INDIGENOUS PEOPLE GET NOTHING FOR FREE, WHATEVER WE GET IT IS PAID FOR IN BLOOD, MULTIGENERATIONAL STRUGGLES, AND SUFFERING.
Estimates of Pre Contact North American population are 75-150 million Indigenous people. 525 years later there are only 6.4 million left . That's 68 million to 143.6 million people murdered. Not by accidental disease (it was planned) but by murder. That's %95.6 of the total population of a people gone, with the remaining %4.4 survivors put into prisons, adopted away from families, and the survivors were forbidden from practicing and maintaining their cultures. All so that the land could be "given" to Settlers.
But we turned those prisons into the hearts of our cultures, we made the reservations our own, & we maintain our cultures. Our families are reuniting, our people keeping the histories and the sacred ways of our ancestors. Descendants of Settlers? We see you.
We see your oilfields and mining operations and logging and city construction on the sacred land and bones of our people. We see you mocking our peoples and cultures as though we are long dead. We are not. We see the oil spills, the forest fires, the radiation leaks in the water. We see the inaction of your Environmental Profit Agency, the laws you write to make theft legal, the babies you've stolen. 525 years of Indigenous genocide and erasure, but we see you. We know your part in this. We see how you benefit from our deaths & erasure. Think long and hard on whose land you really sit on. Whose blood soaks the soil where your home is. Because we see you, & we remember.
"That's all in the past! It has nothing to do with me!” you cry.
Wrong.
We are still being murdered by Settlers and the State. In Canada, USA, and Mexico. The Dakota Access Pipeline HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH YOU. Lands are being destroyed, along with the peoples, & it has everything to do with you. It's where your food, gas, & homes come from. TODAY. And the colonizers and settlers stole an entire people, from tribes and clans and lives of their own, and treated them worse than tools. Millions of lives interrupted so people could be brutally made into nothing more than labor units. From free humans to slaves, And now the freed descendants of those Stolen People have to fear for their lives from the police—groups created to hunt them. Kids shot dead. Mothers murdered. Therapists shot, lunchroom workers killed. No, the genocide continues in Native & Black communities.
And. It. Has. Everything. To Do. With. You.
If you live in the USA, Canada, Mexico. Indigenous & Black Genocides, ongoing, and they are for your benefit.