By Will Hodgkinson
December 2, 2025

Plymouth, Massachusetts

Over 3,000 protesters occupied Cole’s Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on Nov. 27 to observe the 56th National Day of Mourning (NDOM). As Mahtowin Munro (Oglala Lakota), co-leader of United American Indians of New England (UAINE) described, this year’s Day of Mourning action triumphed despite reactionary attempts at sabotage.

In a flagrant violation of the agreement it made with UAINE in 1998 — after police beat, gassed and falsely arrested 25 UAINE leaders and supporters in 1997 — the Town of Plymouth refused  to provide a stage on Cole’s Hill unless UAINE took out extortionate insurance policies. After UAINE sued, the Plymouth Superior Court ordered the town to set up the stage, which it did “within an hour after the ruling,” Munro reported to Workers World.

The ruling found that: “Plaintiffs have established that they have suffered and continued to suffer immediate and irreparable harm to their First Amendment rights to Freedom of Speech.” (patriotledger.com, Nov. 25)

The thousands of people who had traveled for hours or even days to get to Plymouth rebuked these pathetic efforts to quash NDOM, which, year after year, continues to represent the strength and resilience of the liberation struggle of Indigenous peoples worldwide.

From Turtle Island to Palestine: Colonization is a crime!

One member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) described the first NDOM in 1970 as: “A day American Indians won’t forget. We went to Plymouth for a purpose: to mourn since the landing of the Pilgrims the oppression of the American Indian and indict the hypocrisy of a system that glorifies that oppression.”

Kisha James, co-leader of UAINE and board member of the North American Indian Center of Boston (NAICOB) (Aquinnah Wampanoag and Oglala Lakota), opened the program by discussing the history of NDOM, which her grandfather, Wamsutta Frank James, first organized in 1970.

James shattered the racist Thanksgiving fable, which remains the cornerstone of the U.S. settler regime’s founding mythology. Far from being havens for religious tolerance as bourgeois historians insist, the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies were commercial enterprises built on stolen Wampanoag and Massachusett lands and financed by trafficking enslaved African and Indigenous people. “The Mayflower Compact was merely a group of white men who wanted to ensure they would get a return on their investment,” James explained.

The first “thanksgiving” likewise didn’t take place in 1620. It was nearly 20 years later, in 1637, that Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop proclaimed the first “thanksgiving” to celebrate the massacre of over 700 Pequot men, women and children on the shores of the Mystic River in present day Connecticut.

Buried among these lies is a half-truth. Some Wampanoag people did take pity on the first Pilgrim settlers, who, knowing and caring nothing about the lands they had invaded, were looting Wampanoag graves and storehouses at Corn Hill for provisions.

James asked: “And what did we, the Indigenous people of this continent, get for this kindness? Genocide, the theft of our lands, destruction of our traditional ways of life, slavery, starvation and never-ending oppression.”

The genocidal colonization begun by the Pilgrims, James stressed, matters because it is ongoing. The 1620 invasion helped prepare the ground for the U.S. settler empire which continues to dominate the system of capitalist extraction and genocide that Indigenous peoples are fighting around the world — from Turtle Island to Palestine.

James quoted Saidiya V. Hartman, author of “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Trans-Atlantic Slave Route”: “I too live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it.”

James said: “So too are we living in the time of the Pilgrims. The settler project created by the Pilgrims did not end with the Pilgrims. The evils that the Pilgrims brought to these shores – racism, slavery, the class system, jails, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny – these evils continue to affect the people of Turtle Island and beyond. … Until this country, until this settler-colonial project and all settler-colonial projects are dismantled, we will continue to live in the time of the Pilgrims.”

But, as James noted, Indigenous peoples continue to resist the genocidal settler regimes the Pilgrim invasion established: “Native people did not simply fade into the background, like the Thanksgiving myth says. We have survived and flourished. We have persevered. The very fact that you are here is proof that we did not vanish. Our very presence frees this land from the lies of the history books and the mythmakers.

“We will remember and honor all of our ancestors in the struggle who went before us. We will speak truth to power, as we have been doing since the first National Day of Mourning in 1970. …

“In the spirit of Crazy Horse, in the spirit of Metacomet, in the spirit of Geronimo, above all, to all people who fight and struggle for real justice: We are not vanishing! We are not conquered! We are as strong as ever!”

Resistance is our survival

Mahtowin Munro (Oglala Lakota), addressed the fact that this year’s Day of Mourning is taking place as the U.S. settler state escalates its anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, racist, Islamophobic and transphobic terror campaigns. Abandoning Joe Biden’s liberal “empathy,” which his administration used to disguise its own genocidal policies, the Trump administration has basked in fascist terror.

Austerity has slashed tribal budgets and decimated health and welfare infrastructures. An “anti-DEI” purge has removed text about Native history from national parks and deleted information about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) from government websites.

Most recently, Vice President JD Vance used the long-debunked canard of Indigenous child sacrifice to justify the genocidal, settler colonization of the Americas, which he celebrated as “one of the great accomplishments of Christian civilization.”

This is rich coming from the self-proclaimed champion of a “civilization” which, over the past five centuries, has killed, tortured and mutilated more children than any other society in recorded human history. “We are talking about people who kill children every day, in Palestine and everywhere else,” Munro said.

Munro pledged solidarity with the communities Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is terrorizing. Masked thugs have rounded up thousands of undocumented migrants and imprisoned them in concentration camps, such as “Alligator Alcateraz,” built in the Florida Everglades on stolen Miccosukee land.

Munro declared: “I believe we as Indigenous people have a duty to ignore colonial borders. Those are not our borders. … Who are the Pilgrims and their descendants to decide who should live and study here and who should not?”

As Munro stressed, only the struggle of Indigenous peoples can liberate the planet from the genocidal and ecocidal systems of imperialism and settler colonialism. She said: “Every action of the billionaires and their henchmen is an attempt to smash us into compliance. Now more than ever we must resist.

“And for us, resistance is not a choice. Resistance and taking care of each other is what our ancestors taught us to do. Resistance is our survival, and that resistance cannot exist without solidarity. We must look beyond our own lives and struggles to see and name the systems at play. We must be fierce against oppression and also take care of each other.”

Leonard Peltier speaks !

For the first time in nearly 50 years, the crowd heard the voice of Leonard Peltier, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. In 1975, federal authorities fabricated and suppressed evidence to frame Peltier for the killing of two FBI agents. Sentenced to life, Peltier endured nearly five decades as a political prisoner. Despite suffering from repeated lockdowns and medical neglect, Peltier wrote annual statements delivered at NDOM. After a decades-long, Indigenous-led campaign demanding his release, then-President Joe Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence last December.

In a video message broadcast to the crowd, Peltier thanked his supporters for fighting for his release, which he emphasized is a victory in an ongoing struggle against the systems of repression responsible for his incarceration. He said: “Look what they’re doing in Palestine. Look what they’re doing in Ukraine and Iran. They’re killing thousands and thousands of babies and young children and destroying homes. This is the same thing they did to us. This is why we got a Day of Mourning.

Peltier declared: “So we’ve got to fight to expose these atrocities.  Because it’s not over. It’s not over for us, and it’s not over for the rest of the world. … They want to be the Aryans of the world. They want to be the super race. They want to control the whole world, and we can’t let them do that. We won’t let them do that.”

Amid tumultuous cheers, Peltier said he hoped he would speak in person at next year’s Day of Mourning: “We’re not giving up, and the fight’s not over!”

(Filmed at Leonard Peltier’s home on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in association with @leonard_pod – “LEONARD: Political Prisoner” podcast. Produced by @hate5sixofficial @mbdfilms @afulleraf @chaseironeyes. Special thanks to @earthstreammedia. In its first day online, Leonard’s address was viewed over 202,000 times.)

In an extended statement, Peltier wrote: “My personal freedom, once more, reflects our freedom as a People. We must unite with one another and our allies to face the storm we know is coming. We must face what lies ahead with our heads held high and our spirits intact. We have faced their atrocities for hundreds of years, and we remain undestroyed. We draw our strength, our very breath, from the Great Spirit.

“They have their billionaires. There is no fortitude in a dollar bill.” (Read the Full Statement at UAINE’s Facebook page.)

‘A cause worth dying for’

Juan Gonzalez (Maya), representing the Council of Maya Elders, urged the crowd to fight back against the fascism resurgent across the hemisphere — and worldwide: “What our people did before, now it is our turn to do it. To fight for our peoples, for our countries, for our children, for the future.”

As Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) organizer Lea Kayali (Palestinian) made explicit, the Palestinian people resisting ongoing Zionist, settler genocide are fighting alongside other colonized, Indigenous nations in an interconnected struggle for liberation.

Kayali said: “Mourning is supposed to be retrospective. But colonialism robs us of mourning itself … because it rips us as Indigenous people from our roots and supplants an ongoing structure of violence: a genocide factory that breaks our bones, steals our land and criminalizes our existence. … But we as Indigenous peoples have something that our enemies will never have, and that’s a cause worth dying for!”

As Kayali stressed, as colonial genocide intensifies worldwide, so too does resistance — from Turtle Island to Palestine:  “Friends and relatives, the capitalist armageddon is upon us. And we have to start fighting like we might lose our future.”

Yet, Kayali said, the extremity of the violence the U.S. settler empire is inflicting exposes that it “is collapsing under its own weight. … But it is up to us to strike the final blow! … Never let anyone tell you that your resistance doesn’t matter! It is your power and our only hope! … On this Day of Mourning, we say to our ancestors: ‘Rest. We will continue the struggle.’”

‘What do we want? Land Back!’

From Cole’s Hill the demonstrators took over the streets of Plymouth. As tourists goggled, the marchers chanted: “Raise your hands! Make a fist! Turtle Island will resist!” “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, All the wars have got to go!” and “City by city, town by town, colonialism is going down!”

Many waved Palestinian, Haitian, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan and revolutionary Cuban flags. “What do we want? Land Back! When do we want it? Now!” was their universal demand.

At the site of “Plymouth Rock” — actually a forlorn pebble plonked in a sandbox behind a fake-Roman facade — another round of speeches fired up the crowd.

Dahoud Andre, longtime Haitian activist and New York City community leader, addressed the struggle of the Haitian people for sovereignty and self-determination. As Andre described, in the 1790s, enslaved Africans in French-colonized Hispaniola revolted, setting fire to sugar plantations and hacking to pieces the vicious plantocrats who had imprisoned, raped and tortured them. The Haitian people have defended their nation from imperialist extortion, plunder, invasion and occupation ever since.

In the U.S., Haitian migrants are likewise protecting their communities from vicious ICE raids. The fascist terror ICE represents “can only happen if we let it happen,” Andre said. “Our ancestors have done what they did. … We must stand on their shoulders and do what we need to do! … We hold the key to our liberation!”

Kaila Poulino (Taino) urged participants to embrace a solidarity that transcends the repressive ideology of capitalist patriarchy “which is causing such a plague on this planet.” Poulino stressed that liberation can come only through collective solidarity and organization. “We will continue to be free. … We will always be free so long as we continue to come together in this way.”

Poulino led the crowd in a chant taught by Assata Shakur: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom! It is our duty to win! We must love and protect each other! We have nothing to lose but our chains!”

‘Know the history’

Gloria Colon (Mi’kmaq), a NAICOB organizer, called attention to the crisis of MMIW and Two-Spirit people. Despite thousands of disappearances and deaths, including that of Nanette Olsen whose story Colon shared, settler authorities and media in the U.S. and Canada continue to ignore the endemic violence targeting Indigenous communities.

Colon said: “No one talks about that.  Everyone needs to learn this. Know the truth. Know the history — and not the rainbow history — the truth. And the truth is what helps us each and every day.”

The march ended at Post Office Square, where colonists once displayed the severed head of Metacomet, the Wampanoag leader who led Indigenous resistance to genocidal settler death squads during the 17th century “King Philip’s War.”

Jean-Luc Pierite (Tunica-Biloxi), President of the Board of Directors of NAICOB,  read a statement of solidarity from the Bvlbancha Collective. As the statement stressed the genocidal exploitation of Bvlbancha lands which encompass present-day New Orleans, is continuing: “You can be in relation by knowing the past, as it helps us build the present.”

Indigenous Tufts University student activists Vanessa John (Choctaw), Samantha Jonas (Mashpee Wampanoag) and Kaylee Bahe (Diné) closed the action. Their speech, which they wrote and delivered together, demanded unconditional support for Native resistance by any means necessary because, “We are not free until we are all free.”

As the speech underscored, the people who have shown up for the National Day of Mourning embody the power and promise of Indigenous liberation: “We are not all the same, and we come from many paths, but today our footsteps walk together, and that is a sign of hope. That is proof that love for the people, for our communities and our neighbors, that love sustains us and will carry us forward in the struggle for reclamation. Our struggle has not been forfeited, our fire has not gone out, and if you are here, standing with us, you carry the responsibility to amplify, to protect and to honor our truth.

“In 1970, Wamsutta Frank James declared a National Day of Mourning. Today we declare our continued resistance. We make the promise that our descendants will inherit more than just wounds; that they will inherit land, language and liberation; that we will not be erased; that we will reclaim what was stolen; that we will protect our kin, our cultures and our future.

“It is a promise that Indigenous sovereignty is non-negotiable and that every step forward is made with the fire of those who came before us and with the hope of those yet to come. The promise is that we are still here, and we are not done. From Turtle Island to Palestine, colonization is a crime and we will all be liberated!”

The indomitable peoples’ videographer Sunny Singh live streamed the entire three rallies and march of National Day of Mourning 2025, which can be viewed at hate5six.com/ndom.