Taken Over By Good People
On this 4th of July celebration of our nation’s birth, we acknowledge the costs to patriots for freedoms and inheritances won. I reflect on another holiday celebration in our history, Thanksgiving, when we also celebrate winning freedom from homeland oppressors. Freedom to live in a new land with privileges to enjoy life more abundantly.
But, there’s a dark side. The ‘good people’ that we celebrate also brought death and destruction to natives living here. By the time those natives that were termed Indians and Native Americans, realized that the nice white settlers that they supported in surviving and taught how to thrive in a foreign land would not work out so well for their own peoples, it was too late. Too late they realized that more would come. That they would take over as their numbers exceeded those of natives. Natives became their slaves, were beaten, killed and pushed aside.
Yet, we take time to celebrate the takeover without consideration for the inheritances of the natives being awarded to invaders. Too late good natives attempted to save themselves, their way of life and fight back. By then, whites announced themselves citizens and owners of this land that they were foreign to and that natives were not deemed citizens.
MOVE OVER NATIVES DISRESPECT NATIVES MOCK NATIVES
Invaders brought their homeland language and made it standard. They relegated the natives an afterthought while the good people built a nation. The good people lifted to the world a revised historical doctrine of uplift, improvement, building America into the greatest nation ever with their achievements. But, never, never talk about coming into another’s land uninvited to take from them and make what is their own, your own while leaders celebrate with them.