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Navajo Code Talkers | Short Documentary | EXPLORE MODE

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Change is possible! But changing the name is only a first step...

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Change is possible! But changing the name is only a first step...

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‘While changing the name is a first step, the team must still set a path for healing and reconciliation’ with Native peoples

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 Engage in past and present Indigenous people

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 Engage in past and present Indigenous people

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Amplifying Indigenous Experiences | PBS All-Stars Lessons | PBS LearningMedia

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Students will watch three episodes of the UNLADYLIKE2020 series of 26 short films and explore the similarities in issues affecting these women while also identifying the qualities that made them unique. The lessons are about finding common threads between the women, and also between the past and the present.

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Myth of Thanksgiving                                             Native American perspectives on The Pilgrims               

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Myth of Thanksgiving                                             Native American perspectives on The Pilgrims               

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Myth of Thanksgiving

From the Collections: PAST FORWARD: Conversations with American Experience | Native Americans
Native American perspectives on The Pilgrims
Wampanoag historian Linda Coombs and Narragansett Knowledge Keeper Cassius Spears speak with filmmaker Yvonne Russo about the experiences of Native populations at the time of European settlers' arrival in New England 400 years ago, and what is actually known about the first Thanksgiving.

Conversation livestreamed and recorded on November 18, 2020.

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Myth of Thanksgiving | American Experience | PBS

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Wampanoag historian Linda Coombs and Narragansett Knowledge Keeper Cassius Spears speak with filmmaker Yvonne Russo about the experiences of Native populations at the time of European settlers' arrival in New England 400 years ago, and what is actually known about the first Thanksgiving.

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For the Wampanoags, the fourth Thursday in November is considered a day of mourning, not a day of celebration.

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For the Wampanoags, the fourth Thursday in November is considered a day of mourning, not a day of celebration.

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PLYMOUTH, Mass. - Overlooking the chilly waters of Plymouth Bay, about three dozen tourists swarmed a park ranger as he recounted the history of Plymouth Rock - the famous symbol of the arrival of the Pilgrims here four centuries ago.

Nearby, others waited to tour a replica of the Mayflower, the ship that carried the Pilgrims across the ocean.

On a hilltop above stood a quiet tribute to the American Indians who helped the starving Pilgrims survive. Few people bother to visit the statue of Ousamequin - the chief, or sachem, of the Wampanoag Nation whose people once numbered somewhere between 30,000 to 100,000 and whose land once stretched from Southeastern Massachusetts to parts of Rhode Island.

Long marginalized and misrepresented in the American story, the Wampanoags are braced for what's coming this month as the country marks the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving between the Pilgrims and Indians.

But the actual history of what happened in 1621 bears little resemblance to what most Americans are taught in grade school, historians say. There was likely no turkey served. There were no feathered headdresses worn. And, initially, there was no effort by the Pilgrims to invite the Wampanoags to the feast they'd made possible.

Just as Native American activists have demanded the removal of Christopher Columbus statues and pushed to transform the Columbus holiday into an acknowledgment of his brutality toward Indigenous people, they have long objected to the popular portrayal of Thanksgiving.

For the Wampanoags and many other American Indians, the fourth Thursday in November is considered a day of mourning, not a day of celebration.

Because while the Wampanoags did help the Pilgrims survive, their support was followed by years of a slow, unfolding genocide of their people and the taking of their land.

To learn the history of the Wampanoags and what happened to them after the first Thanksgiving, a visitor has to drive 30 miles south of Plymouth to the town of Mashpee, where a modest, clapboard museum sits along a two-lane road. Outside, there's a wetu, a traditional Wampanoag house made from cedar poles and the bark of tulip poplar trees, and a mishoon, an Indian canoe.

Inside the three-room house sits Mother Bear, a 71-year-old Mashpee Wampanoag, hand-stitching a deer skin hat. She's lived her whole life in this town and is considered one of the keepers of the Wampanoag version of the first Thanksgiving and how the encounter turned into a centuries-long disaster for the Mashpee, who now number about 2,800.

That story continues to get ignored by the roughly 1.5 million annual visitors to Plymouth's museums and souvenir shops. The Wampanoag museum draws about 800 visitors a year.

Paula Peters, a Mashpee Wampanoag who is an author and educator on Native American history, said "we don't acknowledge the American holiday of Thanksgiving ... it's a marginalization and mistelling of our story."

The Wampanoags, whose name means "People of the First Light" in their native language, trace their ancestors back at least 10,000 years to southeastern Massachusetts, a land they called Patuxet.

In the 1600s, they lived in 69 villages, each with a chief, or sachem, and a medicine man. They had "messenger runners," members of the tribe with good memories and the endurance to run to neighboring villages to deliver messages.

They occupied a land of plenty, hunting deer, elk and bear in the forests, fishing for herring and trout, and harvesting quahogs in the rivers and bays. They planted corn and used fish remains as fertilizer. In the winter, they moved inland from the harsh weather, and in the spring they moved to the coastlines.

They had traded - and fought - with European explorers since 1524.

In 1614, before the arrival of the Pilgrims, the English lured a well-known Wampanoag - Tisquantum, who was called Squanto by the English - and 20 other Wampanoag men onto a ship with the intention of selling them into slavery in Malaga, Spain. Squanto spent years trying to get back to his homeland.

During his absence, the Wampanoags were nearly wiped out by a mysterious disease that some Wampanoags believe came from the feces of rats aboard European boats, while other historians think it was likely small pox or possibly yellow fever.

Known as "The Great Dying," the pandemic lasted three years.

By the time Squanto returned home in 1619, two-thirds of his people had been killed by it. The English explorer Thomas Dermer described the once-populous villages along the banks of the bay as being "utterly void" of people.

In 1620, the English aboard the Mayflower made their way to Plymouth after making landfall in Provincetown. The Wampanoags watched as women and children got off the boat.

They knew their interactions with the Europeans would be different this time.

"You don't bring your women and children if you're planning to fight," said Paula Peters, who also runs her own communications agency called SmokeSygnals.

The Wampanoags kept tabs on the Pilgrims for months. In their first winter, half died due to cold, starvation and disease.

Ousamequin, often referred to as Massasoit, which is his title and means "great sachem," faced a nearly impossible situation, historians and educators said. His nation's population had been ravaged by disease, and he needed to keep peace with the neighboring Narragansetts. He probably reasoned that the better weapons of the English - guns versus his people's bows and arrows - would make them better allies than enemies.

In the spring of 1621, he made the first contact.

"It wasn't that he was being kind or friendly, he was in dire straits and being strategic," said Steven Peters, the son of Paula Peters and creative director at her agency. "We were desperately trying to not become extinct."

By the fall, the Pilgrims - thanks in large part to the Wampanoags teaching them how to plant beans and squash in a mound with maize around it and use fish remains as fertilizer - had their first harvest of crops. To celebrate its first success as a colony, the Pilgrims had a "harvest feast" that became the basis for what's now called Thanksgiving.

The Wampanoags weren't invited.

Ousamequin and his men showed up only after the English in their revelry shot off some of their muskets. At the sound of gunfire, the Wampanoags came running, fearing they were headed to war.

"One hundred warriors show up armed to the teeth after they heard muskets fired," said Paula Peters.

Told it was a harvest celebration, the Wampanoags joined, bringing five deer to share, she said. There was fowl, fish, eel, shellfish and possibly cranberries from the area's natural bogs.

In his book, "This Land Is Their Land," author David J. Silverman said schoolchildren who make construction-paper feathered headdresses every year to portray the Indians at the first Thanksgiving are being taught fiction.

The Wampanoags didn't wear them. Men wore a mohawk "roach" made from porcupine hair and strapped to their heads.

Darius Coombs, a Mashpee Wampanoag cultural outreach coordinator, said there's such misinterpretation about what Thanksgiving means to American Indians.

"For us, Thanksgiving kicked off colonization," he said. "Our lives changed dramatically. It brought disease, servitude and so many things that weren't good for Wampanoags and other Indigenous cultures."

Linda Coombs, an Aquinnah Wampanoag who is a tribal historian, museum educator and sister-in-law of Darius, said Thanksgiving portrays an idea of "us seeming like idiots who welcomed all of these changes and supports the idea that Pilgrims brought us a better life because they were superior."

Mother Bear, a clan mother and cousin of Paula Peters whose English name is Anita Peters, tells visitors to the tribe's museum that a 1789 Massachusetts law made it illegal and "punishable by death" to teach a Mashpee Wampanoag Indian to read or write.

She recounts how the English pushed the Wampanoag off their land and forced many to convert to Christianity.

"We had a pray-or-die policy at one point here among our people," Mother Bear said. "If you didn't become a Christian, you had to run away or be killed."

Wampanoag land that had been held in common was eventually divided up, with each family getting 60 acres, and a system of taxation was put in place - both antithetical to Wampanoag culture.

Much later, the Wampanoags, like other tribes, also saw their children sent to harsh Indian boarding schools, where they were told to cut their long hair, abandon their "Indian ways," and stop speaking their native language.

Paula Peters said at least two members of her family were sent to Carlisle Indian school in Pennsylvania, which became the first government-run boarding school for Native American children in 1879. Its founder, Civil War veteran and Army Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt, was an advocate of forced assimilation, invoking the motto: "Kill the Indian, Save the Man."

Mother Bear recalls how her mother's uncle, William L. "High Eagle" James, told his family to destroy any writings he'd done in their native language when he died. He didn't want them to get in trouble for having the documents.

Frank James, a well-known Aquinnah Wampanoag activist, called his people's welcoming and befriending the Pilgrims in 1621 "perhaps our biggest mistake."

In 1970, he created a "National Day of Mourning" that's become an annual event on Thanksgiving for some Wampanoags after planners for the 350th anniversary of the Mayflower landing refused to let him debunk the myths of the holiday as part of a commemoration. By then, only a few of the original Wampanoag tribes still existed.

"We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people," he wrote in that speech.

In the 1970s, the Mashpee Wampanoags sued to reclaim some of their ancestral homelands. But they lost, in part, because a federal judge said they weren't then officially recognized as a tribe.

The Mashpee Wampanoags filed for federal recognition in the mid-1970s, and more than three decades later, in 2007, they were granted that status. (The Gay Head Aquinnah on Martha's Vineyard are also federally recognized.)

In 2015, about 300 acres was put in federal trust for the Mashpee Wampanoag under President Barack Obama. That essentially gave them a reservation, although it is composed of dozens of parcels that are scattered throughout the Cape Cod area and represents half of 1% of their land historically.

But President Donald Trump's administration tried to take the land out of trust, jeopardizing their ability to develop it.

Mashpee Wampanoag tribal officials said they're still awaiting final word from the Department of the Interior - now led by Deb Haaland, the first Native American to head the agency - on the status of their land.

Some tribal leaders said a potential casino development would bring much-needed revenue to their community. But without the land in trust, Mashpee Wampanoag council member David Weeden said it diminishes the tribe's sovereignty.

"Four hundred years later we're still fighting for our land, our culture and our people," said Brian Weeden, the tribe's chairman and David Weeden's nephew.

The Wampanoags are dealing with other serious issues, including the coronavirus pandemic. The tribe paid for hotel rooms for covid-infected members so elders in multigenerational households wouldn't get sick.

Even before the pandemic, the Wampanoags struggled with chronically high rates of diabetes, blood pressure, cancers, suicide and opioid abuse. In the expensive Cape Cod area, many Wampanoags can't afford housing and must live elsewhere.

They also worry about overdevelopment and pollution threatening waterways and wildlife.

"The land is always our first interest," said Vernon "Silent Drum" Lopez, the 99-year-old Mashpee Wampanoag chief. "It's our survival."

When she was 8 years old, Paula Peters said, a schoolteacher explained the Thanksgiving tale. After the story, another child asked, "'What happened to the Indians?'"

The teacher answered, 'Sadly, they're all dead.'"

"No, they're not," Paula Peters said she replied. "I'm still here."

She and other Wampanoags are trying to keep their culture and traditions alive.

Five years ago, the tribe started a school on its land that has about two dozen kids, who range in age from 2 to 9. They learn math, science, history and other subjects in their native Algonquian language. The tribe also offers language classes for older tribal members, many of whom were forced to not speak their language and eventually forgot.

"We want to make sure these kids understand what it means to be Native and to be Wampanoag," said Nitana Greendeer, a Mashpee Wampanoag who is the head of the tribe's school.

At the school one recent day, students and teachers wore orange T-shirts to honor their ancestors who had been sent to Indian boarding schools and "didn't come home," Greendeer said.

In one classroom, a teacher taught a dozen kids the days of the week, words for the weather, and how to describe their moods. A math lesson involved building a traditional Wampanoag wetu. Another involved students identifying plants important to American Indians.

There are no lessons planned for the 400th anniversary of Thanksgiving, Greendeer said. If the children ask, the teachers will explain: "That's not something we celebrate because it resulted in a lot of death and cultural loss. Thanksgiving doesn't mean to us what it means to many Americans."

This year some Wampanoags will go to Plymouth for the National Day of Mourning. Others will gather at the old Indian Meeting House, built in 1684 and one of the oldest American Indian churches in the eastern United States, to pay their respects to their ancestors, many of whom are buried in the surrounding cemetery. Plenty of Wampanoags will gather with their families for a meal to give thanks - not for the survival of the Pilgrims but for the survival of their tribe.

"History has not been kind to our people," Steven Peters said he tells his young sons.

"Children were taken away. Our language was silenced," he said. "People were killed." Still, "we persevered. We found a way to stay."

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This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later.

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PLYMOUTH, Mass. - Overlooking the chilly waters of Plymouth Bay, about three dozen tourists swarmed a park ranger as he recounted the history of Plymouth Rock - the famous symbol of the arrival of the Pilgrims here four centuries ago. Nearby, others waited to tour a replica of the Mayflower, the ship that carried the Pilgrims across the ocean.

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Obama Administration Actions to Advance Tribal Nations

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Obama Administration Actions to Advance Tribal Nations

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Obama Administration Actions to Advance Tribal Nations

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The 3,000-member Quinault Nation envisions the construction of a new village

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The 3,000-member Quinault Nation envisions the construction of a new village

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Indigenous People React To Indigenous Representation In Film And TV

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Indigenous People React To Indigenous Representation In Film And TV

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Indigenous People React To Indigenous Representation In Film And TV (Pocahontas, The Lone Ranger)

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Everything You Wanted To Know About 'Indians'

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Everything You Wanted To Know About 'Indians'

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MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

I'm Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Coming up, we will hear from musician, activist and now author Wyclef Jean. He's out with a new memoir and we'll hear from him about his career and very interesting life story, and yes, he answers questions that people have about relationships in his life. That's coming up later in the program.

But first, it's Columbus Day and you might've been taught in school that today is all about celebrating the ship captain who might be considered this continent's first immigrant, but over the years that narrative has been shifting - or at least is being shared - with a focus on those already here when Columbus and his shipmates arrived in the Americas.

And that brings up questions that many people in these politically correct times are afraid to ask. Anton Treuer has written about this very subject in his latest book "Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask." He is a professor of Objiwe at Bemidji State University in Minnesota and he's with us now to talk about Columbus Day as well as some of the other questions that, as the book puts it, you wanted to know but were afraid to ask.

Welcome, Professor. Thanks so much for joining us.

ANTON TREUER: Thanks for having me on.

MARTIN: I did want to get your perspective on Columbus Day, which is observed in a lot of places today, but before we do, I did want to ask about the inspiration for writing this book. Now, you tell one crazy story about this encounter you had with this woman in the forest one day, but I wanted to ask, was that the encounter that led to the book or were there a series of things like that?

TREUER: You know, there were a lot of things that really led to it. I grew up in Bemidji, Minnesota, which is located right in between the three largest reservations in the state. And I guess like many, you know, children in a small rural area, you know, simply wanted to go any place that had a zip code with a higher population density than the one I came from.

But I also wanted to escape the sometimes tangled borderland of racial misunderstandings and thought I'd escape from it all. And when I ended up at Princeton University, I thought, you know, these kids are some of the best educated in the country. They'll know a lot more about all kinds of diversity issues.

And when I got there, you know, the first question was, where's your tomahawk? And I quickly realized that that, you know, borderland was following me everywhere I went. The incident that you reference - at one point I heard that there was a sweat lodge ceremony taking place in the New Jersey woods and drove out there to check it out. And to my great shock, there were about 20 completely naked non-native people waiting in the woods to participate in this ceremony.

And you know, part of me wanted to laugh. Part of me wanted to run away. Part of me wanted to be angry. I opened the car door and was immediately folded into a tight embrace by one of these completely naked strangers who started saying I'm so sorry for what my people did to your people. And of course the urge to be angry or to run away only escalated after that.

But as I looked at this woman's face, she was an elder and on the verge of tears. And no matter how misguided her understandings of Native Americans were, her emotion was sincere. And it kind of brought me a bit of a strange epiphany that there was no running from the borderland. There was only a way through it and I would have to do my part to try to dispel stereotypes but also provide meaningful answers to legitimate questions.

MARTIN: Well, to that end, I mean both of those stories that you've told us encapsulate, I think, one of the things you're trying to deal with here. One is the tomahawk story, which is a stereotype of, you know, violence, aggressiveness, and then the other is, let's just for the sake of brevity, we'll just say, you know, a positive stereotype about being, you know, earth loving. And I'm curious to know in your own life which of those stereotypes have you found the more burdensome?

TREUER: Oh, I guess probably with Native American history and culture one of the most frustrating things is that we are so often imagined but so infrequently well understood. And although you can point to the experience of black Americans, of Hispanic people in America, you know, to see many areas of differential treatment of direct racism, at least those subsections of the population are more widely represented in positions of academic power and political power.

Certainly not enough, but Native Americans are so grossly under-represented in just about every area that it allows even the best educated people to be and remain completely ignorant about the first people of the land.

MARTIN: So native people can be more readily imagined than known?

TREUER: That's right. You know, and you see it in so many ways. It's on issues like, well, mascots for sports teams. You know, we've come a long way since, you know, Little Black Sambo, you know, effigies and things like that kind of dominated the cultural landscape in America, but for some reason Chief Wahoo has persisted.

And we're slowly moving in the direction of doing away with native people being mascots for sports teams, but you know, a team like the Redskins is dominated even by black players who might in other ways be very sensitized to issues of race and racial discrimination but when it comes to native people can very easily turn a blind eye to it. But as long as the mascots or the stereotypes persist and people of all races aren't challenging that action, this issue will linger on.

MARTIN: I'm speaking with Anton Treuer, author of the book "Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask." I've got to ask, Indians versus Native Americans?

TREUER: Yeah, great question, and that's usually one of the first ones that comes up. So for the terminology, this is one area where you'll find a diversity of opinions. And that's really the first disclaimer to put out there about, you know, my work or any work on any subject, really, is that I represent one person's view.

For me, obviously the term Indian is a misnomer from the Columbus experience when Christopher Columbus thought he was in China, Japan, the Indies, and these are Indians, and there it made its transition, you know, into European languages. So it's a misnomer, but all of the other terms have some sort of drawback too.

Native American is preferred in some circles. Sometimes indigenous is as well. But if you say, you know, a Philadelphia native, does that mean a Native American from Philadelphia or just someone who's born and bred? And if you say indigenous, then you also have to qualify where you're talking about because there are indigenous people to every continent.

MARTIN: But you use Indian in the title though.

TREUER: I do.

MARTIN: And there are other media outlets like Indian Country Today, for example...

TREUER: Right.

MARTIN: ...that prefers Indian. So...

TREUER: Yeah, that's true.

MARTIN: So why do you prefer it? Or why do you use it in the title?

TREUER: Yeah. I use them all fairly interchangeably. I use it in the title because it's one of the most common nomers associated with this group of people. I'm aware of its shortcomings, but if you said, you know, "Everything You Wanted to Know About Indigenous People," then you'd have to add "Of North America"...

(LAUGHTER)

TREUER: ...or something else. You kind of have to pick one in spite of its complications.

MARTIN: OK. Well, again, we hope this will be our first conversation and not our last because I'm sure there are many questions that people would like to ask and have answered, but since it's Columbus Day, I did want to ask you your perspective on Columbus Day.

TREUER: Yeah. On the one hand, I think there's a growing awareness that Columbus didn't discover America - that the place was densely inhabited by other human beings. But certainly the Columbus experience would change the entire world. But in spite of the fact that Christopher Columbus wrote lots of letters and kept many journals and by his second voyage there were many official scribes, army officers, priests, writing about the experience, over 500 years later this piece of history gets sugarcoated a lot.

And you know, we now know as a fact of history that on Columbus' second voyage the Spanish instituted a gold dust tribute whereby those who failed to bring a certain quantity of gold dust would have their hands chopped off. And we know for a fact of history that the Spanish cut the hands off of 30,000 people that year on the island of Espanola - what's now Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

And we know that within 30 years the two million people that the Spanish estimated to be inhabiting that island before contact were completely annihilated. And that is a textbook definition of genocide. And we have so successfully sugarcoated the history that we have obfuscated some of the most important parts of that story.

MARTIN: I was just wondering, what would you want the takeaway to be?

TREUER: I would want everybody to be thinking about truth and reconciliation. We have to say what happened, how it happened, why it happened and acknowledging the way that systems of privilege were established and maintained and still maintained, even today, as part of the process to heal those ancient and contemporary wounds and make things better for the next 500 years.

MARTIN: Why don't you just pick one more question, since every - you know, your book is "Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask." I'm sure there are a lot of questions that people might have. Why don't you just pick one and answer?

TREUER: I guess, you know, there are many questions that come up. A lot of people don't understand what's really different about Native American experience in the Americas and native communities are different from many other cultural enclaves, like the Amish, for example, who have preserved culture, life ways, even language.

And one of the primary differences for Native American groups is the fact that they also have nations and governments and governments that predated the United States and the United States Constitution has incorporated a way to deal with native nations that's entirely different than the way they deal with all of the diverse immigrants who've come here and it really defines Native American people and their communities as sovereign nations rather than cultural enclaves. I think that gets misunderstood. And, sometimes, if there's an issue with treaty rights or with, you know, any number of things that come up, there is a tendency to say, why do native people get special or differential treatment?

And it really boils down to this. You know, if one wants to change the status of native nations, it really involves changing the entire U.S. Constitution and probably revisiting all of the treaties by which the land went from native hands to everyone else's and that gets to be a complicated process, which I'm sure the tribes would actually be pretty interested in engaging because native people have lawyers today.

MARTIN: OK. Good point. Anton Treuer is a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University. He's the author of a number of books. We're talking about his latest, "Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask," and he joined us from member station KNBJ in Bemidji, Minnesota.

Professor, thank you so much for speaking with us.

TREUER: Thank you for having me on.

Copyright © 2012 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Everything You Wanted To Know About 'Indians'

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Columbus Day always carries some controversy. In these politically correct times, people who want to learn more about Native Americans, and their side of the story, might be afraid to ask. Host Michel Martin sorts through some of those tough questions with Anton Treuer, who wrote Everything You Wanted To Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask.

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How Pocahontas Redefined How Europeans Saw Native Americans

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Will First Nations voters keep him in office or throw him out?

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Will First Nations voters keep him in office or throw him out?

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Miles Morrisseau
Special to Indian Country Today
Justin Trudeau swept to power in November 2015 to the tune of the song, "Sunny Days," a Canadian classic by the band Lighthouse that is an ode to smoking marijuana and sitting in the sun doing nothing.

And things stayed high for the hip, young Canadian prime minister as he took charge. One of the first things he did in office was legalize marijuana, and his support bumped up among youth and the Indigenous community, which saw the marijuana business booming in the legal and independent market on First Nations across Canada.

Now, however, Trudeau is headed for a snap election of his own making, called in hopes of winning a majority in Parliament as poll numbers showed the government scoring well among voters on pandemic stimulus checks but little else.

With the Sept. 20 election day approaching, however, the skies have turned stormy and Trudeau's poll numbers have dropped, with the rival Conservative Party taking the lead in the polls soon after the election was called. A majority government of more than 170 seats in the Canadian parliament is no longer the goal; Trudeau is now in a fight for his job.

Much of the disappointment and anger against Trudeau and his governing Liberals is over the fact that the election didn't need to be called at all just two years into his second 4-year term, with the pandemic continuing to drag on.

The pullout from Afghanistan has put his role as Canada's Commander in Chief in the spotlight as military families and friends question the sacrifices and the losses over the past 20 years. Trudeau's fresh, never-served face does not provide much empathy.

All summer, the real threat of climate change was seen and breathed over much of Canada as smoke from wildfires across the west and from south of the border filled the skies. The province of British Columbia is still battling wildfires and will be throughout the quick election cycle. Tropical storms continue to threaten the Atlantic provinces.

It was not a time when people wanted to go to the polls, and apathy now is losing ground to anger.

But if this is the end of the line for Trudeau as Canadian prime minister, it could well be Indigenous people who make the final decision. He called it on Election Day in 2015.

"No relationship is more important to me and to Canada than the one with First Nations, Metis Nation and Inuit Peoples," he said at the time.

He confirmed the spiritual degree to which he valued the relationship at the Assembly of First Nations gathering in Ottawa on Dec. 8, 1015, when he vowed to implement recommendations of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was formed in 2008 as a condition of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.

"The constitutionally guaranteed rights of First Nations in Canada are not an inconvenience but a sacred obligation," he told a cheering crowd at the assembly. "We will fully implement the calls-to-action in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission starting with the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples."

Now, however, his relationship with First Nations peoples is in tatters. Critics have accused him of mishandling interactions with the Indigenous attorney general and the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Climate change is hitting home for many communities.

And international attention has focused on Canada as hundreds of bodies of Indigenous children have been found buried at former Indian residential school sites, many in unmarked graves, while the search continues for more.
(Related: Platforms of major parties for Indigenous in Canada election)
He still has support, however, from a number of tribal leaders.

"We are still recovering from the regime of Stephen Harper (Conservative Party) and the damage that he has caused to funding to First Nations people," Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakinak (MKO) Grand Chief Garrison Settee told Indian Country Today. "He was very disrespectful to First Nations leaders and it was very difficult to get work with his office and the bureaucracy."

MKO represents 10 First Nations in Northern Manitoba and on Aug. 31, 2021, passed two resolutions, one supporting the Liberal candidate and the other asking members to support the Liberals.
Political climate
"Nothing is perfect," Settee said. "But we would rather work with a government that is trying to meet us halfway."

The Liberal Party did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Indian Country Today.

The climate crisis for many Indigenous peoples is the existential threat that faces humanity and a challenge to Indigenous peoples as caretakers of Mother Earth.

Fires have burned through western Canada and northern Ontario, and smoke filled the sky over much of the country when the government was shut down and the election was called. Tropical storms and hurricanes have continued to cause more damage along the Atlantic coast, and the province of Newfoundland is currently preparing to be hit by Hurricane Larry.

In 2019, the Vuntut First Nation declared a climate emergency and the Inuit Tapirat Kanatami is asking the incoming government to "advance actions identified in the Inuit Climate Change Strategy, including supporting coordinated climate policy that improves Inuit quality of life."

Yet the nation under Trudeau has continued to push fossil fuel projects that environmentalists and Indigenous peoples say are damaging the region.

The Canadian government nationalized the Trans Canada pipeline when the Liberal government purchased it in 2018 from Kinder-Morgan. The pipeline is built to provide a destination for Canada's tar sands oil after the collapse of the Keystone XL pipeline project. Instead of going south to refineries in the United States, however, the Trans Canada pipeline will take the oil across the Canadian Rocky Mountains to the British Columbia coastline to fill tankers headed to China and elsewhere.
Thousands of unmarked graves
Minister of Climate Change Jonathan Wilkinson, appointed to the role by Trudeau, suggested last month that the Trans Canada pipeline was good for the environment as the country transitions away from fossil fuel extraction.

"Canada needs to ensure that in the context of that transition, it's extracting full value for its resources and using that money to push forward in terms of reducing emissions," Wilkinson said in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Company on Aug. 9, 2021.

The discovery of 215 bodies in unmarked graves beside the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia in May brought the reality of Canada's Indigenous genocide to the attention of the world. Since then, thousands more remains have been found and thousands more are expected to be found.

Canada operated more than 130 federal Indian residential schools with more than 150,000 Indigenous children attending between the 1870s and the mid-1990s. Today, residential schools are generally run by religious denominations.

The Canadian schools were modeled after the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the United States, and Indigenous children were often snatched from their families and shipped off to harsh conditions.

The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement was implemented on Sept. 19, 2007, an agreement negotiated by the Canadian government, churches, survivors, the Assembly of First Nations and other Indigenous organizations. The agreement provided former residential school students with financial compensation. The government also provided $125 million to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, which ceased operation in 2014, and agreed to support an Indian residential crisis line to help people seeking support.

Lynne Groulx, chief executive of the Native Women's Association of Canada, said Indigenous reconciliation is an election issue important to all voters.

"It is definitely important to Canadian voters and has been shown in a number of polls," she told Indian Country Today. "Particularly since the discovery of the remains of the children, there has been an outpouring of support from the Canadian population at large with a high degree of caring and empathy."
Early conflicts
The association as well as other Indigenous organizations are working to get Indigenous peoples registered and voting this election.

But what reconciliation means is undefined. The question of whether to raise the Canadian flags - which were lowered across the country to remember the children who died at Indian residential schools - has become a campaign talking point, with Conservative challenger Erin O'Toole promising to raise the flags back up if elected prime minister.

Trudeau's handling of other Indigenous issues has also tempered his support among First Nations people.

In appointing his cabinet, Trudeau named Member of Parliament Jody Wilson-Raybould, Kwak'wala, as minister of justice and attorney general - the highest post ever held by an Indigenous person in the Canadian government. The relationship seemed to be one held in the highest regard, but eventually ended in conflict.

The dispute came after Quebec-based construction giant SNC-Lavalin was charged with fraud and corruption in overseas contracting, including allegations of bribing officials in Libya. As the case was set to go to trial, Liberal government officials began to push Wilson-Raybould to use her power as attorney general to move the case to remediation.

Trudeau at first denied trying to influence the case, but details emerged that he had pressured Wilson-Raybould to approve the mediation.

Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion reported that Trudeau met with Wilson-Raybould on Sept. 17, 2018, at which time "she reiterated her decision to not intervene in the Director of Public Prosecutions' decision to not invite SNC-Lavalin to enter into a remediation agreement. She also expressed to Mr. Trudeau her concern of inappropriate attempts to interfere politically with the Attorney General in a criminal matter."

The commissioner concluded that Trudeau used his position of authority over Wilson-Raybould to seek to influence, both directly and indirectly, her decision on whether she should overrule the prosecution's decision not to invite SNC-Lavalin to enter into negotiations.

It would be hard to imagine a similar situation playing out in Washington, D.C., with such minimal political fallout. Wilson-Raybould, who retained her seat in Parliament while serving as minister, eventually was shuffled out of her powerful position in the Trudeau government in 2019. She then was kicked out of party and stripped of her rights to run as a Liberal.

She ran for re-election to Parliament as an Independent in 2019 and won, becoming the first woman to win as an Independent in Canadian history. She is not seeking re-election on the Sept. 20 ballot.
What's ahead
Trudeau's handling of missing and murdered Indigenous women has also been questioned. The so-called Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, released June 5, 2019, called out the Liberal government for its lack of action.

"There has been very limited movement to implement recommendations from previous reports," the report stated. "What little efforts have been made have focused more on reactive rather than preventative measures. This is a significant barrier to addressing the root causes of violence. Further, insufficient political will continues to be a roadblock across all initiatives."

For now, it appears Trudeau's backing is waning among some Indigenous supporters.

As rumors of an early election call began to swirl, Wilson-Raybould took to Twitter and tweeted at the prime minister to slow down the march to election and face the challenges of finding 215 children's bodies buried with more to be found.

"If you care enough to make things right, stop your selfish jockeying for an election - which no one really wants - and do what you promised in 2018. #215+," she tweeted soon after the first bodies were discovered at Kamloops.

Mumilaq Qaqqaq, an Inuit member of Parliament who is a member of the opposition New Democratic Party, issued a scathing indictment of the Trudeau years in a farewell speech to her colleagues.

"During my time in this chamber, I have heard so many pretty words like reconciliation, and diversity and inclusion," said Quaqqaq, who is not seeking re-election. "I have been called courageous, brave, and strong by people outside of my party. But let me be honest - brutally honest - nice words, with no action, hurt when they are uttered by those with power."

Even after the snap election was called, the Liberals continued making moves that did not bolster their support in the Indigenous community. On Aug. 31, 2021, the Native Women's Association of Canada demanded the Indigenous Affairs minister explain the appointment of a non-Indigenous man as executive director of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Secretariat.

"Colonialism is clearly alive and well in this country," Groulx, the association's chief executive, said in a letter to the minister.

Still, for some Indigenous leaders, there is no election choice other than the Liberals. Soon after the snap election was called, at an event for New Democratic Party leader and prime minister-hopeful Jagmeet Singh, two First Nations Chiefs endorsed a rival candidate from the governing Liberals.

On Aug. 26, the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs' Grand Chief Arlen Dumas joined with Grand Chief Settee at a press conference to endorse Liberal party candidate Shirley Robinson, Cree, who is challenging the New Democratic Party incumbent Niki Ashton for a seat in Parliament representing the voting district of Churchill- Keewatinook.
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The race is on for each vote and every seat in the House of Parliament, with a minority government for the Liberals the most likely outcome. In Canada, governing without a majority means sharing power with one or more of the opposition parties. One seat could be the difference between ruling the country and sharing the power.

With the race that close, the Indigenous vote hasn't been so important in a Canadian election since First Nations got the right to vote in 1960.

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Analysis: Justin Trudeau faces 'snap' election, Indigenous relations in tatters

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Miles Morrisseau Special to Indian Country Today Justin Trudeau swept to power in November 2015 to the tune of the song, "Sunny Days," a Canadian classic by the band Lighthouse that is an ode to smoking marijuana and sitting in the sun doing nothing.

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In 1776, a powerful empire was born in North America. The Lakotas had reached the Black Hills, the most sacred place and most coveted buffalo hunting grounds in the western plains.

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In 1776, a powerful empire was born in North America. The Lakotas had reached the Black Hills, the most sacred place and most coveted buffalo hunting grounds in the western plains.

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The rise and fall of the Lakota Empire - Pekka Hämäläinen

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Thanksgiving - Traditional VS a different viewpoint COs by Nathalie Barat.

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Thanksgiving - Traditional VS a different viewpoint COs by Nathalie Barat.

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The past, present and future of Native American food

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The past, present and future of Native American food

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THE SIOUX CHEF
Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge reservation

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Sean Sherman: The past, present and future of Native American food

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When you think of North American cuisine, do Indigenous foods come to mind? Chef Sean Sherman serves up an essential history lesson that explains the absence of Native American culinary traditions across the continent, highlighting why revitalizing Indigenous education sits at the center of a better diet and healthier relationship with the planet.

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We Are the Land: A History of Native California

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We Are the Land: A History of Native California

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JULY 2, 2021

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I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area of California for eight years during the 1970s and 1980s. One of the reasons I moved there in the first place was because of its radical history, much of it fairly recent and much of it still alive at the time. It was one of the few places I have lived in the United States where a fair amount of that history was somewhat common knowledge, even mainstream-the Black Panther Party, Free Speech Movement, People's Park, Haight-Ashbury and the counterculture come to mind. While I lived there, an awareness of the historical role of the Latino population in California was on the rise. One group whose history was less known and mostly barely acknowledged was that of the original inhabitants of the land. It was as if the indigenous people whose lives had been disrupted and their lands stolen had never existed. This was in spite of various efforts by the descendants of some First Peoples to reverse that erasure. I had never lived in a place where the histories of Native Americans (no matter how distorted) had been so completely erased.

It was through an Ojibwa fellow I knew for a short time that I learned the names of some of the California Native peoples tribes: the Ohlone, the Shoshone, the Nisenan were just the beginning of a long list of Native Peoples group identities. Unfortunately, even armed with these names, the actual histories were still difficult to discover. There didn't seem to be many books written about any of them. Most municipalities built on land taken from the indigenous ancestors gave little or no acknowledgment of who was there before the European and American occupiers. No museums existed dedicated to this history existed while the museums that did exist celebrating California's colonial history barely mentioned those the colonizers found when they arrived.

A new book, titled We Are the Land: A History of Native California, is an attempt to fill in this historical gap. Authored by historians Damon B. Akins and William J. Bauer, Jr., the text is a comprehensive, decades-spanning discussion of Native People's history in the territory now known as California. Each chapter is deeply researched via both primary and secondary sources. The narrative is academic in approach, but mostly conversational in tone, making it accessible to the general public. Like many texts concerning complex and even complicated histories, the challenge to the authors is to create a readable and complete story that provides both detail and context. Given the difficulty of the task-from plowing through research to composing an interesting and concise chronicle-Akins and Bauer have written a classic.

This is a history seen through the lenses of indigenous communities and individual storytellers, not the eyes of great capitalists and invaders. The indigenous history prior to the European and American invasion is told via legends and remembrance. The history of these same peoples becomes one of resistance to and accommodation with those intruders once the first contact is made. This is similar to other such texts like Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the United States. Of course, it seems ridiculous to think any other approach could be accurate, especially in the twenty-first century. However, the reader knows that a small but powerful element of the ruling elite vehemently oppose histories that tell the truth about the brutal European and the US conquest of the new world. After all, such truths give lie to their holy legends about American exceptionalism.

The book is mostly arranged chronologically. However, interspersed between the chronology are chapters focused on the history of individual California cities: Ukiah, Los Angeles, Berkeley and Oakland, Sacramento, etc. Each of these chapters summarizes the particular history of the Native Peoples who lived there and the results of their interaction with the Spanish, the Americans and even the Russians, who traded with various coastal peoples. Attention is paid to the ecology of the area and its effect on the relations between indigenous people and the foreign invader. One thing becomes quite clear as the reader delves further into the text-settlers, prospectors, politicians and the US Army supported each other intentionally and otherwise in the genocide of California's indigenous people. The massacres by settlers were joined with rewards offered by the government for trophies of body parts from dead Indians. Laws intentionally misnamed to create an illusion that they were designed to protect Native People's actually exacerbated their removal from their lands, the kidnapping of their children and the disruption of their culture and economy. Although the Spanish missions were devastating to Native Peoples during and after their existence, it was the infamous gold rush that legend says began in Sutter's Mill that seems to have been the most destructive in all regards. The land rush that followed only hastened the ultimate goal of erasing the Native People from the land and from history.

Even though We are the Land may not necessarily have been conceived and written as a consciously radical history, it is one. The very fact of its existence and its approach to the history of a people whose history has been intentionally erased and replaced by that of the conqueror ultimately makes this text a radical one. Not only is it a much needed and important retelling of the invader's history from the perspective of the invaded, it is also a relocation of the region's indigenous peoples from a history based on their erasure to a history based on their preeminence.

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Rewriting History in the Land Called California - CounterPunch.org

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I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area of California for eight years during the 1970s and 1980s. One of the reasons I moved there in the first place was because of its radical history, much of it fairly recent and much of it still alive at the time.

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The scope of violence against Native people in the United States is truly staggering.

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The scope of violence against Native people in the United States is truly staggering.

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JULY 2, 2021

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The scope of violence against Native people in the United States is truly staggering. In fact, it would be safe to say the historical genocide never ended. It is ongoing. It is the violence of stolen lands, of stolen children, of dispossession, of police, of payday lenders, liquor stores and pawnshops, of fracking and mining in Native territory. And yet, despite this furious and barbaric onslaught, Native people persist - unbowed.

But the murder, torture and mutilation have been gruesome. Take one statistic, cited in the recently published Red Nation Rising by four writers and activists: the Indian Health Service "sterilized between 25 and 50 percent of all Native women between the years 1970 and 1976." Can you imagine if this had been white women? Howls of outrage would resound from CNN and NBC. Tucker Carlson would scream that the white genocide had arrived. But it's Native women, so there's nary a peep.

The stealing of Native children has long been known to those who look into it. But it was in the news recently. That's when the New York Times reported on June 24 that 751 bodies, mainly children, had been found in a mass grave at a former school for indigenous children in Saskatchawan, Canada. This was only weeks after the remains of 215 children were found at another of these former church-run schools, also in unmarked graves. On June 30, another 182 bodies were found near one of these schools in British Columbia. One wonders how many more will turn up. Certainly, the settler-colonial practice of stealing children was much more malevolent than what those who did it said at the time, namely, that they were helping these children "assimilate" to white society. Assimilate into the cemetery is more like it.

There were also such schools in the United States. This week, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland "said the country would search federal boarding schools," the Times reported, "for possible burial sites of Native American children." What these missionary assimilationists were doing in Canada, they were probably doing here too, namely, raping and killing indigenous children. Though it's unclear how the children died, "some former students of the schools have described the bodies of infants born to girls impregnated by priests and monks being incinerated."

Red Nation Rising touches on these notorious boarding schools, as one of many forms of barbaric cruelty inflicted on Native Americans. Why? To steal their land, in which Native people have such profound roots. This book also makes clear that Native culture is not capitalist. Indeed the basis of capitalism, private property, is alien to and has been used to dispossess Natives.

"There is now a monstrous disruption in the force of all relatives who live above and below the surface of the Earth. Today, in our era of life, this monster is known as capitalism, the most threatening and successful force of death and poverty," this book's forward announces. Capitalism wars against life, and one of that war's frontlines is the bordertown. "Bordertowns, as with all imperial borders, are spatial expressions of an intent to murder," this book says. "That is why, from Saskatoon to Santa Fe, bordertowns are always bloody killing fields."

Red Nation Rising argues against defining the ongoing crime against the Indian as one of race. Racism is a problem, no doubt. But the real issue between imperial vigilantes and Natives is land. "The erasure and elimination of the Native...is simply to gain access to land," the authors write. This is why the American 1776 war of independence was catastrophic for Natives, and for Blacks. The book argues that the revolutionary war "was actually a counterrevolutionary war to enslave Blacks and exterminate Indians." All I can say is don't tell this to the know-nothing GOP governors in such a tizzy over critical race theory that they've banned it from public schools. They'll have a fit. In fact, this book is precisely the sort of clear-eyed analysis of power relations within the imperial core that right-wingers aim to eliminate.

The authors mention the arrival of fracking in Native lands and with it, man camps, citing former Congresswoman Deb Haaland voicing concerns about oil and gas workers soliciting Navajo women and girls for sex. Some considered this worry outrageous at the time. But such abuses, along with pollution and destruction of sacred sites, always come with man camps and flourish in bordertowns. "Wall Street is an advanced man camp," the authors write. "The White House is a man camp in miniature. The Bakken oil field is an emergent man camp. The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is an annual man camp. The Ivy League is a federation of man camps."

The authors also critique those who decry police brutality. "Police are Indian killers," they write. Police are per se violent. Lamenting police brutality assumes that there is some acceptable level of violence. Red Nation Rising argues that there is not, that Native people, Blacks and many, many others would be better off without police. "To call for an end of police brutality, therefore, is not to call for an end to police violence; rather it is to call for more 'justified' police violence."

The "bad apples" excuse for police violence, this book argues, is simply a lie. Violence inheres in policing. Why else would cops sport enough military gear for an occupying army? And this occupation is most evident in how police attack and kill Native Americans. "All settler colonial policing begins with the idea that Native peoples have no claim to Native land and, equally important, stand in the way of settler claims to Native land."

So the colonial project means extirpating the Indian; sterilizing women, stealing children and sending them to boarding schools where half of them perish (or maybe more, to judge from the aforementioned ghoulish discoveries of mass graves at such schools in Canada), "policing" men, especially those living on the street, with violence. That's today. It comes after several centuries of outright slaughter and official trickery and machinations to abet that genocide. "The fact that the U.S. government broke every treaty it entered into with Native nations tells you all you need to know about settler law."

And yet Natives survive and persist. This baffles the colonist, even those who claim concern for Native welfare. Indeed, "the 'solutions' the liberal capitalist state offers to white supremacy are the smallpox-infected blankets of ongoing settler colonialism." This book calls for Native defiance, not just one Standing Rock, but many. It also calls for solidarity with others in similar struggles. It's is not a history or anthropology. It is a call to action.

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Native Genocide, Native Liberation - CounterPunch.org

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The scope of violence against Native people in the United States is truly staggering. In fact, it would be safe to say the historical genocide never ended. It is ongoing.

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The Stagecoach

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From a Native American Perspective

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From a Native American Perspective - WS

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HOW HOLLYWOOD STEREOTYPED THE NATIVE AMERICANS

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HOW HOLLYWOOD STEREOTYPED THE NATIVE AMERICANS

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How Hollywood stereotyped the Native Americans

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1. Pick out the words the people answer and other key-words.
2. According to the different speakers, what is Thanksgiving about?
3. Recap what you understood in the video and get ready to present it to the class.

VOCABULARY BOX
Inaccurate: incorrect
Turkey: dinde
Pilgrim: the same of the first Europeans who settled in America

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Thanksgiving | Native Americans | One Word | Cut

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1. Pick out the words the people answer and other key-words.
2. What atrocities did Christopher Columbus commit?
3. What is taught about him in American schools?
4. What should be taught about him?
5. Recap what you understood in the video and get ready to present it to the class.

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Christopher Columbus | Native Americans | One Word | Cut

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1. Pick out the words the people answer and other key-words.
2. How did the Native American call themselves?
3. Why were they called Redskins?
4. What is the "N-word"?
5. What insult was the young woman called in high school?
6. Recap what you understood in the video and get ready to present it to the class.

VOCABULARY BOX
Derogatory: insulting
Outdated: old-fashioned
Gross: disgusting

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Redskin | Native Americans | One Word | Cut

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1. Pick out the words the people answer and other key-words.
2. Guess what residential schools are.
3. What does the old woman say about World War 2?
4. Does she think that when a language disappears, the culture disappears too?
5. Recap what you understood in the video and get ready to present it to the class.

VOCABULARY BOX
Rob: steal
Navaho

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Language | Native Americans | One Word | Cut

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Thanksgiving 'National Day Of Mourning' 

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Thanksgiving 'National Day Of Mourning' 

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Native Americans of New England have been hosting an annual protest in Plymouth, Mass. since 197

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Thanksgiving 'National Day Of Mourning' For Some

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American Art

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Short Presentation

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Chí’chil Biłdagoteel - otherwise known as Oak Flat, Arizona – is regarded as sacred ancestral land by the Apache people. With the territory at risk of being sold for copper mining to a subsidiary of Rio Tinto, resident Wendsler Nosie has set up a protest movement from his tipi, alongside his daughter and granddaughter.

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Chí’chil Biłdagoteel - otherwise known as Oak Flat, Arizona – is regarded as sacred ancestral land by the Apache people. With the territory at risk of being sold for copper mining to a subsidiary of Rio Tinto, resident Wendsler Nosie has set up a protest movement from his tipi, alongside his daughter and granddaughter.

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The Apache war against copper mining: 'this is an act of desecration'

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1. Pick out the words the people answer and other key-words.
2. What are the misconceptions about reservations?
3. Recap what you understood in the video and get ready to present it to the class.

VOCABULARY BOX
Bleak: joyless
Misconception: incorrect idea
Trapped: imprisonned

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Reservation | Native Americans | One Word | Cut