Thread by @rebeccanagle

I can't speak to how the Holocaust is being used, bc its not my history.

But as a Native woman, I know we don't need to leave the US to find examples of genocide & ethnic cleansing. If we don't want history to repeat itself, we need to stop acting like its a foreign problem.

In my tribe, before the trail of tears, Cherokees were rounded up at gun point, dragged from their homes, and kept in concentration camps. Then forced on a death march halfway across the country.

Our story isn't an anomaly; it was US policy for the better part of a century.

The actual legal basis for the US separating migrant children from their parents and holding them captive exists because the US a long and ugly history of separating Indian kids from their families and sending them to boarding schools.

nytimes.com/2019/05/26/opi…

Recently Ft Still in Oklahoma was added as a detention facility for migrant children. The Fort was built to fight the Indian wars and from 1894-1914 held 400 Apache men women and children as prisoners. Many died without ever seeing freedom.

washingtonpost.com/history/2019/0…

All human rights abuses across the globe deserve recognition, remembrance & our collective learning from.

But for a country literally founded in genocide, there is no ocean we need to cross, no foreign history book we need to open to find out what genocide is and how it happens.

And maybe because this country is so reluctant to take lessons from our own history is why it keeps repeating itself.