True Left

ALBANY — A statue of Maj. Gen. Philip Schuyler outside City Hall is set to come down in a matter of weeks, city officials confirmed Friday.
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"As a man heavily invested in the institution of enslavement YALI teens maintained that he was able to accomplish what he is remembered for because he depended upon those enslaved to him to carry out those tasks that freed him up to focus on other matters," the report states. "His accomplishments were possible because he stood on the shoulders of those who were enslaved to him."
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The decision to remove the statue follows a unanimous vote in December by the Albany City Board of Education to rename the Philip J. Schuyler Achievement Academy as Roots Academy at West Hill, following growing frustrations by students and staff with keeping Schuyler's name.

Police on Monday released images and a video of the two vandals who allegedly scrawled the word “murderer” in red spray paint across the statue of Christopher Columbus in Central Park last month.

Surveillance footage shows the destructive duo climb over barricades protecting the statue of the Italian explorer — with spray cans in tow — on Feb. 26.

A woman in a bright orange coat painted over the “Columbus” text with the “murderer” accusation, according to the video.

Her partner in crime, dressed in all black, climbs onto the statue and nearly slips off while covering it in red paint, the footage shows.

The graffiti artists also spray-painted “Give us our land back” on the bronze and granite sculpture.

Statues of historical figures have come under attack across the country in recent years, as critics have pointed out or unearthed truths about many of the leaders.

City and state officials said they turned to Team Henry Enterprises after a long list of bigger contractors — all White-owned — said they wanted no part of taking down Confederate statues.

For a Black man to step in carried enormous risk. Henry concealed the name of his company for a time and long shunned media interviews. He has endured death threats, seen employees walk away and been told by others in the industry that his future is ruined. He started wearing a bulletproof vest on job sites and got a permit to carry a concealed firearm for protection.

The drama interrupted Henry’s careful efforts to build his business. But after removing 24 monuments in Virginia and North Carolina, Henry, 45, has grown more comfortable with his role in enabling a historic reckoning with social injustice across the South. The threats haven’t let up; Henry has simply learned to live with them.

“My head’s in a different place now,” he said. “It’s like, I’m not scared to cross the street, but I’m always going to look both ways, right? So I’m not totally oblivious to who I am and what I’ve done, but I’m just not letting fear kind of drive what I do.”
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He had come to understand that those statues — especially Lee — were like religious objects to their defenders. They had stood more than a century as totems of a powerful mythology: that slavery was somehow benign, that Southerners were the noble victims of Northern aggression, that things were better when White people presided over an orderly world. The Lost Cause.

As the crane lowered the statue to the ground, Henry was awed by the size of the thing. The crowd surged forward; someone said they wanted to urinate on it. Henry hollered for people to stay back.

Then he noticed one African American woman looking at him with an expression of utter disgust. Henry said he felt confused; wasn’t she happy at what he had just done?

“She was like, ‘Why are you showing so much care to the statue? Just drop it. Just let it go. Just kick it over. Nobody cared about George Floyd, but you care about this statue?’”

The statue was hoisted off its pedestal in less than an hour after 131 years of towering over Richmond’s grandest street. Henry’s mother — Freda Thornton, who now lives in South Carolina — ran through the security barricade and surprised her weeping son with a big hug.

“I just kind of held him for a minute, just to let him get himself together,” Thornton remembered. “I told him, ‘You did it, and God’s favor protected you and it’s over.’ I said, ‘It’s over, the work is completed now.’”

Henry’s mission as the man who finally drove the Confederates out of Richmond was nearly complete. He had a brief, blunt message that morning for the chilly workers as they prepared to do the unusual work that has become so familiar.

“It’s the last one,” he told them. “Let’s do it right and get out of here.”

Roosevelt said Churchill hindered negotiations with the Chinese, who Churchill referred to as "pigtails", as he "was obsessed with the colour of their skin". Churchill wasn't just a child of the empire, he was everything colonialism represented. His treatment of our Indian allies is a huge example of his attitude to non-white people.

If anyone was interested in factual history, they would open their eyes and realise how racist Churchill was. English history in English schools is taught through fluffy rose-tinted glasses. His involvement in the intentional and deliberate enabling of counntless atrocities carried out by a militia he sent to Ireland in the 1920's, known as the 'black and tans', is very well known, except in Britain itself.

It’s Time for the Federal Government to Say Goodbye to Columbus Day
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On Monday we celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the United States. Well, some of us do.

Across the United States, tribal, federal, states, and local governments will be closed. They are closed because Monday is a federal holiday. Of course, the federal holiday does not celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Instead, the federal holiday celebrates Christopher Columbus, ignoring the actual history of the man.

Growing up, I was not taught Columbus really was a lost sailor who was heading in a whole different direction than the western hemisphere.

I was also not taught Columbus actually never set foot on the land that is now known as the United States.

Nor was I taught of the atrocities that Columbus and his men perpetrated on the innocent Indigenous peoples in the western hemisphere:  the raping of Indigenous women, the thievery of goods, and ultimately of the land.

No, what I was taught was a constructed false narrative that began in elementary school about how “Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492” and that he discovered America.

From early childhood as a young Potawatomi boy, I began to view history from a different lens than my non-Native students. Native Americans reject the notion you can discover land where inhabitants already live.

So, Columbus Day was a federal holiday that I felt uneasy about as it approached each October. Even as a child, I felt sick for the portrayal of Columbus as a hero, knowing our country’s constructed history was a hoax.

As an adult, I learned our Indigenous ancestors paid a premium price because of Columbus.
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To Native Americans, Columbus is not considered a hero to be placed on a pedestal; rather, he is considered a dishonored villain. Indigenous people believe that a man who set in motion the mass genocide of this land’s first people should not be honored or glorified.

For this reason, Native Americans  have worked to change the celebration of Columbus Day to instead be called Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  In recent years, in cities and states around the country, Indigenous Peoples’ Day has gained recognition.

Now, it is time for the federal government to say goodbye to Columbus and fully embrace Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Last year, in his first year in office, President Joe Biden issued a proclamation to recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day. He was the first U.S. president to do so.

Last Friday, Biden declared Monday, October 10, 2022 as Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
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Keeping Columbus Day as a federal holiday allows the constructed hoax of Columbus discovering America to be perpetuated from one generation of Americans to the next.  That needs to change.

In the lead-up to Christopher Columbus Day on Oct. 10, local Indigenous groups have told City of Tampa officials to remove a Columbus statue from the park dedicated to him on Bayshore Boulevard and W Platt Street. But even if the city refuses to remove it, the group says the statue will come down.

“One way, or another the statue of Columbus must and will be removed,” the Florida Indigenous Alliance and the Florida American Indian Movement wrote in a letter addressed to the city.

The groups want the statue removed and for the city to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day. For Natives, Columbus represents slavery, ****, genocide, torture and other atrocities that he and his companions described in their own words and in their diaries.

 In the letter addressed to the city, the groups point out that Columbus even did horrific things to Native infants.

“Dominican Friar Bartolome De Las Casas recorded that Columbus hung Native people in rows of thirteen to honor Christ and his disciples, and further that Columbus had his men feed Native infants to dogs,” the letter reads.
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FIA says that Native Americans first asked for the statue to be removed in 1991, and spoke before council about the inhumanity that Columbus represents. But in the ensuing 31 years, the Indigenous people have only been met with resistance from the city. At a protest against the statue two years ago, Tampa Police Department officers surrounded the statue to protect it after it was covered in fake blood.

And leading up to that protest, TPD officers used taxpayer money to guard the statue morning and night after it had been tagged “BLM” and other messages during the George Floyd uprising.
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In 2021, Governor Ron DeSantis passed a law making it a felony for protestors to tear down or damage historical statutes, which would include Columbus statues and confederate monuments.

FIA says that Columbus’ horrific and inhumane treatment of Indigenous Peoples endures today in America as Native women are **** and murdered near camps full of men that are established for fracking operations.

And recently, thousands of Native children have been discovered in mass graves in Canada, and many are being uncovered in the United States. The children were brutalized and killed in concentration camps called “residential boarding schools” from the mid 1800s until the late 1970s.

“The celebration of Columbus’s invasion of Caribe, Arawak, and Taino lands is a celebration of the subjugation of Indigenous Peoples and the theft of Indigenous lands,” FIA wrote. “Continuing [to] celebrate that kind of event impairs reconciliation and understanding.”

FIA said that part of ending celebrating genocide is removing monuments to the subjugation and genocide of Indigenous people. The group pointed out that in other cities, when people’s patience has run out, they’ve taken matters into their own hands and torn down Columbus statues. But the group says it hopes the City of Tampa will hear the voice of Natives and make things right before it has to reach that point.

This week, the Chicago Monuments Project finally released its long-delayed report recommending a series of new public memorials across the city and the removal of several statues that the commission flagged for honoring white supremacy or disrespecting Indigenous peoples.
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Lightfoot’s task force recommended taking down several other monuments that negatively depict Indigenous people. One monument that should be removed, the commission said, is a statue honoring the Supreme Court chief justice who presided over Plessy v. Ferguson, which enshrined segregation.

The commission recommended removing the “Jacques Marquette-Louis Jolliet Memorial” because it “reinforces stereotypes about American Indians and glorifies a complicated and painful history of Western expansion. It features a cowering American Indian, following submissively in the footsteps of Marquette.”

A plaque honoring early Chicago settler John Kinzie should also be removed, the report said, because it “openly prioritizes whiteness and denies the existence of Native peoples, and earlier settler Jean Baptiste Point du Sable.” For similar reasons, the commission said the “Jean Baptiste Beaubien Plaque” should go.

Bridge reliefs on the DuSable bridge, including “The Defense,” “The Pioneers,” “Discoverers” and “Regeneration” should also be taken down because they show American Indians “as merely a foil to help define the heroic acts and qualities of colonizing forces,” though that would be challenging as they’re built into the physical structure.

The report also recommends taking down tablets dedicated to explorers De La Salle, Jolliet and Marquette. One of the plaques, it says, highlights “the first white men to pass through the Chicago River” and “explicitly voice(s) the ideology of white supremacy.”
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One professor, John Low, rebutted the notion that monuments simply document history.

“Monuments are not innocent. We have to understand the role of monuments and other commemorative sites and activities in developing a shared narrative of the past, present and future. These commemorations can ossify memory and create and perpetuate master narratives in which one view of past events is granted legitimacy at the expense of other views,” Low wrote. “They can contribute to a collective memory that all too quickly becomes accepted as truth. The Chicago Monuments Project presents the opportunity to reconsider our monuments and memorials and assess whether they fairly represent the histories and peoples of Chicago.”

New Zealand celebrates Māori New Year as an official public holiday for the first time

 (CNN)For the first time, New Zealanders are enjoying an official public holiday this June 24 to celebrate Matariki -- also known as Māori New Year.

Matariki is the Māori name for a cluster of stars, also known as the Pleiades, the rising of which is recognized by many of the country's Indigenous people as the start of the new year.

In a statement, the New Zealand government noted that this is "the first public holiday to recognize Te Ao Māori" or the Māori worldview. The official holiday was established in April, with the passing of the Te Kāhui o Matariki Public Holiday Act.
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Māori, who make up about 15% of New Zealand's population, were dispossessed of much of their land during Britain's colonization of the country. Thousands of Māori have protested for civil and social rights in recent years, and have criticized governments for failing to address social and economic inequalities.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern introduced a new curriculum with mandatory teaching of Māori history and British colonialism.