Anthropology teaches us that our earliest ancestors were in constant migration on the hunt and search for food in order to survive.
About 30,000 years ago, our early ancestors began migrating across the Bering Strait. Between 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, these first migrants continued their journey into what’s now the Americas.
Fast forward to about the early 1400s, and the Norseman Leif Erikson is credited by anthropologists to have been the first European to land in North America. In 1492 the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, financed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, landed on a small of island of what is known today as the Bahamas. In 1607, the English pilgrims founded the first colony, in Jamestown, off the Atlantic coast.
In 1621, the English settlers of Plymouth were helped to survive the hostilities of the new world by the Wampanoag nation. Then according to popular folklore, these Plymouth colonizers and the Wampanoag natives shared an autumn feast that revisionist historians claim was the first Thanksgiving celebrated in the colonies. It was literally lifesaving help to the settlers that the Wampanoag nation gave, and they would eternally regret.
In 1619, the first African slaves were brought to Virginia, thus began the brutal and genocidal slave trade, conducted by the European immigrant/colonizers that would decimate the African continent and continue unabated for about 250 years. An estimated 12.5 million Africans were captured, enslaved and shipped to the “New World” during this brutal genocidal period.
A group of well-respected anthropologists and historian researchers concluded that about 90 percent of the entire Indigenous population of the “New World” was killed by the European colonizers. As the colonizers spread their land grab war across the “New World,” the Mexicans fell victim to the continued genocidal and insatiable appetite of the European colonizers for territory and land.
The history and creation of the United States of America is one of systemic and continued genocidal war waged on the Indigenous, Black, Mexican, and Asian populations of this country for more than 500 years. This is a horrific murderous history that any nation would instinctively (to keep from going into collective insanity) want to revise, alter, change, or forget. And that is of course why this nation’s history is replete with fairy tale revisionist fiction, like the first peaceful Thanksgiving gathering between the colonizers and the Indigenous Wampanoag natives.
Contextual historical logic and common sense tell us that this fantasy Thanksgiving could not have happened that way! But we Americans love our folklore and hide our guilt and shame in our historical lies.
We have witnessed firsthand for the past four years under the current administration what malicious lies, hate mongering, and evil revisionist history will do to a nation. The current president tells this country that immigrants (of all the people to demonize and scapegoat) are ruining this country, and pathetically half the country of 300 million believe this despicable lie.
We go to war against immigrant families and have snatched children from their parents and put these traumatized kids in cages. We sterilize some of the immigrant women so that they cannot produce more “enemies” to attack and subvert this nation. We send immigrant men by the planeload back to their countries to certain death.
We are currently a nation divided, history tells us we have always been a divided nation, and our current president has ripped away the hypocritical veil once and for all so that all the world to see us: naked, fearful, and polarized.
We can pretend with the installation of the new administration that the horrors of the Trump years never happened, once again revising, burying, or conveniently forgetting our sins of the past that have led to our current polarized and dysfunctional national paralysis. Or we can work as a collective nation to shed light on our horrifically painful past and commit to a national effort of historical remembrance, atonement, and reparation.
In 2021, the U.S. has a unique opportunity to acknowledge and remember our true, horrific, and painful past and a continued racist present, while simultaneously committing as a nation to work with honest and heartfelt remembrance to wipe out the scourge of racism from our country.
We can atone, in words and actions, for our many transgression of the past and all of the people who we have harmed in our tumultuous history. And finally we can begin to truly heal our nation by making the appropriate reparations to the African American and Indigenous nations. These simple yet courageous acts will go a long way in helping to heal our current national wounds that have festered for so long.
With these doable national acts of atonement and reparation, we can help this nation finally and permanently realize its long-deferred aspirational commitment to equality and justice for all.
Our immigrant story goes back thousands of years, and it will continue, so long as humans are driven by hunger, violence, and war to migrate and seek food, shelter, safety, and sustenance to survive and prosper.
As a proud and blessed immigrant, I can tell you that we—every single immigrant woman, man, or child who lives is this country—are eternally grateful for the opportunity to work, live, and contribute to the health and prosperity of this nation. So that the United States of American can once again be the world’s beacon and refuge for the hungry, persecuted, and tired immigrant masses of the world who yearn for freedom.
Armando Vazquez writes from Orcutt. Send a response to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 10-17, 2020.
