Today is the day when we give thanks to the natives, those aboriginal peoples whose land we forcibly colonized, raped, and conquered. We fought several wars over it and we generally treated both aboriginals and colonizers alike, in very bad ways. At least today is the day in Canada (Americans celebrate this in November) where we give thanks to the natives for showing us how to survive the long, cold winters, which game was good eating and which plants were which.
It reflects a time when those too conservative for Great Britain and for that matter the rest of Europe were essentially kicked out for being too puritanical and fanatic about it. If, say, you happened to be female and for whatever reason they decided they didn’t like you, they would brand you a witch and murder you accordingly.
So they came to a new land, the “New World” and promptly began colonizing. A large part of this colonization involved a religious colonization, called a “mission.” These people were on a mission to obliterate the culture and most of the personnel within the indigenous population, or to enslave them.
This colonization took part using arbitrary people based in Europe and to hell with any non-european already occupying the land. In fact, there once was a great city called Hochelaga, where more than 500 000 people lived. There is still a city on that site today, except now with a population of just over 3 million. 3 million colonizers’ descendants and other immigrants and the descendants thereof, that is. While the indigenous population were mostly slaughtered, or forcibly re-located to a village on the south shore.
Of course, I refer to Montreal, an important island in the Mohawk nation.
The truth of the matter is, this land known as the New World, was conquered by three major European countries, all of which were fighting wars with each other constantly. Serial killers and mass murderers, like Adam Dollard des Ormeaux, were heroised, while true heroes would have been seen as enemies, traitors and general pariahs. These colonizing countries sent their worst prisoners here as well, to settle and rape the land and force Christianity, primarily in the form of Catholicism, to become the “National” state religion, very often in a cruel and sadistic, extremely abusive manner.
In an effort to forcibly assimilate the native populations even recently, the state imposed residential schools which stole the children from their parents, essentially kidnapping them to make then wards of the state, committed physical, sexual, emotional and other forms of abuse on these children, told them lies about their parents, et cetera. Residential schools were essentially concentration camps.
-At least, that’s how I understand it. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe not. Either way, those of us of European descent, myself included, probably shouldn’t be here. Having said that, if my family wouldn’t have come to Montreal, I probably wouldn’t have been born, as my family would have most likely fallen prey to the European anti semites, missionaries, conquistadors and the like.
-Happy Thanksgiving, and enjoy!
