The Columbus Project
by Mary Mu
Since Columbus hit the shores of Haiti, white people have taken whatever they wanted from the Americas. They came for gold and new trade items, they took them. They needed workers, so they took them. They wanted more land, so they took it. They wanted everybody to fear them and to generate more political power for their leaders, so they forced people to pray to the Christian idols. All that threatened this Christofacist conquest fell to bloody ruin. What did stand in their way? The Arawak, Carob, Aztec, Sioux, Apache, Tupinamba, Araucanian, and right here, the Iriquois Nation.
. . the natural lands, the forests, wolves, bears, eagles, pure streams and rivers, clean quiet shorelines . . . all these indigenous people and places, attacked.
Some excuse the tyrants of expansion as they do their racist aquaintances, such as "They didn't know any better", and "they came to share." Racists such as Columbus and his crew knew only what they wanted to take. They came to exploit the land and the people and kill anything and everyone that did not comply with the capitalist plan. The plan has never changed in the history of America.
So now, bitter irony wreeks from the celebration of the invasion of this land. Even the person who does not revere Columbus can emulate the same greed and exploitation as the first white invaders.
Whites expect to learn the stories that bring wisdom to the Native American people. The want to make the herbal remedies, and recover a lost sense of belonging. This is another angle to the new face of Columbus. Every week I hear him say that he's going into homeopathic medicine or wants to, that he's doing rituals that are making him a real spiritwalker. He is rushing to "discover" the mysteries of the forest and meadow in medicine before the last areas of indigenous fauna become parking lots or hazardous waste dumpsites. He is learning from the last of the tribes that this culture silenced just centuries age as threats to Christian teachings.
Detainment camps for Native Americans are a contemporary extension of his oppression. He's also trying to take music and holistic health from the African-American culture. How can he so selfish as to expect the people that have recieved the most violence from Columbus and the men he brought here to sit at the table with us and share what few stories they have preserved? The stories and the medicines are some of what little is their own in the New World that Columbus and his men built, a world of hatred and theft. White Iperialist America had better learn to share and respect. The people, and the earth, won't take another five-hundred years of greed and disrespect.
by Mary Mu
Since Columbus hit the shores of Haiti, white people have taken whatever they wanted from the Americas. They came for gold and new trade items, they took them. They needed workers, so they took them. They wanted more land, so they took it. They wanted everybody to fear them and to generate more political power for their leaders, so they forced people to pray to the Christian idols. All that threatened this Christofacist conquest fell to bloody ruin. What did stand in their way? The Arawak, Carob, Aztec, Sioux, Apache, Tupinamba, Araucanian, and right here, the Iriquois Nation.
. . the natural lands, the forests, wolves, bears, eagles, pure streams and rivers, clean quiet shorelines . . . all these indigenous people and places, attacked.
Some excuse the tyrants of expansion as they do their racist aquaintances, such as "They didn't know any better", and "they came to share." Racists such as Columbus and his crew knew only what they wanted to take. They came to exploit the land and the people and kill anything and everyone that did not comply with the capitalist plan. The plan has never changed in the history of America.
So now, bitter irony wreeks from the celebration of the invasion of this land. Even the person who does not revere Columbus can emulate the same greed and exploitation as the first white invaders.
Whites expect to learn the stories that bring wisdom to the Native American people. The want to make the herbal remedies, and recover a lost sense of belonging. This is another angle to the new face of Columbus. Every week I hear him say that he's going into homeopathic medicine or wants to, that he's doing rituals that are making him a real spiritwalker. He is rushing to "discover" the mysteries of the forest and meadow in medicine before the last areas of indigenous fauna become parking lots or hazardous waste dumpsites. He is learning from the last of the tribes that this culture silenced just centuries age as threats to Christian teachings.
Detainment camps for Native Americans are a contemporary extension of his oppression. He's also trying to take music and holistic health from the African-American culture. How can he so selfish as to expect the people that have recieved the most violence from Columbus and the men he brought here to sit at the table with us and share what few stories they have preserved? The stories and the medicines are some of what little is their own in the New World that Columbus and his men built, a world of hatred and theft. White Iperialist America had better learn to share and respect. The people, and the earth, won't take another five-hundred years of greed and disrespect.
