Native Americans weren’t fighting with those rifles in 1492.
In the Dorchester Selectmen’s minutes from the pre-royal governor days of the MA Bay Colony, two brothers regularly appear. Their mother was the daughter of a “gentleman” in the town (once reprimanded for his “peculiar religious ideas” – you tiptoed around a “gentleman” – he then moved to Boston). Their father was a poor-boy- apprentice-made good, until he developed a drinking problem. (Among the father’s productive activities before he got lost to drink and abandoned his weaving: inspecting gates, surveying the Blue Hills, and acting as a translator with the Narragansett Indians). Well, these two young men became a project of the selectmen, who worked hard to get them to mend their ways and to find work. No, working for that particular boatman would not do. (The boatman was an unsavory character-- there were always unsavory characters about even in the earliest days of Puritan Boston Harbor – this was a port.) No, shooting in the woods with Indians was not a productive use of their time. (I always wonder what else they were up to with their Indian friends in those woods in the 1650’s or so.) Their sister came to the attention of the authorities in Boston when her father (wayward but not yet banned from the colony) reported that she had been carried off from their home on Thompson’s Island. The General Court found that a ship’s captain had aided a young man of some status in transporting her off to Barbados because she was pregnant; her return was ordered. (I have no idea if she came back.) As for the two idle brothers (btw, their gentlemen grandfather had excluded them from his will): after their father’s death, they were caught stealing linens (very valuable property then) from a dry goods dealer in Boston, a serious crime. Thereafter they seem to disappear from the record, which leads me to suspect they were sent off to Barbados for hard labor. Or maybe they just ended up in Maine or something. Their mother had tried to hide the stolen linens for them and was sentenced to a severe whipping, though I think she may ultimately have been spared that punishment, as often happened. (I think I have found her, remarried in Roxbury. Her husband sued a neighbor’s husband on the grounds that the neighbor’s wife had slandered his wife by accusing her of abetting a theft.)
The teens who liked to shoot with Indians in the woods: their baby brother was a great grandfather (1st, I think – can’t remember now) of a 19th c. governor of Rhode Island. None of these people are relatives of mine. I just got interested in this family’s history while exploring my own.
Anyway, I look at these Western Indians with their rifles and woven-cloth apparel, and I think of those Puritan Dorchester teens shooting with Indians in the woods and the long and thick history of this country. I also think of my father, who worked in in the summers of his college years as a gandy dancer for the Great Northern Railroad outside of Great Falls, MT. He remembered to me (when I was a little girl – we were in NJ, say 1958) when one day he looked up from his labor and saw Blackfoot Indians on horseback, glowering down upon him. When my father died, I learned that, on his limited income, he had been supporting an Indian organization in Montana.
Who are the “real” Americans?
[That’s tonight’s rant/long story from an old woman.]
Interesting, too, from this article: “In consideration of maintaining good relations with its closest neighbors in the region, immigration within the Western hemisphere remained uncapped.” I assume this was also an acknowledgement of the free flow of immigrants chiefly from Canada and Mexico that had existed since forever. Interesting that the immigrants from Mexico did not concern the powers that be – yet.
Trump would like you to hold off on any requests for aid from the Government until he’s had a chance to do a paper towel tossing photo-op and talk about windmills causing cancer
I would add foreign policy, which in the US is dominated by the executive. Trump plans to reassert control of US foreign policy the week after he wins the presidential, or less than 50 days from now. Which is why Zelensky was not particularly happy with his recent Trump meeting. Upon victory, Trump would immediately call Putin and guarantee the entire Donbass and Crimea for Russia, plus no war reparations. Maybe some Trump hotels in Crimea? Such threats are mind-blowing to Ukrainians who just want the war to stop and a return to pre-2013 boundaries. The irony is that Trump’s peace plan is more radical than the pre-2023 Kissinger plan that as late as May 2022, called for “a cease-fire in Ukraine and a restoration of the line of contact as it stood before Russia’s full-scale invasion that February.” And even Kissinger later changed his mind due to Putin’s continued aggression and insisted that he never meant to condone the illegal annexation of Crimea. Within a week of Trump’s reelection (which hopefully does not happen), the world is again going to be pondering what motivates such a creature? Not to mention “how did the US become so discombobulated?”
The Western World will think that everyone in American is a moron AND that the world’s people would all be better off if the British won the American Revolution. And they would be right.
JD and the Rump are “making an example of Springfield” all right. JD created a story. In short order, the city government and school telephones were deluged with bomb threats.
Sorry it’s beyond my search engine capabilities to figure out why the Aurora, CO, story creation (Venezuelan gangs in apartment buildings) fizzled, without calling in the crippling harassment of nonresident fascists. We have about a month to figure it out, because Springfield is the model for what the Rumpublicans are going to do to every city whose vote doesn’t go their way.
So they entertain “the idea of conducting a national “review” of any citizen naturalized after 1965 to determine “capability with America,” among other criteria.”
Would that mean a sweep up the Ramaswamy clan? Nikki Haley and her ancestors? Justice Ho from the 5th Circuit Court? All of whom benefited from the 1965 immigration act which lifted the previous ethnic restrictions and quotas. The 1965 was also written in a way that it included Southern European immigrants from Italy and Greece who also got screwed over after the 1924 immigration act.
As a recently-minted Denverite, unfortunately I can’t explain it either, unless there simply isn’t/wasn’t a critical mass of local racists to fan the flames. I’d guess having Democratic mayors and governor actively tamping down the story didn’t hurt.
