11:33 am By Maegan La Mala · Blogs|Internet|Politics · Comments Off
27 Nov 2008Via / Ill Doctrine
Feast on this:
The first president, George Washington, in 1783 said he preferred buying Indians’ land rather than driving them off it because that was like driving “wild beasts” from the forest. He compared Indians to wolves, “both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.”
Thomas Jefferson — president No. 3 and author of the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Indians as the “merciless Indian Savages” — was known to romanticize Indians and their culture, but that didn’t stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, “[W]e shall destroy all of them.”
As the genocide was winding down in the early 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt (president No. 26) defended the expansion of whites across the continent as an inevitable process “due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway.”
Roosevelt also once said, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of 10 are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the 10th.”
Via / Alternet
I hate to rain on your Thanksgiving Day parade, blown up and filled with hot air like the balloons blown up to incite people to stuff themselves silly today under the illusion of family unity, and prepping people to stampede their way into stores to get that must have toy made of plastic.
We’ve been through this before. And I’ve had mixed results with my own children and struggling against the mainstream who needs invented traditions to get people in a room together to play nice and be grateful.
Pero people are mourning today.
In 1970, United American Indians of New England declared US Thanksgiving Day a National Day of Mourning. This came about as a result of the suppression of the truth. Wamsutta, an Aquinnah Wampanoag man, had been asked to speak at a fancy Commonwealth of Massachusetts banquet celebrating the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims. He agreed. The organizers of the dinner, using as a pretext the need to prepare a press release, asked for a copy of the speech he planned to deliver. He agreed. Within days Wamsutta was told by a representative of the Department of Commerce and Development that he would not be allowed to give the speech. The reason given was due to the fact that, “…the theme of the anniversary celebration is brotherhood and anything inflammatory would have been out of place.” What they were really saying was that in this society, the truth is out of place.
And what is the truth?
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