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16 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
The CIA has more Indigenous blood on its hands than Custer... Honduras, Guatemala, Bolivia...
Panama, Nicaragua, Chile, as well...
The first Secretary of State to overthrow a foreign gov’t was John Watson Foster (who overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii). He told his grandson of his exploits: Allen Dulles, the first civilian director of the CIA, the man who orchestrated the bloody Guatemalan coup in 1954.
Foster wrote of Hawaii, what became the mantra of the CIA: “The native inhabitants had proved themselves incapable of maintaining a respectable and responsible government and lacked the energy or will to improve the advantages which Providence had given them.”

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More from @nickwestes

Nick Estes Profile picture
18 Oct
I’ve seen sooo many US Indigenous “get out the vote” campaigns — “Indigenize the vote” “voting is sacred” — but zero solidarity from those same campaigns and politicians with Indigenous Bolivians voting today. Is a vote only “sacred” when it’s for empire?
The US backed the right wing military coup to depose of Evo Morales, the Indigenous president, and MAS, a movement with many Indigenous people. None of the elected US Indigenous politicians opposed the coup. Not a single one.
Bolivian Indigenous movements brought us some of the more revolutionary environmental politics such as the rights of nature movement, first codified in the Bolivian plurinational constitution, and the 2010 People’s Agreement that center the Andean cosmovision of Vivir Bien.
Read 6 tweets
Nick Estes Profile picture
20 Sep
The veneration of a jurist who used the racist legal fiction of the Discovery Doctrine to describe *all* American Indians is appalling. Her thinking was that we’re still too incompetent to manage our own lands, and we need the US to do it for us, like wildlife...
No religion should determine law, whether it’s abortion or Indigenous rights. Yet, RBG upheld a fifteenth century papal bull that said Indians barely possess faculties that distinguish them from animals.
Colonialism is authoritarian by nature. In the US, the highest jurists are appointed, not elected, by a president who is also not directly elected by the people, in system premises on Indigenous elimination. We should be challenging these systems not normalizing them.
Read 4 tweets
Nick Estes Profile picture
10 Sep
I was a research assistant at an oral history center, when my boss showed us the 2007 video, "Collateral Murder." Apache helicopter pilots radio a second chopper, "Crazy Horse One-Eight," before gunning down six Iraqis. "Look at those dead bastards," one says.
I had long opposed the Iraq war. The idea that Indigenous names, Crazy Horse and the Apache people, those who had died fighting US imperialism, however, had become military codewords in the bloody massacre of Iraqi civilians made me throw up. It is the never-ending Indian war.
Later, I read the WikiLeaks US embassy cables, showcasing the zeal with which the US imperialism destroys nations and movements it sees as threats, literally holding back the rest of the world from advancing any social alternative to the world-destroying machine of capitalism.
Read 4 tweets
Nick Estes Profile picture
10 Sep
“The tribal relations should be broken up, socialism destroyed, & the family & the autonomy of the individual substituted. The allotment of land in severalty, the establishment of local courts & police... & the universal adoption of the English language are means to an end.”
— Thomas Morgan, Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1889)
Indian policy wasn’t an accident. It unfolded by design and specifically targeted the communal aspect of Indigenous social relations, which were broken by breaking up the land.
Read 4 tweets
Nick Estes Profile picture
4 Sep
I can’t speak on whites pretending to be Black in the academy. But I see similarities with how whites have adopted a Native identity in the academy. Yes, there’s a question of resources. What’s not often spoke about is the politics of injury tied to these make-believe identities.
The cunning of trauma politics is that it turns actual people and struggles, whether racial or Indigenous citizenship and belonging, into matters of injury. It defines an entire people mostly on their trauma and not by their aspirations or sheer humanity.
Who’s the audience for the politics of injury? It certainly isn’t for those who are marginalized. Mostly it’s for white audiences or institutions of power. It’s non-threatening to be a traumatized person, especially when those dishing out the trauma become those who solve it.
Read 10 tweets
Nick Estes Profile picture
28 Aug
Daniel Carr, a Three Percenter militiaman, showed up with a handgun to the home of a witness to the Steven Baca shooting during Baca's preliminary hearing. Prior to this, Carr was accused of pointing a gun at drivers while he held a sign that read "F*CK BLM" at an intersection.
Steven Baca is charged w/ aggravated battery causing great bodily harm for shooting Scott Williams 4x & aggravated battery against 2 women at a June protest against the statue of a Spanish colonizer. Baca's the son of a former sheriff & once ran a "Support ABQ Police" FB page.
Carr's release follows Kyle Rittenhouse's shooting dead two protestors & wounding another in Kenosha, WI. Rittenhouse was a junior cadet in a cop training program that taught minors how to shoot guns. He had "BLUE LIVES MATTER" insignia on his FB page & aspired to be a cop.
Read 5 tweets

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