Conversation

Throughout the ages, colonizer has successfully used the same tricks to steal land from #indegenous : starve them !"
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For decades on the West Bank, #Israeli settlers and the IDF soldiers who protect them have both denied #Palestinians access to their crops and ripped the trees from the ground to deny their caretakers a living. Because it takes a number of years after planting for new trees to bear fruit, it’s obvious why they do this.
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Historically it’s often been the case that those who wanted to colonize a land used attacks on treasured resources to dispossess and even eradicate those reliant on them. To see this closer to home we need look no further than the 19th century campaigns in North America to wipe out bison populations, including one led by the US. army starting around 1870. This was done with the expressed purpose of forcing Indigenous peoples reliant on these herds onto reservations.

By taking away a peoples’ way of life like this, European colonizers attempted to degrade and eventually destroy their cultures. In Canada, and likely in the United States, what was done to indigenous people is often dismissed as something that happened, “long ago” (even as it continues in many places to the present day).

#Colonization #HungerAsAWeapon

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/22/of-olive-trees-bison-and-the-dispossessed/