{"id":20592,"date":"2012-02-13T05:05:30","date_gmt":"2012-02-13T05:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=20592"},"modified":"2012-02-13T05:05:30","modified_gmt":"2012-02-13T05:05:30","slug":"the-first-american-freedom-fighter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=20592","title":{"rendered":"The First American Freedom Fighter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/williamlkatz.com\/first-american-freedom-fighter\/\" target=\"_blank\">The First American Freedom Fighter<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/williamlkatz.com\" target=\"_blank\">William Loren Katz<\/a><br \/>\n2012-02-02<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/williamlkatz.com\/bio\/\" target=\"_blank\">William Loren Katz<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This February 2nd stands as the 500th anniversary of the death of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hatuey\" target=\"_blank\">Hatuey<\/a>, an Indigenous American fighter for independence from colonialism not mentioned in the same breath as Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. However, Hatuey deserves recognition as their earliest ideological ancestor and great forerunner.<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\nLittle is known about Hatuey, a Taino Cacique [leader], not his date of birth, nor exactly when he first led his forces into battle. But key elements of his story have come down to us from <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas\" target=\"_blank\">Bishop Las Casas<\/a>, the Dominican Priest, who became Spain\u2019s \u201cDefender of the Indians.\u201d On February 2, 1512, Las Casas was in Cuba when Hatuey died at the hands of the European invaders.<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\nHatuey\u2019s armed resistance began on the island of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hispaniola\" target=\"_blank\">Hispaniola<\/a> [today Haiti and the Dominican Republic] during the age of Columbus. It probably increased after 1502 when a fleet of 30 Spanish ships brought over the new <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nicol%C3%A1s_de_Ovando\" target=\"_blank\">Governor Nicol\u00e1s de Ovando<\/a>, hundreds of Spanish settlers and a number of enslaved Africans to pursue Spain\u2019s search for gold.<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\nBut oppression rarely goes as planned. Before the year was over Governor Ovando complained to King Ferdinand that the enslaved Africans \u201cfled among the Indians, taught them bad customs, and could not be captured.\u201d The last four words reveal more than his problem with disobedient servants or his difficulty of retrieving runaways in a rainforest. Ovando is probably describing the formation of the first American rainbow coalition: Hatuey and his followers are greeting and embracing the runaway Africans as allies&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire essay <a href=\"http:\/\/williamlkatz.com\/first-american-freedom-fighter\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The First American Freedom Fighter William Loren Katz 2012-02-02 William Loren Katz This February 2nd stands as the 500th anniversary of the death of Hatuey, an Indigenous American fighter for independence from colonialism not mentioned in the same breath as Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. However, Hatuey deserves recognition as their earliest ideological [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,21,459,8],"tags":[9620,9573,9572,9571],"class_list":["post-20592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latincarib","category-history","category-media-archive","tag-hatuey","tag-william-katz","tag-william-l-katz","tag-william-loren-katz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}