From Mary Annette Pember at The Progressive:
This Thanksgiving, as an Ojibwe woman, I will grieve for what Europeans did to native peoples here. But I will also give thanks for life.
I will grieve because Europeans killed most of us quickly and directly at first and later resorted to more cunning means of forced assimilation, such as boarding schools and discriminatory land allotment. It is estimated that there were between 7 million and 10 million indigenous individuals inhabiting what is now America at the beginning of European contact in the early 15th century. By 1900, there were only about 230,000 of us left.
Some might wonder why a Native-American woman would give thanks on a holiday that highlights the beginning of the end for many tribes. I give thanks because that’s what we Ojibwe do. We express gratitude for the great gift of life given to us by the creator.
Traditional Ojibwe religion is deeply rooted in the understanding that life, ever moving, ever changing, is a tremendous gift. This understanding dates way back before the days when the Wampanoag Indians sat down with the Pilgrims for that now famous meal.
We also understand that there is no escaping life’s relentless nature. We are leaves on a tree, in various states of growth. At some time, we will turn color, fall from the tree, swirl colorfully around some kid’s feet and join the soil once again.
Continue reading about “As a Native-American, I’ll have mixed feelings about Thanksgiving”
From Jacqueline Keeler:
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 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.
From the Angry Black Woman:
Fucking MARVELOUS. Western corporations fuck up the planet, western environmentalists march in an persuade, sometimes by economic might, governments that in order to fix it, the citizens of the fucked up places must give up their land. WHAT KIND OF FUCKED UP BULLSHIT REASONING IS THIS SHIT GODDAMMIT?!?!?!?!?!?!? I am so SICK of this everlasting insistence that Westerners know better and to hell with studying the local set up to see WHAT it is and WHY it has worked the way it has, no. We must import Western ideas wholesale and impose them on every damn place, completely ignoring the fuckery they bring into other people’s lives until said other people have suffered/hurt/died, in the case of Africa; according to PDF From Refuge to Refugee: The African Case MILLIONS of people; and god knows how many in Asia; and have had to raise holy hell before we back off!
From the Jacki Rand Choctaw at the Daily Iowan:
Native social values, based on an alternate calculation, have always been simply counterintuitive to a capitalist mind. The “kindness” of Native nations, sovereign then and sovereign today, not to mention their lands, rivers, minerals, timber, and other resources — for which they received virtually nothing — are the original source of United States “greatness.” Theft and exploitation of indigenous resources and labor, human-rights violations, and commodified African bodies, without which there would be no American ingenuity, created the big boost to U.S. world domination.
This Thanksgiving, I exhort Americans to honor their first president’s decree with petitions to the government of his and other founders’ creation “to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord.” Recognize our treaties, humanity, and agency in your ancestors’ survival. Absent that, we will continue to meet you, treaties in hand, in the courts of the land.
Continue reading about On Thanksgiving, recognize the contributions of Native Americans
From Ojibwa at DailyKos:
When the subject of slavery in the Americas is discussed, many people assume that this is about the 13 million Africans who were captured, enslaved and transported to the Americas to work on the plantations. Yet the history of slavery in the Americas starts long before this. From the very beginning of the European discovery of the American continents, Europeans were involved with slavery: not African slaves, but American Indians.
From nojojojo over at Angry Black Woman:
“…25 million Americans are underinsured and I know full well I’m not the only brown one of those. Consider the number of us who are disproportionately affected by poverty, and compare that against the fact that health insurance premiums keep rising by as much as 150% per decade while wages remain essentially flat (note: PDF). Consider how little media attention, medical research, and government funding is accorded to health issues that primarily or disproportionately affect people of color, like sickle cell anemia. Consider also how the intersection of race with gender or other factors, and the lingering effects of colonialism, cause literal epidemics of poor health care, addiction and/or violence in some PoC communities, like ongoing rape and involuntary sterilization among American Indian women. (See also unusualmusic’s insightful linkspams on women in prison, intersexed women of color, and more.)
This is killing us. It is killing us. The current health care system of the US kills people across the board, yes. But it’s killing more of us. And it’s leaving a greater proportion of us in abject poverty or lifelong trauma if we survive.
So we, especially, need to fight back.”
From Kenyon Farrow at Grio:
When Obama delivered his “gay agenda” speech to the well-fed, well-scrubbed mostly white crowd of gays and lesbians at the Human Rights Campaign’s Annual Dinner on Saturday night, anyone outside of the LGBT community would have assumed by the applause that the entire “gay community” is in agreement that access to serve in the military, gay marriage, and hate crimes legislation are our primary issues. But in reality, HRC’s political agenda is not what I want. It does not speak for me, nor for the lives of many other black, poor and working class LGBT people.
Given the fact that we’re in a long recession where hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost in almost every month of 2009, and national unemployment numbers are at nearly 10 percent, why are we not talking about the issues that most people are concerned about – health care and the economy – and their impact on the LGBT community? The truth is, for many people at that dinner who could afford the cheapest ticket at $250 a plate, jobs and wages are of little concern.
It’s not as though there is a lack of evidence that supports the idea that LGBT folks are impacted by poverty. A report on lesbian and gay poverty in the US by the Williams Institute this spring showed that lesbian and gay couples were as likely to be poor as straight couples, mostly due to the impact of race and gender.
Read the rest of the piece here.
Continue reading about Black working class gays left out of national gay rights agenda
From Queer Kids of Queer Parents Against Gay Marriage:
It’s hard for us to believe what we’re hearing these days. Thousands are losing their homes, and gays want a day named after Harvey Milk. The U.S. military is continuing its path of destruction, and gays want to be allowed to fight. Cops are still killing unarmed black men and bashing queers, and gays want more policing. More and more Americans are suffering and dying because they can’t get decent health care, and gays want weddings. What happened to us? Where have our communities gone? Did gays really sell out that easily?
As young queer people raised in queer families and communities, we reject the liberal gay agenda that gives top priority to the fight for marriage equality. The queer families and communities we are proud to have been raised in are nothing like the ones transformed by marriage equality. This agenda fractures our communities, pits us against natural allies, supports unequal power structures, obscures urgent queer concerns, abandons struggle for mutual sustainability inside queer communities and disregards our awesomely fabulous queer history.
In 2004, Micheal Moore went on record:
I don’t agree with the copyright laws and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they’re not trying to make a profit off my labour. I would oppose that. I do well enough already and I made this film because I want the world, to change. The more people who see it the better, so I’m happy this is happening. Is it wrong for someone who’s bought a film on DVD to let a friend watch it for free? Of course it’s not. It never has been and never will be. I think information, art and ideas should be shared.
I have yet to see Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. The fact that Moore did not release his latest documentary under a Creative Commons License, in my view, undermines his credibility, motivation, intention, and message. It’s not like we have the technology to disseminate and distribute films to a wide audience for free.
My view is, if you’re going to criticize an economic system and advocate for a different, more justiciable economic system, then it behooves you as an activist, journalist, and filmmaker to operate within the structures of the more justiciable economic system — especially when those alternative structures already exist. Lead by example. Walk the walk. Get it? What was it that Mahatma Ghandi said, something about “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
What gives Moore? Why isn’t your latest film released on the internet under a CC license? If you honestly oppose the oppressive structures of capitalism, then why do you continue to prop up those structures?
Continue reading about Michael Moore: pirate my film, please
NLinStPaul of Daily Kos wrote on an amazing piece a couple of weeks ago, titled: “The subtle racism of friends and allies.” She writes:
“Have you ever heard a person of color say that they prefer the open racism of conscious bigots to the subtle racism of us do-gooders on the left end of [...]
Continue reading about “The subtle racism of friends and allies”
Kai from Zuky wrote an excellent piece a couple of years ago: “The White Liberal Conundrum.” Kai writes:
“As I’ve often noted, many white liberals remain oblivious to the depth and breadth of anti-racist work, opting to hide behind the delusion that anyone who votes for Democrats and doesn’t have a pointy hood in the [...]
