This day in 1890: The massacre at Wounded Knee

Court of Leaves, Painting by GateKeeper

By TONY SEED

1890 (29 December): The 7th U.S. Cavalry commanded by Col. James Forsyth massacred 300 unarmed and peaceful Lakhota Sioux Indians, many of them women and children, at Wounded Knee Creek (Chankpe Opi Wakpala), South Dakota – a Lakota encampment on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation – after a fruitless search for weapons in their encampment. In other words, the Sioux are completely disarmed. About thirty soldiers also died, many victims of their own crossfire.

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This Day. Martyring the six ‘Chilcotin Chiefs’

October 26 is the anniversary of the 1864 hanging of the six “Chilcotin Chiefs” (also Tsilhqot’in) by the Colony of British Columbia. The hanging took place at 7 a.m. on Front St. in Quesnel, one of the largest mass hangings in Canadian history. They had been ambushed at what they were told was a peace conference where they would meet the newly-installed Governor Frederick Seymour and discuss terms. The mostly indigenous crowd of 250 represented seem to have been Dakelh from the north, Secwepemc from the south, some Tsilhqot’in and a party of Nuxalk who walked 1000 km to honour the “Chiefs.” 

Cultural genocide: National Museum of Brazil destroyed

(September 3) – Very sad news. The 200-year-old National Museum of Brazil has been virtually destroyed by fire.

The museum in Rio de Janeiro had 20 million items, including Egyptian and Greco-Roman artifacts and a 12,000-year-old human fossil, the oldest found in the Western Hemisphere, known as “Luzia”. Connected to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the museum has expositions that include anthropology, archeology and paleontology, among others.

Farm warfare: How Israel uses chemicals to kill drops in Gaza

The use of chemical weapons is a crime against humanity. The purpose of herbicides is to enable farmers to grow produce, but Israel is quietly using them to do just the opposite in the Gaza Strip — in the name of security | AMIRA HASS, Haaretz

Palestinian farmers harvest their wheat in a farmland in central Gaza | Reuters

(July 6) – Photographs of military armored vehicles uprooting and crushing trees and vegetation within the Gaza Strip are not foreign to Israelis, but what is less widely known is that since 2014 Palestinian fields are also being  razed through the use of herbicides sprayed from the air — as first publicized by the website 972.

Zionists codify discrimination and ethnic cleansing with ‘Jewish nation-state bill’

On May 3, Israel tabled a draft law that defines Israel “as the Jewish and democratic nation state of the Jewish people to self-determination in their historic homeland.”

Sixty-four members of the Knesset voted in favour of tabling the bill, while 50 voted against. One of the bill’s sponsors, MK Avi Dichter was quoted as saying during discussion of the bill: “Anyone who does not belong to the Jewish nation cannot define the State of Israel as his nation-state.”

100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration: Palestine – Ethnic cleansing and dispossession (Excerpt)

By Dr. ISMAIL ZAYID*

Click to enlarge.

CALENDAR OF EVENTS

[…]

It was the second of November 1917 when Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, issued his infamous declaration in the form of a letter written to Lord Rothschild. It read:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people…, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

It is interesting to note that the four-letter word “Arab” occurs not once in this document. To refer to the Arabs who constituted, at the time, 92 per cent of the population of Palestine and owned 98 per cent of its land, as the non-Jewish communities is not merely preposterous but deliberately fraudulent. I do not need to tell you that this letter has no shred of legality, as Palestine did not belong to Balfour to assume such acts of generosity. Dr. Arnold Toynbee described the British role, in issuing this document, accurately:

“We were taking it upon ourselves to give away something that was not ours to give. We were promising rights of some kind in the Palestinian Arabs’ country to a third party.”

Similarly, the well-known Jewish writer, Arthur Koestler, summed it up aptly when he described the Balfour Declaration as a document in which “one nation promised a second the country of a third.”

Support Mi’kmaq demand to remove the name ‘Amherst’ from PEI historic site

Since 2008, Mi’kmaq leader Keptin John Joe Sark, a member of the Mi’kmaq Confederacy of Prince Edward Island has been demanding that the PEI government take action to have the name of Jeffrey Amherst – a notorious British General responsible for distributing blankets infected with smallpox amongst the Mi’kmaq and other Indigenous peoples in the 18th Century – removed from the historic site at Port-la-Joye at Rocky Point, across the harbour from Charlottetown.