The Milahanska, or Long Knives, are the Native Europeans who lived in Britain. They arrived on the east coast of North America over a thousand years after the Lenape.
Country facts (circa 1713):
- Name: British Empire;
- Location: Britain, Ireland, east coast of North America, Jamaica, Barbados, Bermuda, Saint Helena, ports in Africa, India and the Mediterranean (pictured above);
- Population: 6.5 million, maybe more;
- Area: about 700,000 sq km;
- Languages: Washichuiyapi, an Indo-European language (related to what Columbus spoke);
- Religion: worship of Wanikiya;
- Technology: West Eurasian;
- Government: centralized, ruled by a chief;
- Currency: mazaska, aka “pieces of maza”.
The Milahanska grew maize and aghuyapi su, raised ptegleshka, thhahhchashungkala, khhokhhoyah’angla and khukhushe (pictured above) and rode sungkawakhangs. They lived in short houses, sometimes in towns of up to 500,000. They made things out of maza.
They took land through war, purchase and broken treaties.
Money: mostly mazaska, round pieces of maza, coloured brown, white and yellow (in order of increasing value).
War: They were used to fighting in open fields with mazawakhangs, loud, slow-loading weapons made of maza. They were not good at fighting in woods and their weapons were not fast enough till the 1800s. Small things or nothing at all could lead to war. They killed even women and children. Worshipping their god, Wanikiya, offered little to no protection.
What the Milahanska lacked in weaponry and skill, they made up for with numbers and disease. More and more came across the sea every year, bringing disease:
Diseases: wichhahanghang, nashli and Wanikiya Wowichala (pictured above). The last was a disease of the spirit, based on guilt, sin and blame, on male authority and violence, on lies, on taking more than you need, on seeing the Earth not as a Mother but as a thing to rape.
The conquered: Those who had lived through the Milahanska diseases and wars, in North America, Australia and New Zealand, were pushed onto small bits of land or into wastelands or no lands. Their children were taken and forced to be brought up (at least in part) by Milahanska women (pictured above).
In 1921, at their height, they ruled the seas and about 43.7 million square kilometres, almost a third of the earth:
In 2014, they numbered 309 million, almost 50 times more than in 1713. Unlike some other Native Europeans, few married those without white skin.
Languages: They spoke Washichuiyapi. In 2014, it had at least 373 million native speakers, 83% of them Milahanska. Another billion people can speak it as a second or foreign language.
How I made this post: I took my post on the Delaware (Lenape) and flipped it onto what Winston Churchill calls the English-speaking peoples, by which he means just the White ones. I used Lakota Sioux words for things that Native Americans were unfamiliar with (to make them seem unfamiliar in English). I took my view of Christianity from John Trudell (Santee Sioux). Strictly speaking, I should have used Lenape words and ideas, but I am more familiar with Sioux ones.
– Abagond, 2016.
See also:
- The Delaware
- British Empire
- The British – flipped from my post on the Iroquois.
- The Anglo world – flipped from my post on the Arab world,
- Anglo Americans – those of North America. The post is modelled on the National Geographic.
- Australia
- New Zealand
- The Milahanska through time:
- -40,000: behavioural modernity
- -4,000: Proto-Indo-Europeans
- +100: Germani
- +800: Angles
- +2012: Anglo Americans
- Wanikiya – their god
- Washichuiyapi – their language
- Winston Churchill
- John Trudell
- conquest
593
Does this post only refer to the British and their ethnic diaspora, or all English speaking Whites?
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I have also heard of the Lakota word Wašíču. I wonder what the difference in meaning is between these two words.
That would have been great.
I wonder if any of the major universities in the Hudson or Delaware river valleys (eg, NYU, Columbia, U Penn, Princeton, Rutgers, SUNY, etc.) or any of the community colleges in southern NJ have any Lenape studies program. In fact, do any universities in the USA have any Native nation studies programs?
@Benjamin
Surely from a Lakota perspective, anyone who has taken on the language, culture and religion of the Milanhanska and enrolled as a member of one of the bands of the Milanhanska nation would also be one of them too.
If someone whose paternal grandparents were Seneca and maternal grandparents were Ojibwe, but they spoke exclusively the Lakota language, adopted Lakota culture and religion as their own and lived in Lakota communities, anyone from the Milahanska would label them as Lakota too (albeit a Lakota whose grandparents hailed from different nations).
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@jefe
Interesting, that makes sense. So I could see Milahanska referring to the “anglosphere”.
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I see what you did there. Very good.
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@ Benjamin
In this post, it means any English-speaking White person.
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@ Jefe
According to my Lakota dictionary:
Milahangska:
If I remember correctly, the Iroquois called the British Long Knives too.
washichu :
From what I understand the word can be derogatory,
Note that my dictionary does spell it as wašíču. Here, and in the post, transliterate š as sh, č as ch and so on.
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I saw the word wasichu in an Alice Walker poem. I had no idea what it meant. The title of the poem is Who. The first line of the poem Who has not been invaded by the wasichu? Back then I had no idea what a wasichu was. But today reading your post thread I see it means white man.
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Food for thought.
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What about George Wasichu-Washington? Was he then a construct created by British or perhaps French intelligence, with a person then found to fill the role? Or was it just some eeire instance of synchronicity? How do we know the totality of story of George Washington is real? The events of is later years obviously were real, but what about his origins?
But maybe we shouldn’t ask, or we might then begin to have the same questions about later presidents and other holders of high office. Maybe Washington originally was recruited for one purpose and then broke away. That might explain the high esteem he came to be held in. People without the exposure or knowledge to understand or conceive of the possibility of someone being a created man, viscerally attributed to him a special kind of integrity. For generations after his death, he was regarded in America as a secular saint, a Providential man, a man above all other men. There had to be a reason.
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Those skin diseases look like something recent. Is there a dermatologist available to treat these poor people?
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I had to go back and read again those wasichu are responsible for bringing disease. That’s always the case with them. I bet Columbus had disease too when he encountered the indigenous people.
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You left Hong Kong off the 1921 map. And Diego Garcia.
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Mary said,
“I bet Columbus had disease too when he encountered the indigenous people.”
The Europeans introduced VD to the Americas.
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@Michael Jon Barker
If by “VD”, you mean Venereal Diseases, I’ve heard that it was the other way around. That the Europeans got it from the Native Americans.
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@Mary Burrell
WHO? Written by Alice Walker
Who has not been
invaded
by the Wasichu?
Not I, said the people.
Not I, said the trees.
Not I, said the waters.
Not I, said the rocks.
Not I, said the air.
Moon!
We hoped
you were safe.
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Anonymike
“………………….And Diego Garcia.”
Every British and US citizen should find out about the crimes against humanity their respective governments are culpable of . What has has happened to the Chagossians is mind-bendingly so far out of realms of belief. So few people know of this. Reading John Pilger’s ” Freedom Next Time” : Stealing a Nation has brought to light the daylight savagery of the Milahanska.
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(http://johnpilger.com/videos/stealing-a-nation)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zhGvId4fcc)
Please watch and read.
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(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing_a_Nation)
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Thank you for this great post. For all of Australia’s problems with their Aboriginal population academic and governmental organizations go out of their way to speak about them, to say that their institutions stand on the soils that are owned by Australia’s first peoples. The Native American presence in the United States, in socio-economic discourse, has been barely mentioned. The only tidbits you do hear is the controversy with a football team in DC. As for the Mexicans that Trump so despises, they are mostly ethnically cleansed indigenous peoples who are crossing an artificial line. Much like the Middle East and Africa, the borders of the countries of North and South America were drawn up by Europeans who had no considerations for where the natives would choose to live.
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Benjamin said,
“If by “VD”, you mean Venereal Diseases, I’ve heard that it was the other way around. That the Europeans got it from the Native Americans.”
That’s true that Eurocentric historians blame indigenous people for VD. To paraphrase I remember reading in high school that “The colonizers tamed the sav*ges but the sav*ages tamed the colonizers” or words to that effect.
Be*stiality didn’t fit the narrative when Eurocentric historians were writing about bringing civilization to “the sav*ges”.
VD is linked to infection within livestock and I’m going to speculate that putting ignorant men on a ship for a few weeks with a bunch of sheep led to cross infection which was spread when the sailors sexually assaulted native peoples.
The closest thing to lives stock in the Americas were buffalo which aren’t the kind of animals that domesticated easily. Everything else, sheep, cattle, horses ect were imported.
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The European white man always invading and bringing disease and raping the women and children and forcing their way of doing and being on indigenous people through colonialism and oppression.
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Reading this post again i think of the stolen generations in Australia.
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@Anonymike
I did colour them in, but it is hard to see unless you click on the map and then enlarge it. The same goes for Malta and some of the smaller islands in the Caribbean and Pacific.
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‘Stealing A Nation’
This is the “plight of the Chagos Islands, whose indigenous population was secretly and brutally expelled by British Governments in the late 1960s and early 1970s to make way for an American military base. The tragedy, which falls within the remit of the International Criminal Court as “a crime against humanity”, is told by Islanders who were dumped in the slums of Mauritius and by British officials who left behind a damning trail of Foreign Office documents.
Before the Americans came, more than 2,000 people lived on the islands in the Indian Ocean, many with roots back to the late 18th century. There were thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a railway and an undisturbed way of life. The islands were, and still are, a British crown colony. In the 1960s, the government of Harold Wilson struck a secret deal with the United States to hand over the main island of Diego Garcia. The Americans demanded that the surrounding islands be “swept” and “sanitized”. Unknown to Parliament and to the US Congress and in breach of the United Nations Charter, the British Government plotted with Washington to expel the entire population.
After demonstrating on the streets of Mauritius in 1982, the exiled islanders were given the derisory compensation of less than £3,000 per person by the British government. In the film, former inhabitants Rita Bancoult and Charlesia Alexis tell of how, in accepting the money, they were tricked into signing away their right to return home: “It was entirely improper, unethical, dictatorial to have the Chagossian put their thumbprint on an English legal, drafted document, where the Chagossian, who doesn’t read, know or speak any English, let alone any legal English, is made to renounce basically all his rights as a human being.”
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continued
“Today, the main island of Diego Garcia is America’s largest military base in the world, outside the US. There are more than 4,000 troops, two bomber runways, thirty warships and a satellite spy station. The Pentagon calls it an “indispensable platform” for policing the world. It was used as a launch pad for the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq.
The truth about the removal of the Chagossians and the Whitehall conspiracy to deny there was an indigenous population did not emerge for another twenty years, when files were unearthed at the Public Record Office, in Kew, by the historian Mark Curtis, John Pilger and lawyers for the former inhabitants of the coral archipelago, who were campaigning for a return to their homeland.
John Pilger first become aware of the plight of the Chagossians in 1982, during the Falklands War: “It was pointed out to me that Britain had sent a fleet to go and save two thousand Falkland Islanders at the other end of the world while two thousand British citizens in islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean had been expelled by British governments and the only difference was that one lot were white and the others were black. The other difference was that the United States wanted the Chagos Islands – and especially Diego Garcia – as a major base. So nothing was said, which tells us something about the ruthlessness of governments, especially imperial governments.”
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continued
“In June 2004, shortly before Stealing a Nation’s television screening, the British Government had issued an order-in-council, a royal decree using archaic powers invested in the Queen, bypassing Parliament and the High Court, to ban the Islanders from ever returning home. “The Queen rubber-stamps what in many cases politicians know they can’t get away with democratically,” said Pilger. “Dictators do this, but without the quaint ritual.”
In May 2006, the High Court finally ruled that the Chagossians were entitled to return to their homeland. However, in the summer of 2008, David Miliband and the Foreign Office began another appeal, to the Law Lords, against the High Court’s judgements. They found in favour of the Government.
In April 2010, the British Government established a marine nature reserve around the Chagos Islands. Several months later, WikiLeaks published a US Embassy diplomatic cable from 2009 which read as follows: “Establishing a marine reserve might indeed, as the FCO’s [Colin] Roberts stated, be the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands’ former inhabitants or descendants from resettling in the [British Indian Ocean Territory].”
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@taotesan: Yes that is the poem and today it makes perfect sense to me now.
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And whilst Americans call Diego Garcia “unbelievable”, you should see the abject living conditions that Chagossians live in in Mauritius.
Savage Milahanska!
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@Mary Burrell
Yes, Mary. Alice Walker is spot on. But i don’t think the moon is even safe.
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“Reading this post again i think of the stolen generations in Australia”.
And the boarding schools for the Original Peoples of America.
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