The Rude Pundit - For Columbus Day: Indians Say You Can Shove Your Apology

That's an editorial cartoon from Indian Country Today by Marty Two Bulls, typifying a "yeah, hey, really, no" response from much of the Indian community to the Senate's passage of an apology to Native Americans for, you know, all that shit like genocide, treaty-breaking, etcetera, etcetera. The wording of it is, more or less, "Our bad." To demonstrate how seriously they took the effort to say America's sorry, the measure, sponsored by Democrat Byron Dorgan and Republican Sam Brownback, was passed as an amendment to a defense appropriations bill. The resolution passed the Senate last year, but failed to be signed into law. Now it looks like it's finally gonna make it through. Hey, look: bipartisanship when there's no consequences.

You should totally read the Native American Apology Resolution just for the line: "Whereas despite the wrongs committed against Native Peoples by the United States, Native Peoples have remained committed to the protection of this great land, as evidenced by the fact that, on a per capita basis, more Native Peoples have served in the United States Armed Forces and placed themselves in harm's way in defense of the United States in every major military conflict than any other ethnic group." It may as well say, "And thanks for the mascots, too."

While some Indian groups and others find it to be a step in the right direction, it's not inappropriate to say that in many quarters of Indian America, the resolution, which explicitly denies reparations or claims against the United States for, you know, genocide, treaty-breaking, etcetera, etcetera, has been met with, "Hey, fuck you. Howzabout some fuckin' help instead?" Like Kevin Abourezk, a Lakota journalist, who writes, "Each year, we watch the health, safety and education of our children erode like the sandy banks of a raging river. But rather than improved health care or justice programs, Native people get this: an apology from the Senate." To their credit, South Dakota Senators Tim Johnson, a Democrat, and John Thune, a Republican, said that this was a nice, if empty, start, and that more needs to be done for Indian communities.

Like maybe doing something about, for instance, this from Amnesty International regarding crime on America's reservations: "One in three women will be raped in her lifetime. Half the reported murders and 72% of child sex crimes are never prosecuted. Ninety percent of sexual assaults on native women are committed by men from the dominant ethnic groups." You may as well toss in a jump in the youth suicide rate, a rise in gang activities on the reservation, and unending domestic abuse of native women.

Umm, sorry?

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/

but it won't put food on the table. It won't help to heal an abused woman. It won't educate the children and give them hope for their futures. We need to do more for them.

to me, that seems almost insulting. Well no, actually insulting.

In the first 8 hours since midnight my Native Unity blog the "Why Do We Celebrate Columbus Day?" story from 2004 by Native actor, Mark Reed, has more hits than a total of the previous three days in a row.

WOW!!!! Let's change Columbus Day to Native American Day - North Dakota did it.

There is an indigenous people's day.

I hope to see Silversong's dream a reality someday. :)

Honor Day is a holiday created by Native artist Silversong Belcourt.

http://www.honorday.org/

It is devoted to honoring all peoples and life on this planet, and to restoring honor as a informant of action.




We had the privelege of printing this artwork of hers for Honor day a few years back.

She was a wonderful lady and will be missed. :( In the meantime we can support her holiday which is quite popular in the NW! :)

The Spain that Christopher Columbus and his crews left behind before dawn on August 3, 1492, as they sailed forth from Palos and out into the Atlantic, was for most of its people a land of violence, squalor, treachery, and intolerance. In this respect Spain was no different from the rest of Europe.

Epidemic outbreaks of plague and smallpox, along with routine attacks of measles, influenza, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid fever, and more, frequently swept European cities and towns clean of 10 to 20 percent of their populations at a single stroke. As late as the mid-seventeenth century more than 80,000 Londoners-one out of every six residents in the city-died from plague in a matter of months. And again and again, as with its companion diseases, the pestilence they called the Black Death returned. Like most of the other urban centers in Europe, says one historian who has specialized in the subject, "every twenty-five or thirty years-sometimes more frequently-the city was convulsed by a great epidemic." Indeed, for centuries an individual's life chances in Europe's pesthouse cities were so poor that the natural populations of the towns were in perpetual decline that was offset only by in-migration from the countryside-in-migration, says one historian, that was "vital if were to be preserved from extinction."

Famine, too, was common. What J. H. Elliott has said of sixteenth century Spain had held true throughout the Continent for generations beyond memory: "The rich ate, and ate to excess, watched by a thousand hungry eyes as they consumed their gargantuan meals. The rest of the population starved." This was in normal times. The slightest fluctuation in food prices could cause the sudden deaths of additional tens of thousands who lived on the margins of perpetual hunger. So precarious was the existence of these multitudes in France that as late as the seventeenth century each "average" increase in the price of wheat or millet directly killed a proportion of the French population equal to nearly twice the percentage of Americans who died in the Civil War.

That was the seventeenth century, when times were getting better. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries prices fluctuated constantly, leading people to complain as a Spanish agriculturalist did in 1513 that "today a pound of mutton costs as much as a whole sheep used to, a loaf as much as a fanega of wheat, a pound of wax or oil as much as an arroba <25 Spanish pounds>." The result of this, as one French historian has observed, was that "the epidemic that raged in Paris in 1482 fits the classic pattern: famine in the countryside, flight of the poor in search of help, then outbreak of disease in the city following upon the malnutrition." And in Spain the threat of famine in the countryside was especially omnipresent. Areas such as Castile and Andalusia were wracked with harvest failures that brought on mass death repeatedly during the fifteenth century. But since both causes of death, disease and famine, were so common throughout Europe, many surviving records did not bother (or were unable) to make distinctions between them. Consequently, even today historians find it difficult or impossible to distinguish between those of the citizenry who died of disease and those who merely starved to death.

...

http://www.the7thfire.com/Native_American/Native_American_Holocaust-Pestilence_and_Genocide.html

that led to such glories as the inquisition which Ferdie and Izzie were happy to sponsor to cement their claims as 'most christian monarchs' a dubious prize that all european royalty competed for in the day.

Another act Ferdinand and Isabella are known for is the expulsion/forcible conversion of jews which occured during their reign.

This religious posturing combined with an exploitative merchantile and military system didn't bode well for the gunless, steeless, pagan Arawaks on the recieving end of Columbus's jaunt. (and disease...well it did it's handiwork for sure and those blankets didn't hurt...)

On edit: Great post, lots of good background there! :thumbsup:

I've always said that celebrating that day was like indians celebrating columbus day... Yey! Go Empire!



I just finished 'Devil in the White City' about the 1893 Columbian exhibition and world's fair in Chaicago. That was what really set off the 'Columbomania' that led to the establishment of the holiday. It is a simplistic relic of a by gone commercial age and nothing more. If only the joblessness and the market instabilities of the gilded age were as quaint and far from our experience.

We had a holiday today here in Venezuela -- No, Not Columbus Day. Venezuela has removed Columbus Day as a national holiday and inaugurated "Indigenous People's Resistance Day". The statutes to Christopher Columbus have been torn down.

The rights of indigenous people -- to land, education, health care, and maintaining their historic culture -- are specifically enumerated in the 1999 Venezuelan Constitution. President Chavez's government has sent cheap oil to poor American Indian peoples in the U.S. and elsewhere who need it. Chavez puts great ideas into actual practice.

I blow a few hundred bucks in the Indian Casinos of Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun every couple of years or so. I know it does not make up for the atrocities and genocide committed by my ancestors, but it is a gesture I like to make.