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!