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Armando Vazquez. Courtesy photo.
By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor
The Bering Straits and early migration into the “New World”:
Approximately 30,000 years ago our early ancestors began migrating crossed the Bering Straits. Between 15,000 to 20,000 years ago these first migrants continued their long journey into what is now known as the Americas. We the Indigenous of the “Americas” are the progeny of these first migrant. In the ensuing 15,000 years our Indigenous ancestors would continue their migration from what is now known as the North Pole all the ways south to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Our Indigenous ancestors were hunters and gathers, requiring them to be nomadic and constantly on the move following the herds of animals that they would hunt and kill to sustain the tribe. Along the ways these early ancestors learn to gather and collect edible plants. This is basic and indisputable anthropology. Anthropology teaches us that our early earliest ancestors were in constant migration on the hunt and search for food in order to survive.
The European Migration/Invasion Begins:
Fast forward to about the early 1400s and the Norseman Leif Erickson is credited by anthropologists to have been the first European to land in North America. The invasion of North America by the Europeans begins. In 1492 the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, financed by the King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, landed on the small of island of what is known today as the Bahamas. In 1607 the English pilgrims founded the first colony, in Jamestown, off the Atlantic coast. By 1609 over 85-90% of the Jamestown migrants had succumb to disease, starvation and wars with the Indigenous natives. Historian note that if it were not for the early critical help and support (food, water, shelter) of the Pawhatan nation all of the Jamestown settlers would have perished. In 1621 the English settlers of Plymouth were helped to survive the hostilities of the new world by the Wampanoag nation. Then according to popular folklore, these Plymouth colonizers and the Wampanoag natives shared an autumn feast that revisionist historian claim was the first Thanksgiving celebrated in the colonies. It was literally lifesaving help to the settlers that the Pawhatan and the Wampanoag nations gave, and they would eternally regret. The European invaders (migrants) continued their migration, encroach, slaughter and takeover of Indigenous land.
500 years of Genocide, Slavery and War:
In 1619 the first African slaves were brought to Virginia, thus began the brutal and genocidal slave trade, conducted by the European immigrant/colonizers that would decimate the African continent and continue unabated for approximately 250 years. It is estimated that 12.5 million African were captured, enslaved and shipped to the “new world” during this brutal genocidal period. During this period of “new world” genocidal slavery all-out war was also declared on the Indigenous nations. A group of well-respected anthropologist and historian researchers concluded that between 55 to 60 million, or about 90%, of the entire Indigenous population of the “new world” was killed by the European colonizers. The killing of the Indigenous populations was so pervasive during this “Black and Indigenous Holocaust” the entire planet cooled down for period of time. As the colonizers spread their land grab war across the “new world” the Mexicans fell victim to the continued genocidal and insatiable thieving and murderous appetite of the European colonizers for territory and land.
America: The nation that has always suffered from “Selective Historical Amnesia”
Courtesy photo.
The history and creation of the United States of America is one of systemic and continued genocidal war waged on the Indigenous, Black, Mexican and Asian populations of this country for over 500 years. This is a horrific murderous history that any nation would instinctively (to keep from going into collective insanity) want to revise, alter, change or forget. And that is of course why this nation’s history is replete with fairy tale revisionist fiction, like the first peaceful Thanksgiving gathering between the colonizers and the Indigenous Powhatan natives. Contextual historical logic and common sense tell us that this fantasy thanksgiving just could not have happened that way, no matter how much some folks want to believe it, and revise history to make it so! But we Americans love our folklore and hide our guilt and shame in our historical lies.
We have witnessed first-hand for the past four years under the current administration what malicious lies, hate mongering and evil revisionist history will do to a nation. The current president tells this country that immigrants (of all the people to demonize and scapegoat) are ruining this country and pathetically half the country of 300 million believe this despicable lie. ‘The immigrants are the number one enemy of the United States’, clamors the administration. We go to war against immigrant families and snatched children from their parents and put these horrified and traumatized kids in cages, like the “animals” that they are according to the current president. We sterilize some of the immigrant women so that they cannot produce any more “enemies” to attack and subvert this nation. We send immigrant men by the plane load back to their native countries to certain death.
We are currently a nation divided, history tell us we have always been a divided nation, and our current president has rip away the hypocritical veil once and for all so that all the world to see us; naked, fearful, and polarized. We can continue down our current dark, myopic and revisionist history and faint selective amnesia once again, and pretend with the installation of the new administration that the horrors of the Trump years never happened. Once again revising, burying or conveniently forgetting our sins of the past that have led to our current polarized and dysfunctional national paralysis. Or we can work as a collective nation to shed light on our horrifically painful past and commit to a national effort of historical remembrance, atonement and reparation.
A New Day for the United States of America:
Courtesy photo.
In 2019 there was an estimated 272 million migrants worldwide. For a substantial percentage of the world’s populations, very little has change over hundreds, if not thousands, of years, we are, and have always been in constant migration, looking for ways to feed our family and survive. The European settlers immigrated to the “new world” over 500 years ago seeking what the current world’s migrants are seeking; safety, freedom, a chance to work, feed oneself and their families, and settle into a peaceful place that they can call home, with a chance to survive, prosper, and give back to the nation that has up to now mostly vilified and demonized them.
In 2021 The United States of America has a unique opportunity to acknowledge and remember our true, horrific, and painful past with a continued racist present, and simultaneously commit as a nation to work with companionate deliberation, honest and heartfelt remembrance to wipe out the scourge of racism from our country. We can atone, in words and actions, for our many transgression of the past, and all of the people that we have harm in our tumultuous history. And finally we can begin to truly heal our nation by making the appropriate reparations to the African-American and Indigenous nations. These simple yet courageous acts will go a long way in helping to heal our current national wounds that have fester for so long and so deeply divided this nation along racial and economic lines. With these doable and simple national acts of remembrance, atonement, reparation for all we can help this nation finally and permanently realize it long deferred aspirational commitment to equality and justice for all.
As a proud and blessed immigrant I can tell you that we, every single immigrant woman, man or child that lives is this country is eternally grateful for the opportunity to work, live and contribute to the health and prosperity of this nation. Our immigrant story (in the Americas and throughout the world) goes back thousands of years and it will continue for ever so long as humans are driven by hunger, violence and war to migrate and seek our food, shelter, safety and sustenance to survive and prosper. So that the United States of American can once again be the world’s beacon and refuge for the hungry, persecuted and tired immigrant masses of world that yearn for freedom.
— Armando Vazquez, M.Ed., founding member of CORE and the Acuna Art Gallery and Community Collective.