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Wearing my Moccasins

Monday, July 21, 2014 8:10 PM


Speaking of the current immigration controversy, from a Native American perspective, let's review a typical episode in the so-called collision of cultures (a nice euphemism for genocide) in the Americas:

It is 1608 as “undocumented" European immigrant, Captain John Smith, sails onto the Kuskarawaok or Nanticoke River and makes contact (“discovers”) the Nanticoke Indians. In time, those discovered found their traditional hunting and farming disrupted, their lands becoming deforested, and their game increasingly more scarce. Resenting the native peoples of the area for compensating the loss of game by appropriating some of the immigrants’ eco-disturbing hogs and cattle, the settlers decided to settle things by bridling against coexistence. So undocumented immigrant, Maryland governor Thomas Greene, ordered undocumented immigrant, Captain John Pike, to attack and destroy the villages and gardens of the legitimate caretakers of the land … to force them out.

It is June 10, 1610 as Baron De La Warr sails into the Delaware Bay, lands at Jamestown Virginia to persuade the “original settlers” (other undocumented European immigrants) not to give up and go home to England. Making good on his instructions from the London Virginia Company, De La Warr ordered the kidnapping of Native American children and the murdering of the Iniocasoockes, the cultural leaders of the local Powhatans. When not kidnapping and murdering, these original sodbusters raided Indian villages, burned their homes, and torched their cornfields. (If you can’t send them “home,” just send them back to Creator.)