Russell Means Reminded the World of the Real America (Izvestia, Russia)
The death this week of Native American activist Russell Means is a monumental loss to indigenous peoples around the world, and as this article by Russian journalist Orhan Jemal shows, for non-indigenous people as well. For Russia’s Izvestia, Jemal details some of the highlights of Means’ remarkable career, and explains why in his mind, this Native American hero symbolized what is genuinely great about America, both yesterday and today.
For Izvestia, outlining some American history most Americans know nothing about, Orhan Jemal writes in part:
Means got his start with the desecration of a monument to the first American president. It was just minor symbolic hooliganism: in 1970, a group of activists associated with the American Indian Movement relieved themselves on the head of George Washington, carved out of an entire mountain in the town of Rushmore. It didn’t attract much attention, as there were plenty of freaks in the U.S. at the time, but Means and his comrades had no intention of stopping there.
U.S. mythology understands the story of Thanksgiving Day thus: British settlers, who journeyed to America on a three-masted ship, The Mayflower, founded the Plymouth Colony. In the first winter they died like flies from starvation, and all would have perished if not for the local chief Tisquantum, who gave the settlers a few turkeys and bags of corn. This sharing of a common table with their Indians saviors came to be celebrated as a major American holiday.
On Thanksgiving Day, he appeared at Plymouth and “spoiled the party.”
Means led hundreds of Indians to Plymouth and held a series of protest marches, recalling as it really was: about 1,000 Indians, including women and children, gathered at the harvest festival. They were surrounded, the men were shot, the women and children burned and the severed head of their chief was mounted on a pike and left to rot for 24 years. The next day, the governor of the colony declared a day of “Thanksgiving” for their God-given victory over the savages. That was how America’s biggest holiday was marked for the first time.
READ ON IN ENGLISH OR RUSSIAN AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.
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Great loss to all mankind.
dduck, reading more deeply about this; especially what tribal people say about all matters Means, gives a far bigger picture in depth. Suggest Nyt obit and Indian Country, also Navajo Times. Read the comments also if so inclined to broaden the many situs, including a critical Supreme Court decision that supported Means, but eroded all the US tribes legal reach that has its own disastrous effect after the fact. Vine DeLoria and other American Indians, Latinos, Asians and Euro Americans were at the head of the ‘turn away’ of Cristoph Columbo as ‘discoverer’ –holding him properly to be a genocide unleasher (as many have been seeing and saying for over 150 years), and Thanksgiving as a holiday remembering cooperation between a newly arrived group and American tribes in situ, while overlooking concomitant slaughters of the tribes elsewhere at same time, and at other times. You can also read about A.I.M on wikipedia.
[It is true that fraternal organizations of some Italian Americans have often held that Columbo/us is a hero 'discoverer of America'... It also appears via archelogical excavations and botanical and zoological anomalies, that Chinese, Japanese, Polynesians, Vikings and Vespucci and many other persons from any seafaring nation of continent, came long long ago to the now USA shores.]
Thank you, William, for this article. I haven’t seen a lot of coverage of Russell Means’ death in the media, so it’s good to hear it mentioned here.
From what little coverage I have seen, few people seem to remember that Russell Means ran for president in 1988. He ran for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination against Ron Paul and lost. Despite running against one another, there doesn’t appear to be any bad blood between the two of them, as Russell endorsed Ron Paul for president this last year.
People who claim to cherish liberty ought to consider listening to some of the things Russell Means said. As a libertarian, Russell Means had little love for either the Democratic or Republican Parties. He was a critic of the Obama administration (see video above), and I doubt he had any kinder words for Mitt Romney.