remove the Spanish colonial presence in what is now known as the upper Rio Grande Valley. Born with the name Popyn, meaning “ripe squash,” Po’pay was convicted alongside dozens of Indigenous leaders for practicing “sorcery.” Following the public and violent punishment of these “criminals,” the Spanish authorities released the prisoners following the direct action of local communities. Upon his release from jail, Po’pay relocated to Taos, where in 1680 he organized a successful and well-planned assault on the colonial administration in Santa Fe. Carrying knotted deerskins to announce the day of the attack, Pueblo runners informed local communities about a scheduled August 11 uprising. Although commencing a day prematurely, thousands of Indigenous warriors engaged in a ten day offensive that forced the settler community (including Tlaxcala servants, mestizo residents, detribalized Natives known as genízaros, and Pueblo allies) to relocate hundreds of miles south to El Paso del Norte. The anticolonial struggles of Po’pay and his contemporaries remain a specter of the potential and possibility of Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism.
ARTWORK: DYLAN A.T. MINER
Jamaican Maroons Fend Off the British
In the early 1700s, Queen Nanny and the Windward Maroons used guerilla warfare to defeat the British from the mountains of Jamaica. In doing so, they avoided further enslavement and forced the British to capitulate. In 1939-40, the British Governor in Jamaica gave the Maroons two thousand five hundred acres and they were able to live under their own governance.
ARTWORK: DAMON LOCKS
The Stono Rebellion
On Sunday September 9, 1739, a group of Charles Town-area slaves set out toward Spanish-controlled Florida, determined to become free from their white masters in the South Carolina colony. After killing around two dozen people, and burning property, the well-armed group of about one hundred played drums and waved banners in celebration during their hopeful escape south. By chance they were discovered, and a militia of armed churchgoing whites put down what became known as the Stono Rebellion. With about seventy-five deaths, Stono stood as the bloodiest revolt in the English Colonies.
ARTWORK: MARK CORT; TEXT/STENCIL: RUSSELL HOWZE
John Brown (1800-1859)
“It was his [John Brown’s] peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but such will be more shocked by his life than by his death. I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave.”—Henry David Thoreau
ARTWORK: JOSH MACPHEE
The Haitian Revolution
The most successful slave uprising in history which led to the formation of the first Black republic in 1804.
ARTWORK: AARON RENIER
Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)
“Education makes a man unfit to be a slave.”
ARTWORK: JOHN JENNINGS
Sequoyah and the Cherokee Writing System
In 1821 Sequoyah completed the development of a Cherokee writing system. Each character represents a syllable, instead of one sound as when one writes English, so it’s called a syllabary. There are eighty-five characters in the writing system and these were cast into metal for printing. A Cherokee dictionary was produced in the mid-1970s, one hundred and fifty years after the first editors and printers of the Cherokee Phoenix came to New Echota to print the first Native American newspaper. Some say Sequoyah was illiterate, but how can you be illiterate if you’re the person who developed your own system of writing? Some say the writing system, or portions of it, may have existed even before Sequoyah.
ARTWORK: SPEAKEASY PRESS (DESIGN: FRANK BRANNON; ILLUSTRATION: LUZENE HILL; TRANSLATION: LAURA PINNIX)
Elisée Reclus (1830-1905)
Elisée Reclus, influential French geologist and anarchist, proposed that humanity take full responsibility as the conscience of the Earth.
“Wild nature is so beautiful! Is it then necessary that man, in his seizure of it, has to proceed systematically to exploit each newly conquered domain and to mark his ownership with vulgar constructions and property boundaries as straight as a die?” —L’Homme et la Nature,1865
ARTWORK: SHAUN SLIFER
The Underground Railroad
“Yes I was a slave and I’ll say this to the whole world: slavery was the worst curse ever visited on the people of the United States.”—John Rudd
ARTWORK: SAM KERSON
The Little Shell Band of Chippewa Indians
“We are a scattered tribe. We weren’t claimed by the whites. We weren’t claimed by the full bloods. They used to call us persons with no souls. Now at least we have an identity.”
ARTWORK: LARRY CYR
Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Action
On June 3, 1863, Harriet Tubman led union troops in a guerrilla action at Combahee River, South Carolina, leading over seven hundred and fifty slaves to freedom. It was the first and only military action to be conceived and led by a woman in US history.
ARTWORK: DARRELL GANE-MCCALLA
Little Bighorn
On June 25, 1876, General George Custer and a heavily armed cavalry regiment attacked a camp of Lakota, Arapaho and Cheyenne
