Colorado American Indian Movement denounces 'Convoy of
Conquest'
The following is excerpted from an Oct. 9 news release
from the American Indian Movement of Colorado:
Today, in the streets of downtown Denver, scores of
American Indian Movement members, and our TCD [Transform
Columbus Day] allies were arrested in a principled act of civil
resistance to the "Convoy of Conquest" (aka: Columbus Day
Parade). Despite any denials by its organizers, the Convoy is a
celebration of genocide against the indigenous peoples of the
Americas, and it elevates the theft of our homelands, and the
murder of our people, to national holiday status. To Colorado
AIM this is intolerable and unjustifiable.
Our arrests are designed to expose a corrupt educational,
legal and political system that refuses to describe the
destruction of millions of indigenous people at the hands of
Columbus for what it is: genocide. In a legal and political
system that rationalizes and justifies the murder, theft, and
ongoing betrayal of our peoples and nations, we, as the victims
of such a system, are under an obligation to expose such moral
and legal bankruptcy, and we actively refuse to cooperate with
legalized murder and theft. Our arrests today lay bare the
facts (they are not allegations) that Columbus was personally
responsible for:
* Trading in African slaves prior to his voyage to the
Americas in 1492.
* Columbus was personally responsible for overseeing a
colonial administration that directly led to the deaths of
millions of indigenous people. ...
* Columbus advanced and expanded the arrogant European
"Doctrine of Dis co very," claiming that superior, civilized
Christian Europeans had the right to seize and appropriate
indigenous peoples territories and resources. This doctrine has
been embedded into racist Federal Indian Law, and is applied
today in the case of the Western Shoshone in Nevada and the
Lakota in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
* More importantly, the legacy of Columbus allows the U.S.
government to "lose" between $40 and 100 billion in money that
the U.S. was to administer for the benefit of individual
American Indi ans. The government has admitted that it
deliberately destroyed evidence in the case, and it appears
that the U.S. has no intention of finding or accounting for the
money that it has stolen. See: www.indiantrust.com
* The Columbus legacy is reflected in the psychology of the
War in Iraq, as the U.S. military continues to refer to any
territory not under immediate U.S. control as "Indian Country."
Anyone who expresses a view other than the accepted, official
version is considered to be "off the reservation." Anyone who
actually tries to understand the Iraqi people, as opposed to
murdering them, is suspected of being a "race traitor" for
having "gone native." These small examples reveal a much larger
and dangerous psychology of the ongoing war by the U.S. against
indigenous peoples and other "infidels and heathens."
* With our arrest and our prosecution by the City of Denver,
we intend to go on the offensive, to put Columbus on trial, to
put his legacy on trial,to put the City of Denver, the state of
Colorado, and the U.S. itself on trial. We will defend
ourselves with an unapologetic political defense in court, and,
just as we did in 1992, and in 2001, we will prevail.
Colorado AIM and our allies do not risk our liberty as a
political ploy, or merely as a tactic; we believe that the time
is overdue to challenge the most pervasive and the most deeply
seated source of racism in the world: the oppression of
indigenous peoples. Columbus Day continues to operate as a
justification of racial superiority, and it, in fact, creates
demonstrable and verifiable harm to our children, and to their
children.
For further comments on these actions, or on the philosophy
behind these statements, please contact Colorado AIM at (303)
871-0463 or coloradoaim.org.
Reprinted from the Oct. 21, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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