AN OPEN APOLOGY TO THE FIRST NATIONS

WELCOME TO ONE HUMAN FAMILY
My intent with this blog is to open a forum where, from one human being to another, we can pour out our tears regarding the horrendous, inconceivable acts of unnecessary violence and inhumanity carried out by some Europeans against the innocent FIRST NATION, the MILLIONS of peoples living on the American continent when the English "discovered" this "new" land. It wasn't "new" to the peoples who occupied it, but it's a nice way to put it in the history books so that the white offspring of generations to follow have NO REAL IDEA of what went on in this country. I'm white and until I watched 500 Nations and digested what really happened to our darker skinned brothers and sisters, I just didn't really understand why I would get the cold shoulder by some American Indians. NOW I UNDERSTAND! Like the Tibetans in China, it is very very hard to swallow that your country was stolen by some stronger peoples, and that now you are living on the very fringes of society, barely surviving. Every day you visualize how life used to be, how it still should be, your customs, your beautiful streams and mountains, the ancient traditions of generations before you. GONE. LOST. DEAD. And now alcohol is killing what's left of it. And your one river is drying up. And you don't know how much more land will be taken from your children. It makes me seriously sick to my stomach to realize what our ancestors did, how they used and abused and lied and cheated and deflowered and murdered using their CHRISTIAN GOD as their excuse. They killed just to kill at times, just to kill...in the name of God...just kill the "heathens"! If I didn't know sweet, wonderful, sincere, loving Christian people I would HATE CHRISTIANITY! There is NO DAMN EXCUSE for what they did when they had other options, which was most of the time. It was just easier to erase them. These sort of white men make me want to erase them from the face of this world. They are the ones who should have gone down. There were other ways to settle here. We didn't have to wipe out so many tribes, so many innocent women and children. We didn't need to kill other human beings. We didn't have to have the best land for ourselves. We didn't have to take ALL the land, kill ALL the buffalo, take their children away from them to make them into little Christian Europeans. I cannot believe this took place only 100 years ago. I'm sickened and appalled. I am compelled to stay up all night to set up this blog, to apologize a hundred million times, which can never be enough. Please help me heal this wound in the hearts of the FIRST NATION. Please apologize here and now. We owe them at least that much!

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Thursday, May 13, 2010

White People's Logic

After putting this blog online, I contacted several people and asked them to participate in helping to relieve the ongoing anger and resentment some First Nation people still harbor toward the white man. This was one of the reasons I created this blog originally. I hoped it could become a part of the healing. I hoped it would help heal the sour margins of our co-existence. To know, after watching First Nations and looking more deeply into the history, the TRUE history, I felt compelled to do something to help mend what some terrible people did to those who FIRST inhabited this land. Others apparently do not feel the need. They say it wasn't them who committed the atrocities and therefore they feel no need to "apologize" to the peoples of the First Nations. In their "Christian" way of life, they cannot manage to find a grain of real pity, at least not enough to make them lift a finger to paper. It was a long time ago and had nothing to do with me, they say. Oh, they think it's sad, but they don't feel any responsibility regarding the actions taking against the First Nations, and of course, THEY would never NEVER has done such things. They say the First Nations just need to get over it and get on with life.

I ask, "Don't you think if a million white people expressed their sorrow and despair and regret over what our ancestors did to them, don't you think that could be a new beginning, an aid in healing the hearts of the broken." Response, "I just don't feel like you do about it. I don't feel that I should have to apologize."

WOW, I didn't realize how full of pride we white folk really are. I didn't really realize that it was a huge deal to ask someone to put together a few sentences of regret that might help the people whose land we robbed, whose people we slaughtered. I didn't think my own blood, those with apparent hearts of gold, would "not feel like me", not be so ashamed and disheartened to see that our ancestors were no better than the Chinese with the Tibetans, Hitler with the Jews, or any of the other conquerors who regard humans who are not like them, as worthless vermin to torture, rob, rape, abuse, and murder. With such pride, such a false sense of innocence, I understand why history repeats itself. Skip a generation and everyone conveniently forgets the suffering, at least the suffering done to others. It gets old, it gets swept under the carpet as the conquerors and their descendants enjoy the fruits of their looting, it becomes history to read about in books. Read about in books, the facts seem ancient, unchangeable, even when many victims are still living with the consequences of their horrors that were perpetrated against innocent people.

Many victims still live. Victims of the German Holocaust, of the Rwanda Racial Cleansing, of the First Nations Genocide. I find it odd that Germans I know have expressed their sincere regrets over the burning of the Jews, and while Americans point their fingers at the Germans, at the Rwandans, at the Chinese, it never even passes over our minds that the biggest of all genocides took place right here on the American continent as our "Christian, God-fearing, free-religion seekers, found good excuses to steal, pillage, rape and massacre the people who lived FIRST on this land. We never even give it a thought. We just believe what we were taught. Columbus discovered a new world and the pilgrims settled it in search of a land free of religious persecution. We remember the Indians and the pilgrims enjoying their first Thanksgiving together, we forget that white settlers slaughtered millions upon millions of First Nation peoples in order to take what they wanted. Fine, we have what our ancestors wanted, we have all the best land, we enjoy being Americans. BUT IT WASN'T FREE. IT CAME AT THE COST OF 100 MILLION FIRST NATION HUMAN BEINGS, people who loved their land and their traditions and their religion just as the settlers did. In my opinion, their was another way to go about using some of this land, but it would have required honesty, integrity, virtue, uprightness, compassion and decency, all those "Christian" values this country claims to stand for. It is completely disgusting to realize what brutes our ancestors were and how they systematically went about obliterating the Indian race from this land for their own benefit. It's nauseating, at least for me. How other white people can not grip this truth is beyond me, how they cannot apologize for some facet of the wrong is beyond my comprehension. Without sorrow, without soft hearts, without compassion, without acknowledgment of the horribly wrong doings, these things will happen again. And it may very well happen to white people, or white people of a certain religion, or white people who own guns, or white people who are patriots, but it will happen. Then...who will be sorry? Apparently only those who suffer are sorry. Those who win and take and get and survive well BECAUSE of the suffering of others, don't seem to mind at all. Everyone just goes on living in constant denial. It's the American way!

2 comments:

  1. I'm sorry, and I know full well that I have benefited at the expense of Native people. Our Unitarian Universalist church service was on the need to apologize for the past and present. It also discussed the need to teach the actual brutal truth in history classes.
    Amber

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry, I can not understand what you said in your article, but I can see you worked hard. Keep going on.

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