Indigenous lives matter, from North America to Palestine

Repeating another indigenous genocide is an evil errand

Many have watched the genocide unfolding in Gaza ignorantly, as if the event had no precedent in world history, and as if humanity had no opportunities to learn crucial lessons from the failures of our ancestors.

In fact, we have walked this road before, always with devastating consequences that too many came to recognize only too late.

Even American’s most “progressive” state has an ugly history

The genocide of indigenous North Americans continued in California well after it had already been completed across the rest of the country. For a state with such a supposedly progressive reputation, the brutality of California’s past is remarkably recent.

In the wake of the discovery of gold in 1849, legions of prospectors and settlers flocked to the west coast, which had previously been a backwater. By then, the major cities of the east had all been established, but California was still relatively wild.

Acts of genocide suffered by innocent people over the ensuing decades ranged from multiple outright massacres to a policy placing bounties on the heads of any native Californians. Children were stolen from the families for “re-education,” not unlike those forced in the torture camps of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia a century later.

From 1909 until 1979, California adopted a policy of forced sterilization—now widely recognized as an abuse of international human rights. It was applicable to not only indigenous women, but even beyond the end of their civilizations, also to Black and Latina women who were either incarcerated or resided due to disabilities in state institutions. 20,000 women were forcibly sterilized under that policy before it was officially suspended, yet the practiced has continued elsewhere in the United States at least until 2020.

The last pocket of indigenous Californians was a family of four from the Yahi tribe discovered by settlers in 1908. They were attacked by prospectors, and fled into the wilderness, where all—but one—died before revealing himself in 1911.

In his culture, people spoke their names only after another member of the tribe had introduced them first. That’s why the last indigenous Californian, Ishi, was named by settlers using his tribe’s generic word for “man.”

Ishi in 1916. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Ishi ended up working at the University of California as a janitor. He died in 1916, at the side of a UCSF doctor who befriended him. His last words were, “You stay. I go.”

Overlooked parallels

The forced sterilization of Black and Latina women, using the policy crafted originally as a genocidal strategy against indigenous women, is just one illustration of how human rights violations tend to expand if left unaccountable.

History offers any number of further examples, from 400 years of ruthless European colonialism around the world, to the last 250 years across the U.S.

While California’s genocide continued until 1916, the same—or even worse—viciousness can be observed across America generally. This country was created by the theft of land and a relentless genocide so severe that it later inspired the Nazis, who reportedly found American policies (particularly the “one drop” rule) too extreme to replicate. 

Not so different today than before

Surprisingly, the generally shameless New York Times published a powerful oped yesterday by Palestinian-American psychologist and author Hala Alyan posing the provocative question, “why must Palestinians audition for your empathy?”

Her question has a disturbingly straightforward answer: as indigenous people, Palestinians are the latest in an entirely too long line of communities whose humanity has been denied by oppressors building empires by seizing their resources.

Israeli officials have made comments in the past week likening Palestinians to “animals,” while Israeli journalists have referred to them as “savages.”

Somehow these people managed to get their jobs without seemingly having ever read a book. And they call themselves the civilized ones!

Nothing separates their—I’ll just come right out and say it: evil—descriptions of Palestinians from Columbus describing Tainos in the Caribbean as savages, or American settlers treating indigenous North Americans as if they were simply obstacles on the path to industrial progress.

In fact, all people share the inherent human dignity that the world once came to recognize and defend…that is, until the United States abandoned the international human rights regime and drove it into the gutter.

After doing so much to destroy the principles for which our nation once fought a World War, Washington is now exporting that regime of lawlessness around the world.

Your own interests are implicated

Concerns for human rights draw on sources far beyond empathy or altruism. In fact, indigenous peoples have held keys to environmental sustainability that their oppressors—industrial societies—need increasingly desperately.

The world is finally coming to recognize the priceless wisdom of indigenous people, particularly in the context of managing natural resources that industrial society has managed to either squander or alternatively destroy in wanton ignorance.

For instance, native Americans practiced forest management techniques far more advanced than the “modern” policies that drove the West to catastrophic wildfires for the past decade. Similarly, indigenous communities in South America have offered priceless wisdom about the incomparable effects of plants, whether as medicines or agents of exploring consciousness,  previously unknown to scientists.

Many observers forget that the conflict in Palestine has more to do with land and water than it does with religion. That’s yet another result of the propaganda masquerading as journalism across the United States.

Paid subscribers can access a series of poems by Palestinian authors that I’ve collected, alongside one of my own that I put to music in 2017 to help expose the parallels between life in the West Bank and the Black experience in the United States.