Richard Kagan, a supporter of the hypothesis of the black legend and regarding the Black Legend in the United States writes:
Compounding this perception of Spain as an inferior ´other´ was the Black Legend, the centuries-old cluster of Protestant beliefs that the United States inherited from the British and, to a certain extent, from the Dutch. The Black Legend equated Spain with the Inquisition, religious bigotry, and the bloody persecution of Protestants and Jews. It also conjured up images of despotic monarchs who denied their subjects access to any semblance of economic and political freedom and who had consequently set Spain onto the road of economic weakness and political decline. Such a reading of Spanish history was overly simplistic but promoters of American exceptionalism found it useful to see Spain as an example of what would happen to a country whose fundamental values were antithetical to those of the United States.— Richard Kagan, Spain in America: The Origins of Hispanism in the United States
The reputation of Bartolomé de las Casas, the 16th-century Spanish colonist who acted as a historian and social reformer before becoming a Dominican friar, appointed the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians", was subject to the Black Legend. His extensive writings, the most famous being A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and Historia de Las Indias, chronicle the first decades of colonization of the West Indies. He described the atrocities committed by the colonizers against the indigenous peoples.
However, one persistent point of criticism has been Las Casas's repeated suggestions of replacing Indian with African slave labour. Even though he repented that position later in his life and included an apology in his History of the Indies, some later criticism held him responsible for the institution of the Atlantic slave trade.
One detractor, the abolitionist David Walker, called Las Casas;
"This wretch... stimulated by sordid avarice only,"and holding him responsible for the enslavement of thousands of Africans.
David Walker (1796 – 1830) was an American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was enslaved, his mother was free; therefore, he was free as well (partus sequitur ventrem). In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the African Grand Lodge he published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and self-help in the fight against the oppressive and unjust slavery.
The appeal brought attention to the abuses and inequities of slavery and the responsibility of individuals to act according to religious and political principles. At the time, those with vested interests in the economic framework reliant on slavery were fearful of the possible reaction that the pamphlet would provoke. It was also the case that many of Walker's fellow abolitionists thought his views were extreme.
Historians and liberation theologians cite the Appeal as an influential political and social document of the 19th century. Walker exerted a radicalizing influence on the abolitionist movements of his day and inspired future black leaders and activists.
The pamphlet condemns Las Casas but is remarkably lacking in making such a severe historiographic judgement upon the English.
The English are the best friends the coloured people have upon earth. Though they have oppressed us a little and have colonies now in the West Indies, which oppress us sorely.--Yet notwithstanding they (the English) have done one hundred times more for the melioration of our condition, than all the other nations of the earth put together. The blacks cannot but respect the English as a nation, notwithstanding they have treated us a little cruel.Page 47 An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World
There is no intelligent black man who knows any thing, but esteems a real Englishman, let him see him in what part of the world he will--for they are the greatest benefactors we have upon earth. We have here and there, in other nations, good friends. But as a nation, the English are our friends.
These quotations can be found within a context that, whilst challenging the values of a United States that in certain states allows for slavery to continue, presents Las Casas as a villain and the English as the best friends of coloured people.
It is well known to the Christian world, that Bartholomew Las Casas, that very very notoriously avaricious Catholic priest or preacher, and adventurer with Columbus in his second voyage, proposed to his countrymen, the Spaniards in Hispaniola to import the Africans from the Portuguese settlement in Africa, to dig up gold and silver, and work their plantations for them, to effect which, he made a voyage thence to Spain, and opened the subject to his master, Ferdinand then in declining health, who listened to the plan: but who died soon after, and left it in the hand of his successor, Charles V.*
* See Butler's History of the United States, vol. 1, page 24.----See also, page 25.
This wretch, ("Las Casas, the Preacher,") succeeded so well in his plans of oppression, that in 1503, the first blacks had been imported into the new world. Elated with this success, and stimulated by sordid avarice only, he importuned Charles V. in 1511, to grant permission to a Flemish merchant, to import 4000 blacks at one time.*
* It is not unworthy of remark, that the Portuguese and Spaniards, were among, if not the very first Nations upon Earth, about three hundred and fifty or sixty years ago--But see what those Christians have come to now in consequence of afflicting our fathers and us, who have never molested, or disturbed them or any other of the white Christians, but have they received one quarter of what the Lord will yet bring upon them, for the murders they have inflicted upon us?--They have had, and in some degree have now, sweet times on our blood and groans, the time however, of bitterness have sometime since commenced with them.--There is a God the Maker and preserver of all things, who will as sure as the world exists, give all his creatures their just recompense of reward in this and in the world to come,--we may fool or deceive, and keep each other in the most profound ignorance, beat murder and keep each other out of what is our lawful rights, or the rights of man, yet it is impossible for us to deceive or escape the Lord Almighty.
An ideology has been at work here. See the context of the pamphlet on this link. What about Admiral Sir John Hawkins of Plymouth, a notable Elizabethan seafarer, widely acknowledged to be "the Pioneer of the English Slave Trade". In 1554–1555, Hawkins formed a slave trading syndicate of wealthy merchants. He sailed with three ships for the Caribbean via Sierra Leone, hijacked a Portuguese slave ship and sold the 300 slaves from it in Santo Domingo. During a second voyage in 1564, his crew captured 400 Africans and sold them at Rio de la Hacha in present-day Colombia, making a 60% profit for his financiers. A third voyage involved both buying slaves directly in Africa and capturing a Portuguese ship with its cargo; upon reaching the Caribbean, Hawkins sold all the slaves. On his return, he published a book entitled An Alliance to Raid for Slaves.[citation needed] It is estimated that Hawkins transported 1,500 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic during his four voyages of the 1560s, before stopping in 1568 after a battle with the Spanish in which he lost five of his seven ships. The English involvement in the Atlantic slave trade only resumed in the 1640s after the country acquired the American colony of Virginia.
The emergence of the Abolitionist movement in Great Britain in the late 18th century, and the 1772 judgement of Lord Mansfield in the Somersetts case that in English Common Law slavery was unlawful, the British plantocracy became concerned. This plantocracy was not the best friends of "the coloured people". It was in fact a slavocracy, consisting of a ruling class, the political order and government dominated by plantation owners. Most of the early European colonies in the New World were largely plantocracies, usually consisting of a small European settler population relying on a predominantly West African chattel slave population (as well as smaller numbers of indentured servants, both European and non-European in origin), and later, freed Black and poor white sharecroppers for labour. These plantocracies proved to be a decisive force in the anti-abolitionist movement.
The London Society of West India Planters and Merchants was an organisation established in London to represent the views of the British West Indian plantocracy. The organisation played a major role in resisting the abolition of the slave trade and that of slavery itself. The Society was formed in 1780, and brought together three different groups: British sugar merchants, absentee planters and colonial agents. The society started with a predominantly Jamaican leadership, but as emancipation approached, by the 1830s the leadership came to include a broader ranger of planter interests from across the British Caribbean. The society evolved into the West India Committee.
Despite the ending of slavery in Great Britain, the West Indian colonies of the British Empire continued to practice it. British banks continued to finance the commodities and shipping industries in the colonies they had earlier established which still relied upon slavery, despite the legal developments in Great Britain.
The best friends of slaves were the Abolitionists who saw to The Slave Trade Act being passed by the British Parliament on 25 March 1807, making the slave trade illegal throughout the British Empire. The Act imposed a fine of £100 for every slave found aboard a British ship. This was at a time when the French under Napoleon decided to revive slavery, which had been abolished during the French Revolution and to send his troops to re-enslave the people of Haiti, Guadeloupe and the other French Caribbean possessions, the British took the moral high ground with their prohibition of the slave trade.
Contradicting this moral high ground was the fact that after the 1807 Act, slaves could still be held, though not sold, within the British Empire. In the 1820s, the abolitionist movement revived the campaign against the institution of slavery. In 1823 the first Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Britain. The Society's members consisted of a union of non-conformist churches and many had previously campaigned against the slave trade. In 1831 the slave Sam Sharpe led the Christmas Rebellion (Baptist War) in Jamaica, an event that catalyzed anti-slavery sentiment. This combination of political pressure and popular uprisings convinced the British government that there was no longer any middle ground between slavery and emancipation.
On 28 August 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act received Royal Assent, paving the way for the abolition of slavery within the British Empire and its colonies. On 1 August 1834, all slaves in the British Empire were emancipated, but they were indentured to their former owners in an apprenticeship system that meant gradual abolition: the first set of apprenticeships came to an end on 1 August 1838, while the final apprenticeships were scheduled to cease on 1 August 1840, two years later.
The government set aside £20 million for compensation of slave owners for their "property" across the Empire but it did not offer the former slaves compensation or reparations.
In context, the £20 million voted by parliament to compensate slave owners under the 1833 Act can be compared with the Gross Domestic Product of the Great Britain at the time which was £459 million.
The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed
The history of British slavery has been buried. The thousands of British families who grew rich on the slave trade, or from the sale of slave-produced sugar, in the 17th and 18th centuries, brushed those uncomfortable chapters of their dynastic stories under the carpet. Today, across the country, heritage plaques on Georgian townhouses describe former slave traders as “West India merchants”, while slave owners are hidden behind the equally euphemistic term “West India planter”. Thousands of biographies written in celebration of notable 17th and 18th-century Britons have reduced their ownership of human beings to the footnotes, or else expunged such unpleasant details altogether. The Dictionary of National Biography has been especially culpable in this respect. Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from the Britain’s “island story”. If it was geography that made this great forgetting possible, what completed the disappearing act was our collective fixation with the one redemptive chapter in the whole story. William Wilberforce and the abolitionist crusade, first against the slave trade and then slavery itself, has become a figleaf behind which the larger, longer and darker history of slavery has been concealed.David Olusoga The Observer Sun 12 Jul 2015
This kind of "Black Legend" racialised ideology was present in the identity politics and political formation of the Native American Party, and, what came to be known as the Know Nothing movement.
So, who, according to the "Nativists", are the native Americans? The "Indians"?
The answer to such a question was, for the Know Nothing movement - "Native-born American Protestants!"
Anti-Catholicism had been a factor in colonial America but played a minor role in American politics until the arrival of large numbers of Irish and German Catholics in the 1840s. It then reemerged in nativist attacks on Catholic immigration. It appeared in New York politics as early as 1843 under the banner of the American Republican Party. The movement quickly spread to nearby states using that name or Native American Party or variants of it. They succeeded in a number of local and Congressional elections, notably in 1844 in Philadelphia, where the anti-Catholic orator Lewis Charles Levin, who went on to be the first Jewish congressman, was elected Representative from Pennsylvania's 1st district. In the early 1850s, numerous secret orders grew up, of which the Order of United Americans and the Order of the Star Spangled Banner came to be the most important. They merged in New York in the early 1850s as a secret order that quickly spread across the North, reaching non-Catholics, particularly those who were lower middle class or skilled workmen.
The immigration of large numbers of Irish and German Catholics to the United States in the period between 1830 and 1860 made religious differences between Catholics and Protestants a political issue. Violence occasionally erupted at the polls. Protestants alleged that Pope Pius IX had put down the failed liberal Revolutions of 1848 and that he was an opponent of liberty, democracy and republicanism. One Boston minister described Catholicism as "the ally of tyranny, the opponent of material prosperity, the foe of thrift, the enemy of the railroad, the caucus, and the school". These fears encouraged conspiracy theories regarding papal intentions of subjugating the United States through a continuing influx of Catholics controlled by Irish bishops obedient to and personally selected by the Pope.
In spring 1854, the Know Nothings carried Boston, Salem, and other New England cities. They swept the state of Massachusetts in the fall 1854 elections, their biggest victory. The Whig candidate for mayor of Philadelphia, editor Robert T. Conrad, was soon revealed as a Know Nothing as he promised to crack down on crime, close saloons on Sundays and to appoint only native-born Americans to office—he won by a landslide.
In Washington, D.C., Know Nothing candidate John T. Towers defeated incumbent Mayor John Walker Maury, causing opposition of such proportion that the Democrats, Whigs, and Freesoilers in the capital united as the "Anti-Know-Nothing Party". In New York, in a four-way race the Know Nothing candidate ran third with 26%. After the 1854 elections, they claimed to have exerted decisive influence in Maine, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and California, but historians are unsure due to the secrecy as all parties were in turmoil and the anti-slavery and prohibition issues overlapped with nativism in complex and confusing ways. They helped elect Stephen Palfrey Webb as Mayor of San Francisco and J. Neely Johnson as Governor of California. Nathaniel P. Banks was elected to Congress as a Know Nothing candidate, but after a few months he aligned with Republicans. A coalition of Know Nothings, Republicans and other members of Congress opposed to the Democratic Party elected Banks to the position of Speaker of the House.
In San Francisco, California, a Know Nothing chapter was founded in 1854 to oppose Chinese immigration—members included a judge of the state supreme court, who ruled that no Chinese person could testify as a witness against a white man in court.
In the spring of 1855, Know Nothing candidate Levi Boone was elected mayor of Chicago and barred all immigrants from city jobs. Abraham Lincoln was strongly opposed to the principles of the Know Nothing movement, but did not denounce it publicly because he needed the votes of its membership to form a successful anti-slavery coalition in Illinois. Ohio was the only state where the party gained strength in 1855. Their Ohio success seems to have come from winning over immigrants, especially German American Lutherans and Scots-Irish Presbyterians, both hostile to Catholicism.
Historian John Mulkern (John R. Mulkern (1990). The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts: The Rise and Fall of a People's Movement. University Press of New England. pp. 74–89), has examined the party's success in sweeping to almost complete control of the Massachusetts legislature after its 1854 landslide victory. He finds the new party was populist and highly democratic, hostile to wealth, elites and to expertise and deeply suspicious of outsiders, especially Catholics.
The new party's voters were concentrated in the rapidly growing industrial towns, where Yankee workers faced direct competition with new Irish immigrants. Whereas the Whig Party was strongest in high income districts, the Know Nothing electorate was strongest in the poor districts. They expelled the traditional upper-class closed political leadership class, especially the lawyers and merchants. In their stead, they elected working class men, farmers and a large number of teachers and ministers. Replacing the moneyed elite were men who seldom owned $10,000 in property.
Many were appalled by the Know Nothings. Abraham Lincoln expressed his own disgust with the political party in a private letter to Joshua Speed written August 24, 1855. Lincoln never publicly attacked the Know Nothings, whose votes he needed:
I am not a Know-Nothing—that is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equals, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to that I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.John Wilkes Booth, the American actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865, was a member of the Know Nothing movement.
The American Party was represented in the 2002 Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York, led by William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), the fictionalized version of real-life Know Nothing leader William Poole, who was also the real life leader of the Bowery Boys.
Gangs of New York (2002), includes a fictionalized portrayal of the New York Draft Riots.
The New York City draft riots of 1863 - the largest civil and racially-charged insurrection in American history
The New York City draft riots (July 13–16, 1863), known at the time as Draft Week, were violent disturbances in Lower Manhattan, widely regarded as the culmination of white working-class discontent with new laws passed by Congress that year to draft men to fight in the ongoing American Civil War. The riots remain the largest civil and racially-charged insurrection in American history.
U.S. President Abraham Lincoln diverted several regiments of militia and volunteer troops after the Battle of Gettysburg to control the city. The rioters were overwhelmingly white working-class men, mostly Irish or of Irish descent, who feared free black people competing for work and resented that wealthier men, who could afford to pay a $300 (equivalent to $9,200 in 2017) commutation fee to hire a substitute, were spared from the draft.
Initially intended to express anger at the draft, the protests turned into a race riot, with white rioters, predominantly Irish immigrants, attacking black people throughout the city. The official death toll was listed at either 119 or 120 individuals. Conditions in the city were such that Major General John E. Wool, commander of the Department of the East, said on July 16 that, "Martial law ought to be proclaimed, but I have not a sufficient force to enforce it."
The military did not reach the city until the second day of rioting, by which time the mobs had ransacked or destroyed numerous public buildings, two Protestant churches, the homes of various abolitionists or sympathizers, many black homes, and the Colored Orphan Asylum at 44th Street and Fifth Avenue, which was burned to the ground. The area's demographics changed as a result of the riot. Many black residents left Manhattan permanently with many moving to Brooklyn. By 1865, the black population fell below 11,000 for the first time since 1820.
1863 - The United States foundation story and the great land-grab cover-up!
This includes the invention of the Thanksgiving story. It was during the American Civil War that President Abraham Lincoln, prompted by a series of editorials written by Sarah Josepha Hale, proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day, to be celebrated on the 26th, the final Thursday of November 1863. Since 1863, Thanksgiving has been observed annually in the United States.
Thanksgiving, as a "founding of the nation story" required a reduced role for those indigenous peoples of the continent who had provided the crucial means for the winter survival of colonists in Virginia and Massachusetts during their first years.
Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, following the failure of the Roanoke colony in Sir Walter Raleigh's first efforts made under the joint-stock Virginia Company, to raise the capital necessary to create successful colonies. In the winter of 1609 through 1610, Jamestown residents had little food or effective shelter as they experienced the Starving Time. The Powhatan people integrated and cared for the English who left Jamestown to live with them, as they were much more prepared for the harsh winter. In the summer, when the governor of Jamestown requested that Powhatan return the runaways, he offered vague comments that the English considered rude, but showed no intention to bring them back. In response, the English terrorized a local village, killing about 15 Powhatan, burning the houses down, cutting the corn supply, and kidnapping and murdering the queen and her children. The Powhatans had never seen this magnitude of hatred before Jamestown's establishment; as the chief roughly said in a letter to Captain John Smith:
I have seen two generations of my people die...I know the difference between peace and war better than any man in my country... Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war? We can hide our provisions and run into the woods; then you will starve for wronging your friends. Why are you jealous of us? We are unarmed, and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in a friendly manner, and not so simple as not to know that is it much better to eat good meat, sleep comfortably, live quietly with my wives and children, laugh and be merry with the English, and trade for their copper and hatchets, than to run away from them, and to lie cold in the wood, feed on acorns, roots and such trash, and be so hunted that I can neither eat nor sleep... Take away your guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may all die in the same manner.And what actually happened at the first Thanksgiving?
Much like Columbus Day, Thanksgiving is considered by some to be a "national day of mourning", as a celebration of the cultural genocide and conquest of Native Americans by colonists. Thanksgiving has long carried a distinct resonance for Native Americans, who see the holiday as an embellished story of "Pilgrims and Natives looking past their differences" to break bread.
Professor Dan Brook of the University of California, Berkeley condemns the "cultural and political amnesia" of Americans who celebrate Thanksgiving:
"We do not have to feel guilty, but we do need to feel something."Professor Robert Jensen of the University of Texas at Austin is somewhat harsher in his article No Thanks to Thanksgiving:
"One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting."Since 1970, the United American Indians of New England, a protest group led by Frank "Wamsutta" James has accused the United States and European settlers of fabricating the Thanksgiving story and of whitewashing a genocide and injustice against Native Americans, and it has led a National Day of Mourning protest on Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts in the name of social equality and in honor of political prisoners.
Reverse land-grab!
It was Richard Oakes, one of the inspirations for the rapper Magneto Dayo and The Lakota Medicine Men called "The Journey", who led the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island with LaNada Means and approximately 50 California State University students, and 37 others. The Occupation of Alcatraz is credited for opening a rediscovered unity among all the Native American tribes.
The Alcatraz Occupation greatly influenced the American government's decision to end its Indian termination policy and to pass the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975.
"The Indian occupation of Alcatraz. November 29th, 1969. Doris Purdy, my mother, worked at the Indian Bureau in Berkeley and went with some of the Indians to Alcatraz. There were some comments about her blue eyes, but she was more or less accepted. She said her mother was a Sioux. She used a 16 millimeter movie camera. Since her death the film belongs to me legally. Prof.George Purdy, University of Cincinnati"
YouTube
The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 was signed into law on January 4, 1975. The ISDEAA made self-determination the focus of government action. The Act reversed a 30-year effort by the federal government under its preceding termination policy to sever treaty relationships with and obligations to Indian tribes. The Act was the result of 15 years of change, influenced by American Indian activism, the Civil Rights Movement, and community development based on grassroots political participation. In practical terms the Act authorized the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, and some other government agencies to enter into contracts with, and make grants directly to, federally recognized Indian tribes. The tribes would have authority for how they administered the funds, which gave them greater control over their welfare.
In the 1950s some members of Congress passed legislation to renew the effort to have Native Americans assimilate, and to terminate the special relationship between the federal government and tribal nations. The government sought to terminate the legal standing of numerous tribes, judging their members ready to be independent U.S. citizens. More than 100 tribes and communities were terminated.
In practical terms, the policy ended the U.S. government's recognition of sovereignty of tribes, trusteeship over Indian reservations, and exclusion of state law applicability to native persons. From the government's perspective Native Americans were to become taxpaying citizens, subject to state and federal taxes as well as laws, from which they had previously been exempt.
From the native standpoint, Northern Cheyenne former U.S. Senator from Colorado Ben Nighthorse Campbell said of assimilation and termination in a speech delivered in Montana:
If you can't change them, absorb them until they simply disappear into the mainstream culture. ... In Washington's infinite wisdom, it was decided that tribes should no longer be tribes, never mind that they had been tribes for thousands of years.The policy for termination of tribes collided with the Native American peoples' own desires to preserve native identity, reflected in an activism that increased after World War II and survived through the anti-collectivism era of Joseph McCarthy. The termination policy was changed in the 1960s and rising activism resulted in the ensuing decades of restoration of tribal governments and increased Native American self-determination.
— Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Opening Keynote Address
The failure of termination policies became obvious with assessment by the late 1960s. Native Americans and the federal government began to work for a return to greater Indian rights represented by the earlier IRA. The passage of the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 (ICRA) was influential. ICRA guaranteed the application of much of the Bill of Rights in Indian Country, a guarantee which Native Americans on reservations had not enjoyed.
The rise of activist groups in the 1960s, such as the American Indian Movement (AIM), and high-profile demonstrations such as the occupation of Alcatraz led by Native American activist Richard Oakes (activist), helped bring the issue of Native American rights to greater prominence in public policy. President Richard Nixon's "Message from the President of the United States Transmitting Recommendations for Indian Policy" (8 July 1970) recommended self-determination for Indian tribes as a goal of the federal government. His message said that termination was an incorrect policy. Nixon called for broad-sweeping self-determination legislation.
The Proclamation
Proclamation to the Great White Father and All His People
We, the native Americans, re-claim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery.
We wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the Caucasian inhabitants of this land, and hereby offer the following treaty:
We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for twenty-four dollars ($24) in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man's purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago. We know that $24 in trade goods for these 16 acres is more than was paid when Manhattan Island was sold, but we know that land values have risen over the years. Our offer of $1.24 per acre is greater than the 47¢ per acre that the white men are now paying the California Indians for their land. We will give to the inhabitants of this island a portion of that land for their own, to be held in trust by the American Indian Affairs [sic] and by the bureau of Caucasian Affairs to hold in perpetuity—for as long as the sun shall rise and the rivers go down to the sea. We will further guide the inhabitants in the proper way of living. We will offer them our religion, our education, our life-ways, in order to help them achieve our level of civilization and thus raise them and all their white brothers up from their savage and unhappy state. We offer this treaty in good faith and wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with all white men.
We feel that this so-called Alcatraz Island is more than suitable for an Indian Reservation, as determined by the white man's own standards. By this we mean that this place resembles most Indian reservations in that:
1. It is isolated from modern facilities, and without adequate means of transportation.
2. It has no fresh running water.
3. It has inadequate sanitation facilities.
4. There are no oil or mineral rights.
5. There is no industry and so unemployment is very great.
6. There are no health care facilities.
7. The soil is rocky and non-productive; and the land does not support game.
8. There are no educational facilities.
9. The population has always exceeded the land base.
10. The population has always been held as prisoners and kept dependent upon others.
Further, it would be fitting and symbolic that ships from all over the world, entering the Golden Gate, would first see Indian land, and thus be reminded of the true history of this nation. This tiny island would be a symbol of the great lands once ruled by free and noble Indians.
The Letter
December 16, 1969
Dear Brothers and Sisters:
This is a call for a delegation from each Indian nation, tribe or band from throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico to meet together on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, on December 23, 1969, for a meeting to be tentatively called the Confederation of American Indian Nations (CAIN).
On November 20, 1969, 78 Indian people, under the name "Indians of all Tribes," moved on to Alcatraz Island, a former Federal Prison. We began cleaning up the Island and are still in the process of organizing, setting up classes and trying to instill the old Indian ways into our young.
We moved onto Alcatraz Island because we feel that Indian people need a Cultural Center of their own. For several decades, Indian people have not had enough control of training their young people. And without a cultural center of their own, we are afraid that the old Indian ways may be lost. We believe that the only way to keep them alive is for Indian people to do it themselves.
While it was a small group which moved onto the island, we want all Indian people to join with us. More Indian people from throughout the country are coming to the island every day. We are issuing this call in an attempt to unify all our Indian Brothers behind a common cause.
We realize that there are more problems in Indian communities besides having our culture taken away. We have water problems, land problems, "social" problems, job opportunity problems, and many others.
And as Vice President Agnew said at the annual convention of the National Congress of American Indians in October of this year, now is the time for Indian leadership.
We realize too that we are not getting anywhere fast by working alone as individual tribes. If we can gather together as brothers and come to a common agreement, we feel that we can be much more effective, doing things for ourselves, instead of having someone else doing it, telling us what is good for us.
So we must start somewhere. We feel that if we are going to succeed, we must hold on to the old ways. This is the first and most important reason we went to Alcatraz Island.
We feel that the only reason Indian people have been able to hold on and survive through decades of persecution and cultural deprivation is that the Indian way of life is and has been strong enough to hold the people together.
We hope to reinforce the traditional Indian way of life by building a Cultural Center on Alcatraz Island. We hope to build a college, a religious and spiritual center, a museum, a center of ecology, and a training school.
We hope to have the Cultural Center controlled by Indians, with the delegates from each Indian nation and urban center present for the first meeting on December 23, and at future meetings of the governing body.
We are inviting all our brothers to join with us on December 23, if not in person, then in spirit.
We are still raising funds for Alcatraz. The "Alcatraz Relief Fund" is established with the Bank of California, Mission Branch, 3060 16th Street, San Francisco, California 94103, and we are asking that donations of money go to the bank directly.
Many Indian Centers and tribal groups from throughout the country have supported the people on Alcatraz by conducting benefits, funded [sic] drives, and so forth. We are deeply appreciative of all the help we have received, and hope that all Indian people and people of good will, will join us in this effort.
We are also asking for formal resolutions of support from each organized Indian tribe and urban center. We can have great power at the bargaining table if we can get the support and help of all Indian people.
We have made no attempts at starting a hard and fast formal organization. We have elected spokesmen because someone has had to be a spokesman. We feel that all Indian people should be present or represented at the outset of a formal national Indian organization.
We have also elected a Central Council to help organize the day-to-day operation of the Island. This organization is not a governing body, but an operational one.
We hope to see you on December 23rd.
Indians of All Tribes
As far as the United States Constitution defined the civil and human rights of the "Indian Nations" in the The Fourteenth Amendment (Amendment XIV) adopted on July 9, 1868, the indigenous people of the United States were excluded from citizenship, according to the preceding The Civil Rights Act of 1866, 14 Stat. 27–30, enacted April 9, 1866, was the first United States federal law to define citizenship and affirm that all citizens are equally protected by the law. It was mainly intended, in the wake of the American Civil War, to protect the civil rights of persons of African descent born in or brought to the United States. This legislation was passed by Congress in 1865 and vetoed by U.S. President Andrew Johnson. In April 1866 Congress again passed the bill to support the Thirteenth Amendment. Johnson again vetoed it, but a two-thirds majority in each chamber overcame the veto to allow it to become law without presidential signature.
John Bingham and other congressmen argued that Congress did not yet have sufficient constitutional power to enact this law. Following passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, Congress ratified the 1866 Act in 1870.
So, as the Constitution stood, until legislation in 1924, The Fourteenth Amendment excludes Native Americans who maintain their tribal ties and "persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers". While the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution defines as citizens any persons born in the U.S. and subject to its jurisdiction, the amendment had been interpreted to not apply to "Native people".
The "Indian Nations" were regarded therefore as foreigners in their own lands until the issue was resolved with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which granted full U.S. citizenship to indigenous peoples. This Act of 1924, also known as the Snyder Act, was proposed by Representative Homer P. Snyder of New York and granted full U.S. citizenship to the indigenous peoples of the United States, called "Indians" in this Act.
The act was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge on June 2, 1924. It was enacted partially in recognition of the thousands of indigenous people born in the United States who served, and died, in the armed forces during the First World War.
The abolition of slavery and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments
A political cartoon of Andrew Johnson and Abraham Lincoln, 1865, entitled "The 'Rail Splitter' at Work Repairing the Union". The caption reads (Johnson): Take it quietly Uncle Abe and I will draw it closer than ever!! (Lincoln): A few more stitches Andy and the good old Union will be mended!The Thirteenth Amendment (Amendment XIII) to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. In Congress, it was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on January 31, 1865. The amendment was ratified by the required number of states on December 6, 1865. On December 18, 1865, Secretary of State William H. Seward proclaimed its adoption. It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted following the American Civil War.
The Reconstruction Amendments are the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, adopted between 1865 and 1870, the five years immediately following the Civil War. The last time the Constitution had been amended was with the Twelfth Amendment more than 60 years earlier in 1804. The Reconstruction amendments were important in implementing the Reconstruction of the American South after the war.
Their proponents saw them as transforming the United States from a country that was (in Abraham Lincoln's words) "half slave and half free" to one in which the constitutionally guaranteed "blessings of liberty" would be extended to the entire populace, including the former slaves and their descendants.
