Indigenous National Day of Mourning: Lessons for immigrant rights movement

The struggle for immigrants' rights and Indigenous rights are both struggles against imperialism

On Nov. 27, 1970, Indigenous activists organized the first National Day of Mourning to protest the historical and ongoing oppression of Indigenous people by the United States.

In addition to the long history of injuries committed to Indigenous people by the U.S. and other colonial regimes, Wamsutta James and the other co-founders of this annual protest had a particular insult to motivate their actions: After James had been invited to represent Indigenous peoples at a Massachusetts government celebration of the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower, his speech was rejected by state censors for including a relatively mild rebuke of English settlers’ crimes against the local Wampanoag tribes. Rightfully outraged, James together with activists and sympathizers organized a national-level rally, with hundreds of Indigenous attendees from all over the country.

Every year since then, Indigenous people and those in solidarity with their struggle have marked the day as an opportunity to educate people about Indigenous history and struggles, and to dispel the standard, patriotic, incorrect, and patronizing mythology of the Thanksgiving holiday, which papers over the genocide of Indigenous peoples and their cultures as well as the ongoing struggles for recognition and justice that continue today.

Particularly in a political moment in which the government is actively trying to both whitewash history and avoid accountability in the present, at the same time that it tries to undermine the rights of millions of working people to continue to live in this country, it is important to recognize the deep injustices that have been committed in the name of the “American” nation.

Who wants to jump into a melting pot?

It’s common to hear that the United States is “a nation of immigrants,” and often liberal speakers at anti-Trump protests will repeat it in an attempt to rebuke Trump’s nativist, anti-immigrant policies. Nevertheless, this patriotic narrative of U.S. pluralism is a misdirection that papers over the reality of brutal, racist settler colonialism that characterized much of U.S. history. It also conveniently muddles the categories of the victims of U.S. imperialism, re-casting Indigenous and enslaved peoples, whose rights were horrifically violated by the U.S., as the benefactors of high-minded American generosity.

Although immigrants today are lectured in schools about how we should identify with the pilgrim settlers that claimed this land for the English—and it is easy to see why such a narrative can be comforting—this is a historical misidentification of massive proportions. The settler-colonial society that evolved into the U.S. state was founded on the systematic violent theft of land from the local Indigenous peoples, who consistently protested and fought against these incursions. It was based on a racist and self-serving economic order that intentionally devalued the lives of Indigenous people and the enslaved Black people that it imported from Africa—while simultaneously violently suppressing the largely immigrant working class.

The enslaved Black people too are categorized incorrectly by the immigrant myth: These people did not travel to the U.S. in search of a better life, they were kidnapped and forcibly brought here, suffering some of the worst horrors of human history in the process.

The concept of America as a nation of immigrants, without mentioning its legacy of settler colonialism, also serves to obscure the nature of immigrants today. Today, much of the far right’s anti-immigrant rhetoric focuses on Latin American people, attacking them as foreigners and criminals. Nevertheless, many of these people are themselves the descendants of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, in some cases even specifically the descendants of people who had lived in what is today the western U.S., violently annexed in wars of expansion against both Indigenous nations and Mexico.

Even for those whose family histories do not specifically include Indigenous peoples pushed out of the territories of the U.S., immigration from Latin America today is driven in no small part by the footprint of U.S. imperialism itself: repeated imperialist incursions—both in the form of overt military threats and sanctions as in Venezuela, but also in the form of more subtle undermining of local environmental and economic conditions by U.S.-based businesses—are a major force driving immigration to the borders of the United States. While the typical trappings of the immigrant narrative generally imply that these immigrants owe gratitude to the U.S. state, it is clear today that they are not beneficiaries but rather victims, who if anything are owed compensation from the U.S., rather than the inverse.

It is encouraging to see consciousness of this grow within the immigrant rights movement. A growing refrain within immigrant rights’ spaces is the recognition that “we did not cross the border, the border crossed us”. This recognition is pivotal, as it identifies the crux of the fight for immigrants’ rights as a fight against imperialism and its unending hunger for exploitation.

Imperialism is the enemy of humanity

Throughout these historical processes, Indigenous people and other oppressed people were not passive observers of human history, silently shedding a stoic tear in the face of oppression—they have been active participants, even when their Yankee counterparts refuse to recognize or remember it. While largely omitted from schoolbooks and national memory, Ken Burns’ latest TV series “The American Revolution” actually does a fairly good job of dramatizing this history, showing how Indigenous people fought for their own interests on both sides of the war, only to be treated as subhuman by colonizers of all factions.

Fighting for rights as immigrants today requires a clear understanding of the U.S. state and its interests. The myths of Thanksgiving that obscure the historical violence committed by the U.S. against Indigenous peoples and cast it as a “land of opportunity’ also obstruct our ability to understand the ebbs and flows of racist immigration politics.

While capitalists have at times opened the door to immigrants when they needed workers to build the railroads, fill the factories, or tend the fields, the same capitalists also supported anti-immigrant measures when boom turned to bust and a steady flow of new workers was not to their benefit. Today, even as capitalists are cranking the wheel of xenophobia to expel “illegal immigrants”, they’re setting up a “new Bracero program” that would see imported workers treated like slaves, unable to participate in society or live a life outside of work.

The crisis of immigration is manufactured by the capitalists and their byzantine system of border controls, with the first United States borders existing to enclose Indigenous people onto Indian reservations. The fight to erase these racist lines of division can only be meaningfully achieved alongside the struggle for recognition and redress of the grievous injustices committed against Indigenous peoples to this day, who were the first to suffer when these lines were drawn and whose communities still bear not only the burden of mistreatment and marginalization, but who also have lit and maintained the fires of struggle against imperialism.

Photo: Maya people from Mexico were at the head of the annual Indigenous National Day of Mourning march at Plymouth Rock, Mass., in 2022. (Cultural Survival)