In an effort to stop the unconscionable termination of water service to tens of thousands of Detroit’s poorest residents, the ACLU of Michigan has had the honor of working with a team of distinguished lawyers led by heroic civil rights attorney Alice Jennings. The legal team’s litigation, brought on behalf of a class of water customers who seek an injunction of shut-offs and a plan for water affordability was dealt a tremendous blow recently when the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed decisions by the Bankruptcy Court and the District Court to dismiss the lawsuit.
In its ruling, the Sixth Circuit said it had previously rejected the suggestion that people are entitled to water as a right. “We reject it again today: ‘there is no fundamental right to water service.’”
The ruling—which comes as we prepare for a holiday season wherein the U.S. celebrates a legend about European settlers making common cause with America’s indigenous people—leaves a particularly bitter sting when note is taken of the attitude of First Nations peoples toward land and water.
Massasoit, a legendary Wampanoag leader, for example, is credited with this observation:
“What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth, for the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?”
If settlers and indigenous peoples saw eye-to-eye during the supposed first Thanksgiving, the settlers’ descendants didn’t get the memo—because the First Nations were victims of many massacres, broken treaties, mass relocation, disease pandemics, environmental destruction, territorial theft, confinement to reservations, and much more.
Even today, First Nations peoples and their allies have been forced to put their bodies on the line to protest the Dakota pipeline, and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has failed to honor a fundamental tenet that water belongs to us all. Meanwhile, here in Michigan, the ACLU continues to fight discrimination against indigenous people, challenging practices such as the dehumanizing tradition of using First Nations peoples as sports team mascots.
The deviation from an honorable relationship between settlers and indigenous peoples is not surprising if it is understood that the supposed intercommunal first Thanksgiving may never have happened – at least not in the way children’s history books describe it. There is sharp disagreement among historians about the first Thanksgiving, but one credible account describes how Puritan colonists who detested the Pequot people staged a pre-dawn raid on one of their villages and massacred more than 700 men, women and children. A 1637 proclamation by Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop that thanked God for the massacre was followed by days of thanksgiving.
America has never been what it could have been if Europeans who came to its shores had conformed to the values and perspectives of the people who were already here rather than embarking on an unending campaign of conquest, genocide and cultural chauvinism. Instead of a nation where we live in peace and honor, share and protect the earth, we have a country where land and resources are hoarded and wasted and people are not allowed to move freely throughout a continent their ancestors have occupied for much longer than the settler government that excludes them.
Those who want to “build a wall” because of fears that “criminals” will cross the borders should pause on Thanksgiving and consider that America’s original inhabitants would have fared better if, after hearing the news coming out of the Bahamas in 1492, they had erected a barrier of their own. They chose instead to welcome settlers, and we who are not indigenous to this continent would do well to, at long last, conform our values and perspectives to those who have been here the longest.