Today is the day when the United States celebrates the land theft and massacre of indigenous people. The mythologized, gastronomic encounter between pilgrims and the Wampanoag and Pequot tribes is a story we were taught in school, but is far from the truth of what occurred in 1621. For Native Americans everywhere, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning, as the arrival of white colonists foretold the killing of 95% to 99% of Native Americans. Around 56 million were killed in the first 100 years of European colonization alone.
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The term “genocide” comes from the ancient Greek word genos, which means race, nation or tribe, and the Latin word caedere, which means killing and annihilation. Essentially, it describes the intentional destruction of a nation or an ethnic group. With this definition in mind, it is accurate to say that our nation was born in genocide. Today, especially, I think of the all massacres and atrocities, the forced migration, the brutal assimilation, and the attempted cultural and physical extinction of the indigenous people of the U.S.
While I work in solidarity with Palestinians, I am constantly aware of how I lived on colonized land. I can’t help but think of the overlap between the genocide that occurred in the States and the genocide happening in Palestine. Both Palestinians and Native Americans have faced similar ethnic cleansing policies. Perhaps the reason Americans have such difficulty confronting what is happening elsewhere in the world is because that would require us to contend with our own history.
Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University and one of the world’s most prominent scholars of the Holocaust, spoke about this idea in an interview with The Beinart Notebook. He asked:
Why is it that so many Americans respond so viscerally to terms like ‘settler colonialism,’ ‘decolonization,’ ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’? I don’t think it’s only because people have an investment in Israel. I think because at some level, maybe only semi-consciously, people recognize that that same intellectual framework, that decolonization framework, would be profoundly destabilizing for the United States as we know it. Because whether Americans are fully conscious or not, there is at some level a recognition of the analogy between the demands that are made in the pro-Palestine activist world increasingly for decolonization and a sense of what that would mean if we were to go down that road at all in United States’ land-back movement.
Many indigenous people understand that what happened and is happening in the Americas is the same thing Palestinians face. Since the creation of Israel, natives from the U.S. have supported natives from Palestine. The Native American Movement and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) fought for their stolen rights at Wounded Knee in the 1970s. At Standing Rock, Native Americans worked with Palestinian Youth Movement activists and wore keffiyehs to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. Last November, the Puyallup Tribe blocked a U.S. military ship carrying arms bound for Israel with a traditional canoe.
The language that Israel uses to justify colonization is similar to the propaganda the U.S. uses to steal land. In the U.S. it was “manifest destiny,” the idea that expansion was divinely ordained. For Zionists, it is the narrative that Palestine is “a land without people for a people without a land” and “making the desert bloom.” Both ideas are based on superiority and the concept of God-given authority.
Palestinians and Native Americans are an example of the power of resistance against colonialism and occupation. Despite a government’s attempt to extinguish them off the face of the earth, they remain, and always will. I learn so much from them, as well as all oppressed groups, about how to persevere in struggle and how to thrive against all odds.