The Stolen Children of Maine: Native Wabanaki Seek Truth, Reconciliation Amidst a Cultural Genocide
In These Times
The compendious catalogue of a recent exhibit offers representations of art as practiced by numerous Plains tribes from first encounter with Europeans to their near decimation not only from military conquest and rough frontier justice but from European-spawned disease. Much of the work is likened to that of Italian painters of religious scenes during the Renaissance, which might be defined as the depiction of social life sustained by a sacred sacrifice of blood.
Last month, when Pope Francis described Ottoman Turkey’s slaughter of between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians during World War I as “the first genocide of the 20th century,” the Turkish government predictably denounced his characterization. However, those who assert the first genocide in the 20th century was carried out by Germany against the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia (South-West Africa) have also raised concerns about the Pope’s statement.
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For a Native American, the story of Thanksgiving is not a very happy one. Jacqueline Keeler, a member of the Dineh Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux finds occasion for hope. Poem for Thanksgiving 2014 by Seymour Joseph. Svati Kirsten Narula's research article, How America's Thanksgiving Turkeys Got so Huge - doubling in size in 50 years.
Despite the May 20 ruling by Guatemala’s Constitutional Court, which overturned the original verdict on procedural grounds, the May 10 conviction of that country’s former head of state, General Efrain Rios Montt, for the genocide of Guatemala’s Mayan people, could be a defining event in modern history.
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