Dear Ones,
Holocausts and genocide come in different sizes.
Mame
AMERICA'S FIRST EXTERMINATION
Helene Smith
First Americans have been targets of extermination from the beginning of the United States. The British and then US colonists took carried this out on the last sacred lands of the indigenous people. Blankets from smallpox hospitals were given as gifts, which resulted in the population eventually decreasing to two percent traditionalists.
Next came nuclear bomb testing, more than a thousand, most often at reservations causing cancer and child deformities, as toxic chemicals from Nazi-made nerve gases used in WWI and WWII made into pesticides. fumigants and raffinate, nuclear waste fertilizer. (see The Shoshone Bannock Sun dance Poisoning. (www.macdonaldsward,com) For years the nuclear bomb sites were marked on atlases as danger zones, not for "Indians" living on the land but for outsiders passing through the reservations.
Following radioactive bomb blasts came nuclear waste dumping on reservations with Yucca Mountain threatened to become one gigantic nuclear depository also affecting First Americans. The oldest, largest nuclear waste reservation is at Hanford, Washington reservation ever since WWII with radioactive waste accumulating to the present time–leaking plutonium now threatening Oregon and the Columbia River, as well. as Washington.
Besides sterile land the government also sterilized indigenous people, a form of genocide–this every time they were admitted to hospitals, for whatever reason. The group WARN, women of "red" nations, and Senator James Abourezk in the 1970s disclosed this atrocity. It was also happening among Puerto Ricans in Connecticut and elsewhere.
When other nations also try to "ethnically cleanse" themselves of different cultures and nationalities, as horrible as it is, we are hypocritical in thinking our own wonderful country is free of such atrocities. Therefore, with what we now know, it is quintessential to admit our wrongs and pledge to never let them happen again, When history keeps repeating itself over and over again, this is a sign of insanity,
