Happy Thanksgiving from TomCat
And from me –
And if you need a lttle something extra to be thankful for, this just might be it. It certainly would have made TomCat’s day – if not his whole year (he would of course wish it had happened in Oregon, but the fact that it happened at all is eexlilarating.)
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
I don’t think much about scalping, not even in the colloquial sense of demanding exorbitant prices, and getting them because the goods in question are not available elsewhere. So I suspect that most people don’t think much about scalping either. But, since tomorrow is Indigenous Peoples Day, and scalping is associaed with indegenous people in the Americas, I thought it a good opportunity to bring up some real, unsanitized history in hope of helping to set the record straight.
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Christoph Strobel, UMass Lowell
For the third year, the United States will officially observe Columbus Day alongside Indigenous Peoples Day on Oct. 9, 2023.
In 2021, the Biden administration declared the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples Day.
I am a scholar of Colonial-Indigenous relations and think that officially recognizing Indigenous Peoples Day – and, more broadly, Native Americans’ history and survival – is important.
Yet, Indigenous Peoples Day and Columbus Day should also serve as a reminder of the violent past endured by Indigenous communities in North America.
This past – complete with settlers’ brutal tactics of violence – is often ignored in the U.S.
My research on New England examines the important role that settlers’ wars against Native Americans played in their colonization of the region.
This warfare often targeted Native American women and children and was often encouraged through scalp bounties – meaning people or local governments offering money in exchange for a Native American’s scalp.
Scalping describes the forceful removal of the human scalp with hair attached. The violent act is usually performed with a knife, but it can also be done by other means. Someone can scalp victims who are already dead, but there are also examples of people being scalped while they are still alive.
Different groups have historically used scalping to terrorize people.
Native Americans certainly scalped white settlers dating back to the 1600s. Popular culture is full of examples of Native Americans scalping white settlers.
In several Indigenous cultures in North America, scalping was part of human trophy taking, which involves claiming human body parts as a war trophy. Scalps were taken during warfare as displays of military prowess or for ceremonial purposes. But just because scalping was practiced by some Native American societies, it does not mean that it was practiced by all.
Eyewitness accounts, histories and even art and popular films about the American West have perpetuated the false idea that scalping is a uniquely indigenous practice.
White settlers’ wide use of scalping against Indigenous peoples is far less acknowledged and understood. In fact, Colonists’ use of scalping against Native American people likely accelerated this practice.
Various European American colonizers also scalped Native American people from at least the 17th through the 19th centuries. It was a way to provide proof that someone killed a Native American person. Several North American colonial powers, from the British to the Spanish empires, paid bounties to people who turned in scalps of killed Native Americans.
Colonies, territories and states in what is now the U.S. used scalp bounties widely from the 17th through the 19th centuries.
Colonial governments in New England issued over 60 scalp bounties from the 1680s through the 1750s, typically during various conflicts between Colonists and Native Americans.
Massachusetts made the widest use of scalp bounties among the New England Colonies in the 1700s.
Massachusetts’ lieutenant governor issued one of the most notorious scalp bounty declarations in 1775. This declaration, called the Spencer Phips Proclamation of 1755, provides a glimpse into how this brutal system worked.
“For every scalp of such Female Indian or male Indian under the Age of Twelve Years, that shall be killed and brought in as Evidence of their being killed …, Twenty Pounds,” the declaration reads.
This reward was a large amount of money for Colonists, equivalent to more than 5,000 pounds, or US$12,000 in today’s currency. The scalp of a male Native American could fetch two and a half times this amount.
In the Colonial era, such violence was normalized by anti-Native American sentiment and a sense of racial superiority among Colonists.
And the violent trend was long-standing. As several historians point out, violence against and scalping of Native Americans also played a significant role in the conquest of California in 1846.
One historian has called California “the murder state” in the 1800s, as the scalping and massacres of Native Americans accompanied white settlers’ taking Native American land. State and federal officials, as well as several businesses, supported this genocide by paying bounties to scalp hunters.
From a contemporary perspective, the United Nations would consider the targeted killing of Indigenous women and children to be genocide.
Centuries later, California and Massachusetts have had different responses to their role in these sordid histories.
California has acknowledged “historic wrongdoings” and the violence committed against the Indigenous people who live in the state. In 2019, California Gov. Gavin Newsom set up a a Truth and Healing Council to discuss and examine the state’s historical relationship with Native Americans.
In Massachusetts, state officials have largely been silent on this issue. This places Massachusetts more in line with much of the United States.
This is true even as Massachusetts, under the leadership of then-Gov. Charlie Baker, put a special emphasis on genocide education in the school curriculum.
The legacies of violence and scalping are deeply rooted and can be observed in numerous parts of U.S. society today.
For instance, various communities, including Lovewell, Maine, and Spencer, Massachusetts, are named after scalp bounty hunters. Locals are often not aware of the history behind these names. Such town names, and the history of violence connected to them, often hide in plain sight.
But if you look closely, from the writings of early Euro-American colonizers and American literature to popular sport mascots and state and town seals, the brutality wrought upon Indigenous people remains at the forefront of U.S. culture more than five centuries after it began.
Christoph Strobel, Professor and Chair of History, UMass Lowell
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, let’s do what we can to dissociate scalping from being associted only with “savages” (or maybe stop thinking of savages as different population groups from our own and instead defining it on the basis of actions only.)
Incidentally, tomorrow is also still Columbus Day too. So in tomorrow’s video thread I’ll share a video (an old one from 2019) made for Full Frontal and featuring Deb Haaland.
The Furies and I will be back.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
This is not the first time I (or TC) have written about Juneteenth, but I don’t like to let it slip away. Confederates of the 1860’s (and earlier and later) could certainly give today’s Republicans a run for their money on delusion and denial – and mean spirited arrogance. “Well, just don’t tell them they’re free, and they’ll have to stay enslaved.” I apologize if that prompted a Barf Bag – especially when there are so many delicacies to celebrate with.
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Kris Manjapra, Tufts University
The actual day was June 19, 1865, and it was the Black dockworkers in Galveston, Texas, who first heard the word that freedom for the enslaved had come. There were speeches, sermons and shared meals, mostly held at Black churches, the safest places to have such celebrations.
The perils of unjust laws and racist social customs were still great in Texas for the 250,000 enslaved Black people there, but the celebrations known as Juneteenth were said to have gone on for seven straight days.
The spontaneous jubilation was partly over Gen. Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3. It read in part, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”
But the emancipation that took place in Texas that day in 1865 was just the latest in a series of emancipations that had been unfolding since the 1770s, most notably the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln two years earlier on Jan. 1, 1863.
As I explore in my book “Black Ghost of Empire,” between the 1780s and 1930s, during the era of liberal empire and the rise of modern humanitarianism, over 80 emancipations from slavery occurred, from Pennsylvania in 1780 to Sierra Leone in 1936.
There were, in fact, 20 separate emancipations in the
United States alone, from 1780 to 1865, across the U.S. North and South.
In my view as a scholar of race and colonialism, Emancipation Days – Juneteenth in Texas – are not what many people think, because emancipation did not do what most of us think it did.
As historians have long documented, emancipations did not remove all the shackles that prevented Black people from obtaining full citizenship rights. Nor did emancipations prevent states from enacting their own laws that prohibited Black people from voting or living in white neighborhoods.
In fact, based on my research, emancipations were actually designed to force Blacks and the federal government to pay reparations to slave owners – not to the enslaved – thus ensuring white people maintained advantages in accruing and passing down wealth across generations..
The emancipations shared three common features that, when added together, merely freed the enslaved in one sense, but reenslaved them in another sense.
The first, arguably the most important, was the ideology of gradualism, which said that atrocities against Black people would be ended slowly, over a long and open-ended period.
The second feature was state legislators who held fast to the racist principle that emancipated people were units of slave owner property – not captives who had been subjected to crimes against humanity.
The third was the insistence that Black people had to take on various forms of debt in order to exit slavery. This included economic debt, exacted by the ongoing forced and underpaid work that freed people had to pay to slave owners.
In essence, freed people had to pay for their freedom, while enslavers had to be paid to allow them to be free.
On March 1, 1780, for instance, Pennsylvania’s state Legislature set a global precedent for how emancipations would pay reparations to slave owners and buttress the system of white property rule.
The Pennsylvania Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery stipulated “that all persons, as well negroes, and mulattos, as others, who shall be born within this State, from and after the Passing of this Act, shall not be deemed and considered as Servants for Life or Slaves.”
At the same time, the legislation prescribed “that every negroe and mulatto child born within this State” could be held in servitude “unto the age of twenty eight Years” and “liable to like correction and punishment” as enslaved people.
After that first Emancipation Day in Pennsylvania, enslaved people still remained in bondage for the rest of their lives, unless voluntarily freed by slave owners.
Only the newborn children of enslaved women were nominally free after Emancipation Day. Even then, these children were forced to serve as bonded laborers from childhood until their 28th birthday.
All future emancipations shared the Pennsylvania DNA.
Emancipation Day came to Connecticut and Rhode Island on March 1, 1784. On July 4, 1799, it dawned in New York, and on July 4, 1804, in New Jersey. After 1838, West Indian people in the United States began commemorating the British Empire’s Emancipation Day of Aug. 1.
The District of Columbia’s day came on April 16, 1862.
Eight months later, on Jan. 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the enslaved only in Confederate states – not in the states loyal to the Union, such as New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri.
Emancipation Day dawned in Maryland on Nov. 1, 1864. In the following year, emancipation was granted on April 3 in Virginia, on May 8 in Mississippi, on May 20 in Florida, on May 29 in Georgia, on June 19 in Texas and on Aug. 8 in Tennessee and Kentucky.
After the Civil War, the three Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution each contained loopholes that aided the ongoing oppression of Black communities.
The Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 allowed for the enslavement of incarcerated people through convict leasing.
The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 permitted incarcerated people to be denied the right to vote.
And the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 failed to explicitly ban forms of voter suppression that targeted Black voters and would intensify during the coming Jim Crow era.
In fact, Granger’s Order No. 3, on June 19, 1865, spelled it out.
Freeing the slaves, the order read, “involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, become that between employer and hired labor.”
Yet, the order further states: “The freed are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
Since the moment emancipation celebrations started on March 1, 1780, all the way up to June 19, 1865, Black crowds gathered to seek redress for slavery.
On that first Juneteenth in Texas, and increasingly so during the ones that followed, free people celebrated their resilience amid the failure of emancipation to bring full freedom.
They stood for the end of debt bondage, racial policing and discriminatory laws that unjustly harmed Black communities. They elevated their collective imagination from out of the spiritual sinkhole of white property rule.
Over the decades, the traditions of Juneteenth ripened into larger gatherings in public parks, with barbecue picnics and firecrackers and street parades with brass bands.
At the end of his 1999 posthumously published novel, “Juneteenth,” noted Black author Ralph Ellison called for a poignant question to be asked on Emancipation Day: “How the hell do we get love into politics or compassion into history?”
The question calls for a pause as much today as ever before.
Kris Manjapra, Professor of History, Tufts University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I know you’re busy, but if you can manage, you might just want to track down some of those slaveowners in the underworld and give them a piece of all our minds. Not that they probably haven’t heard it – but those are mighty thick heads to try to get it through to.
The Furies and I will be back.
Let me make clear that I am not attempting to stand in for SoINeedAName – even if that were not impossible given his talents (yes, I have some of my own, but they are not in competition with his), the added responsibility is not something i am ready to take on.
However, I could not resist this headline:
And when I read on, and saw the photos, I could resist even less.
Yes, Virginia. There is a Santa Claus, and he’s officially brought back the “Muttcracker” photo shoot as a new Fort Collins holiday tradition.
For the second year in a row, Fort Collins’ Canyon Concert Ballet partnered with Animal Friends Alliance to showcase nine of the local rescue’s adoptable dogs and cats ahead of the ballet company’s annual production of “The Nutcracker.”
Like last year, Nutcracker dancers posed with the animals for photos celebrating both their upcoming shows and Animal Friends Alliance’s adoptable pets. Of the pets featured in the Nov. 20 photo shoot, all of the puppies have since been adopted. Gladys, a senior beagle involved in the shoot, is available for fostering and adoption this week, while the kittens featured will likely be available at an adoption event from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at PetSmart, 4432 S. College Ave, according to Animal Friends Alliance.
Here are the pictures – I wasn’t there, so I’m not sure of all the costume ID’s, but I am of most of them.
If I were that Rat King, I’d be terrified of that ferocious cat!
Sorry, sweetie, I gotta go dance the Trepak.
Looks like the dancers could just ear them all up…
I think this is one of the snowflakes … but the little sweeitie
in her arms doesn’t appear to be chilled.
By the hair, and also the sleeves, I’m thinking this must be Clara.
The dances we usually think of as the Arabian Dance, Chinese
Dance, and Spanish Dance are actually called “Coffee,” “Tea,” and “Chocolate,” in that order. This looks like Chocolate to me.
Coffee being full of caffeine, it’s not surprising the dancers have the energy for four photos. But I’ll only show two.
Here’s the second.
And I think this one is Tea.
Of course there has to be the Sugar Plum Fairy
Twice.
You can see all of the pictures (there are 17) if you click through on the headline – or here. They’re shown as a “gallery” – see one, then click to the next and so on. Virgil will be so proud of the town he grew up in for doing this. They couldn’t have when he lived there – it was much smaller, although the university was already there.
I hope you enjoyed seeing this as much as I did. A Happy Holiday season to all!
It was a pleasure to work with Dr. King on Vietnam Summer. Of all the people I have met in my life, he stands head and shoulders above the rest.
In addition to I Have a Dream, you should also watch Beyond Vietnam. I was in Riverside Baptist Church. After the speech, we formed the organizing committee for Vietnam Summer. The policies he outlined are what we are still fighting to achieve today and challenged the far right to murder him.
I trust that this is the first time Dr. King has observed this remembrance washout grieving since 2013. I rejoice that he is rejoicing today!
This year, once again, I wish you a very Merry Christmas, or whatever holiday is appropriate to your beliefs. Since many of the Carols I’ve used in years past stopped working, I had to change the music I’m using to celebrate Christmas with you. Traditional Christmas Carols An hour of traditional Christmas carols sung by a church choir. 1. Silent Night 2. O Come All Ye Faithful 3. Away In A Manger 4. Hark! The Herald Angels Sing 5. Ding! Dong! Merrily On High 6. Joy To The World 7. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen 8. It Came Upon The Midnight Clear 9. Rocking 10. See Amid The Winter Snow 11. I Wonder As I Wander 12. De Virgin Mary Had A Baby Boy 13. A Maiden Most Gentle 14. As With Gladness Men Of Old 15. The Shepherd’s Farewell 16. Past 3 O’Clock 17. A Child This Day Is Born 18. Deck The Halls 19. We Three Kings 20. White Christmas
Note that the last Carol is for our Republican friends, who we wish a hearty “Happy Holidays”. Finally I will restate last year’s warning, as our nation remains in dire peril, but not for long!
