Thankstaking in the Trumpfederacy: Terminate the Tribe That Aided the Pilgrims

http://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/23/thankstaking-in-the-trumpfederacy-terminate-the-tribe-that-aided-the-pilgrims/
Date Written:  2018-11-23
Publisher:  CounterPunch
Year Published:  2018
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23080

A look at the hostile climate that exists under the Trump Administration for America's first peoples. The article looks at the further erosion treaties and protective laws, and the belief among indigenous communities that the administration's policy is a return to 'termination'.

Abstract: 
--

Excerpt:

A Mashpee elder wanted to know "who's the Indian" on top of the dome? A question devoid of sarcasm, though the context of the Mashpee's crisis is laced with challenges to identity. Philip Reid, a slave purchased by Clark Mills for $1,200, was largely responsible for seeing that the bronze his master was commissioned to cast would become the Statue of Freedom. In 1856, while Secretary of War, future President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, approved the design of the illusory goddess which sculptor Thomas Crawford considered evocative "of our Indian tribes." But "Freedom" isn't an Indian, she was to symbolize the displacement of Indians for colonial aspiration. And Jefferson Davis's epitaph to freedom is on the quarter-million-plus graves of those he later committed to die to keep some four-million of Philip Reid's fellow-victims in shackles and chains.