Palestinians and American Indians

Alvin Josephy’s been gone for twenty years now, but his words are still with us, many still ringing in my head. Alvin said in many ways that the Reservation System, and how it evolved with land takeovers in broken and revised treaties and with the Allotment Act, was brutal and unjust. But—he said—it allowed at least some Indian tribes to stay attached to some ancestral lands. In fact, I think he would be pleasantly surprised by tribal pushbacks on land and land usage in the last 20 years. He’d like the story of the Yuroks in California, using California law to extend land holdings, advocating for fish, plants, and condors. (Alvin wrote about Condors, but that’s another story.)

Today’s story is the news videos from Gaza, the pictures of seas of people on the road to their homeland in North Gaza, some in cars and pickups piled high, others with donkey pulled carts, still others pushing prams and pulling wagons while walking. Most are walking, one a small boy carrying a full-grown cat! We’re told that the sea of people might be 400,000, not all, to be sure, of the million and a half who once called North Gaza home, but a sizable chunk of them.

When interviewed, they allowed as how their homes are probably no more, reduced to rubble, but the place is still home. They greeted each other, relatives and friends they hadn’t seen for a year, with tears and hugs, and more than one told the camera that this is “home.”

President Trump didn’t understand that when he suggested that Gazans be moved to Jordan and Egypt; the Israelis who think that this whole bloody war will result in the takeover of Gaza with new Jewish settlements don’t understand. People who marvel at the continuing presence of Hamas don’t understand. My guess is that American Indians do.

It’s ironic and tragic that early Zionists looked to the Euro-American takeover of Tribal lands as a model for their ambitions in Palestine. It’s tragic that lines drawn on a map by conquering European powers at the end of the World War I and the resulting British mandate and occupation played out so unfairly for the Arab Christians, Druze, and Muslims who lived there. They had lived for centuries as separate but neighbor nations under Ottoman rule that was called “Millet.” Millet means “people,” and each people governing itself in most matters was the way of the Ottoman Turks when they ruled well.

Oliver McTernan, Catholic priest-turned-conflict negotiator, appeared on Amanpour and Company to say that Gazans wanted their land, no matter what the condition, and held out hope that groups like his could facilitate return and rebuilding, including rebuilding relationships among minority groups and political facations within Gaza.

It’s a dream, but a good dream. And Israelis are key. It is key that Israelis who have all along promoted peace and cohabitation or two states step up. It is important that Israelis recognize that their own founding as a nation owed to the work of a “terrorist” organization, Irgun, and that they were able to absorb Irgun into the body politic. And Israelis must realize that they have now become a pariah nation in the eyes of many. Any peace built on the power they exerted—with massive American aid—and that they are still exercising in Lebanon and now the West Bank, will be a fragile peace, doubted by the world. And it invites the quiet rebuilding of another terrorist force that their actions over the last year have visibly grown.

My friend Steve Kliewer of the Lostine Presbyterian Church in Lostine, visited the West Bank in December. Alvin’s daughter and my good friend, Diane Josephy Peavey, traveled to the Holy Land numerous times, and had it in her mind to write something about the parallels between American Indians and Palestinians. She traveled with Christian Arab guides, but saw the conditions for all Palestinians and lamented them in many conversations over the years. Write them down now, I want to tell her.

And tell me when, Steve and Diane. I am not up to much physical work, but I feel almost compelled to be a witness to this huge global event that will play out among peoples and nations for decades to come.

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phot from Al Jazeera

Book review: re Palestine and Indigenous America

In his new book, The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates visits three places: Dakar in Senegal, West Africa, which has become a place of pilgrimage for African-Americans tracing slave ancestry; to Columbia, South Carolina, where a previous book of his has been banned, and where a woman born in the South rises to teach and defend her teaching of the book; and to Palestine.

Coates, a MacArthur Fellow and the author of a famous Atlantic Magazine piece arguing for financial reparations for descendants of American slaves, is bamboozled by Palestine. Read Rich’s Post →

Political parties, armies, and nations change

Segregationist Southern Democrats had a grip on the party—and in some cases the country—for years. Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of Civil Rights legislation alienated Southern Democrats, and chased them into the Republican Party—which had been the party of Lincoln and abolition!

Germany’s radical Nazi government gained power in fewer than twenty years, was defeated, and went from genocidal rampage to conversion to Western democracy in a few years; Japan’s Imperial aggression transformed itself into a Western leaning and anti-militaristic state.Read Rich’s Post →

Blessed are the peacemakers

This history blog of mine usually focuses on Nez Perce, Native American, and American history and history telling. I like to find the missing pieces of our history—my current obsession is the under-told story of the beaver’s place in the US economy and Euro-American Westward expansion. I highlight the places where historians have found new links and chinks in old stories—in my student days, the role of disease in depopulating Indigenous America was not taught, the roles of the plague and the Little Ice Age in European expansion and emigration not seriously treated. Today they are routinely credited with major impacts on US history and world events.Read Rich’s Post →

Eurocentrism in America and Palestine

In the introduction to America In 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples Before the Arrival of Columbus, a book of essays Alvin Josephy edited and published on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the Caribbean, he wrote that:

“Commencing with Columbus’s arrival among them, Spanish, French, and English invaders, colonizers, pirates, and imperial explorers all but exterminated them [indigenous people], slaughtering Caribs wholesale with fire, steel, European tortures, and savage dogs, working thousands of them to death as slaves, and wiping out their settlements with the pox, measles, dIphtheria, and other white men’s diseases to which the Indians had no resistance…Read Rich’s Post →

War’s sidekicks and allies

In his new book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, Ned Blackhawk argues that

”the most traumatic development in American history [is] the loss of indigenous life due to European diseases. Epidemics tore apart numerous communities and set in motion large-scale migrations and transformations. North America’s total population nearly halved from 1492 to 1776: from approximately 7 or 8 million to 4 million.”Read Rich’s Post →

Heroes

My recent scrape with death—for those who hadn’t heard, I rolled my car in the Wallowa River canyon on Sunday on the way back from a fine Portland Thanksgiving—and the crazy recess in the war in Israel/Gaza have me thinking about fortune and history, about being in a certain place in a specific time, about the people and events that create our life stories. About my heroes.Read Rich’s Post →

An American Indian solution in Palestine?

When I am talking with non-Native audiences, and even when talking with Tribal friends, I sometimes say that I feel like I am body-surfing on a wave of pro-Indian sentiment in the country. I say that a big part of this is based on recognition of non-Native—read mostly white male—failures in dealing with the natural world. We haven’t been so smart about fire, fish, and water, and grope now, trying to play catch up with preemptive burns and reintroduction of beaver and bison.Read Rich’s Post →