White Settlers of America Same as White Settlers of Palestine: Kill the Natives

The 1882 obliteration of an indigenous Tlingit village in Alaska is a stark example of the affinities between America and Israel. They both were born by shedding the blood and stealing the land of the native indigenous populations.

On Oct. 26, 1882, in Angoon, an indigenous Tlingit village of about 420 people in the southeastern Alaska panhandle, the US settler military began shelling the village as winter approached. Then, just like Israeli settler soldiers do in Palestine, white American sailors landed and burned everything:  homes, food caches and canoes. Conditions grew so dire in the following months that elders sacrificed their own lives to spare food for surviving children. The objective of the US military, as dictated by the US government at the time, was to ethnically cleanse many native indigenous areas of the country. There were no "terrorists" back then because the native Alaskans did not fight back like the Palestinians, Vietnamese, Algerians, Black South Africans and other brutalized colonized people usually do.

In 1973, the racist audacity of the American government (Department of the Interior) granted Angoon a compensation for the ethnic cleansing in the pathetic insulting amount of $90,000.  “You can imagine the generations of people that have died since 1882 that have wondered what had happened, and why it happened. In our minds, we didn’t do anything wrong,” said Daniel Johnson Jr., a tribal head in Angoon.

The attack was one of a series of conflicts between the colonizing American military and the Alaska Natives after the U.S. bought the territory from Russia in 1867. The U.S. Navy also acknowledged last month its destruction of the nearby village of Kake in 1869, and the brutal shelling of Wrangell, also in southeast Alaska.

Rosita Worl, the president of Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau, described how some elders that winter “walked into the forest” — meaning they died, sacrificing themselves so the younger people would have more food. Such instances must be happening right now every day in Palestine.