To the Environmental and Wildlife Management Council of Aurelireria:

I understand that because my ancestors were the ones to release the creatures who have named themselves "humans" onto the previously pristine planet Earth (after the famine caused by their insatiable greed on Aurelireria), you felt it was my duty to investigate, and either attempt to re-capture or exterminate them, depending on my findings. This has become quite problematic. You see, they are not the cute creatures they once were. In my great-grandmother's journal, she explained that she released the creatures on earth because of their similarities to the other ape species of the planet. She naively believed that the humans would be friends with Earth's other inhabitants. Unfortunately, they have changed substantially and will no longer be manageable as either pets or wildlife. They have evolved, grown in numbers, and have substantially altered most of the planet's natural environment. This has been particularly

http://alexlod.com/2011/01/14/the-future-of-human-evolution/

apparent in their sector named "North America." I have been learning much about the development of the species from studying their first person texts via a convenient medium of computer-based education entitled "American Literature 2231." Luckily, this method allows me to forgo including a self-portrait, so that my human colleagues have no idea of my origin or appearance. 

It seems that the North Americans harbor some sort of primitive memories of our people and of their arrival on Earth. They have explained their existence as a sort of magic trick performed by an invisible and all-powerful being named "God" who threw them out of a garden for eating fruit. The primary debates in North America stem from whether this God (whom no one can see or prove with evidence) favors one group of humans over another. To learn the answer to this strange query, the humans torment and attack one another. Apparently, they believe that the God favors the most violent and irrational members of their species. The pinkish ones, called "Europeans," seem most prone to these delusions of supernatural favor. 

After fighting amongst themselves in Europe, some of them decided to look for a new country in which to practice their religious rituals. Some of them, called "pilgrims," decided to separate from their church and homeland, and venture to North America in order to practice religious freedom in a place called Plymouth Bay. The pilgrims felt that their church had grown corrupt and no longer served the will of the God they invented, so they wanted to live in a new place and start a church that was truer to their understanding of God's wishes.  As the human writer, Richard Howland Maxwell, explains in his essay, "Puritan and Pilgrim: A Delicate Distinction," the pilgrims formed a democratic government based on a covenant in which the elected leaders were bound by the same rules as the people they served. A larger group of English (a sub-group of Europeans) who shared the original religious views of the pilgrims sailed over and settled in Massachusetts Bay. This group, called Puritans, did not want to separate from the church, however. This minor difference led to many complications between the two populations. The Puritans' government existed to serve God, rather than the people who elected them (Maxwell). One of the Massachusetts Bay Puritan leaders, John Winthrop, wrote, in "A Model of Christian Charity," "Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then He hath ratified this covenant and sealed our commission" (157). Winthrop told his people that if they failed to do God's will, as interpreted by himself and their other leaders, "the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us...to make us know the cost in such a breach in covenant" ("A Model of Christian Charity" 157). Winthrop wanted the government to be both, in his words, "civil and ecclesiastical" ("A Model of Christian Charity" 156), or in our words, to bind religion and politics together.

The pilgrims, including Plymouth's governor, William Bradford, had a more tolerant view of religion and were better champions of religious freedom. Darren Marcus Staloff writes, in The Reader's Companion to American History, as quoted by the website, History.com, that under William Bradford's governorship, "Plymouth never became a Bible commonwealth like its larger and more influential neighbor, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Relatively tolerant of dissent, the Plymouth settlers did not restrict the franchise or other civic privileges to church members...renegades like Roger Williams resided in the colony without being pressured to conform to the majority's religious convictions." You may wonder why I'm telling you all of this. The reason is that humans still argue over what role religion has in their government. I know that it is strange, but they are confusing and obstinate species. As my human classmate and colleague, Courtney Tyson, writes, "The first thing that this brings to mind is Michelle Bachmann and her special brand of conservatism. Although the Tea Party may disagree, it seems to me that the majority of the morals that they want to impose on the US population through legislation are strongly Christian oriented. When the wishes of the church are transformed into the wishes of our political leaders, it is easy for those who don't agree with the church to receive civil punishments." The Tea Party and this Bachmann character are present-day political specimens who wish to return to a Winthrop-style theocracy. As you see, religious tolerance, intolerance, and the separation of church and state still consume North Americans. However, it is not entirely their fault. Their lives and memories are short, and with such small brains, we cannot expect too much from them. Roger Williams was interesting because he believed that the Native Americans were human and deserved rights because of it. This made him unpopular with many other European Christians of the time.

The pink ones travelled around the Earth to prey on brownish people and steal their land and food. Their behavior was  like a cancer that progresses in the body and seeks to destroy it from within. In honor of their imaginary God, the Europeans decided to force the other humans, known as "Native Americans," to adopt European customs, including language, and religion. The human instructor, Gill Creel, explains, "In political science, they call this belief 'exceptionalism' because everyone has to act a certain way except us because we are exceptional." So, to try to explain human delusion--the Europeans practiced a religion called Christianity. They felt that the combination of their religion and their pink coloring made them God's favorites and gave them special privileges. The Europeans felt that this gave them the right to usurp land and resources from other people, and even to keep Native Americans and another darker pigmented group of people called Africans, as prisoners or slaves. Naturally, the Native Americans tended to disagree with this state of affairs. While many of them were willing to share their land and resources with the Europeans, they did not want to become slaves, or lose their culture in favor of the European culture. One of the Native Americans of the Abenaki people was named Aniwaneto. He made a speech entitled, "Speech Resisting the Colonial Expansion," in which he rejected the English settlers' claims to land already occupied by the Abenaki people. Atiwaneto seemed to have a better grasp of the tenants of Christianity than did the Europeans, and he called them on their hypocrisy. In this speech, Aniwaneto said, "We acknowledge no other boundaries of yours than your settlements whereon you have built...The lands we possess have been given us by the Master of Life. We acknowledge to hold only from Him" (128). The Europeans considered such words to be acts of war--probably because they thought that their God wanted them to own everything. They employed strange and deceitful methods of propaganda to justify their assaults on the Native Americans. One popular form of propaganda was called a captivity narrative. Donna M. Campbell explains, in "Early American Narratives," that captivity narratives were used to reinforce racist stereotypes of the Native Americans as "beasts" or as a "Satanic threat to religious utopia." It is hard for us to understand such irrationality, but it is essential to study it in order to follow the trajectory of human development. Apparently, the European Christians felt that if they portrayed people who were culturally different from them as inhuman, it justified their inhumane treatment of those people. Today, the people of North America continue to have problems with cultural and pigment-based discrimination, particularly in the areas of distribution of wealth, access to healthcare, and the ability to secure employment. It is useful to look at the historical reasons behind such disparities. 

Humans oppress one another for reasons of religion, culture and pigmentation. They also have a hierarchy based on gender. The males of the species oppressed the females--even the females with similar pigmentation! (It is madness--I know...imagine if the greens warred with the blues or attempted to enslave all of the orange arms...we would have never evolved.) One of the women who was unhappy with the her status as a second-class citizen was a poet named Anne Bradstreet. In Bradstreet's poem, "The Prologue," she writes, "I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/Who says my hand a needle better fits" (ll.25-26). My human colleague, Joshua Brundige, explains that in these lines, Bradstreet "boldly states that she will not stand for being told she would be better sewing and doing things that women are 'supposed' to do rather than writing poetry...let women form their own opinions and create their own works of art." Bradstreet, and other poets, including the African slave, Phyllis Wheatley, proved to the European Christian hierarchy that women and people with brown skin were not only human, but capable of great art, and deep insight. Today, women and people of various pigmentations and cultures have gained a closer proximity to equality than they had in the 17th century, but they have not evolved enough to warrant membership in the council. The people of North America show some evolutionary promise, but still have a long way to go before they are evolved enough to treat all members of their species equitably.

In a few hundred years, many of the humans have progressed remarkably, though others wallow in self-induced ignorance and delusion. I would like to request permission from the Council to collect several specimens of the human species who have proven capable of intellectual insight of their ancestors, and of the world that they currently occupy. I propose to gather these specimens from the population of "American Literature 2231" because they have certainly added to my understanding of their species--specifically those residing in North America. Perhaps we could isolate the genetic or environmental components that separate these enlightened individuals from the more delusional and warlike members of the human species. 

While awaiting the Council's response, I will remain engaged in the human class under the pseudonym, Ann K. Brady.

Respectfully yours,

Zeelee 4868