HISTORY
Juneteenth Wasn’t the End of Enslavement in the United States
Here’s Why We Should Still Celebrate
Now that Juneteenth is a national holiday, people of all races are discovering its significance. Juneteenth is the day that Union soldiers marched through Galveston, Texas, and informed enslaved people that the war was over, the South had lost, and they were, in fact, free. It is commemorated as the end of slavery in America. It isn’t. There’s only one teeny little problem...
The funny thing about history is, you can assign significance to almost anything. We never audit our holidays. If we did, we would know that Easter and Valentine’s Day are rooted in pagan fertility rituals. Personally, I think it’s time for Lupercalia to make the comeback, but that’s just IMHO.
But I digress.
America loves a loophole — after all, we are a country founded by lawyers. So it’s ironic that the loophole that allowed enslavement to continue in the United States until August of 1866 did not come from colonizers but the colonized.
Native Americans lived in what the United States government called Indian Territory. Because of the treaties signed with Indigenous Americans, the United States government had no jurisdiction over Indian territory.
