Eyewitness

• In 2021, the Biden administration declared the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples Day.
• I am a scholar of Colonial-Indigenous relations and think that officially recognizing Indigenous Peoples Day – and, more broadly, Native Americans’ history and survival – is important.
• Yet, Indigenous Peoples Day and Columbus Day should also serve as a reminder of the violent past endured by Indigenous communities in North America.

Understanding scalping

• Popular culture is full of examples of Native Americans scalping white settlers.
• In several Indigenous cultures in North America, scalping was part of human trophy taking, which involves claiming human body parts as a war trophy.
• But just because scalping was practiced by some Native American societies, it does not mean that it was practiced by all.
• In fact, Colonists’ use of scalping against Native American people likely accelerated this practice.

Scalp bounties in New England and California

• Colonies, territories and states in what is now the U.S. used scalp bounties widely from the 17th through the 19th centuries.
• Colonial governments in New England issued over 60 scalp bounties from the 1680s through the 1750s, typically during various conflicts between Colonists and Native Americans.
• Massachusetts made the widest use of scalp bounties among the New England Colonies in the 1700s.
• State and federal officials, as well as several businesses, supported this genocide by paying bounties to scalp hunters.

Memory and violence

• Centuries later, California and Massachusetts have had different responses to their role in these sordid histories.
• California has acknowledged “historic wrongdoings” and the violence committed against the Indigenous people who live in the state.
• Gavin Newsom set up a a Truth and Healing Council to discuss and examine the state’s historical relationship with Native Americans.

Legacies of scalping

• The legacies of violence and scalping are deeply rooted and can be observed in numerous parts of U.S. society today.
• For instance, various communities, including Lovewell, Maine, and Spencer, Mass., are named after scalp bounty hunters.
• Such town names, and the history of violence connected to them, often hide in plain sight.

• The mandate had given Britain administration of the territories of Palestine and Transjordan after the end of the first world war.
• Asserting its “natural and historic right” to a homeland and recognition by the United Nations, the council declared the establishment of Israel.

Eyewitness account

• The Manchester Guardian’s eyewitness account, which it ran on page five on May 15 under the headline “Natural and Historic Right”, explained why such support was needed.
• The proclamation of statehood had taken place “in a subdued atmosphere caused by Jewish military reverses”.

Expert analysis of the birth of the state of Israel and the plight of the Palestinian people.

• The Daily Telegraph reported that “Britain does not intend, for some time, to grant recognition to the Jewish State of Israel.
• The Conservative broadsheet explained that these would include “definition of its boundaries and the establishment of a government clearly in control”.
• The UK’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, thought Britain’s duty was to balance US enthusiasm for Israel with diplomatic sympathy for the Arab case.
• The Attlee government believed that immediate recognition of Israel by the US was unfair and encouraged by American Jewish opinion.

Reports from the US

• Moments later, the Jewish Agency for Palestine appealed to the security council to call on the Arab states to “desist from aggression”.
• It was, Cooke reminded his readers, “the UN Security Council’s first experience with an open and admitted war”.
• He described Andrei Gromyko, the Russian representative to the UN, sitting in “unflurried silence”, while Dr T.F.
• Tsiang of China asked how the US could “recognise a Jewish State and, at the same time, seriously ask the Arabs to stop fighting”.