Indigenous People’s Day 2021

Indigenous People’s Day 2021

speech by

Kamau Benjamin

All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (GC)

Monday October 11, 2021

Malcolm X Park, Washington DC

The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (GC) would like to thank John Steinbach and the Indigenous Peoples for inviting the A-APRP (GC) to make this presentation today at Malcolm X Park on Indigenous People’s Day in 2021. Indigenous People’s Day should be celebrated every day of the year. We all know how important Indigenous People’s Day celebration is to its people in the New World (America), as Africans masses in the diaspora must know how important it is to celebrate African Liberation Day.

We understand that Indigenous Peoples’ and African Peoples’ slavery, exploitation, and suffering over the past 400 years has been a result of colonialism, settler colonialism, neo-colonialism, and massacres. These incidents gave rise to the confiscation of humans, the land, gold, silver, spices, and other raw materials in Africa and the New World that helped to fuel the economies in Europe after 1492 A.D. Some of these economies in Europe were bankrupt and at war with each other (Christianity vs. Islam). (OPEN VEINS OF LATIN AMERICA, Eduardo Galeano). This also led to the destruction of their culture, enslavement, and entombment in the mines of the Indigenous population, the beginning of the looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a commercial hunting of Africans that signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. Galeano stated that this exploitation gave momentum and chief rise to primitive accumulation of wealth after plundering internally and externally of their lands. As it was stated, this rampage occurred after the Middle Ages and made possible a new historical stage in the world economic evolution that brought those Europeans to the New World.

This is why these Europeans plundered the New World occupied by the Indigenous People and captured African slaves and eventually balkanized the African continent in the name of God and the Catholic Church. They built a bourgeois democracy in the North, Central, and South of the New World that they invaded. Even though, it is written by some historians, that Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the New World, other historians have document that Africans and Asians had ventured to these shores some 500 years before he did. However, Columbus, knew that Marco Polo, another Italian explorer had made a bold venture to Asia (India) had written in his book of the abundance of pearls, gold, and spices in enormous quantities in the New World (Asia (India). This exploration to Asia was new to Europeans struggling to emerge out of the Medieval Middle Ages. Also, it had taken Spain almost eight hundred years to win back the lands that the Moors (Africans) had conquered and occupied for that long period of time and had introduced Islam to the people. Spain was in The Inquisition and Holy Wars. The Catholic rulers were Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand who were ordained by Pope Alexander VI. The Pope ordained them as proprietors and Master of the New World. This decree extended God’s reign over the earth. Consequently, they were eager to finance Columbus’ voyage to the New World in which they knew very little of Asia (India) to pursue the gold, silver, pearls, spices riches, etc.

Three years after Columbus ventured to the New World in 1492, He directed a military campaign against the Indigenous People of Haiti in which he named the island Hispaniola. They decimated the Indigenous People. He shipped more than 500 of these Indigenous People back to Spain and sold them as slaves. In the courts in Spain, they were read to without any interpreter before a notary public, exhorting them to adopt the Catholic faith.  We can clearly see and begin to understand how and why those imperialist, colonialist, colonial settlers, and neo-colonialist conquered Northern, Central, and Southern Hemisphere of the New World that was inhabited by Indigenous People at that time.

As we stated earlier, these Europeans also invaded Africa and captured the inhabitants mainly from West Africa and brought them in chains on slave ships to the New World to work as slaves for 400 years in the name of God and the Catholic Church.  Today, they have balkanized Africa and have built AFRICOM Military bases all over the CONTINENT and the NEW WORLD to protect imperialism.  Now we know why all the treaties that were negotiated and signed by the United States and the Indigenous Peoples were broken by the United States government in order to capture all of the lands in Northern Hemisphere of the New World.

The year 1540 was a crucial turning point in the history of the New World. The Great Indigenous People were incited by Vasquez de Coronado when his expedition to the Great Plains launched an inevitable 350-year struggle between the European settlers and the Indigenous Peoples.  From that point forward, the series of battles between them where blood was shed and ultimately tens of thousands of lives were lost on both sides.  The Battle of Tippecanoe, the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, all three Seminole Wars, and the Battle of Little Bighorn were some of the most important conflicts that led up to the last massacre. The Battle of Wounded Knee, and the Trail of Tears to the Oklahoma Reservation were two of the last humiliating defeats the Indigenous Peoples had to endure at the hands of the US imperialists. The Spanish Conquistadors conquered and slaughtered the Indigenous Peoples in the Central and Southern Hemisphere of the New World. Even though, the Mayans, the Incas, and the Aztecs built great civilizations and monuments leading up to invaders, killers, and looting of the conquistadors from Spain.

The All-African People ‘s Revolutionary Party (GC) pays tribute to the valiant fighters and survivors on Indigenous People’s Day 2021 of their brutal transition through settler-colonialism and imperialism.

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