As a previous editor of the Classic Progressive Historians, I was trying to get a historian I had met on line to post there. He was in Mexico and as we corresponded, he told me that at least 80% of “Mexicans” are Lipan Apache. Who is Arizona wanting to “send back to where they came from?”
http://www.indiancountrytoday….
The privileges of citizenship were slow to come for Indians while the responsibilities came right away. It’s hard not to think of the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, some of the toughest combat of WWII. The Navajo code talkers served though that campaign at a time when Arizona was still denying them the vote. Now, it appears that Arizona Indians who visit the cities will have to be careful about being brown in a no-brown zone, whether or not they are veterans.
The man talked about how his people were forced into speaking Spanish as the result of the Spanish Conquest, and that they were trying to get their language back.
This law is not aimed at Europeans without papers, even though by its plain words a German tourist could be locked up for leaving her Phoenix hotel without her passport. This law is aimed at Mexicans and the blood of Mexicans is primarily American Indian.
Spanish Conquest 1492-1580 by Sanderson Beck
In December 1511 Fray Antonio Montesinos preached a sermon at Santo Domingo in which he warned the conquistadors they were all in mortal sin because of the cruel way they were oppressing innocent people. He asked them,
Tell me, by what right do you hold these Indians
in such cruel and horrible servitude?
By what authority did you make unprovoked war
on these people, living in peace and quiet on their land,
and with unheard-of savagery
kill and consume so great a number of them?
Why do you keep them worn out and down-trodden,
without feeding them or tending their illnesses,
so that they die-or rather you kill them-
by reason of the heavy labor you lay upon them,
to get gold every day?
What care do you take to have them taught
to know their God and Maker, to be baptized,
to hear Mass and keep their Sundays and holy days?
Are they not men? Have they no soul, no reason?
Are you not required to love them as you love yourselves?
Do you understand this? Do you not feel it?
How can you be sunk so deep in unfeeling sleep?1
And lookie here, looks like the historian was right after all.
Lipan Apache Targeted for More Abuse at Border
The US made new threats about the condemnation and seizure of Lipan Apache lands in Texas for the US/Mexico border wall, as the abuses of Indigenous Peoples in the borderzone continues unabated. President Obama continues the genocidal borderland policies of the Bush administration.
The Lipan Apache announcement came this week at the same time that a US Border Agent shot and killed a man, Solis Palma, 28, throwing rocks east of Douglas, Arizona. The practice of US Border Agents murdering rock throwers mirrors the genocidal practices of Israeli soldiers shooting rock throwers, including children, at the border of Palestine.
The Lipan Apache in Texas have been targeted for the seizure of their land, while wealthy white land owners in the Texas borderlands benefit from US white supremacist policy.
Fray Antonio Montesino’s words are still relevant today.
Are they not men? Have they no soul, no reason?
Are you not required to love them as you love yourselves?
Do you understand this? Do you not feel it?
How can you be sunk so deep in unfeeling sleep?1
“and the blood of Mexicans is primarily American Indian.”
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