This comprehensive documentary history examines the systematic destruction of Indigenous peoples in what is now the United States from 1492 to the 20th century. Through detailed regional analyses, population data, survivor testimony, and historical records, the document chronicles how an estimated 5-8 million Indigenous people were reduced to 250,000 by 1900—a 95-97% population decline.
Category: Rights
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Kansas is at a Crossroads as Raids, Bills increase the High Cost of Criminalizing THC
Kansas raids dozens of hemp shops while considering legalization bills that could generate $20-50 million annually. The state arrests nearly 5,000 people yearly for cannabis possession at a cost of $7-54 million in criminal justice expenses—money that could fund schools, roads, or treatment programs instead. Meanwhile, legislators debate three competing approaches: medical cannabis (SB 294), adult-use regulation (HB 2405), or tighter hemp restrictions (SB 292). The math is clear: prohibition costs Kansas taxpayers millions while generating zero revenue and saddling thousands with criminal records that reduce lifetime earnings. The question isn't whether Kansas can afford to reform—it's whether Kansas can afford not to.
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From Robert Charles to ICE: Echoes of State Violence and Resistance in America
The summer heat bore down on New Orleans that July night in 1900 when gunfire first cracked the air. Robert Charles, a Black laborer who had dared to sit on a porch in a white neighborhood, would be dead within four days—his body riddled with bullets, then mutilated by a mob drunk on the kind of rage that newspapers cultivated and police sanctioned. Before he fell, Charles killed several officers in what he surely understood would be his final stand. The city erupted. White mobs roamed the streets hunting Black residents. At least 28 people died, most of them Black civilians guilty of nothing more than existing in the wrong place during a wave of sanctioned terror. The rhetoric that summer was familiar: dangerous criminals, threats to public safety, the necessity of force. Charles was not portrayed as a man defending himself against a violent arrest in a society that offered him no legal protection. He was a monster to be exterminated, and the Black community that harbored him deserved collective punishment. More than a century later, the same language of fear and control echoes through the detention centers and deportation raids of today.
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How Cotton, Gold, and Greed Fueled a Continental Crime
In 1830 the United States signed away its own credibility with the Indian Removal Act, a feel‑good promise of “humanity and justice” that devolved into bayonets, disease‑ridden stockades, and death marches stretching from the Smokies to the Oklahoma prairie. The article you’re about to read punches through the textbook euphemisms—“westward expansion,” “voluntary exchange”—to expose the real machinery of expulsion: Andrew Jackson’s political street‑fight in Congress, forged treaties written in languages the signers could not read, and private contractors who made fortunes feeding tribes rancid bacon on thousand‑mile treks. From Osceola’s guerrilla war in the Everglades to the frozen sandbars where Choctaw children died waiting for ferries that never came, the piece follows each “civilized” tribe’s road into exile and tracks the fallout right up to modern flashpoints like McGirt v. Oklahoma and the Standing Rock pipeline standoff. It is a hard look at how a republic can celebrate liberty with one hand while erasing whole nations with the other—and why the ghosts under Highway 62 still keep the receipts.
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How Federal, State, and Industry Checks Keep Milk Safe During an FDA Lab Pause
Federal officials have paused the Food and Drug Administration’s proficiency-testing program—the twice-a-year audit that checks whether milk laboratories around the country can still hit federally defined targets—while they move the work to a new site. The daily safeguards that actually decide whether a tanker can unload or a production lot can ship, however, remain fully in force. Processing plants continue to screen every load for drug residues, run microbial counts after pasteurization and hold product until results clear. State public-health labs still pull independent samples, can order recalls and feed data to the national residue database. Because those two front-line layers are unchanged, food-safety scientists and regulators agree that the risk to consumers has not increased despite the temporary gap in federal audit rounds.