CELEBRATING INDIGENOUS PEOPLE'S DAY INSTEAD OF COLUMBUS DAY THE START OF COLONIZATION

feeling rebloggy

Each year, more cities, states and universities opt to celebrate an alternative to Columbus Day: Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Instead of honoring Christopher Columbus, the Indigenous Peoples’ Day recognizes Native Americans, who were the first inhabitants of the land that later became the United States of America. Advocates for the switch to Indigenous Peoples Day argue that Columbus did not “discover” America in 1492 but instead began the colonization of it. 

For decades, Native American activists have advocated abolishing Columbus Day, which became a federal holiday in 1937.

http://time.com/4968067/indigenous-peoples-day-columbus-day-cities/

 Many of those who don’t have to work today are just glad to have the time off. But for the approximately 15,097 Massachusetts residents who identified as Native American or Alaskan Native in 2017 according to the US Census, the holiday means a lot more. 

Instead of Columbus Day, some municipalities in the state are recognizing the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples Day. Mahtowin Munro of Watertown, of the Lakota Nation, has led the effort to inform the public about what historians call “the Columbus Controversy.”

“The actions of Columbus and his men decimated the original peoples of the Caribbean and paved the way for the genocide and enslavement of millions more indigenous peoples throughout the Americas in the coming centuries,” Munro said. 

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/10/07/indigenous-peoples-day-tufts-harvard/LiAxI5hS7cAJtZwkh4SayN/story.html

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WHAT I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO

WE AS ONE
GILBERT YOUNG

On my first day in the neighborhood, all the green afro flags made me think my white neighbors were what my family called “them good white folk.” Before I found out the Magnolia flag was actually Mississippi’s flag of secession, I imagined these particular good white folk as courageous Mississippians wholly prepared to confront the layered traditions of white power and black suffering that were violently stitched into our nation, our state, and today’s prevailing Mississippi flag.

For me, the American flag is no better. 

Kiese Laymon 

http://www.thefader.com/2016/09/19/my-mississippi-pledge-kiese-laymon

Ordinary Heroes: Nicholas Winton

A successful stockbroker, sports enthusiast, Nicholas Winton was living the high life in the 1930s. But he became concerned over what he was reading in the newspaper about Hitler. So, at 29 years of age or so, he went to Prague, Czechoslovakia to see if he maybe he could to save some people

At 104 years of age, when asked what made him think that HE could do it, Winton said, "I work on the motto if something is not impossible there must a way of doing it."

When he got back home to Britain, he went about creating something that could get people, especially the children, out of Prague. His first step in starting this rescue mission involved "borrowing" the stationary of a pre-existing group in the U.K. called "British Commitee for Refugees From  Czechoslovakia" ...then adding the subheader "CHILDREN'S SECTION"

He got to work saving children through the network he created. And when the real organization found out what he was doing, they adopted him.

Jewish parents heard of his rescue effort through the grapevine -more and more Jewish people, sensing that war was in the air, hearing that the Nazi's were coming- and they begged his organization to get their children out.And he did it. He did it 669 times

Winton had managed to get 669 children out.

Many of the children he saved didn't know of his existence or who he was until 50 years later, in the 1980s.  This 2 minute video of him getting a bit of a surprise.

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