Indigenous leaders aim to lead the Occupy Wall Street Movement

by Thomas Dahlheimer

In an Indigenous leaders’ proposal presented to the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly there is the following statement. “Without addressing justice for indigenous peoples, there can never be a genuine movement for justice and equality in the United States.”

A “talking head” on CNN recently said that the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly is considering using a statement make by Indigenous leaders as its central statement of protest. “Indigenous peoples have suffered 500+ years of genocidal colonization”.

An Indigenous leader addressed the Occupy Wall Street protesters and said, “Indigenous peoples are not strangers to the devastation of corporate greed in the United States – it was the cause of the American genocide – and still is.”

Colonialism is the source and cause of the greedy global capitalistic system we live under today. We can not truly end global capitalism and its byproducts corporate greed and earth-destroying industrialization without ending colonialism.

Corporate greed came to the Americas with Christopher Columbus who was carrying out his Roman Catholic mission, as directed by Pope Alexander VI in his Doctrine of Discovery, 15th Century Papal Bull Inter Caetera.  In this papal bull the pope wrote that Indigenous “nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.” Inter Caetera and other Doctrine of Discovery papal bulls form the basis of U.S. Federal Indian Law, as established in the 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh.

In their proposal Indigenous leaders have asked for the Occupy Wall Street, General Assembly, “To Repudiate the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, to endorse the repeal of the papal bull Inter Caetera (1493), to work for the reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court case of Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), and call for a repeal of the Columbus Day holiday.”

Indigenous leaders are saying: “Inter Caetera is the foundation of the international system we live under today and directly related to the corporate-state-military occupation and rape of Mother Earth.”

The colonized peoples around the world are fighting back, making it more difficult for the U.S. to steal and waste the limited and depleting natural resources of the earth.  U.S. colonial consumerism – or, the U.S. corporate greed theft and waste of the earth’s natural resources – is the primary cause of the current global crisis.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement should unite with the struggles of the colonized peoples of the world. The colonized peoples’ enemy is the unrepentant Roman Catholic Church hierarchy – who will not formally repeal and apologize for the papal bull Inter Caetera and also ask the leaders of our current world system to stop using Inter Caetera as the world system’s foundation and guiding principle.

The colonized  are struggling fiercely to get this Roman Catholic Church created and sustained world-system- monster off their backs so they can live and prosper on their own land and resources.

The world system of capitalism – for which the U.S. is the leading state power, and Wall Street its economic epicenter – was built on the enslavement of African people and the genocide of Indigenous peoples and theft of their lands.

Any attempt to reform capitalism will prove to be futile. This system is going down. And the majority of the oppressed peoples of the world are the ones who are going to bring it down as they struggle to build a new world based on justice and equality.

There is no such thing as “going back to the good old days.” Parasitic capitalism is not going to go away by simply repealing a Supreme Court decision about corporate personhood or enacting any number of other changes to regulate capitalism – it’s essentially a corrupt economic system. We cannot overcome a disease by treating its surface symptoms. The heart of capitalism is colonialism. We need to decolonialize the world system we live under today – I believe this is the only solution to our world crisis problems.

Capitalism is a parasite, sucking the blood of the majority of humanity, waging unending wars of plunder and occupation, terror and genocide around the world in order to control natural resources necessary for the high standard of living in the Western world. It’s mainly promoted by the U.S., and it’s justified by a delusional ideology of religious Christian supremacy and historic white racist supremacy – its goal is to conquer and exploit mother nature and the entire world of animals, peoples and nations.

This corrupt capitalistic system has wreaked havoc on the majority of the world – the true 99 percent – for 500+ years, destroying whole continents of people, decimating civilizations, terrorizing nations, imposing poverty and repression and even destroying the ecosystem of the planet.

The fact of the matter is that even as middle-class U.S. white people are beginning to experience the effects of the economic crisis, they are never-the-less still living the highest standard of living in the world at the expense of the real “99 percent” in this country – the African Americans, Mexican Americans and Native Americans who live behind an invisible wall of colonial oppression.

In this country there are more black men in prison than in college? There is a war going on inside these borders, but we (Euro-Americans) walk right over this lands Indigenous people, African Americans and Mexican Americans to get to Wall Street.

The Occupy Wall Street General Assembly is beginning to understand that it should be calling for genuine justice and equality, by supporting the right of the African, Afghani, Iraqi, Palestinian and Indigenous peoples to have their land, resources and self-determination back in their own hands.

Until the Occupy Wall Street Movement fully adopts this global strategy of decolonization it will not be a genuine unfettered movement for justice and equality.