picturesofwar:

This day in history:

Dachau concentration camp is liberated from Nazi German control by American soldiers after 12 years of operation.

At least 30,000 prisoners died while being held inside and more than estimated 200,000 people were interned at one point or another within the camp.  Exact figures will never be known.

April 29, 1945 - 67 years ago today.

Ezili Dantò

The Revolution which created the nation of Haiti was inspired by the divine decree of the warrior love goddess known as Ezili Dantò who danced in the head of the great Haitian priestess, Cecile Fatiman, on that famous Haitian night in 1791, on a red hilltop, at a forest thicket in Haiti called Bwa Kayiman.

Led by the powerful warrior spirit of Ezili Dantò, Cecile Fatiman crowned the African warrior Boukman with her royal red Petwo scepter, ushering in the Haitian war which forever slashed the chains of European slavery in Haiti to create Africa’s sacred trust, Manman Ayiti - the first Black nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Ezili Dantò is the symbol of the irreducible essence of that ancient Black mother, mother of all the races, who holds Haiti’s umbilical chord back to Africa, back to Anba Dlo*. Calling on her essence, breath, vision and cosmic power brought forth Haiti’s release from 300-hundred years of brutal European enslavement.

Ezili Dantò is the spiritual mother of Haiti and the preeminent cosmic symbol of Black independence, unity, self-determination, justice, equality and freedom.

(Source: educationforliberation)

brandx:

The historical construction of Swedishness can be traced to the pre-eminence of the Swedes, along with the Norwegians and Danes, in the construction of the white race as the elite of homo sapiens. In a scientific discourse hegemonic for almost 200 years, the Swedes and other Scandinavians were considered the most physically and aesthetically perfect people on earth.

The nation’s scholars excelled in and contributed substantially to racial science: Carl Linnaeus created the first modern scientific system for race classification in the mid-1700s; Anders Retzius invented the skull or cephalic index – which became the principal method for racial science itself – in the 1850s; and the Swedish government founded the Swedish Institute for Racial Biology in 1922.

In the mid 1930s, Sweden also installed one of the most effective sterilization programs ever, a eugenicist project that was both racialized, heteronormative, gendered and classed, and that affected more than 60,000 Swedes before being dissolved in the mid-1970s.

Read More

(Source: eurozine.com)

cruelyouth:

Having only 5 hours of sleep last night, and needing to wake up early tomorrow, I’m not going to type a lot about this, but I did want to write something down so that I won’t forget it.

One of my co-workers is a black gentleman who grew up in Indiana during the 1930s and 40s.  A very scary time to be in this state.

When I worked tonight, he was telling me how he, along with many other black men, were taught how to act and behave, especially around white people.

Read More

newwavefeminism:

theeducatedfieldnegro:

Colonialism: Sins of Europe in the

Scramble for Africa

Now that Africa is the hot topic of the hour, let’s actually get people caught up on the historical context

Warning: video is graphic [as colonialism itself was graphic… and not even that long ago!]

brazilwonders:

Resistance to slavery took many forms. Documents of the period refer to the desperation of the slaves who starved themselves to death, killed their babies or fled. Sabotage and theft were frequent, as were work slowdowns, stoppages and revolts.

Other slaves sought solace in African religion and culture. The mix of Catholicism (made compulsory by slave masters) and African traditions spawned a syncretic religion on the sugar plantations, known today as Candomblé. The slaves masked illegal customs with a facade of Catholic saints and rituals. The martial art capoeira also grew out of the slave communities.

Many slaves escaped from their masters to form quilombos, communities of runaway slaves that quickly spread across the countryside. The most famous, the Republic of Palmares, which survived through much of the 17th century, was home to some 20, 000 people. Palmares was a network of quilombos covering a broad tract of lush tropical forest straddling the border of Alagoas and Pernambuco states. Under their leaders Ganga Zumba and his son-in-law Zumbi, its citizens became pioneers of guerrilla warfare, repeatedly fending off Portuguese attacks between 1654 and 1695. Eventually Palmares fell to a force of bandeirantes from São Paulo.

As abolitionist sentiment grew in the 19th century, many (unsuccessful) slave rebellions were staged, the quilombos received more support and ever-greater numbers of slaves fled the plantations. Only abolition itself, in 1888, stopped the growth of quilombos. Over 700 villages that started as quilombos remain today. Some were so isolated that they remained completely out of contact with white Brazilians until the last couple of decades.

fuckyeahlatinamericanhistory:

March 15

• 1711: Eusebio Kino, a Jesuit missionary active in present-day northern Mexico and the US southwest, where he founded a number of Catholic missions, dies at age 65 in what is now the Mexican state of Sonora. 

• 1985: Brazil’s two-decades-long military dictatorship ends with the last day of Gen. João Figuereido’s administration.

• 1990: Fernardo Collor de Mello is sworn in as the first democratically-elected president of Brazil in 26 years. He would resign from office two years later.

• 2009: Mauricio Funes is elected president of El Salvador.

boha1000:

Natives recall residential schools abuse

HALIFAX - When he was six years old, Barney Williams told his father he had been raped at the Christie Roman Catholic school near Tofino, B.C. But his father — a staff member at the native residential school — didn’t believe him.

Tears well up in Williams’s eyes as he recalls the moment more than 60 years later when his ailing father finally apologized for doubting what happened in the late 1940s.

“As I walked into the room, he said, ‘I’m sorry for what I did to you,’ ” Williams said Wednesday, the first day of national hearings in Halifax for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

“That was my reconciliation. That was my moment of truth.”

Now 72, Williams is a member of a committee helping other residential school survivors as they come forward to tell their stories to the three-member commission, which has already held two other national hearings — one in Winnipeg, the other in Inuvik, N.W.T. — since it started its work last year.

Williams, an elder with the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations in Meares Island, B.C., said his brother also attended the residential school, but he died before he could reach his own sense of reconciliation.

“He tried to protect me, but he was not much older than me,” Williams said. “He was just a boy himself.”

In all, Williams spent eight years at the school before he went home.

“There was that missing time, when you’re a little boy,” he said. “Canadians need to believe that this actually happened, and they really need to listen. … Even at my age, I get emotional talking about it.”

The commission has a five-year mandate to document the history of Canada’s native residential schools, inspire reconciliation and produce a report by 2014. The federal government has set aside $60 million for the commission’s work.

The first government-funded, church-run residential schools opened in the 1870s. The last one closed outside Regina in 1996.

The 130 schools became infamous for being places where many students suffered emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

The schools were also known for overcrowding, poor sanitation, unhealthy food and menial labour. Harsh punishment was meted out for those students who spoke their native language or took part in traditional rituals.

The Atlantic region had one residential school, according to the commission. The Department of Indian Affairs built the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School north of Halifax in 1930.

Students were taken from all three Maritime provinces and the Restigouche Indian Reserve in Quebec. It was operated by the Archdiocese of Halifax until 1956.

In all, about 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children attended these schools. For those native families who resisted the system, children were forcibly taken away by the RCMP.

The churches that operated the schools started apologizing in 1986.

In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a public apology for what had happened, saying the goal of the schools was “to kill the Indian in the child.”

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Manitoba Justice Murray Sinclair, was established as part of a landmark $4-billion agreement reached in 2007 with survivors who had filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government and the churches.

Hundreds of survivors and their relatives have gathered in Halifax to take part in the latest round of hearings, which wrap up on Saturday.

The commission opened its hearings with a sacred fire ceremony Wednesday at the Nova Scotia legislature.

The ceremony culminated with the arrival of Patrick Etherington, a residential school survivor who walked more than 2,200 kilometres from Cochrane, Ont., with his 28-year-old son, Patrick Jr., and his partner, Frances Whiskeychan.

Etherington Sr., a member of the Moose Cree First Nation originally from Fort Albany, Ont., attended a residential school between the ages of six and 11.

Like so many other native children, he suffered physical abuse at the school.

He said he started the walk back in late July to raise awareness about the impact of the residential school experience on several generations of aboriginals.

“It gave me the purpose of helping and creating more awareness toward everybody affected by the residential school issue,” he said in an interview.

Etherington said he an his son forged a bond during the long walk that was absent before.

“It was hard work,” he said.

Williams said the commission is revealing the truth about what happened at the schools, but true reconciliation will take a long time.

“Many of us are still at a point where we’re not ready to do that,” he said. “We’re still in a place of pain, resentment and anger.”

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version incorrectly stated that Williams had waited 50 years for his father’s apology.

http://www.metronews.ca/vancouver/canada/article/1007338—natives-recall-residential-schools-abuse—page0

dreams-from-my-father:

aphoticoccurrences:

unapologetically-black:

pennilessambition:

this makes my blood boil

But we were the savages… They mock, destroy, murder, steal, conquer, rape, pillage, and don’t try to understand… But we, and all other indigenous/melanated people, WE were/are the savages. Yeah, right.

ugh. i don’t even think i want to know what’s happening…

I can’t!! Right now, this just too much for me! From the attire of this man - I use this world lightly here - , you can tell this picture was taken fairly recently (and not 200 years ago)!

Thanx for bringing ‘civilization’ !

=/ 

(Source: questcequecestqueca)

elgin-marbles:

Portrait of Juana Inés de la Cruz at age 15

Juana Inés de la Cruz de Asuaje y Ramirez was born in San Miguel Nepantla, near Mexico City. She was the illegitimate child of a Spanish Captain, Pedro Manuel de Asuaje, and a Criollo woman, Isabel Ramirez. Her illegitimacy was due to her mother’s refusal to marry.

She learned how to read and write at the age of three. By age five, she could do accounts, and at age eight she composed a poem on the Eucharist. By adolescence, she had mastered Greek logic, and at age thirteen she was teaching Latin to young children. She also learned the Aztec language of Nahuatl, and wrote some short poems in that language.

In 1664, at age sixteen, Juana was sent to live in Mexico City. She asked her mother’s permission to disguise herself as a male student so that she could enter the university. Not being allowed to do this, she continued her studies privately. She came under the tutelage of the Vicereine Leonor Carreto, wife of Viceroy Antonio Sebastián de Toledo. The viceroy, wishing to test her learning and intelligence (she being then seventeen years old), invited several theologians, jurists, philosophers, and poets to a meeting, during which she had to answer, unprepared, many questions, and explain several difficult points on various scientific and literary subjects. The manner in which she acquitted herself astonished all present, and greatly increased her reputation. Her literary accomplishments soon made her famous throughout New Spain.

She was much admired in the vice-royal court, and declined several proposals of marriage, for in the spirit of her mother, she refused to marry. In 1667, she entered the Convent of the Discalced Carmelites of St. Joseph as a postulant. In 1669, she entered the Convent of the Order of St. Jérôme.

In Juana’s time, the convent was often seen as the only refuge in which a female could properly attend to the education of her mind, spirit, body and soul. It was Juana’s only refuge from marriage. Nonetheless, she wrote literature centered on freedom. In her poem Redondillas, she defends a woman’s right to be respected as a human being. Therein, she also criticizes the sexism of the society of her time, poking fun at and revealing the hypocrisy of men who publicly condemn prostitutes, yet privately pay women to perform on them what they have just said is an abomination to God. Sor Juana asks the sharp question in this age-old matter of the purity/whoredom split found in base male mentality: “Who sins more, she who sins for pay? Or he who pays for sin?” For these works, she is regarded as one of the first feminists.

Foolish men who wrongly accuse women, Without seeing that you are the cause of what you fault them for; You want with unthinking presumption to find in the woman you seek… Either love women for what you force them to be, or fashion them according to what you want them to be.

auntada:

“The Congressman-elect is a bright mulatto of good address. He is an effective stump-speaker, and is very popular with his race, while enjoying the friendship of many white people in his district. He is very ambitious to do something toward elevating his race, and he will be pretty sure to be heard from when the new Congress assembles.”

Harper’s Weekly, March 2, 1889

The Honorable Henry Plummer Cheatham (R-NC), the only African American member of Congress in 1889. Cheatham, a graduate of historic Shaw University, served in Congress from 1889 to 1893.

I’m having 2008 election flashbacks when people (including his current VP Biden) said similar shit about Obama. Like over 100 years later. 

fuckyeahlatinamericanhistory:

Two views of the Abrazo de Acatempán, Agustín de Iturbide and Vicente Guerrero’s ultimately short-lived alliance towards the end of Mexico’s war of independence on February 10, 1821. Iturbide’s Army of the Three Guarantees combined the forces of  the country’s upper class criollos together with the revolutionary troops of Vicente Guerrero and Guadalupe Victoria.