Comment on the article by Maurice Switzer. A new beginning

"Maurice Switzer, Citizen Special
"Published: Wednesday, June 18, 2008

"According to Anishinabek teachings the first humans were brothers created in the four colours of mankind -- red, yellow, black and white -- who were endowed by G'zhemmnidoo with their own languages, cultures and belief systems.

"The white brother was the most eager to set out on his own -- his was the gift of doing things quickly -- thus beginning a journey for Eurocentric people from the wheel to interplanetary travel in the blink of an archaeological eye.

"But that gift can be a hindrance when it comes to living in a changing world. Inventing the internal combustion engine was a breeze for the white brother's descendants, compared to learning how to co-exist with relatives whose skin colours and customs are different, from places like Africa, China ... or Canada."

Annie writes:

No disrespect meant to anyone, but I need to do this for myself.

I consider the above "four different coloured brothers" teaching to be a modern one, and it is based on the racist, white supremacist doctrines brought here with the colonisers.

It was, at first, only two "races", i.e. "colours of people" according to how much melanin they had.

The dominant one was supposed to be melanin-challenged people from the European continent, so-called "white" who believed so passionately that white=might, right, etc., that they powdered their faces with rice and wheat powder, sometimes containing zinc and lead and mercury (which is why the practice was stopped, probably, it was killing people) and why they wore white wigs.

The dominated people, were anyone who had melanin, at first there were only "coloured" people or "white" people. It was racist as well as classist.

The "white" people saw everyone else on the planet they encountered as potential slaves. But not all.

Some of the early Europeans were brought here as slaves (yes, it's true) to Jamestown. After they had obtained their freedom which might have been in their own lifetimes if they were lucky, many of them went "native". While they were still slaves, however, they lived with and had children with, at first slaves that were Native (and yes there were those as well, some tribes were selling their enemies to the British as slaves, and so were the French involved in that slave trade) and slaves that were African.

The people from Africa were now called "negro" which is Spanish for "black" and the mixed race people were called "yellow" or "mulatto" or a whole slew of words (among these brass ankles, redbones, creoles, melungeons, mestees, etc.). It did not matter at all to the "whites" what the mix was in term of ancestry, since the racist system was invented by "white" supremacists and they were always deemed superior and since they did not care to associate with the "blacks" (from Africa) and the "yellows" (mixed race) anyway, they just started referring to every one that was not "pure" European as
"coloured".

Now laws were passed that any coloured person ("red", "yellow", or "black", it did not matter) who did not have documentation that he or she was "free" could be captured and enslaved.

By then they had stopped wearing white powder on their faces, and white wigs, and started doing censuses instead where the household was visually inspected (usually the head of the household) and the census taker decided if the family was "white" or "coloured" and the latter, even if a free household for centuries, could be enslaved. Early censuses have households changing, even though the same family lived there, depending on what the census taker was deciding with a visual inspection, "white" or "colored".

"Red" was now being used to describe people in a horrific way. Nothing to do with ochre, it had to do with barbaric practices, very evil practices. A "redskin" was a "trophy", a human "pelt". This was cumbersome (there was money paid for "redskins" by the "whites") and these were reduced to scalps.

Any mention of the "four races by colour" of mankind should be denounced in my opinion.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (and maybe others before her) came up with the "four" (or "five") race theory which influenced Adolph Hitler. It is an artificial construct, and in my opinion it should be denounced every time it is mentioned, because it originates with Eurocentric "white" supremacists, not with the Original people, who not only saw humans as equal humans when the first Europeans landed, taking them into their homes, sheltering, feeding, nurturing, and helping them, but welcomed them as allies and friends.

Until the Aboriginal holocaust started, that is...

In any such system, "white" is always going to be the dominator, it's their system after all.

References

Adolph Hitler, a true American
http://www.bluecorncomics.com/hitler.htm

Wichita Kansas Series
http://www.iwchildren.org/wichita.htm

Redskins, a 500-year old hate crime
http://www.iwchildren.org/500yearhatecrime.htm

See wikipedia and google for an in depth look at the history of the "four races" theory, an artifical social construct.

Note

Not all people (obviously) consider the word "redskin" to be derogatory. Perhaps they have forgotten or never knew of the original meaning of the term, which was to equate the bloodied skin of a dead "Indian" to the pelt of an animal. It is for this reason many see the term as extremely offensive.

Some people self-identify as "redskins"; since I simply cannot see my brothers and sisters in the way that the dominators once did, as scalps/pelts that could be sold when they were killed, I just force myself to hear "redskin" as in "potato" rather than the way it actually orginated, no bad on the people who don't know any better.

PHOTO ESSAY ON REDSKINS

Maurice Switzer Bio

CC License Canada 2.5
Attribution - Non Commercial - No Derivatives

First published to the Reclamation Information forum