ThanksTaking Day

Peace! The following article was originally posted on a Nation of Gods and Earths listserv by my brother in Allah's Mathematics, Allah Divine. Much love!

The Lie

The Pilgrims left England seeking religious freedom. When they landed here, the righteous Pilgrims met wild Indians who soon became their friends. They learned to work together even though they had different languages and cultures.

In October of 1621, the Pilgrim settlers and the Indians of Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts celebrated their good harvest and had a feast together. They each brought foods, which they shared with each other, in the first Thanksgiving, a celebration thanking God for taking care of their people. Thanksgiving is a wonderful way to remember all that we should be thankful for, and a reminder that white people and people of color can unite and be happy together. Yeah Turkey!

The Truth

This is how it really went.

The Pilgrims may have been religious radicals who were driven out of England, but they were never known for being "righteous" people. Although we are often taught that they were "fleeing religious persecution, " most schoolbooks don't mention that their voyage was being funded by a trading company. The trading company and the Pilgrims were interested in a lot more than religious freedom.

In 1620, the Pilgrims were pleased to find the ruins of a former Native village of the Pawtuxet Nation. They settled here and built a colony which they called the "Plymouth Plantation."

The Pawtuxet people had lived there in peace for thousands of years. That is, until the English settlers began arriving. In 1614, an English soldier named John Smith arrived and began taking Indians to sell into slavery in Europe. Another common practice among Europeans was to give "Smallpox Infected Blankets" to the Indians.

The settlers would offer the blankets as a friendly gift, secretly knowing what would soon happen to their new "friends." Since smallpox was unknown on this continent before the arrival of the Europeans, Indians did not have any immunity to the deadly disease. In a short time, smallpox would wipe out entire villages with very little effort required by the Europeans. The Europeans thanked their God for the Indians' demise. A colony founder remarked in a letter back to England: "But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So…God hath thereby cleared our title to this place."

By the time the Pilgrims arrived six years later, only one Pawtuxet had survived, a man named Squanto, who had spent time as a slave to the English.

When the Pilgrims met Squanto, they were sick and near starving. Since Squanto understood the language and customs of the Puritans, he taught them to use the corn growing wild from the abandoned fields of the village, taught them how to fish, and taught them about the foods, herbs and fruits of the land. Basically, Squanto saved their lives. Without his help, Plymouth Plantation would not have survived its first winter.

Squanto also negotiated a peace treaty between the Puritans and the Wampanoag Nation, a very large Native nation which totally surrounded the new Plymouth Plantation. Because of Squanto's help, the Puritans enjoyed almost 15 years of peaceful harmony with the surrounding Indians, and the Pilgrims prospered.

At the end of their first year, the Puritans held a great feast following the harvest of the food that Squanto had taught them how to farm. The feast honored Squanto and their friends, the Wampanoags. The first Thanksgiving was a day of the Pilgrims giving thanks for the Indians who helped them and took care of them. However, the Indians who were there were not even invited! Actually, a few days before this feast took place, a squad of Pilgrims led by Miles Standish actively sought the head of a local Indian chief, and an 11 foot high wall was erected around the entire Plymouth settlement for the very purpose of keeping Indians out!

The feast was followed by three days of "Thanksgiving" celebrating their good fortune. The Pilgrims drank even more than their daily custom of half a gallon of beer, and engaged in drunken acts of violence and sodomy. They were having a good old-fashioned European party.

Soon after this first "Thanksgiving, " in 1629, the Puritans began a march inland from the shore. Using *Bible Passages* to justify their every move, they seized land, took the strong and young Indians as slaves to work their land, and killed the rest.

They destroyed their "friends" the Wampanoag pretty easily. Their chief was beheaded, and his head placed on a pole in Plymouth, Massachusetts - where it remained for 24 years.

But when they reached the Connecticut Valley around 1633, they met a different type of force. The Pequot Nation, very large and very powerful, had never entered into the peace treaty negotiated by Squanto, as had the Wampanoag and the Narragansett. They were not interested in helping or befriending the white settlers. The elders of the Pequot had warned them not to trust these people.

When resisting Pequot Natives killed two slave raiders, the Pilgrims demanded that the killers be turned over to them. The Pequot refused. This act of resistance led to the Pequot War, the bloodiest of the Indian wars in the northeast.

An army of over 200 white settlers was formed. They also convinced over 1,000 Narragansett warriors to join them by using lies and deceit. Although they would later destroy the Narragansett as well, the Narragansett Indians believed that they were helping the right group of people.

Commander John Mason decided not to fight a head-on battle. Instead, the Pequot were attacked, one village at a time, in the early hours of the morning. Each village was set on fire with its sleeping Natives burned alive. Women and children over 14 were raped and captured to be sold as slaves. Other survivors were brutally tortured and murdered.

Indians were sold into slavery in the islands of the West Indies, Spain, Algiers, and England; everywhere the Pilgrim traders went. The slave trade was so profitable that boatloads of 500 at a time left the harbors of New England. Of course, all this helped lay the foundations for the African slave trade.

As Ras Kass rapped in "Nature of the Threat":

Stealin land from the indigenous natives

Gave them alcohol to keep the Red (and BrownMan) intoxicated

Whites claim they had to civilize these pagan animals,

But up until 1848 there's documented cases

of whites bein the savage cannibals, eating Indians

In 1992, it's Jeffery Dahmer

They slaughtered a whole race with guns

Drugs, priests and nuns

1763, the first demonic tactic of biological warfare

As tokens of peace, Sir Jeffery Amherst

passed out clothin and blankets to the Indian community

Infested with small pox, knowin they had no immunity

Today it's AIDS, you best believe it's man made

Cause ain't a damn thing changed

The destruction of Indians in the Pequot War soon led to more destruction in King Philip's war. In 1641, the Dutch governor of Manhattan offered the first scalp bounty. Usually, we are taught that the Indians were the ones scalping white people. The truth was that it began with whites scalping Indians, and other Indians being paid or tricked to scalp their brothers and sisters.

The Dutch and Pilgrims joined forces to exterminate all Natives from New England, and village after village fell. Following an especially successful raid against the Pequot in what is now Connecticut, the churches of Manhattan announced a day of "Thanksgiving" to celebrate victory over the "heathen savages."

One colonist in Manhattan wrote, "There is now but few Indians upon the island and those few no ways hurtful. It is to be admired how strangely they have decreased by the hand of God, since the English first settled in these parts." Strange, indeed.

This was the Second Thanksgiving. Since that day, Thanksgiving has been a celebration of the destruction of Native people in the name of white supremacy. And somehow, God is all part of the plan.

During the feasting that followed this second Thanksgiving, the hacked off heads of Natives were kicked through the streets of Manhattan like soccer balls. This is the origin of the football tradition on Thanksgiving.

From then on, a Thanksgiving feast was held after each successful massacre. Each town held days of Thanksgiving to celebrate their own victories over the Natives until it became clear that there needed to be an order for these special occasions. It was George Washington who finally brought a system and a schedule to Thanksgiving when he declared one day to be celebrated across the nation as Thanksgiving Day.

Years later, Abraham Lincoln decreed Thanksgiving Day a legal national holiday during the Civil War - on the same day and at the same time he was ordering troops to march against the Sioux Indians in Minnesota.

Epilogue

In 1492, there were over 80 million Native Americans. A century later there were only ten million. Today, there are about two million left.

You can't help everybody.First it was smallpox blankets meant to kill any Indian who touched them. But the Europeans gave them to the Indians as an act of friendship. The Indians would not be cold during the winter, thanks to the generous white people, right? Then they all started dying.

Then the Europeans offered alcohol to help the Indians cope with the cold winters (especially since many of them had lost their homes), and also to help celebrate their…um, well they ain't have sh*t to celebrate, did they? And now alcoholism is a major problem for Indians. They call it their "firewater" and that sh*t is killing many of them slowly.

Finally, some people learned that casinos could be built legally on Indian land. This seemed great. After all, the Pequot Indians, who were almost destroyed in the Pequot War, now make about $9 Billion a year off their casino built in the same area where they once fought. But guess what?

Now, the Indians have two more problems. First, they're losing their traditional values and deep understandings of man and nature. Instead, they're becoming shallow and materialistic in the pursuit of more money. And now the Indians have another addiction after alcohol: gambling.

Be careful whose "help" you accept.Everyone offering help isn't sincere.

PEACE!

Fabricating Family Ties

Peace!

Today’s mathematics is “knowledge born”. I can’t help but think about ideas and how the are filtered into our lives. So many times do we exhibit a word or action that is a directive offspring of an idea that was planted in us mentally. Often we never know exactly when the point of contact was. It wouldn’t surprise one to learn that a lot of what and how we think is obtained through the “tell lie vision”. Now, I am a proponent for educational and enjoyable television, most of all “responsible” television. And in many ways, despite how we may think or feel about television in our society, it is truly a reflection of the mind state of the people and definitely of the U.S. government. After all, the government has used television programs and in particular, children’s programming, to orientation and indoctrinate our youth into the establishment’s “ideal” of “American values”.

Unbeknownst to many of us, this is actually the origin or our beloved comic book heroes such as Superman and Batman. They play a large role in transmitting the American worldview to masses of children during the 1930’s and 1940’s. It was very prevalent during the 1940’s with the introduction of “Captain America” who would be seen kickin’ Hitler in the crotch or battling “snarling, fanged” Japanese soldiers. It has continued straight through to my generation with cartoons like G.I. Joe and Transformers.

I have always been one to say that I thought cartoons were more for adults than children. After all, years later, I got a lot more of the jokes. As a child, I was more intrigued by the animation in and of itself. Going back and watching a lot of cartoons and television shows I knew throughout my youth revealed to me a lot more about myself and in particular where I may have adopted certain phrases, words, and mannerisms etc. I spent a lot of time watching television in my life.

“They continue to teach the 85% daily…..” -13th degree, Lost Found Muslim Lesson No. 2

It was one day last week when my Queen and I sat down to enjoy an evening of the “idiot box” and one of our favorite shows, “The Simpsons”. This episode “Little Big Girl”struck a cord in me so much that I couldn’t really laugh. All I could do was to sit and do the knowledge and unravel the politics behind the animation. It seems to have been an episode most fitting for the month of November, considering Europeans and their fascination with the mythical feast of “Thanksgiving”.

However, in the episode Lisa was to do a report on her family lineage and heritage. Considering that the show “The Simpsons” is based on a “poor white trash” family, one could only expect that they hadn’t any sense of who they were. After discovering that her family had no real heritage and nothing that was admirable or respectable enough to present in her class, Lisa decided to concoct a lie about her great-great-great grandmother having been a Native American. And specifically the “Hitachi” tribe, a name she obviously pulled from her microwave. She gave a long speech of falsehoods before her school, seeking a good grade, only to be awarded by being asked to give her presentation before a larger multi-ethnic public audience. And she did, receiving accolades from those who knew nothing of the First Nations. Lisa eventually became overrun by guilt and the lies she was perpetrated only to break down before an audience of Native Americans.

What was interesting was how the ideas interwoven into the episode represented a double edged sword. On one hand, one could interpret this as non-Original peoples, that is, white peoples and the lies that have been perpetrated by those amongst them claiming to have Native ancestry into order to:

1) Receive federal monies by being on a tribal roster.
2) Claim some authority or right to be here in North America. I.E. a “real” American.

It is no secret that many whites showed up in droves claiming Native Ancestry once the U.S. government and the Bureau of Indian Affairs established the blood quantum and the policy of handing out land and money to individuals as opposed to groups. This happened in the late 1800’s. It isn’t a surprise that many tend to identify with Native peoples whenever they feel really nostalgic about American history. They justify their right to live on this land and due what they will to it and with it since they have strove to internal the “spirit” of Native Americans. Like when biker’s cruise on Harley’s with a chief or some feathers tattooed on their arms. Another sight is the really “spiritual” white people who attempt to harness the Native energy because it complements their back to nature-neo-hippie-mocha latte mantra- world view. When really, if they had the true knowledge of themselves and of the truth, they would delve deeper into studies of people such as the Druids of the Celtics in Europe and the sciences they practiced and how they were very environmentally conscious.

The other side of the sword, would be the assumption that the episode portrayed not just a confused white person, but in a way, making a mockery of anyone who attempts to reclaim their Native ancestry. And the most contemporary example would be us so-called Latin Americans. Making knowledge born or making known who we are is simply brushed off by main stream white America and viewed as a fledgling attempt at planting our own roots and staking claim to the U.S. as they once did. While this is far from the truth. And the truth being, “we are the Original people”. We are “los indios”, whether full-blood or mestizo. This, of course, they do not want to admit because it could mean the eventual displacing of European descendants from our land. All the more reason for the reclassifying job done at the Census Bureau in 2000. By placing “Latinos” in the category of white, it boosts their population numbers and is an extremely political move. One that will have cultural consequences via the constant barrage of euro-centric propaganda. It's bad enough that we've had to deal with the mind set of "the whiter the better" for 514 years throughout Latin America. People are being forced to compromise their identity to move ahead in this society.

However, we will not be disappeared or looked over. Our voices will not be silenced.

We are here to make knowledge born!

Peace!

Racism in "Espana"

Paz!
Las matematicas de hoy es "sabeduria y compremiendo". Wisdom is one’s wise words, ways, and actions. It is through our ways, words, and actions that we display our understanding, that is, our perspective of the world (how we see things). It is in our words and actions that we have long exhibited the subconscious (and probably even consciously) year to be like our oppressor. Plain and simple. The people of the lands of so-called Latin America, North and South, have a color complex. Many of us still think that “white is right”. We continue to link our reality back to a population and culture who are un-alike us, simply because of language, religion, and certain elements of tradition. Many of us think that we are “Spanish”. From the article below, one can see how we are viewed by Spaniards. Not all. But many I’m sure. So in reality, our words, ways, and actions aren’t as wise as the should be. They are full of confliction and conviction as our words and actions reflect the yearn to be like someone else. Someone whom we are not. And this is not understanding. It is a misunderstanding. It is how we wish to be viewed by the world so as to be accepted in a “white man’s world”. That is, since “black” and “color” are so despised by those overwhelmed by the mindset and institutions of white supremacy. And ultimately, this predictament hinders our ability to effectively control our own lives.

It makes me think of mi Tia, and her attempt to hide who she was when she first came to this country. She would front and tell people she was from "Argentina" despite the strong indigenous features that compliment her face. My Queen was even shocked to see huge paintings of "matadores" in mi Ti Ti's living room. Such a sharp contrast from who she blatantly is. In the words of Nation and Gods and Earths Elder, Abu Shahid, "Know who you is so you know who you ain't, so you can stop imitating a people who've spent years imitating you!"

Viva America Indigena!

Quito, Oct 23 (Prensa Latina) Ecuadorean Government, media and people in general showed indignation on Tuesday for a violent aggression against a 16-year old Ecuadorean girl in Spain.

Foreign Minister Maria Fernanda Espionsa, who is in Madrid, lodged a firm protest before Spanish authorities for the attack suffered by the Ecuadorean teen in the Barcelona subway.

In remarks made public by phone, Espinosa said to have received orders from President Rafael Correa to meet with the young girl and offer her legal support.

Espinosa said to have made representations to the Ministry of Foreign Relations of Spain for the cowardly attack and for the release of the perpetrator by a judge.

We strongly reject this brutal aggression to our country people and demand actions to guarantee security of foreigners, who are exposed to cases like this, of an aggressive, racist nature, said Ecuador's top diplomat.

Local media in Ecuador described the attack as brutal and xenophobic and showed video images of the deplorable violent incident.

Residents of Quito expressed their concern for an increase in racist violence in Spain and other European nations and rejected this attack against their peer.

I think the Spanish Government must find an exemplary punishment so that actions like this do cannot happen again, said Jorge Penafiel.

Columbus Day Protest Arrests

DENVER: 10/6/07 Riot-clad Denver police officers moved quickly and violently against non-violent protestors this morning in downtown Denver. Over fifty people sat down in the street to protest the Columbus Day parade. Unlike past years when officers and protestors cooperated during the arrests, officers moved in quickly and used violence against the protestors. Many ofthose arrested were led away by two officers, both using pain compliance holds on the detained person. Those arrested were clearly in pain as they were pushed, pulled and dragged to two Denver Sheriff's Department buses. The use of force by police, particularly the extended periods those detained endured pain compliance holds, constitutes a significant human rights violation. CopWatch observers report that the sit in protestors did not use violence. At least a dozen other arrests were reported as well. After the initial arrest several other protestors ran into the street to block the parade, these individuals were also forcibly arrested. Several of those arrestedwere not participating in the sit-in. At least one arrest by Denver Sheriff's deputies did not appear to have any reason at all.Although police routinely have worn riot gear during the annual protest, this year CopWatch observed a clear escalation in the show of force by police. Riot sticks were being brandished by officers rather than remainingin their belts. Denver Sheriffs actually had an officer armed with a shotgun facing protestors. Denver CopWatch believes that an excessive amount of force was used in detaining and arresting the protestors.

Although the sit-in was blocking acity street, those participating in the sit-in did not use violence. The organized nature of the arrests suggests that the use of force was plannedand approved in advance by the command staff of the Denver Police Department. Chief Whitman was on scene during the arrests. The actions by the Denver Police and the Sheriff's Department was a serious and unnecessary escalation in the use of force. Today's police action was a clear departure from the tactics they have used in previous years which quickly and peaceably removed protestors. The new tactics resulted in the spectacle of people crying out in pain with tears on their cheeks while their hands and arms were being bent backwards by Denver Police Officers. Denver CopWatch will be issuing pictures and video clips of today's violent events in the coming days.

-Article from http://angryindian.blogspot.com/2007/10/censored-denver-columbus-day-protesters.html