Imagine

IMAGINE: FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE EASTERN DOOR

From “The Pikunii Sun” Vol 1 No. 2 Newspaper of Pikunii (Blackfoot People) and other interested persons. Also printed in “The Eastern Door” a newspaper of the Mohawk Nation of Kahnawake, Quebec, Canada

Imagine…

by James M. Craven/OMAHKOHKIAAIIPOOYII

There is a great deal of sensitivity to one of the most notorious of the many Holocausts humankind has suffered: the Nazi Holocaust against Jews, Gypsies and others. Movies like Schindler’s List are a constant reminder of massive suffering that must never be forgotten and historical lessons that must be learned. Most believe that something like the Holocaust of the Nazis against Jews or Gypsies or other victims targeted by the Nazis could never happen here in America or in Canada.

Imagine that something like what happened to Jews in Germany happened in America or Canada. Imagine that Jewish children were forced to repeat Christian prayers and were beaten or even murdered if they spoke or prayed in Hebrew or Yiddish and spoke or prayed Jewish prayers. Imagine if Jewish children were forced to eat pork that was not only forbidden for religious reasons but was also rotten, insect-infested and of the lowest quality so that many children could be “fed” cheaply and very profitably.

Imagine if vulnerable and trusting Jewish children were routinely sexually and physically abused by “clergy” and when the sexual and physical abuse was discovered, those who reported it were beaten or murdered while those who committed the ugly deeds, were protected by powerful and rich churches and sent elsewhere to do more crimes to other Jewish children. Imagine that Jewish children were used for medical experiments or used to test new drugs or surgical procedures. Imagine if Jewish children were used as sexual objects for powerful pedophiles–“dignitaries”—when visiting the isolated institutions in which the Jewish children were kept away from their families and communities.

Imagine if Jewish children were sterilized through coercion or deception. Imagine if Jewish children were registered and controlled by a BJA (Bureau of Jewish Affairs) that had a long history of fraud, theft, abuse and dereliction of trust responsibilities with respect to traditional Jewish lands and resources. Imagine if throughout the Jewish Ghettos, corrupt and sell-out Jews were selected or elected through fraudulent elections to control other Jews in the interests of non-Jews bent on the eventual elimination–through murder, intermarriage, redefinition, assimilation or sterilization–of all Jews.

Imagine if Jewish children were forced into special Boarding/Residential Schools designed to beat, torture, intimidate and brainwash the “Jewishness” out of them.

Imagine if there were football teams with names like the “Kansas City Kikes”, the “San Francisco Sheenies”, the “Houston Hebes” or the Jersey City Jew Boys”; and at half-time, some caricature, of what the bigoted and ignorant consider to be a “typical Jew”, came out to do the “money-grubbing tango”. Imagine if Jews were forbidden to celebrate Jewish holidays or to wear traditional Jewish yamulkas or prayer shawls. Imagine if all the precedents of Nuremberg and International Law (Treaties) were routinely broken by non-Jews while Jews were expected to keep all promises and responsibilities under those laws.

You say it could not happen to Jews in America or Canada what was done in Nazi Germany? You say that especially after Nuremberg, and the horrors that were revealed there, “Never Again”, anywhere? With respect to Jews in America and Canada, perhaps all of the above and more could happen and perhaps not. But there is no “perhaps” that all of the above and much more was done—and is being done–in America and in Canada and elsewhere in the world to Indigenous Peoples.

When do Indians and First Nations Peoples get movies like “Schindler’s List” that expose the past and present of the American and Canadian Holocausts? When do non-Indians care about the American and Canadian Holocausts against Indigenous Peoples as much as many non-Jews do –and should–care about the Nazi Holocaust? When do Indians get the precedents, legal protections and demands for justice of Nuremberg applied in–and to–the very Nations that so piously and hypocritically sat in judgment at Nuremberg?

Jim Craven
Omahkohkiaaiipooyii
Blackfoot Nation

The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards Indians; their land and property shall never be taken from them without their consent.”
(Northwest Ordinance, 1787, Ratified by Congress 1789)

“…but this letter being unofficial and private, I may with safety give you a more extensive view of our policy respecting the Indians, that you may better comprehend the parts dealt to to you in detail through the official channel, and observing the system of which they make a part, conduct yourself in unison with it in cases where you are obliged to act without instruction…When they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pare them off from time to time in exchange for necessaries for their farms and families. To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influencial individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by cession of lands…In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them…” (Classified Letter of President Thomas Jefferson (“libertarian”—for propertied white people) to William Henry Harrison, Feb. 27, 1803)

“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in south Africa and for the Indians in the Wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination–by starvation and uneven combat—of the ‘Red Savages’ who could not be tamed by captivity.” (Adolf Hitler, by John Toland, p. 702)

“Set the blood quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed…and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence. When that happens, the federal government will finally be freed from its persistent Indian problem.” (BIA Document quoted in Patricia Limerick, “The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West” p. 338)

“It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards the FINAL SOLUTION OF OUR INDIAN PROBLEM.” (Department of Indian Affairs Superintendent D.C. Scott to B.C. Indian Agent-General Major D. McKay, DIA Archives, RG 10 series). April 12, 1910 (emphasis added)

From Hitler and His Secret Partners by James Pool:

“Always contemptuous of the Russians, Hitler said: ‘For them the word ‘liberty’ means the right to wash only on feast-days. If we arrive bringing soft soap, we’ll obtain no sympathy…There’s only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.’ Having been a devoted reader of Karl May’s books on the American West as a youth, Hitler frequently referred to the Russians as ‘Redskins’. He [Hitler] saw a parallel between his effort to conquer and colonize land in Russia with the conquest of the American West by the white man and the subjugation of the Indians or ‘Redskins’. ‘I don’t see why’, he said, ‘a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.” (James Pool, Ibid, pp. 254-255)

“Hitler drew another example of mass murder from American history. Since his youth he had been obsessed with the Wild West stories of Karl May. He viewed the fighting between cowboys and Indians in racial terms. In many of his speeches he referred with admiration to the victory of the white race in settling the American continent and driving out the inferior peoples, the Indians. With great fascination he listened to stories, which some of his associates who had been in America told him about the massacres of the Indians by the U.S. Calvary. He was very interested in the way the Indian population had rapidly declined due to epidemics and starvation when the United States government forced them to live on the reservations. He thought the American government’s forced migrations of the Indians over great distances to barren reservation land was a deliberate policy of extermination.

Just how much Hitler took from the American example of the destruction of the Indian nations his hard to say; called ghettos “reservations.”(p. 273-274)