Stop Dakota Access Pipeline! Return all stolen land to Indigenous people! Reparations now!
Stop Dakota Access Pipeline! Return all stolen land to Indigenous people! Reparations now!
By Johann Bedingfield, Uhuru Solidarity Movement National Outreach Coordinator
Any normal human being would be outraged around the U.S.-backed oil pipeline running through Indigenous lands of the great Lakota nation, which remains imprisoned by the U.S. State and the cancerous growth of white settlers who devour The Lakota People and their land, where sacred buffalo used to roam, providing life for the people.
We should be outraged by the U.S. police shooting rubber bullets and water hose cannons meant to kill the Lakota people! But the crime did not start with United Army Corp of Engineers ignoring a letter sent by the Tribal Historic Preservation Office breaking the National Historic Preservation Act.
The crime started in 1492, when Columbus occupied the indigenous lands of the Arawak, enslaving, raping, murdering and pillaging them. Columbus and his crew of savages would throw the Arawak in cauldrons filled with burning hot soap as part of the process of genocide.
As we sit to let the gluttonous thanksgiving meal settle in our bellies, we have a responsibility to address and take action around the brutal origins of this holiday and a birth of this white nation called the U.S.
Contrary to the myth that pilgrims and Indigenous people sat together in the feast of thanksgiving, the truth is the pilgrims landed here, immediately setting up a fortress and murdering the chief of Pequot people before wiping out nearly the entire Native nation.
Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson, both darlings of the white left, and speaking for the common man (white working class) helped consolidate the U.S. colonial state through the most horrific slaughter of Indigenous people from Seminoles to the Cherokees, to the Lakotas, with the participation of ordinary white workers, enthusiastically maiming Native women, children and men including cutting out their private parts. When we celebrate thanksgiving it reinforces white nationalism built upon terror and genocide. This holiday is a celebration of death.
Given this crucial historical context, we must go beyond the outrage of the Dakota pipeline. The truth of the matter is that even without the oil pipeline poisoning the water of the indigenous people, the conditions of the Lakota people and all Native people remain the same, where life expectancy on the so called “Indian reservations” is in the 40s.
The questions we must ask ourselves if we claim to hate the pipeline or the imprisonment of Lakota political prisoner Leonard Peltier: Where were the large white protests around the conditions of Indigenous people contained on concentration camps? Where are the large white protests demanding reparations for hundreds of years of scalping, smallpox blankets that were used as a first biological warfare against a colonized population, ripping out the vaginas of native women and U.S. military massacres such as Wounded Knee around Christmas of 1890? Where is the call of the return of all stolen land of the Indigenous people? Where is the denunciation of the historical white opportunism of the environmentalist movement that got its birth from Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir, who set up the removal of Indigenous people from their lands in order to create recreational national parks for white people? Where is the outcry against former democratic presidential candidate Bernard Sanders and President Barack Obama for reducing the genocidal killings of African, Mexican and Indigenous people by the police as a mere act of discrimination?
Both of these liberal politicians have rejected reparations that are owed to African and Native people. Instead they choose, just like their predecessors, Lincoln and Jackson, to tighten the noose around the necks of colonized peoples, by demanding more of the stolen loot to be in the hands of larger sectors of the white population.
The African People’s Socialist Party is the only organization that paves the way to true socialism and a world without oppressor and oppressed. It is the only organization that clearly defines colonialism as the root of the problem, not racism, which are the ideas in white people’s heads.
Chairman Omali Yeshitela of APSP says that if white people sincerely want to see an end of U.S. and european savage wars of occupation, including the ones that we see at Standing Rock and inside the black community we must destroy white opportunism and the entire white pedestal that rests upon slavery and genocide of African and Indigenous people.
We must unite our future with the aspirations of African, Mexican and Indigenous people to overturn this irredeemable parasitic social system, born from the savagery of European colonization.
Concretely, that means standing in principled and material solidarity with African and Mexican/Indigenous Liberation and rejecting any loyalty to the U.S. colonial superstructure, which is white power from Jill Stein, to Clinton to Trump. Colonialism trumps fascism as the Uhuru Movement says, because the Mexican/Indigenous and African people are already catching genocidal hell from the state, regardless of U.S. political party. White people must fight for black power if we hate oppression.
We must pay and organize for reparations, under the leadership of the African working class, who are struggling to overturn colonialism.
It’s the African Liberation Movement that has historically led and to this to day leads, supports and inspires other colonized people to fight for national liberation against U.S.-led imperialism. The African working class is the most dangerous force that threatens the existence of U.S. colonial white power rule, strategically located inside the U.S. as a domestic colony. The African People’s Socialist Party calls on white people to join the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, an organization of white people that works under the leadership of African working class and that goes into the white community and returns all the stolen wealth back into the hands of African people who are uniting Africa as one nation.
Stop Dakota Access Pipeline! Stop the genocide against Indigenous, Mexican and African people! African and Mexican/Indigenous revolution and liberation in our lifetime! Down with U.S. and European imperialism and colonialism! Join the Uhuru Solidarity Movement!!! For more info go to uhurusolidarity.org and join a truly revolutionary progressive movement.
Below is a poem in honor and solidarity of Indigenous resistance!
The Great Lakota Revolt
By Johann Bedingfield
This was Her land, their home
Mama sows buffalo coat
It’s the old way
Her voice cracks in dismay
Pappa carves sacred pipe
He had sacrificed the night
He says to his son of eight
It’s to remember the victims at Wounded Knee
Pappa’s tired, lined eyes begin to tear
A man who has travel there
To a place of endless pain
Mama sings of the Buffalo Woman
And of her return someday
Oh, the sweet smell of Lakota air
The sun reaches her rays in warmth
The breeze carries son’s raven hair
So many memories have died here
And ancestors fade and shimmer
Oh, their people at Wounded Knee
Your cries calling me
Oh the people at Wounded Knee
Grieve and weep, but to fight to be free
Oh, the people at Wounded Knee
You fought bravely for your land so green
On this day, I recall them for you to see
On this day, soldiers came
On this day, peoples of eagle free
On this day, blue jackets plundered and raped
On this day, seemingly no stopping the death bleed
Then, 1970s shadows came
Branded as terror, Warriors of AIM
It was the last stand
Lakota people fought for their land
But the FBI broke their spirit once again
Such ended the story
The Great Lakota of Wounded Knee
Oh, wait…AMERICA! Do you hear the cry!
It’s the battle cry! UHURU TO THE RESCUE!
The sequel, the African revolt is white power’s doom
SPARKING INDIGENOUS RISING ONCE AGAIN!