I am beginning to comprehend
How things have come to be
How they are.
Christian Doctrine of Discovery….June 18th, 1452
A Pope, a Catholic Pope,
Gave permission to all explorers going out upon the unknown seas
Looking for unknown lands…
To take the land, any land, to kill the people if they weren’t Christians
(how would they be, they had not yet been evangelized)…
The Pope said that the explorers had the rights to the lands,
The natives did not matter…..
To read the rest of the poem, click here.
From that brutal beginning
The militarization of the seas
To the days that we live in now
The indigenous people do not matter
To the empire
No matter where they are.
Alaska, Hawaii, North America (Canada and the USA)
The USA ate up huge chunks
Of Mexico. This confused the people
Because the borders crossed them
They did not cross the border.
The place that was home for them became someone else’s home
Now they are prosecuted for “going home”.
Sound familiar?
Israel takes Palestine, the borders cross the Palestinians,
They did not cross the borders.
The place that was home for them became someone else’s home
Now they are murdered for trying to stay home.
The colonizing, the theft of indigenous land – all over the world
Weaponization is built into the very fabric of our
breath.
Just as the ill fate of African Americans went from
Slavery to Jim Crow to Incarceration
So too has the ill fate of this country gone from
Doctrine of Discovery to colonization to weaponization
Now our economy is based in having weapons-manufacturing
We must have a war, or many wars, going on around the globe
In order to feed the only way that our country knows how to live
Anymore,
Or maybe it is from ever.
Do you see?
This is why the defense budget grows and grows
We must maintain the global status quo
The manufacturers have contracts that feed off of the fat of the land
Without that they would suffocate
And our economy would die.
The Rifle Association knows no other way to
See the world, to see the country,
To see
Life
Even though it is
Death.
The very fabric of American life
The food we eat
The education we consume
The clothes we wear
The books we buy
The air we breathe.
Everything is infiltrated by the
fingers of the gun.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg used to be
One of my sheroes….
And then I learned that in a case before the corrupt court
That concerned Native Americans
She made a ruling based on a law, a document,
That had broken a treaty.
Do you see?
Even our laws are militarized
It means nothing to the ones who are the inheritors of the Doctrine of Discovery
To break a treaty with the Native Americans.
There are people in this land
Who look at the indigenous, to whom this land really belongs,
And think of them the same way that the
Israelis look at the Palestinians.
O(Zero) sum. Nada. Dead on arrival.
Just as Israelis today are killing pregnant Palestinian mothers
So did the settlers of this land as well,
Butcher,
Slaughter
Give smallpox infested blankets to
Diminish the population so they could be herded onto reservations.
Canada,
The USA,
Australia,
And others….the ones who rose to sanctify Israel as she sought revenge.
Colonists in this country were also killed by indigenous people,
They had stolen their land
They did not see that native ways were not the same as
European ways.
So the colonizers stuck by the side of Israel
When the revenge began
And continued.
South Africa had also been colonized, and the people who were the indigenous
Filed the lawsuit against the genocide in Gaza with the
International Court of Justice
Which so ironically, Israel and the United States are not signatories thereof.
I remember long ago walking in the West Bank
With a man from Northern Ireland.
Palestinians would call out to him “Hi there Northern Ireland!”
When I looked puzzled he told me
Northern Ireland was colonized too..
Palestine knew how it felt.
We must take it all apart.
Written By Debbie Blane
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