Wanting to remain neutral but forced to choose sides, some Haudenosaunee nations fought alongside the colonists during the war. His great-grandson lived up to the name of Town Destroyer in his treatment of Indigenous nations both during and after the Revolutionary War (1775–83). The title by which Washington was known to Native nations, Hanödaga:yas or Town Destroyer, was one he inherited from his great-grandfather, John Washington, a slave-owning planter and colonel in the Virginia militia who, during Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, had the chiefs of several tribes killed. Both Washington and Jefferson enslaved and waged war against Indigenous nations to dispossess them of their homelands.Īs a Mohawk citizen of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy – the oldest living democracy in the Western Hemisphere – when I see statues of Washington, like the towering equestrian monument at the Virginia Capitol in Richmond, or the colossus in front of Federal Hall in New York, I see not only a founding father, but also a genocidal one. Lee I wonder, is it George Washington next week Thomas Jefferson the week after Where does it stop?’ The short answer is that it doesn’t stop until the US contends not only with its history of slavery but also its history of dispossession. Courtesy: JASON SZENES/EPA-EFE/Shutterstockįollowing the 2017 clashes at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Trump presciently observed: ‘So, this week it’s Robert E. Ironically, his choice of words more aptly applies to the American campaigns against Indigenous nations, which erased our histories, demonized our heroes, scorned our values and acculturated our children in boarding schools. Deeming attacks on statues ‘a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children’, Trump’s rhetoric echoes the description of Native people in the Declaration of Independence as ‘merciless Indian savages’. Donald Trump recently condemned these actions in a speech delivered in front of his latest provocative backdrop, Mount Rushmore, in Lakota territory illegally seized by the US in the 1870s. In July 2020, Americans are once again divided, gathering in the streets and tearing down statues. The saw marks are still visible on the fence – scars as enduring as those that the American Revolution and its aftermath left on the Native nations of Turtle Island (North America). Like the statue of Christopher Columbus targeted in Boston last month, it was beheaded and the crown finials of its surrounding fence sawn off. In fact, it dates back at least to 9 July 1776 when, after a public reading of the Declaration of Independence, a group of Continental soldiers and New Yorkers, calling themselves the ‘Sons of Freedom’, pulled down the equestrian statue of King George III on Bowling Green. The current dispute over monuments in the US is not new.
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