Via Visit Milwaukee
Pretty much everyone was taught a crock of shit about Thanksgiving. Most of us know the real story by now. Short version? A bunch of religious bigots arrived in what is now Massachusetts because they couldn't get along in England or Holland because of their bigotry. They arrived with no knowledge of how to feed themselves. The locals were a friendly sort and fed them and showed them how to raise crops and hunt. We like to pretend that this was a meeting of equals. It was not. It was the locals kindly taking in refugees. Things went downhill fast and the more Europeans arrived the more of the locals were slaughtered or displaced or enslaved. It's not a pretty history.
Eventually the Europeans who now ran the place realized that they owed something to the people whose land they stole and whose family they killed and treaties were signed. The US has repeatedly broken these treaties. Today we're looking at a treaty about fish. This might seem like a small thing but I know from the violence in northern Wisconsin (white on native) that there is no such thing as a small thing. But we're looking west to the Columbia basin where natives ceded land in return for fishing rights. They still have the fishing rights but the fish are now too toxic to eat at the levels that natives eat them. [Oregon Public Broadcasting/ProPublica}
Political discussion welcome
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