LAND OF THE RED GIANTS OF IXTLAN

Chapter 3, continued

"My mother was named Harriet Bailey. She was the daughter
of Isaac and Betsy Bailey, both colored, and quite dark. My mother
was of a darker complexion than either my grandmother or grandfather.
"My father was a white man. He was admitted to be such by all
I ever heard speak of my parentage. The opinion was also whispered
that my master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion,
I know nothing: the means of knowledge was withheld from me. My
mother and I were separated when I was but an infant - before I knew
her as my mother. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland
from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very
early age. Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month,
its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable
distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman,
too old for field labor. For what this separation is done, I do not know,
unless it be to hinder the development of the child's affection toward
its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother
for the child. This is the inevitable result."
- Frederick Douglass (9)

The same thing was routinely done to Indian families, separating the children from the
old heathen ways and forcing them into christian boarding schools where their hair was
cut and they were beaten if they spoke their native language. This practice gradually
came to an end by the 1970s, largely because of the efforts of AIM policies against
religious and cultural assimilation. My own mother was hauled away to a "Convent" in
Prescott, Arizona when she was 7 years old, in 1931, and was only allowed to see her
father on Saturday nights.

"The last words of this revisionary history of the American West

come from an anonymous Indian: "They made us many promises,
more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they
promised to take our land, and they took it.' They are white Americans,
like the author of this damning case against our national roots in
greed, perfidy, ignorance and malice. The motive force for our theft
of land and identity from the Indians was Manifest Destiny, the
belief that white men were ordained to rule this continent, a policy
that in Dee Brown's words 'lifted land hunger to a lofty plane.'
"Manifest Destiny was a simple instrument to operate, once
we got the hang of it. We would buy or battle Indians off the land
we wanted. A treaty would be drawn, giving the Indians new land
in perpetuity. In perpetuity meant until we wanted the land we had
given them. At such times we would ask for the land we had given
them to hold forever, and they might refuse to give it up. Their
refusal proved they were ignorant savages, and we would defeat
them with modern weapons and herd the survivors onto reservations.
"And not only did the American white man steal the land, he
also destroyed it, even then. When Kit Carson hunted down and
killed a group of Navajos in 1864, destroying their hogans and
their livestock, he also chopped down the peach trees they had
planted.
"There are atrocity stories, dozens of them. I guess the mutilation
of Cheyenne and Arapaho women at Sand Creek was the worst,
if only because the victims were friendly toward their murderers
and were bayoneted, many of them, where they stood huddled
beneath an American flag.
"It falls to a journalist reviewing the books of our days to treat
the dreadful almost as though it were commonplace. The books
I review, week upon week, report the destruction of the land
or the air; they detail the perversion of justice; they reveal national
stupidities. None of them - not one - has saddened me and shamed
me as this book has. Because the experience of reading it has
made me realize for once and all that we really don't know who
we are, or where we came from, or what we have done, or why."
- review of 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee',
Dee Brown; by Geoffrey Wolff,
Newsweek (10)

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put
an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly
torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural
superiors', and has left remaining no other nexus between man
and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'.
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour,
of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the
icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal
worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless
indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single,
unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation,
veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked,
shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."
- Karl Marx (11)

"No political party can possibly lead a great revolutionary

movement to victory unless it possesses revolutionary theory
and a knowledge of history and has a profound grasp of the
practical movement."
- Mao Tsetung 12)

"Every person in the Rebel Army remembered his basic

duties in the Sierra Maestra and other areas: to improve the
status of the peasants, to participate in the struggle to seize
land, and to build schools. Agrarian law was tried for the first
time; using revolutionary methods we confiscated the extensive
possessions of the officials of the dictatorial government and
distributed to the peasants all of the state-held land in the area.
At this time there rose up a peasant movement, closely connected
to the land, with land reform as its banner ... "
- Che Guevara (13)