Payback or jelentései?

Kicking Native Americans out of their homeland was first tried in North America by the English colonists. Pequots were “deported” to Bermuda after King Phillip’s War.  Carolina Amerindians were exported to the Caribbean for slave labor there so that the “settlers” could take their fertile lands. “Indian Territory” was set up by the Americans in Oklahoma as a form of Eastern US ethnic cleansing. (Notice the visible low populations of the Native presence in the East as opposed to Oklahoma, New Mexico, etc.).

 jelentései /yel-en-tey-say/ (nasal) n.
1.    The Algonquian word for destiny/karma
2.    destiny, fate, fortune, kismat, kismet

karma/ˈkärmə/. n.
(in Hinduism and Buddhism) the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences.

Informal: destiny or fate, following as effect from cause.

It is interesting to see the Texas border issue play out between the mostly Amerindian (and some “Mestizo”) child refugees and angry Anglo protesters intent on sending these minors back to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The unfolding issue has highlighted a number of observations.

(1) Now that the shoe is on the other foot, do the protesters finally understand how it felt to be a Native American who had to watch the first "illegals" arrive on their shores and cross Amerindian  territorial borders, beginning in 1607? The 17^th century “European Invasion” started the takeover of North America by outsiders.

(2) Who belongs in the USA? What would Native American forefathers think about the current "border crisis"? Surely not in the same way the immigrant poem below idealistically proposed. Anti-immigrant protests by earlier European arrivals showed fear of takeover by later arriving "huddled masses" from Europe.

The concept of "finders, keepers" is reminiscent of an English naval officer's quip after the English took the island of Jamaica away from the Spanish in 1655. The Naval officer said in so many words, "What is their problem? They took it away from the Indians. Now we are taking it away from them (the Spanish)."

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The statue beneath which this poem appears represents Libertas the Roman goddess of liberty. It is evident that this poem by Emma Lazarus, graven on a tablet within the pedestal on which the Statue of Liberty stands, at the time only applied to a chosen few. It represented freedom and democracy that did not apply to Amerindians or descendants of enslaved Africans who were already here. Today, the sentiment does not apply to those dogged Amerindian children crossing our border into Texas, fleeing for their lives. The statue was placed at the entrance to the New York harbor on Liberty Island and it obviously only applied to masses coming across the Atlantic not the Rio Grande.

Maybe the new Texas border fence should have a plaque that paraphrases the one below the Statue of Liberty with:

"Keep out your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming hoard."


The irony is that the Anglo “settler” descendants/beneficiaries who took Indian lands by force and disease want to send all the little Amerindian refugees back south to that other portion of “Indian Territory”, South and Central America.

The history of unwanted migration began earlier north of the border beginning in 1607. "Free" Powhatan Indian lands that still belonged to the displaced and disenfranchised Native Americans had been offered to Englishmen for the taking. Euphemisms like "virgin territory", "wide open spaces" and "wilderness", were applied to territories already populated and owned by the indigenous Amerindians. It was taken by force for sole ownership by foreign "settlers" in a hemisphere already inhabited and managed by early Amerindians [Read the book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C. Mann].  In effect, our huddled non-Amerindian masses were invited in to share stolen booty while the original owners were corralled on reservations. (The Treaty of 1677 between the King of England and the Queen of Pamunkey, was clear on who could and could not even visit the Virginia reservations without a pass from an Englishman.)

So it was with generations of those who clandestinely inherited stolen Native goods. The children from Central American countries are perfectly described on the Statue of Liberty's pedestal. The only problem? They are the young southern Amerindian cousins of indigenous Americans living in the United States. By both historic and scientific definition they are not recent immigrants like the folks who seek to keep them out. Amerindians coming back North is an ancient practice as can be seen by reported Maya DNA markers found in some South Eastern Woodland people. Both mound-building and corn had already arrived from the south thousands of years before Europeans. The Central American children are survivors of a 500 year holocaust escaping yet another form of genocide from imported guns and bullets, crossing the border to help replenish the DNA of their northern Amerindian cousins. The only main things that divide them are the foreign languages (English and Spanish) of the European "settlers".