.


Modern Apache in Pasadena to save Oak
And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military.

Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under Pres. Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who in 1836 wrote of the Seminoles:

“The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.”

Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.

This New York Times bestseller is now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck. It is a recipient of the American Book Award. More
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