Thanksgiving is a fine example of revisionist history, failure to even consider making amends to Indigenous peoples, the perpetration of american oblivion to all those harmed by our way of life from inception.
What concerns me is how easy it is for intelligent, yet uninformed, people to make blanket statements feeding into the prevailing self imposed ignorance that so afflicts this country.
Thayer Scudder, a respected anthropologist, wrote "No Place To Go" about a forced relocation of 3,000 Dineh (Navajo) people in the 60's. At the time i read the book, he said only of third of those relocated remained alive due to depression leading to death. A stark lack of understanding infuses even most activists when it comes to the plight of Indigenous peoples. I actually am sick of it.
Over 16,000 Dineh have been relocated from Black Mesa/Big Mountain since 1986. More than half are already dead. The suicide rate is the highest in the nation among the youth. Most have been relocated to cluster track housing in the middle of barren land which uses the contaminated Rio Puerco as the water source. People cannot grow corn, nor keep their livestock. Many have died of broken hearts as well as a high rate of cancer.
In 1979, United Nuclear's Church Rock dam burst, spilling 97 million gallons of highly radioactive contaminants into the Rio Puerco. It is the second worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl. But who cares about the excessively high rate of concer among Dineh people? Not americans and not many activists.
Homelessness is also a major fate impacting thousands of relocatees. Many of them are victims of murder in racist border towns like Farmington, Gallup, Winslow and even Tuba City and Shiprock. Torture serial killings have been a rite of passage for bigoted white youth in Farmington and Gallup where occasionally killers have been convicted, tho most of these killings go unsolved.
Genocide includes the loss of land, language, ceremony and customary survival practices. In retrospect, the atrocity of the Big Mountain relocation will be seen as a major human rights violation of the 20th century within US borders. Ah, retrospect.........
The treatment of Native Americans by the US government and it's military has been a blueprint for many fascists including Hitler and the Apartheid regime of South Africa. South Africa displays many of the same problems that Native Americans experience all over this country, alcholism, drug addiction, despair, destruction of family and tribal relationships, orphans, disease, suicide, murder and no hope.
But we happily go on and celebrate when we have not even come close to any kind of reparations, much less acknowlegement of the extent of the problem and the deaths directly resulting from nonstop genocidal policies that in the end harm us all.
(I wish to point out that the Department of Interior, in charge of reservations, is also in charge of prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, including Abu Grhaib. Does anyone ever check out conditions in the reservation prisons or notice the highly disporportionate number of Native American prisoners or inhabitants of death row? I could go on and on, but you can educate yourself. You really should.)
Increasingly, the american untoucables, of which i am one, face murder in a climate that dehumanizes homelessness, immigrants, Indigenous peoples, prostitutes, homo sexuals, women and others who do not fit into what is acceptable. It does not take much effort to verify what i am writing.....
Again, i say, we will not succeed in stopping genocide anywhere else as long as we fail to end it here and in all the americas, where the deathly impacts of globalization and it's narco free trade capitalism are quickly turning Mexico, Central and South America into another ruined Africa all in the name of profit. It will get us too. It already is...
In peaceful struggle, swaneagle
I have written two other responses that i lost on my failing computer. I am attempting now to address your deeply disturbing comment. I suggest you check out the Black Mesa website, www.bmis.org and even take the time to go down and talk to Dineh resisters still clinging to the remnnants of a precious, unique and illuminating way of life. Sadly we are losing more than most will ever know. It just asounds me.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------------------------------