Friday, June 30, 2006
Inured to Indigecide
Today's post by Mona El-Farra (From Gaza) is perhaps not so different from those one can read from Riverbend at Baghdad Burning--electricity and water knocked out, daily trauma of bombing and gunfire, loss of sleep--and were it not for Mona's position as a physician at a Red Crescent hospital, these accounts from the occupied territories of Palestine and Iraq might seem indistinguishable. Even the fighter jets screaming by their windows are the same American model.
But Mona is a doctor, and her matter-of-fact reports of lack of medical supplies, or her worries about incidental disease becoming epidemic as they have in some sectors of Iraq--interspersed with her anxieties for her children who might get trapped on their way home from school or work--conveys the authentic immediacy of someone who has lived her entire fifty-two years under military occupation, and witnessed so many atrocities that endurance and love is all she has. That and the need to communicate.
Indigenous peoples in America know something about that, themselves. Having continued despite centuries of genocide, they understand coexistence is not the same thing as cooperation, but it's a start.
True, today's massacre of Igbo natives, by Nigerian government death squads attempting to quell their autonomous aspirations, is but one of many examples of state-sanctioned terror to control land, people, and resources for first world consumption, but lest we become innured to this phenomenon, we might want to begin asking ourselves what we will do when push comes to shove again between the US government and the indigenous nations and peoples of our own country. Would we maintain our silence if the national guard began shooting Navajo, or Iroquois, or Shoshone?
But Mona is a doctor, and her matter-of-fact reports of lack of medical supplies, or her worries about incidental disease becoming epidemic as they have in some sectors of Iraq--interspersed with her anxieties for her children who might get trapped on their way home from school or work--conveys the authentic immediacy of someone who has lived her entire fifty-two years under military occupation, and witnessed so many atrocities that endurance and love is all she has. That and the need to communicate.
Indigenous peoples in America know something about that, themselves. Having continued despite centuries of genocide, they understand coexistence is not the same thing as cooperation, but it's a start.
True, today's massacre of Igbo natives, by Nigerian government death squads attempting to quell their autonomous aspirations, is but one of many examples of state-sanctioned terror to control land, people, and resources for first world consumption, but lest we become innured to this phenomenon, we might want to begin asking ourselves what we will do when push comes to shove again between the US government and the indigenous nations and peoples of our own country. Would we maintain our silence if the national guard began shooting Navajo, or Iroquois, or Shoshone?
