Endurance

Violence and misery in America is not an act of god; it is an Act of Congress.

Civil disobedience, sabotage, armed rebellion--these are some of the ways of disrupting the status quo. All revolutions require it. Without it, there would not have been a United States of America, a Civil Rights Movement, an end to Apartheid in South Africa, or a soon-to-be reunified Ireland.

Reviving Our Culture, Mapping Our Future, a film about a gathering of indigenous leaders from South Africa, Russia, and the Amazon, offers a road map for restitution.

Ecology, economics, governance, freedom--it's all connected. We are either destructive or constructive in these relationships. Colonialism, by definition, destroys indigenism. Which side are you on?

The extension of citizenship rights to peoples that have been dispossessed and subsumed by the very States that are granting these rights is simply a form of internal colonialism. Indeed, citizenship is often associated with nation building and state legitimacy and, in fact, makes no sense outside of the framework of the nation-state. Human rights on the other hand are extra-governmental and have been traditionally used to counteract the repressive capacity of states. It is for this reason that indigenous peoples have accepted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as an articulation of their rights, as opposed to the citizenship rights imposed on them by the settler state.

--Damien Short Reconciliation, Assimilation, and the Indigenous Peoples of Australia

Americans might be able to secure socialist concessions from the two capitalist political parties, but it isn't very likely. Social Security was only garnered under the threat of mass insurrection against the capitalists that caused the Great Depression. Securing universal health care, housing vouchers, and free college education is not going to happen until we elect enough socialists to Congress.

In the meantime, withdrawing support from the capitalist parties and giving our support to socialist parties and candidates will give them the voice they need to push our two-party capitalist state toward a multi-party socialist republic.

The British settlers in the 13 North American colonies were organized into militias during the century and a half before those militias united into an army that established the independent United States. The militias had only one function: Kill Indians or drive them away in order to take their land.

Actually, the British authorities attempted to limit the settlers’ incursion on Indian lands, particularly following the Treaty of Paris that ended the “French-Indian” war (7 Years War in Europe) in 1760, when the British agreed to a line marking its colonial holdings along the coast and agreed to prevent settlement beyond the Appalachian/Allegheny mountain chain, leaving the rest of the continent as Indian Country. This was one of the primary reasons for the settlers’ decision to separate from Britain to form their own continental empire.

By the time of the War of Independence, tens of thousands of settlers illegally crossed the mountain barrier into the Ohio Valley. Those settlers, mostly Scots-Irish, formed the backbone of the army of independence led by George Washington, himself a lifelong colonial officer. This kind of colonial warfare formed the purpose and goals of the U.S. military after independence, what historian William Appleman Williams called a policy of “annihilation unto unconditional surrender,” a policy that has remained in effect. This is by definition a policy of genocide.

--Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz