Every November, this country tries to sell us the same Norman Rockwell print: pilgrims in buckles, a big bird on the table, an Indigenous family smiling politely like they weren’t about to be written out of the story entirely. The national myth says “peaceful harvest feast.” The historical record says “the early PR campaign of a centuries-long invasion.”

For many Indigenous people, Thanksgiving isn’t a celebration - it’s the National Day of Mourning, marked in Plymouth since 1970 as a protest against colonial violence and historical erasure. It’s a day to remember the dead and honor those who’ve resisted, from the first encounters to the present.

So today, instead of leaning into the holiday haze, we’re zooming out. We’re tracing the long arc of anti-colonial resistance - the rebellions, revolutions, uprisings, boycotts, and movements that refuse to let empire have the last word. Because the history of colonialism is one thing, but the history of unified, conscious people fighting back? That’s the part they left outta the textbooks.

The story usually starts with Columbus, because America loves a man with a branding strategy. But the Norse were here around the year 1000, briefly setting up camp in what they called Vinland, before packing it in and heading home a few years later. Their visit didn’t reshape the world - but this next son-of-a-bitch...

Columbus’s arrival in 1492 did. Not because he “discovered” anything, but because European empires had the hunger and the infrastructure to turn a shoreline encounter into a planetary rupture. They wanted land, labor, gold, spices, and souls. And they had the papal paperwork to justify whatever it took to get them.

That’s the Doctrine of Discovery, a 1493 decree from Pope Alexander VI that basically told Christian nations:

“If the land isn’t ruled by Christians, it’s yours to seize. If the people aren’t Christian, they’re yours to dominate.”

That’s not paraphrasing - that’s the modus opperandi that shaped five centuries of empire. The concept of terra nullius - “nobody’s land” - let Europeans pretend that continents full of human beings were “empty” if the inhabitants didn’t practice European farming or didn’t fit the European category of “civilized.”

This wasn’t innocent confusion. It was legal cover for theft - the American judicial system has upheld the legal validity of the Doctrine at the time of its usage multiple times in order to deny Indigenous people land and reparations.

And from the moment Columbus landed, people resisted. The Taíno of Hispaniola quickly recognized that the strangers with metal armor and an infinite sense of entitlement weren’t “explorers” or “diplomats.” They were invaders. Taíno warriors fought back, sabotaged Spanish outposts, and refused conversion. Columbus responded with the template future colonizers would follow: forced labor quotas, mutilations, kidnappings, and massacres.

Disease did the bulk of the killing - but the Spanish did plenty of the rest. This was genocide through a mix of viral catastrophe, violent extraction, and a worldview that saw Indigenous life as expendable if it slowed down European profit margins.

The invasion of the Americas wasn’t a tragic misunderstanding. It was a business venture with a body count. And it became the blueprint for what would happen, again and again, across the hemisphere.

Colonialism didn’t survive on vibes alone. It operated through a three-part structure designed to extract everything and leave nothing behind.

Land wasn’t just territory - it was wealth, labor, food, water, minerals, and the basis of culture. So empires seized it, parceled it out, and restructured it for maximum output. Indigenous lands became sugar plantations, gold mines, cotton fields, cattle ranches, then later oil fields and uranium pits.

The formula is always the same:

Remove the people, take the land, strip the land, call it progress.

You can’t fully control people who still see themselves as a nation. So colonizers targeted the roots:

• Ban the language - without a distinct language or dialect, oral history is lost.
• Criminalize ceremonies, branding them as witchcraft or savagery.
• Enforce conversion from “heathen” tribal traditions to the colonizers’ faith.
• “Education”/assimilation of children by force via boarding schools rife with abuse.

This is how you turn a conquered population into a labor force. Cultural destruction wasn’t a bug, it’s a premium feature.

To justify perpetual domination, Europeans built a racial caste system and declared it “scientific.” Race wasn’t even a thing, broadly speaking, until colonizers needed a moral alibi for slavery and land theft. Once invented, it became the backbone of the entire system - a global sorting mechanism that made whiteness synonymous with power.

Put these pillars together and you get the machinery of empire: a calculated, efficient system that converted Indigenous land and African labor into European wealth, while convincing itself that this was the natural order of the universe.

/

Against this machinery, the Haitian Revolution hits like a lightning bolt.

In 1791, on the French colony of Saint-Domingue - the most brutally profitable sugar island in the world - enslaved Africans decided the system had extracted its last drop. Under leaders like Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and a vast, sophisticated network of rebels, they fought the French, the Spanish, the British, then the French again under Napoleon.

And they won.

Let’s be clear: No European power had ever been defeated like this by the people they enslaved. Haiti wasn’t just a revolt - it was the first successful anti-slavery, anti-colonial revolution in the modern world. It was a declaration that the iron grip of the oppressor could be overcome, and that people’s chains could be broken through collective action toward a common goal - liberation.

But emancipation came with a price - literally speaking, and one the colonizers made sure Haiti would pay…

In 1825, France sailed back with warships and a bill: 150 million francs to “compensate” former French slave owners for the loss of their human property. It was ransom disguised as diplomacy. Haiti had to take out loans - from French banks - to pay it.

This is where colonialism evolves into neocolonialism. Empires shift from boots on your neck to debt across your shoulders. Haiti spent over a century paying for its own freedom, a financial straightjacket that restricted its development and enriched the very empire it had fought so hard to shake off.

Haiti wasn’t punished for a violent uprising; it was punished for showing others it could be done.

By the mid-1900s, the imperial world was cracking. Colonized people - billions of them - realized the empire was not inevitable. It was beatable. But the methods varied, shaped by geography, culture, and the flavor of brutality they were facing.

Across the 19th century, Latin America became a workshop for the art of telling empire to get bent. From the Andean highlands to the Caribbean coast, communities that had been conscripted into centuries of extraction and racial hierarchy waged rebellions that were less “polite constitutional transitions” and more “absolutely not, actually.” Enslaved and Indigenous peoples in Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti’s reverberations across the hemisphere, the Maya in Yucatán, and the Mapuche in the Southern Cone all forced the region’s creole elites - and their European backers - to confront the fact that the colonial order only persisted because the people at the bottom allowed it to. These uprisings weren’t just about swapping flags; they challenged the entire architecture of caste, forced labor, and land theft. Even when the rebellions were suppressed or co-opted, they carved out space for new political identities and made independence movements reckon with the radical demands they’d been trying to outrun.

The British Empire prided itself on being the “civilized” colonizer - right up until millions of people stopped cooperating. Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement wasn’t passive; it was strategic sabotage. Boycotts. Strikes. Salt marches. Refusing taxes. Refusing to buy British textiles.

It was a nationwide withdrawal of consent from a regime that depended on appearing legitimate. The Raj didn’t fall because Britain got kinder; it fell because Indians made themselves ungovernable. We’d do good to take note of this as the times get ever-more off the rails with each passing day.

Jump to Latin America, where resistance took a different shape. In the 1950s, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the July 26 Movement began a guerrilla campaign against Fulgencio Batista, whose dictatorship was backed by U.S. money, U.S. business, and U.S. political blessing.

The revolution that followed wasn’t just a change of leadership - it was a complete rejection of U.S. hemispheric dominance. Che’s foco theory - the idea that small, highly committed guerrilla groups could spark mass uprisings - spread like wildfire across the Global South.

Whether one agrees with Cuba’s political system or not - I for one do not care for infringement of civil liberties and some of their exercises of state power were problematic at best - you can’t deny what Cuban self-determination symbolized: the idea that empire could be pushed out with the help of some rifles, a radio transmitter, and a dense forest.

Apartheid was colonialism with the mask off - a white-minority settler government engineering a racial hierarchy so rigid it made Jim Crow look amateur. Its downfall came from two directions:

Internal armed resistance: student uprisings, worker strikes, the underground organizing of the ANC, and figures like Nelson Mandela who spent decades refusing to yield.
External soft power: the global BDS campaign of its era - boycotts, sanctions, divestment - driven by solidarity movements around the world. Ireland and Palestine led the pack, bearing the scars of colonialism themselves.

These movements were different in method, but identical in their premise: empire is not destiny. It bleeds. It retreats. It loses.

Colonialism didn’t evaporate after WWII - It just got a new hairdo. Neocolonialism, the financialized, manipulative, calculated oppession of the current era, began in this time period.

Many newly independent nations discovered that independence didn’t include control over their economies. Enter the IMF and the World Bank - institutions supposedly designed for “economic development” but which usually function as pan-global loan sharks in expensive suits.

Structural adjustment: Austerity. Privatization. Agriculture reoriented toward export crops instead of feeding communities or providing necessary raw materials. It’s colonial extraction without the ships. Haiti’s “independence debt” was just a prototype.

Some places didn’t get “post-colonial” eras because the colonizers never left. Here are some of the still-colonized places today, and how their current situation fares.

Cough - America - cough cough…

The Land Back movement isn’t metaphor. It’s the continuation of Indigenous resistance to the Doctrine of Discovery. At Standing Rock, water protectors weren’t just fighting a pipeline - they were fighting the centuries-old idea that Indigenous land exists to be mined, drilled, or flooded whenever a corporation gets an itch.

The Palestinian struggle is one of the most visible anti-colonial fights today: displacement, settlement expansion, land seizure, walls, checkpoints, military rule, apartheid conditions, and the ongoing attempt to erase a people’s sovereignty. Not to mention the out-and-out GENOCIDE perpetrated by that fuck from Philly, Benjamin Netanyahu -

You don’t have to stretch very far to see the parallels. Settler colonialism has a pattern. Palestine is living through the parts the U.S. prefers not to remember about itself.

The unfinished business of decolonization shows up everywhere:
• in movements for reparations,
• in museums being forced to return stolen artifacts,
• in fights for language revitalization,
• in campaigns against extraction on Indigenous land,
• in students refusing to let their universities invest in the machinery of occupation.

Decolonization is not nostalgia - it’s a contemporary demand.

Thanksgiving wants to be a story about gratitude. But the real story is about resistance - five centuries of people refusing to disappear, refusing to accept the empire’s version of history, and refusing to let the world forget what was taken. On this Day of Mourning, we don’t have to celebrate the myth. We can honor the truth. We can mourn the loss, celebrate the defiance, and stand with the movements still fighting to break the same systems that began with Columbus and never really ended.