May 28, 1830

The Equal Justice Initiative informs me about an important event that happened on this very date in 1830:

On this day in 1830, President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, forcing Indigenous people who had lived in the region for centuries to migrate west in brutal and dangerous conditions. To overcome racial inequality, we must confront our history. https://t.co/jmxsbO2zup

— Equal Justice Initiative (@eji_org) May 28, 2021

We must confront our history.

That's exactly what the GOP's "leaders" do not want us to do.  At the federal and state levels, they are on a mission to stop teaching and discussing our history that involves atrocious treatment of non-whites.  Their catchphrase is about "critical race theory," even if the GOP base has no idea what that really means.

The following is an unedited re-post from January 2019:

*************************************************

Remember this factoid?

Between 1500 and 1800 roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried twelve million Africans by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease.

The genocide and then the ethnic cleansing did not end just because it was now the 19th century!

Enter trump in his previous incarnation: andrew jackson, who "extended the powers of the presidency," writes Jill Lepore.

"The man we have made our President has made himself our despot, and the Constitution now lies in a heap of ruins at his feet," declared a senator from Rhode Island.  "When the way to his object lies through the Constitution, the Constitution has not the strength of a cobweb to restrain him from breaking through it."

Jackson set his sights on Indian removal.  He wanted to forcibly move Native Americans from east of the Mississippi to the West.

The Cherokees had forever been fighting to remain on their lands.

We beg leave to observe, and to remind you, that the Cherokees are not foreigners, but original inhabitants of America; and that they now inhabit and stand on the soil of their own territory.

And then a most unfortunate thing happened: "Gold was discovered on Cherokee land."

The US Supreme Court and its Chief Justice, John Marshall, ruled in favor of the Cherokees.  andrew jackson "decided to ignore the Supreme Court."  The Trail of Tears was the result.

We often refer to slavery as America's original sin.  As sinful as that was, the destruction of the lives and histories of the original inhabitants of this land is an even older story.  As much as the aftereffects of slavery and white supremacy have never gone away, the shameful and atrocious treatment of Native Americans continues.  Especially now with version 2.0 of andrew jackson: trump.

President Donald Trump started off the week by mocking one of the worst Native American massacres in US history in order to score some political points. By Friday, a group of young white teenagers were following his footsteps by taunting Native American elders at the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, DC — on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, no less.
In videos shared widely on YouTube and Twitter, a young man wearing a self-assured smirk and a red “Make America Great Again” stands inches away from a native elder who is beating a drum. Different angles of the incident show a group of a few dozen young people, mostly boys, in the background, jumping up and down and jeering in unison at the group of elders present for the day’s march. In some shots, the teens appear to be shouting “build that wall, build that wall.”

The native elder, Nathan Phillips, is also a Vietnam vet--the war that President Bone Spurs dodged well.

“I heard them saying ‘build that wall, build that wall,’ ” Phillips said while wiping away tears. “This is indigenous land. You’re not supposed to have walls here. We never did for a millennia. We never had a prison. We always took care of our elders, took care of our children, always provided for them, taught them right from wrong. I wish I could see that energy … put that energy to making this country really, really great.”

Yet another Indian elder shedding tears is not going to influence the thinking of 63 million racists!

Whose land are we on?

In 2002, my academic "job talk," when I came to interview at the university where I now work, was scheduled, on the fateful Ides of March, in the Calapooia Room.

Until then, I had never heard of Calapooia.

I didn't think much about "Calapooia" until I started interacting with the campus and its people in the fall of 2002.  

Through those previous 15 years of my life in the US, my understanding of Oregon was the caricature that was mainstream: A land of tree-hugging hippies. The story began with that, and ended right there.

After moving to Oregon, for the first time, I was exposed to place for what it was, and I had a lot to learn.  And I had to learn them fast, if I wanted to engage with students with ease and to be able to converse with them about what they knew and were curious about.

Calapooia?

Oregon, too, was Native American lands.  

The Calapooia were one of the many who had lived here for, well, ever.  It took a while for European settlers to come out west.  But, they did.  And when the settlers reached these lands, the story was no different.  Remember Jill Lepore writing this:

Between 1500 and 1800 roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried twelve million Africans by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease.

When Native Americans did not die of disease that Europeans brought with them, wars with the European settlers did them in, or they were simply forced out of their lands.

Once, when we were driving around on a gorgeous summer day, we came across a sign for Fort Umpqua, which was a trading fort and the southernmost outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company.  As one can imagine, the arrival of Europeans meant the end of life as they knew it for the indigenous people.  Often, the literal end of life.  

Beginning in February 1857, federal  troops forced native people to march from a temporary reservation at  Table Rock in southern Oregon 263 miles north across rough terrain to the newly created Grand Ronde Reservation.

Thus began Oregon’s “Trail of Tears.” The Rogue River and Chasta Tribes were the first to be removed from their aboriginal lands. They were joined by members of other Tribes and bands as the march passed other tribal homelands. The journey took 33 days and many died along the way.

I live on the lands where the Calapooia once lived and prospered.  Such an acknowledgment is "the start of action – a concrete step to bring forgotten histories into present consciousness."

Land acknowledgment is a recognition of a truth, a kind of verbal memorial that we erect in honor of indigenous peoples. Like a memorial, land acknowledgment pays respect to indigenous peoples by recognizing where they came from and affirming who they are today. And like a memorial, land acknowledgment is an education – enlisting speakers and audiences to learn about a region’s indigenous history. 

I hope that we will do a lot more acknowledgment, and a lot more direct action too, after the election in November.

When Columbus discovered America

More than a decade or so ago, I met my cousin's son for the first time. (The only time too--our paths have not crossed since.)

He might have been about eight or nine years old back then.  He hesitantly walked up to me and asked, in English, "you live in America?"

"Yes. I have been there for a long, long time now."

The kid was now feeling a tad more confident. "We learnt in school that Columbus discovered America."

I could not let go off the teacher within me.  "Oh, really! Terrific!" And then I added, "so, Columbus discovered America?"

"Yes. That is what the teacher told us."

That's how I, too, was told when I was a school kid his age.

"So, before Columbus discovered America, there were no people there? He was the first person to go to America?" I asked him.

"No. Our teacher said there were people there."

"So, if there were people there already, then it means that somebody discovered America before Columbus did, right?"

The kid was stunned. He hadn't thought about it.  Here he was trying to impress his uncle, and little did he know that I am Captain Killjoy Major Buzzkill General Malaise ;)

Thanks to Columbus, who originally set sail to India, we have ended up referring to as Indians a whole bunch of different peoples with different cultures and traditions in an entirely different part of the world! I joke with students that "I am an Indian from India, and not an Indian from here" whenever I want to highlight this insane historical accident.

Columbus Day is a federal holiday and in some of the states.  No holiday for us here in Oregon.  (We memorialize Columbus Day in our own strange ways!)

Seriously, why are we celebrating Columbus?  I don't have anything against Columbus per se.  He was merely an explorer, who was a product of the times.  But, it is not as if he accomplished something spectacular.  Magellan or Vasco da Gama were far better explorers.  And then the baggage related to Columbus.  So, why honor him with a special day?

Yes, there is the history behind the origin of Columbus Day.  But, the question is how this day has come to mean to us in these contemporary times.  In these tRumpian times, are we really confident that "Columbus Day is for all Americans"?

I like how some of the progressive cities mark that day as Indigenous People's Day.  Perhaps can be observed in many, many countries around the world too.  India, Australia, New Zealand, all the countries in North and South America, ... it is a long list of countries where the original inhabitants have been pushed aside--to say the least--to make space for the newcomers.

Wikipedia says so too.

ps: Given that "America" is derived from Amerigo Vespucci, shouldn't we celebrate Vespucci Day instead of Columbus Day? ;)

But ... what about Native Americans?

In Jill Lepore's narrative, I am now into the 20th century, more than 400 years after Columbus "discovering" India.

After some of the detailed descriptions early on about the asymmetrical interactions between European settlers and Native Americans, and then later about the Trail of Tears, Lepore's narrative does not say much about the original inhabitants.

Now, Lepore herself writes about readers who would question her on why she had skipped something or the other.  As she writes, no single-volume history of the United States can cover it all.  I think that including it all will be like trying to draw a true-to-scale map of the world.  (Was this in Alice in Wonderland?)  But, still ...

I figured I would not be the first person to think of this.  As a truly curious person would do in this internet age, I googled for it.

Sure enough, this essay from The Los Angeles Review of Books pops up, in which the author writes:

Indigenous absences are not a minor fault with These Truths. They lie at its core and they bear weighty consequences for the story that emerges. In a book that confidently bills itself as “an account of the origins, course, and consequences of the American experiment over more than four centuries,” the marginalization of indigenous people is a fundamental problem.

Any historical account will be contested, yes.  But, still ...

Methodology may have been a problem from the start. Lepore has a reliance on written literacy and record-keeping as powerful determinants of history and memory. The “history of truth is lashed to the history of writing like a mast to a sail,” she asserts, adding, “most words, once spoken, are forgotten, while writing lasts.” She makes this claim partly through a contention about the “literall advantage” supposedly maintained by Euro-American colonizers over peoples of indigenous and African descent, who oftentimes used non-written forms of expression and communication.

I don't understand why academics use "methodology" when they mean the research method.  Anyway, that is beside the main point, which is that when Lepore's method is to let the people speak for themselves, and for which she relies on the written word, well, what happens to the stories, the truths, that were not written down but were passed down through the spoken word or through images?

Lepore is a sharp intellect, and a phenomenal communicator.  I am sure there were reasons about which she is confident.  But, still ...

[Scholars] of early America and Native America have produced marvelously fine-grained reassessments of literacies, communication, and meaning production. You can now browse entire library shelves that illuminate the dynamic, enduring processes through which distinctive Native communities have transmitted information: knotted quipu strings, woven baskets, petroglyphs, standing stones, oral traditions, songs, dances, gestures, cornfields, clothing, sand and bone maps, and so much more.

Understanding the non-written is not an easy task.  And, like in the case of the Indus civilization, not being able to decode their inscriptions is another challenge altogether.

Such complexities ought to make us even more interested in understanding the past--what we may have been taught and told might not be anywhere close to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  What a shame that instead of a collective investment in such pursuit of truth, we are even closing down history departments, as if the truth is the one that Henry Ford declared: History Is Bunk.

If you prick us, do we not bleed?

Remember this factoid?

Between 1500 and 1800 roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried twelve million Africans by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease.

The genocide and then the ethnic cleansing did not end just because it was now the 19th century!

Enter trump in his previous incarnation: andrew jackson, who "extended the powers of the presidency," writes Jill Lepore.

"The man we have made our President has made himself our despot, and the Constitution now lies in a heap of ruins at his feet," declared a senator from Rhode Island.  "When the way to his object lies through the Constitution, the Constitution has not the strength of a cobweb to restrain him from breaking through it."

Jackson set his sights on Indian removal.  He wanted to forcibly move Native Americans from east of the Mississippi to the West.

The Cherokees had forever been fighting to remain on their lands.

We beg leave to observe, and to remind you, that the Cherokees are not foreigners, but original inhabitants of America; and that they now inhabit and stand on the soil of their own territory.

And then a most unfortunate thing happened: "Gold was discovered on Cherokee land."

The US Supreme Court and its Chief Justice, John Marshall, ruled in favor of the Cherokees.  andrew jackson "decided to ignore the Supreme Court."  The Trail of Tears was the result.

We often refer to slavery as America's original sin.  As sinful as that was, the destruction of the lives and histories of the original inhabitants of this land is an even older story.  As much as the aftereffects of slavery and white supremacy have never gone away, the shameful and atrocious treatment of Native Americans continues.  Especially now with version 2.0 of andrew jackson: trump.

President Donald Trump started off the week by mocking one of the worst Native American massacres in US history in order to score some political points. By Friday, a group of young white teenagers were following his footsteps by taunting Native American elders at the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, DC — on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, no less.
In videos shared widely on YouTube and Twitter, a young man wearing a self-assured smirk and a red “Make America Great Again” stands inches away from a native elder who is beating a drum. Different angles of the incident show a group of a few dozen young people, mostly boys, in the background, jumping up and down and jeering in unison at the group of elders present for the day’s march. In some shots, the teens appear to be shouting “build that wall, build that wall.”

The native elder, Nathan Phillips, is also a Vietnam vet--the war that President Bone Spurs dodged well.

“I heard them saying ‘build that wall, build that wall,’ ” Phillips said while wiping away tears. “This is indigenous land. You’re not supposed to have walls here. We never did for a millennia. We never had a prison. We always took care of our elders, took care of our children, always provided for them, taught them right from wrong. I wish I could see that energy … put that energy to making this country really, really great.”

Yet another Indian elder shedding tears is not going to influence the thinking of 63 million racists!

Yelling for freedom, while killing and enslaving!

Barely into a tenth of the book, one truth emerges--the hypocritical and contradictory beliefs of the Europeans who settled in the new world.  On the one hand, they claim to be fleeing persecution, and are in search of freedom.  On the other hand, they annihilate Native Americans and bring in humans from Africa as slaves.  All these well before the Declaration of Independence!

Jill Lepore compels us to think about a number of questions, which she then proceeds to discuss.  Questions such as:

In December 1511, on the fourth Sunday of Advent, Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican priest, delivered a sermon in a church on Hispaniola. Disagreeing with the king's ministers, he said the conquistadors were committing unspeakable crimes. "Tell me, by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery? By what right do yo wage such detestable wars on these people who lived mildly and peacefully in their own lands, where you consumed infinite numbers of them with unheard of murders and desolations?  And then he  asked, "Are they not men?"

That was less than 20 years since Columbus discovered America!

When Columbus landed on the shores of Hispaniola--his "India"--"there were about three million people on that island."  A mere fifty years later, "there were only five hundred; everyone else had died, their songs unsung."

Columbus couldn't care. The King of Spain couldn't care.  The Pope couldn't care.

Five hundred years later, trump couldn't care either--Haiti was his primary target when he specifically referred to a few countries as "shitholes."

"Are they not men?"

That was perhaps the first of the questions, to which there was no end.

As European invaders raped women, or even fell in love with them and stayed with them, the land now had "mixed-race children of Spanish men and Indian women,"  Soon, these outnumbered Indians, whose population sharply decreased.  "An intricate caste system marked gradations of skin color." Awful, "as if skin color were like dyes made of plants, the yellow of sassafras, the red of beets, the black of carob."

And, therefore, "pressed upon the brows of every person of the least curiosity the question of common humanity: Are all peoples one?"

In the contemporary US, trump and his 63 million toadies have clearly stated, over and over, that all people are not equal. 

The guy who co-chaired trump's campaign in Iowa, who had been spewing white supremacist and white nationalist talk for ever, recently said:

what matters more than race is “the culture of America” based on values brought to the United States by whites from Europe.
“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” Mr. King said. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

Oh, and what was the response to Montesinos' question?  The conquistadors were required to read aloud to anyone they proposed to conquer and enslave a document called the Requiremento.  If the natives accepted the story of Genesis the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world, and the high priest called Pope, and in his name the King and Queen, then their lives were spared.

The Evangelicals' support for trump is a mere echo of this 500-year old beginning!

Off the top of my head ...

"Any Thanksgiving plans?" she asked as I sat down for a haircut.

Yep, we balding men also need haircuts every once in a while, even if nobody notices the difference between the pre- and post-haircut!

She was a new one.  I had not seen her before, leave alone getting my hair cut by her.  Her hair had a fluorescent color.  I am always impressed with the courage that people have to walk around with strange hair color.  I can't even bring myself to wearing trousers that are in colors other than the mainstream.  What a wuss I am!

It is not an easy question to answer.  For one, I don't know if she is for or against all the hype over Thanksgiving.  What if she has Native American blood and she detests the genocide of her people that resulted from the interactions with the white folk?  Or, if she has no family and events like Thanksgiving makes her depressed ... life for others is never the same as anything comparable to life as we might experience it.

"Oh, just a low key thing ... just by ourselves," I replied. 

Note that I gave nothing there.  Nothing about who is included in the "ourselves."  What "low key" meant.  Small talk can involve a whole lot of back-and-forth without saying any damn thing; something that took me a while to figure out, and which always baffles most visitors from other countries.

"Me too.  My sister and I go have a buffett at ..." I couldn't catch the name of the place that she mentioned.  But the details don't matter in such small talk.  It is, instead, all about the contextual  back-and-forth.

"Oh cool!"

"Yeah, I am a Native American, and I am not much into Thanksgiving."

I would never have guessed that she is Native American.  But, the intermixing means that even people looking white can have a good deal of native blood.

"My mother is from here.  She belongs to the ... tribe."  Again, I couldn't clearly hear the details.  "My father lives in the reservation in Oklahoma."

A simple haircut for a balding man.  The five minutes reveal a huge world behind the person cutting my hair.

"Drive safely.  Too many people rushing," she said as she dusted me off.

One of my many favorite topics this is--people rushing madly.  "I know, I have no idea where everybody is rushing to."

The haircut and the chat cost me ten dollars.  I added a two dollar tip.

"I appreciate you," she said.

A few minutes into the drive, the car ahead of me came to a complete halt.  An accident that had just happened, with smoke rushing out of the scene.  A damaged car smack in the middle of the road.  A dented car on one side, and another dented car on the other side.

After a couple of minutes of waiting, I, like other drivers, turned around towards alternate routes.

What kind of society does “America” mean?

I remember John Steinbeck's line somewhere that the poor in America don't consider themselves to be poor--they have been brainwashed into thinking that they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires.  Poverty is a minor setback, and it is only a matter of time before they become another Gatsby.

Except, it is not any minor setback.  And not everybody easily climbs up the ladder to become millionaires and gazillionaires.  Especially if you are not white in America!

But, when the dominant narrative is driven by whites, who shrug their shoulders and ask "Why can’t they get their act together?," to talk about inequality means that the trolls would immediately attack with name-calling. Socialist!

That shoulder-shrugging approach has always been the MO for the whites-only party, aka the GOP:

Republican orthodoxy is that inequality is not necessarily a problem. And if rising tides substantially lifted everybody’s boat, it might matter less that the yachts parked at the North Cove Marina a stone’s throw from Goldman Sachs rode a bigger swell. Tides in America don’t work like that anymore, though.

Most other boats are leaky.  And many don't even have boats!

Your heart doesn’t even have to bleed to care. The United States risks its prosperity by leaving so many Americans behind.

Republicans. Don't. Care. "Republicans just passed another round of tax cuts to offer a helping hand to the upper crust."

I have always wondered why there is simply no rioting on the streets. Why there is no looting. Why aren't the poor jumping into their broken down cars and rushing to ransack the Versailles of the greedy gazillionaires?

As Catherine Rampell noted in The Washington Post, populism — understood as a political movement shaped around giving the working class a “fair shake” — is pretty much dead.

To refer to trump as a populist is a twisted interpretation of what populism means.  He is no populist; he is merely a loud-mouthed racist, misogynist, ...

So, what happens to the poor?  Especially those who are not white?

Let them eat frog legs!

I made the Trump/Romney photo black and white, and it looks like a Twilight Zone episode where a guy just made a foolish deal with the Devil pic.twitter.com/froiDYDJei

— Adam 'Stuhlbarg' Murray (@Atom_Murray) November 30, 2016

Who is laughing now?

As much as I enjoyed the sarcastic humor in the Daily Show and the Colber Report, as the years went on, I stopped watching them.  For one and only one reason: I worried that instead of getting enraged, we were merely laughing things off.

If you were to go back and watch some of those clips, I bet you will agree with me.  Those were some serious, serious issues that the mostly liberal audience was laughing away--of course, for catharsis, more than anything else.   But, laughter has never overhauled society.  In fact, while we laughed and laughed till we cried, the others whom we were laughing at were loudly and openly gaining strength.

I provide you the following Colbert clip from six years ago as a piece of evidence.  Where was the outrage at Rush Limbaugh's and Steve King's atrocious statements?  I bet you also see how much of the fascist's rhetoric is along the same vein, right?

The Colbert Report

Or, how about this one from five years ago?

The Colbert Report

This land is my land, this land is NOT your land :(

Almost a decade ago, during a vacation in Alaska, we paid for the touristy plane ride from Fairbanks in order to land a kilometer north of the Arctic Circle. It was educational and exhilarating to understand how far--literally and otherwise--I had come all the way from an original home that is near the equator.

The touristy package was a tie-in with a local venture, it turned out.  This tourism was an important economic activity for the "native village."  During the guided bus tour in the village, we listened to his descriptions of the people's history and traditions.  In telling the story, he said, "we lived by ourselves for a long time.  One day, somebody told us that our lands belonged to Russians and we had never seen Russians in our lives.  And then one day they told us that America had bought the lands from Russia and we didn't know what that meant."

He said all that and more in a tone that was very matter-of-fact.  It was like listening to a voice in the documentary narrating the events.  The content of what he said was not new, of course.  But, somehow, to listen to him say that and in that particular setting was very moving.  Very troubling.  I wanted to apologize to him and his people right there.  It might have been because while it is one thing to read about that in history, it is a completely different emotion when one is right there in that part of the history.

In the contemporary life, we rarely ever think about the old stories anymore.  Thanksgiving is slightly more than a month away.  Yet again, I will wonder how a Native American thinks about all the old stories on that Thanksgiving Day.  I will feel awful that my fellow Americans and I have largely forgotten the original peoples.

[The] conquest of the continent is both essential to understanding the rise of the United States and deplorable. Acre by acre, the dispossession of native peoples made the United States a transcontinental power.

A power from the tip of Florida to the settlement above the Alaskan Arctic--by robbing and killing and wiping out the natives.

If slavery was a moral failing, said Lincoln in his second inaugural address, then the war was ‘the woe due to those by whom the offense came’. The rupture between North and South forced white Americans to confront the nation’s deep investment in slavery and to emancipate and incorporate four million individuals. They did not do so willingly, and the reconstruction of the nation is in many ways still unfolding. By contrast, there has been no similar reckoning with the conquest of the continent, no serious reflection on its centrality to the rise of the United States, and no sustained engagement with the people who lost their homelands.

For  one, the Native Americans are such a small percentage of the population--a tiny minority (about one percent of the population) in the very lands that once belonged to them.  There are almost as many Indian-Americans in the US as there are Native "Indian" Americans!  And, after having been exiled to reservations, they became a case of out of sight and out of mind.

Even the great Abe Lincoln was not flawless:

In July 1864, for example, President Abraham Lincoln created a reservation within present-day Washington state for the Chehalis people, reducing their once extensive homeland of 5,000,000 acres (by the measure of the Bureau of American Ethnology) to ‘about six sections, with which they are satisfied’ (according to a letter from the Office of Indian Affairs; the measure of ‘satisfaction’ must be judged by the alternative, which was removal and joint occupation of another reservation). As a section is 640 acres, ‘about six’ would have come to about 4,000 acres.

 We  humans all  over the world have committed so many atrocities that there aren't enough minutes in our lives to apologize.  As one who was born into  the "uppermost" caste of the atrociously tragic caste-ridden India, I know I have plenty to apologize for.  "What would American history look like if native peoples had been kept in sight and in mind?" is a question that perhaps we can ask ourselves as we sit down for Thanksgiving.

Colbert explains reparations

Eating or drinking while watching this might be injurious to your life :)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - The Great White Wail
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

Thanks for ... ?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Thanks For Nothing
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor The Daily Show on Facebook

Those darned illegal immigrants :)

cartoons of the day

Indians :-)

Who else but Stephen Colbert can do this? His guest was way awesome too.