Jennina Rose Gorman is a longtime activist from Altoona. She gave a speech at a snowy rally Native American Thoughts on Gaza on March 10 in Johnstown’s central park. The text of her speech can be read below.
Hello, many of you know me as Jennina Rose Gorman. I live in Altoona, PA. Although you may not be able to tell by my appearances, I am a Haudenausee woman, Mohawk and Seneca Nations, and only 1/4 Irish.
So why am I telling you this? Why is an Indigenous woman from North America here, talking about what is happening in Palestine? Because what’s happening in Gaza is genocide and the world looks to the America’s history as a model of “successful genocide and colonization.”
It is difficult to determine exactly how many Natives lived in North America before Columbus. It’s estimated as many as 18 million (100% of the population at the time) Native Peoples lived in North America prior to the genocide and colonization that took place here on American soil.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 331.9 million is the current population in the U.S. Native Americans have been reduced to about 2.09% of the United States which is only about 6.79 million people. And when we were forced to defend ourselves, and fought back, WE were labeled as Savages, Beasts, etc.: The same dehumanizing language that Israel is now using to describe Palestinians.
In 1948, 1.4 million Palestinians lived in 1,300 Palestinian towns and villages. More than 800,000 of the population were driven out of their homeland to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, neighboring Arab countries, and other countries of the world.
Every year on May 15, Palestinians around the world, numbering about 12.4 million, mark the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the near total destruction of it in 1948.
The Palestinian experience of dispossession and loss of a homeland is 76 years old this year. This did NOT begin on October 7th, 2023. Although by Dec 19, 2023 this conflict had killed more Palestinians than all Palestinian-Israeli clashes since the outbreak of the first Intifada combined. Now in 2024, the numbers are just staggering and should be a huge wake up call to the rest of the world. We cannot allow this to continue.
I take it personally when I see another indigenous culture and people being slaughtered en mass so a European culture can steal the land, resources resources and homes of those people. A few days ago, we celebrated International Women’s day while thousands of Palestinian women and children are being killed while starving and waiting for food. It takes a special kind of evil to target starving people with bombs while they wait in bread lines.
This is an evil we must join together and defeat. We must say NO MORE indigenous people and their cultures wiped from the face of the earth! No more killing poor people in other countries with our tax funded weapons while 40 million here in the U.S. struggle with food and housing insecurities, lack of healthcare and poverty wages.
It is time we stopped seeing ourselves as separate from one another and start learning that we are part of a global community. When Canada was on fire, we all learned that the air we were breathing here in PA was affected- 2,151 miles away.
We cannot afford to turn the TV off and pretend that this isn’t happening or doesn’t affect us at all. What happens anywhere in the world affects us all. What hurts and kills our brothers and sisters in Palestine will cause global ramifications. We are all connected and there is strength in our connection and we must use that now to stop the genocide in Palestine.
I am asking all of you today to call your congressman and Senators to demand a ceasefire. Demand that the U.S. stops funding Israel and their weapons of genocide with our tax dollars. To my Indigenous relatives, we are the descendants of the Indians they could not kill. We owe it to our ancestors and the seven generations that will follow to stand up and fight against the genocide in Palestine and the destruction of our mother earth. Stand with me and say NO MORE. Thank You.
These are Native American thoughts on Gaza.