Israeli Settler-Colonialism, Ethnic Cleansing Criticized By Woman Living In Former Sioux Territory

“The world would be more peaceful if settlers just went back where they came from.”

Minnetonka, March 4 – A homeowner in the Minnesota capital-area suburbs – built on land that held the Sioux nations until “white” settlers and American cavalry removed them to reservations west and south in the nineteenth century – made several posts to social media this week decrying what she referred to as the Jewish State’s illegitimate status, since it “stole” the land of the “indigenous” Palestinian people. She called on the “white, European” Jews to get out of Palestine and “go back” to wherever their ancestors came from. Minnetonka formed part of the ancestral home of the Dakota peoples, a group affiliated with Sioux nations of the upper Midwest.

Roshumba Halk, a political activist, tweeted from her house in the southern portion of the Dakota Sioux territories, from where the tribes were forcibly moved to unfamiliar lands by the expanding US and its military. She purchased the house with her husband six years ago, from the couple who had bought it new from a developer, and not from the long-displaced Sioux. Her tweets called Israel a settler-colonialist enterprise that pursues ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, and called on the international community, the United States in particular, to take measures against the entrenchment of that settler-colonialism.

“Zionism is a colonialist project,” she wrote in response to a tweet by an Israeli government spokesman. “Free Palestine! Settlers out!” Ms. Halk’s posted the 720th reply to the original post, and included graphics copied from various other accounts that recycle anti-Israel memes and disseminate them with little regard for their factuality, or lack thereof.

“White Jews have no business in Palestine!” she wrote again several minutes later, this time reacting to a reporter’s update on military and humanitarian developments in the Gaza Strip.

Ms. Halk ended up in Minnesota when her husband found a political position in St. Paul, the state capital. The Halks chose to settle in Minnetonka because of its relative affordability, livability, and access to a choice of mosques at which to worship. She immigrated to the US with her parents when she was three; the family hails from Algeria originally, with some Berber and Arab ancestry, according to spotty records and a DNA test, none of which show any Lakota or Dakota lineage.

“The world would be more peaceful if settlers just went back where they came from,” she asserted in a stand-alone tweet to her 193 followers. “You can’t just move somewhere for opportunity and ignore the dispossession of the indigenous people from that place that made your opportunity possible.”

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