“Forcible transfer of children, imposed by direct force, or through fear of violence, duress, detention, psychological oppression, or other methods of coercion”
It was Soldier Wolf’s closeness to her family and their stories of abuse at the school that inspired her to become the Northern Arapaho tribal historic preservation officer and work on the return of the children lost at Carlisle.
For Carlisle’s founder, Richard Henry Pratt, an Indian fighter who once served with George Armstrong Custer, the boarding school was another battlefront of the Indian wars. Pratt devised the school’s curriculum of “kill the Indian, save the man” from his experiments in forced education on Cheyenne, Caddo, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche prisoners of war at Fort Marion, Florida, in the early 1870s. The prison experiments impressed Indian reformers in Congress, who authorized the Bureau of Indian Affairs to take control of the Carlisle Barracks to build the nation’s first off-reservation boarding school.
As Pratt assembled Carlisle’s first class of students, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Ezra Hayt ordered him to take children from the Lakotas because of their “hostile attitude toward the government.” Hayt hoped to pressure the Lakotas, and other western Indigenous nations, into opening millions of acres of treaty-protected territory for white settlement. “The children would be hostages for the good behavior of their people,” wrote Pratt of his first Carlisle recruitment mission at the Rosebud and Pine Ridge agencies in Dakota Territory.
The Romani genocide/holocaust, also known as Porajmos, was the planned and attempted effort, during World War II by the government of Nazi Germany and its allies to exterminate the Romani people of Europe.
Roma were branded with hot irons, women had their ears cut off and they made us wear a brown inverted triangle to distinguish us from the others. We were persecuted, deported to concentration camps, tortured, murdered, used us as human subjects for perverted experiments, thrown in specific “Gypsy Ghettos” because the Germans wanted “.. to toss in the Ghetto everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened, and which anyway has to be destroyed.” and much more.
The Nazis even implemented an Eugenics research program, which had the purpose of “proving”that Romani people were an “inferior race” which was why Nazi scientists traveled within Nazi occupied Europe documenting the Romani communities. Roma were forced to undergo DNA tests and something similar to the “one drop rule” was applied – even if you only had a rather small insignificant % of Romani blood you were still seen as Romani and persecuted.
No one knows how many Roma actually survived this horror, since no one ever bothered to list the victims or survivors. A lot of historians were (and still are) very biased against Romani people so it’s especially hard to get clear numbers. Some historians estimate that the number of Romani victims lies between 220,000 to 500,000 and that is not true. The real death toll is as high as 1.5 million to +2 million. About 90% of Europe’s Romani population was exterminated by the Nazis.
The Romani Holocaust ended in 1945, yet it took until 1982 (37 years later) for it to be formally “recognized” that a genocide has been committed, and even then it was only recognized by Germany. An apology to the Romani has never been received. The German government paid war reparations to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust but not to the Romani. The Interior Ministry of Wuerttemberg argued that “Romanis were persecuted under the Nazis not for any racial reasons but because of an asocial and criminal record.” when that is clearly not true and there are countless of articles proving this statement wrong.
The Roma who survived the Holocaust were regularly accused of lying about their experience and were denied any help or recognition. It was not until the 1990s that Romani who had suffered the concentration camps were entitled to apply for proper compensation.
Roma have been killed because of the Nazi’s racism, traditional anti-Romani attitudes and a mixture of prejudice towards Romani people – we were defined “enemies of the race-based state”. Yet this is still continually erased from the history books or barely even worth a footnote.
European countries continue to make no or insufficient mention of the Roma victims in their official position regarding the Holocaust when they should put some effort on making the Roma genocide widely known and recognized to serve as a counter force to the increasingly violent rhetoric and action against Roma because of them and through them.
Please read, spread and remember this. This history should not be swept under the carpet or forgotten. Please also respect that this day is not about all Holocaust victims like 27th January. It’s specifically about the Romani Holocaust victims who continue to get excluded from the topic of the Holocaust/WWII even 72 years after this horror ended. The reason why 2nd August was picked as the date is also exclusively related to the Romani victims and has something to do with the Romani Day of Resistance.
Just a note for gadje that in some (not all) dialects “Porajmos” is considered a really offensive word to use so a lot of people use Samudaripen to mean the same thing.
Useful information, but I have to add: there is no way the Nazis were performing DNA testing of Romani. The fundamental mechanics of DNA were not figured out until three dudes stole Rosalind Franklin’s research in 1953.
DNA was known to be the vehicle of transmission of heredity since Griffith’s experiments in 1928, and Avery et al confirmed it ca 1944, but we knew nothing about the structure, replication, or function of DNA until 1953. Therefore, actual testing of DNA was impossible.
Oh boy if you’re mad about the US separating children from their parents, putting people in camps, and having a zero tolerance policy towards asylum seekers that has led to deliberate extensive cruelty as a futile deterrent wait until you hear about Australia.
…what’s going on in Australia?
Buddy! Strap in because there are two parts to this:
The past 100+ years of ripping kids from their families, racism, and attempted genocide
The past 20+ years of racism, but now island torture prisons! LEVEL UP!
Australia has had a long history of separating children from their parents. The government decided that mixed raced children of Indigenous Australians were not OK so literally kidnapped them and raised them to assimilate into white society and “breed the colour out.” This started about 1905 and ended about 1970. We call them the Stolen Generations. This has had long lasting negative effects on Indigenous Australians as it was a decades long attempt to absolutely destroy their culture and commit genocide. “But that was the past?” Surprise! By “ended in 1970″ I mean “the reasons in which we en masse tear children away from their families now has a different reason” and Indigenous children are now being taken away at even higher rates than during the stolen generations. Australia saw its Indigenous population, thought “how do we destroy their culture?” and when we were done thought “gee, how do we blame them for having all these issues in their communities?”
BUT THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING!
Fast forward to now: Trump is using kids as political leverage to stop people from coming to the US right? Buddy he’s ripping Australia off. Scott Morrison, Minister for Immigration at the time once did that.
OK so for context: when people try to come to Australia via boat seeking asylum because they’re fleeing war/persecution we do either 2 things: turn them back and let them just… die elsewhere… Or we lock them up in detention centres on Manus/Nauru Island. That’s where we keep them indefinitely in bad conditions, give them dodgy medical care, smear them in the press, and react indifferently when they die from suicide/negligence/assault… and cover up sexual assaults from guards and the incredibly high rate of self harm and depression even in children. The entire idea is to be as cruel as possible so other people hear about it and go “geez, let’s not go to Australia. They’ll literally torture us before they give us a protective visa.” And when I say indefinitely I mean indefinitely. Some refugees have spent 5 years wasting away in these prisons. Some children have spent their entire life in these prisons. And the government openly admits that they’re genuine refugees. They’ve been rigorously vetted and known to be safe people with no intention of harming us but it’s the zero tolerance principle. You tried to come here via boat? You go jail but we call it “detention.”
The main line of attack against refugees: “they’re just coming here to take advantage of our welfare.” Oh no! It’ll cost the taxpayer money to subsidise a refugee to live in a safe country! So instead of having them “rip off” the taxpayer with a couple hundred a fortnight we’ll just lock them up on an island where it costs $1 million per person on average over the past 4 years and operational costs have wasted $5 billion in 4 years. Why help someone for barely enough money to survive when you can torture them and keep them imprisoned for several times more!
Scott Morrison, or Sco-Mo as we kids call them, loved the US’s Muslim Ban idea by the way. He said it was proof that the rest of the world was “catching up to Australia.” Yeah. Geez guys. What took you so long to be as bad as Australia?
Mandatory detention has had bipartisan support from the two major parties since its creation by the Keating government in 1992. We have been keeping people in prison for seeking asylum for 26 years.
We also don’t want to get rid of them. There was a deal under the Obama administration to take some of these refugees but this process has carried on into the Trump administration. He was livid the idea that he should uphold this deal because 1) OooOBaMaaaa!! 2) REFUGEES?? In America??? So that’s currently going nowhere. Meanwhile New Zealand, our good ally and close neighbour, has said “I’ll take some of them” and the current PM (Turnbull) has said no. His excuse? We have a deal with the US. We should see where that goes. It’s going nowhere. So he conveniently can just pretend his hands are tied and let refugees continue to be tortured and die under his care.
(And he hasn’t said it but I bet he’ll never let refugees settle in New Zealand because if they become NZ citizens they’ll have travel rights to come to Australia without the same visa restrictions as other countries AND THEN THE REFUGEES WOULD WIN).
So let’s top this all off with the icing on the cake: a phone call between Trump and Turnbull when Trump was getting acquainted with all the world leaders last year. Turnbull explained our zero tolerance refugee policy and the cruelty as a deterrent that is employed and Trump said “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
“That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
Let that sink in.
And that’s where we’re up to now in modern history. See everyone likes to go to the obvious big example we have of the Nazis and their camps but the truth is… this never stopped. There are similar examples of this abhorrent behaviour happening right now and have been for decades. Governments have been putting people in camps and trying to destroy cultures, or ethnicities, or deny people safe havens from wars, and be utterly heartless and deliberately cruel since forever. This is the ongoing drive of conservatism: keep people out, keep people a certain way, and the current example in the US is just that bubbling over the horribly inescapable surface. We are deluded to think that this cruelty took a 70 year respite when WW2 ended and it’s taken this long to get this strong.
The world has always been racist. Trump just doesn’t bother to filter it. And Australia just wants to keep it on an island so no one can see it.
Also, that Australia/New Zealand immigration deal? Australia has slowly been taking away the rights of New Zealanders resident in Australia – including children born in Australia to Kiwi parents – and making it nigh-impossible for them to actually get Australian citizenship, basically all because of paranoia that brown people will move from NZ to Australia. They’re aggressively deporting Māori and Pasifika New Zealanders, even those who may have come as small children and have no memory of New Zealand, both for things like being convicted of any crime and for things like “being of bad character”. Or, rather, they don’t deport them. They put them in offshore prison camps and tell them they can’t leave until they agree to leave Australia. (It’s not that these things don’t affect Pākehā NZers, it’s that we’re not the real targets.)
During our election campaign last year, the Deputy PM of Australia openly said that if Labour were elected to government it would be bad for Australia because they would encourage refugees to try and get to Australia hoping to be taken by New Zealand. They have an island fortress mentality Trump hasn’t even started to achieve.
Gaelic hasnt been lost. It’s never died or been brought back. There’s an unbroken line of native speakers going back to the beginning of the language. That doesn’t seem like a ‘lost’ language to me. Furthermore I’m not sure what ‘artificial life-support’ means in this context. Gaelic is given funding for schools because there’s still native speakers of the language. It’s no more artificial than money being given to schools for English language lessons.
If anything is ‘artificial’ its the imposition of a foreign language
(English) into a Gaelic majority zone and native speakers having to
fight for decades to be able to be taught in their own language. Native speakers being forced to learn English to exist within their own regions because a central government would not allow services to be given in a people’s own language.
But then the clock only goes back so far with people who wish that minority languages would just die. There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?
“There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?” — THIS RIGHT HERE
Also just gonna point out here:
In the UK, the languages Gaelige, Gaelic, Cymraeg and Kernewek (that’s Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish respectively) didn’t just “die out.” There was a concerted effort by the English to kill them off.
For example, in Wales, if a child was heard speaking Welsh in a classroom, they’d be given a “Welsh Not”, a wooden plaque engraved with “WN” to hang around their neck. They’d pass it onto the next child heard speaking Welsh, and whoever had the Welsh Not at the end of the day was punished – usually with a beating.
Kernewek was revived after a long hard struggle by the Cornish folk, and is now being taught again, but a lot about it has been lost because everyone who grew up speaking it has died.
And languages are never revived “just because.” The language of a place can offer so much insight into its history, so if you’re content to let a language die then you’re content to let history die.
People talk about “dead” languages as if they dwindle away gradually, naturally coming to an end and evolving into something else, but that’s rarely the case. Languages like Cymraeg and Gaelige and especially Kernewek didn’t have the chance to die with dignity, they were literally beaten out of my parents and grandparents.
Is it any wonder every other country hate the English? We invade their country, steal their history, claim pieces of their history as ours or flat out re-write it, and kill every part of their culture that we can.
It’s a miracle that any of the Celtic languages survived, so even if you don’t see the point in keeping them alive, the actual natives of each country we’ve fucked over are clinging onto what heritage they have left through the only thing they can: their language.
Hey OP, póg mo thóin!
*snerk* xD
I would like to point all of these “just let it die” assholes directly at Hebrew.
The language was effectively dead. It had been murdered and forced-assimilated away.
But there was this dude named Ben Yehuda.
And he said “no.”
“The language of my people for four thousand years or more,” he said, “should not stop existing because of a bunch of assholes.” (Okay, this is a dramatic retelling. He probably didn’t actually say assholes.)
So he started an official movement to recreate Hebrew as closely as possible to how it had been spoken about a thousand years prior.
Today, ancient Hebrew is spoken by millions of Jews around the world weekly in our prayers and Torah readings, and modern Hebrew is the official language of eight and a half million people–many of them having been born speaking it as a first language. Many people in the first group also speak at least some modern Hebrew–and it’s possible you do, too! A lot of loan words from Hebrew and Yiddish have made their way into English (like klutz, mensch, and kibitz).
That’s hardly “on life support.” Hebrew is growing, living, and thriving because of the Enlightenment efforts of the 1800s. The same COULD be done for languages like Welsh, Navajo, and Basque if the larger powers that be said “this is important” rather than forcing a giant bastion of culture–the language in which a people lived, loved, thought, told stories, and explained their world–to die.
there is a distinct difference between language that has died because it stopped meeting the needs of the people using it and language that has been deliberately killed by oppressors
I remember reading a linguist’s thoughts on this a while back. They noted that languages are not only an important cultural heritage, but also an important historical artifact that offers a look into the unique perspective of a culture. The things that we name and how we name them reflect our values and priorities. For example, Inuktitut is said to have several different words for snow that categorize them by various metrics. This reflects a need for communication regarding what the snow was like, which naturally would be important to a people who deal with snow on a near constant basis. There are nine different ways to say “you’re welcome” in Native Hawaiian, each responding to a different level of gratitude. You don’t respond the same way to “thanks for giving me a donut” as you do to “thanks for saving my life.” This reflects a culture of accountability and honor.
The study and preservation of indigenous languages worldwide is vital to the enrichment of our global culture. You don’t have to be fluent in multiple languages to be able to understand the perspective that is offered by nurturing this tradition. Our ability to communicate is one of our greatest gifts – what a waste it would be to throw that away simply because providing institutions of cultural heritage is too inconvenient.
I just want to emphasize the cultural component here. Languages die off like this due to people trying to wipe out that culture. Take a look at the Hague’s definition of genocide and see how it talks about trying to destroy that culture through forced assimilation, population control, and theft of children. Language destruction goes hand in hand with all of that.
When you stop to think about it, when do you hear of a language people just stopped speaking? When is it not associated with form of genocide?
“The Trump administration cannot ignore the law, nor the reality of tribes’ existence as sovereign nations that predate the United States. Treaties cannot be sponged away. The government’s legal duty to provide medical care to tribes, determined by treaties, Congress, Executive Orders, and the Supreme Court of the United States, cannot be summarily dismissed. These actions maynot only be illegal, but threaten the survival of natives today, whose ancestors were extinguished by the millions in the genocide of Indigenous that began with the landing of Christopher Columbus in 1492. We deserve to live.”
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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