YESTERDAY
Someone compared the holocaust to the indigenous people of North America. I’m not mentioning the atrocities, where the border of the United States was relocated making immigrants of those who have always lived here. I’m not talking of the questioned number of millions to thousands who DIED after contact with Europeans… or those who endured slavery, rape, and pillage on behalf of colonization.
JUST YESTERDAY
In 1493 Columbus stole… all he could see. AND YESTERDAY Friendly Powhatan’s fed starving settlers at Jamestown and taught them to grow crops on land near im- possible for them to do so with their own innovations.
AND YESTERDAY
The government told the Dakotas they would… provide them food, making them travel in the cold brisk fall to await for a supply that never came. TO COME HOME TO, Germans inhabiting their homes in New Ulm, Minnesota… Where they then proceeded to burn and wage war on the village which led to the largest execution in the history of the United States where they killed the
Sioux warriors at Mankato on the order of the oh so praised Mr. Lincoln.
AND YESTERDAY
There were concentration camps at Fort Snelling.
AND YESTERDAY
The Nez Pierce fought at Little Bighorn to VICTORY in which was recognized and named after the racist Colonel killer they defeated. AND JUST YESTERDAY There was the Trail of Tears.
AND YESTERDAY
There was Wounded Knee, where the government killed an onslaught of innocent Native people. Then incarcerated a man by the name of Leonard Peltier for murder unjustly proven. AND JUST YESTERDAY Alcohol was introduced to a people whose bodies weren’t created to digest such impure toxicities.
AND YESTERDAY
There are reservations parceled up and given away, reservations that were unacknowledged and created as jail cells to keep Native people united in their impoverished state. Reservations disowned of their titles to be so.
JUST YESTERDAY
Native people marched.
YESTERDAY
The American Indian Movement arose in St Paul, Minneapolis where they demanded their civil rights. Proceeding to storm Alcatraz… marching on Washington DC… fighting for justice, and remaining yet to be acknowledged as civil rights leaders in the mainstream.
AND YESTERDAY
My grandfather relocated to the city from the reservation his grandfather founded and then assimilated as asked… to marry a Swedish farm girl and fight in a war that he WAS A MESSENGER, watching his friend lose his head before him, … remaining still invisible.
AND YESTERDAY
My father went to a Catholic reform school in order to erase the Indian in him and further alienate him from a culture that was a part of his identity.
AND YESTERDAY
My father, my uncle, my cousin, my uncle, my grandfather DIED of a disease in which 17% of Native people suffer and a… disease in which 95% of those people who containing the disease in which they
give their children, like me, a 50% chance of getting, a disease by the name of diabetes.
Thinking about Natives and the United States genocide, think of how the Government has done little to progress the people who have been here be- fore the government was instated and how little they apologize for the trea- ties they made and continue to break and think of how little the government has done to reconcile the wrongs they carry out.
AND REMEMBER
That yesterday, is our today.
