I opened this series exploring the reality of the exploitation ofAfrica, African people, and the African diaspora as central to mythof modernity. I’m an American, and at this point it’s impossibleto miss that this country as it stands was built by enslaved andexploited bodies.

But another part of being an American isthat we have to acknowledge that this country was also built on theexploitation of indigenous people—Native Nations—that had been inthe “Americas” for eons, and on Native land.

(Hope everyone takesa deep breath, because I am going to stumble over terminology a lot.I hate using “the Americas”, but Turtle Island seems kind ofregionally specific. And while I’m going to avoid “Indian”because we’re all about accuracy here, I struggled to figure outwhen “indigenous” worked better than “Native”. I understandwhy the latter is generally preferred, but there is also a history ofEuro-Americans using “native” to describe *themselves*, hence the word “nativist”. Yeah...thank you for your patience with me.) 

One of ourcomfortable national mythologies is that we improved on what wefound. This is the story all colonizers tell themselves, and it’snot true. As we fall into continuing ecological degradation, we’reforced to acknowledge that there is deep wisdom in the cultures andpractices of the people we committed genocide on.

Genocide. That is aconcept that we need to explore when we think about the people weexploited to build our country. I can probably only speak for Gen X,but the way genocide was presented to us, it was Hitler’s FinalSolution: it was the extermination of everyone from a marginalizedgroup. It did not succeed with the Jews of Europe, so it was alwaysan “attempt”, and the prevention of it was a victory ofenlightened civilization.

The truth about genocide is muchmessier. You can successfully commit genocide without completelydestroying an entire group of people. One of the most devastatingstatements I had to sit through as an adult was hearing someone at aShoah commemoration noting that there were so many communities thatwere so thoroughly decimated in Europe that there was no one toremember many of the victims. We light candles to remember those whodied that we are connected to, but more importantly we light candlesto commemorate those we never knew because no one else is left to doit.

That is a successfulgenocide.

Genocide isn’tsimply the death of a community or a people. It is also theeradication of a culture. My father is a South Korean national, buthe was born when the country was occupied by the Japanese. By thetime he was born in 1943, my grandparents were not allowed to givehim a Korean name. Japanese was being taught in schools, and the useof the Korean language was discouraged. This is why I look at Ukrainenow and shudder as I see children kidnapped and forced to speakRussian; moreover, they are told that they are not Ukrainian but arenow, in fact, Russian. When Vladimir Putin and his lieutenants saythat Ukraine and its culture do not exist, that is laying thegroundwork for genocide.

Putin and theRussian leadership are no less monstrous if they are ultimatelyunsuccessful. And the same can be said about my country.

I have seen the term“erasure” used repeatedly when I read about indigenous history inthe United States, and this is another facet of genocide. Theindigenous people of this country from their hundreds of nations arenot gone. Many were killed, many polities consolidated, and therehave been acts of horrific violence committed against them, but theycontinue to exist not just as a people but as many different peoples,with different cultures, histories, and customs. Talking aboutIndigenous Americans as if they met a tragic demise is to deny theircontinued existence. They are still here, and they’re not givingup.

I can’t tell youthe title of the first book I read about Indigenous American history,but it was in 1994, and it was a title I found, of course, in theBoston Public Library. It was the first time I had realized that weshouldn’t use the word “tribe” but “nation” to describe thepolities of the First Peoples of the “Americas”, and it drovehome for me how mistaken it was to lump together these diverse peopleas simply “native”. (Which, maybe, was an overdue realization:the family lore is that my great-grandmother’s great-grandmotherwas indigenous, and we are very specific that, if so, she was fromthe Creek Nation.) But I had a very young child at the time, and Iwas about to begin a career, so it wasn’t until much later that Icould read more.

I also can’t tellyou what drew me to Charles Mann’s 1491and 1493other than that theywere talked about in circlesI paid attention to, but I remember sitting in the Prudential Centerfood court (back when they had one) ona Saturday night after the library had closed, devouringchapters of both books.Mann opened up literally a whole new world of history, and in doingso exploded many of our comfortable mythologies about the“pre-Columbian” world.

Theone that sticks out the most is the fairy tale that the indigenouspeoples somehow lucked—stumbled—into an agricultural andhorticultural paradise. They were people alternatively more peacefulor more violent than the European settlers who later arrived, butthey were always simpler—youknow, because they hadn’t had the benefit of Christianity or theEnlightenment, or they were genetically inferior, take your pick—andthe only way they could survive for as long as they did was becausethey were in such a “blessed” land. That played into thenarrative of the tragic, lost peoples, and because it played to ourpathos, that in and of itself made most of us feel better.

Andof course, it wasn’t true. If the Amazon looks like a permacultureparadise in which you can be both nourished as well as cured of manyailments, it is because it was *designed* that way. Don’t look atit only as an example of a rain forest, look at it also as one of thelargest and most well-managed orchards in history.

LikeAfrica, the Americas were a net contributor to the world’sresources. Mann points out that Thomas Malthus’ theory aboutpopulation and resources in Europe really *was* accurate: a smallpopulation could grow only so much before there was too muchcompetition for resources, which would lead to war, disease, famine,or all of the above. There was a natural ceiling to populationbecause there was a limit to resources.

Thecrops of the Americas solved the Malthusian problem. Corn(maize), potatoes, and sweet potatoes, among others, made possiblelevels of nutrition for the European andAsian populationsthat had been unattainable before. He tells the story of a prisonerwho had been incarcerated for over a year and had been fed nothingbut a soupmade with potatoes. Shockingly, this prisoner emerged healthier thanhe had been before.

Potatoesand corn in all of their diversity were not accidents of nature butthe results of continuous experiments with breeding and cultivationmethods. Corn, in particular, is not found “in the wild” at all;it’s closest relatives are a group of plant species known asteosintes (and no, I don’t think they are a genus on their own). Tolook at the plant, which resembles cattails as much as anything else,it’s very difficult to imagine that it could yield somethingnutritious and filling, but, after centuries of careful cultivation,here we are.

(This is to say nothing of the other foodsof the Americas—vanilla, chocolate, tomatoes, peppers,squashes—that make the modern cuisines of so many culturesdelicious. But we’ll delve into that when we get to IndianGivers and InThe Shadow of Slavery.)

I’veread enough history to know that it’s a mistake to paint allindigenous peoples, even in North America, with the broad brush ofenvironmental conservationism. Cahokia, discussed in many of thesetitles, was an example of a centralized civilization that went bigand practiced agriculture with a capital A. (I have no clue whatthose mounds were for, but then again I can’t tell you exactly whatStonehenge is for, either.) As was the case all over the world, theythrived during the Medieval Warming Period and then declined duringthe Little Ice Age. Unlike European polities, the lessons many in theAmericas learned was to decentralize, both as a political organizingprinciple, and as a strategy for sustenance.

Amongother things, Cahokia demonstratesthat the Native Nations ofthe Americas were—are—assusceptible to abusing their resources as anyone else, and the factthat many nations instead adapted to their environments and practicedsophisticated land management techniques should drive home not thatthey were some deity’s chosen people but really good students ofhistory. Both KathleenDuVal’sNativeNations and Colin Calloway’sNewWorlds For All pointed outways these nations dramatically changed their environments in orderto accommodate new trade relationships. Importantly, this was whilethey held the numerical advantage andthe significant agency thatcame with it.

Ithas occurred to me that many of the First Nations of North Americalearned thelesson of living in balancewith their environments evenearlier than Cahokia, particularlyafter reading Alfred Crosby’s EcologicalImperialism. If this classichas not aged perfectly, it has still aged well, and I would recommendit to anyone who considers themselves a student of history. It wasfrom this book that I learned how European sailors figured out how touse the winds in the circlesof latitude to navigate furtherand further west, using the Fortunate Isles (The Canaries, Madeiras,and Azores) as their first destinations.While Crosby explains the saga of European navigational developmentsin detail, he also takes pains to note that the Chinese made theearliest global voyages, and both China and the Islamic worldcontributed the naval technology that made later European voyagespossible. Europe got out ahead of others because of politicalchoices, not because ofinnate cultural resilience or aptitude.

Thebulk of Crosby’s book is about the ways in which the flora andfauna of Eurasia were the foot soldiers of European settlercolonialism, and this is one of the primary reason that“Neo-European” colonies have been successful in certain placesand not others. My eyes popped as I read his accounts of wild horses,cattle (!), and pigs in the colonies, particularly North America.(Fun fact: it takes one generation for a domesticated pig to revertto form as a “razorback” hog. As much as I am a vegan, I woulddefinitely think twice about setting pigs free into the wild.) Butit cannot be overlooked that part of why those animals were sosuccessful in the Americasis because the plants they fed on were even more successful. Some ofthose plants were intentionally carried, some were “opportunistic”travelers on the voyages, and some were on the animals themselves.Regardless, Eurasian floratook so well and quickly to the soil of North and South America thatthey preceded European colonists and animals into areas, sometimes byseveral years.

Crosby’sargument about why the Americas as well as New Zealand were so mucheasier to colonize comes down to the relatively late introduction ofhuman beings to those areas. While human beings hadbeen present formillennia—Patty Krawec’s BecomingKin cites indigenous oralhistories that give credible evidence of possibly one-hundredthousand years—as evolution goes, even an eon is a relatively shortperiod of time. Human beings who traveled away from the land massgroupings of Eurasia and Africa were going to encounter othercreatures they had not evolved with. Importantly, those creatures,particularly the megafauna, hadn’t evolved with *them*, and thuslacked the defensive instincts when they encountered Homosapiens. Thus, by the timeEuropeans arrived, those megafauna were gone, and the balance of theecosystems indigenous people lived within was inherently moredelicate. Might that be another reason indigenous Americans were suchimpressive land managers?

Maybe.But maybe that’s also part of the trend toward romanticizing what’spresented to be a tragic story with an inevitable end.

Aswith Jared Diamond after him, Crosby’s primary concern is about therole of disease in shaping the fate of the continents. Of course theFirst Peoples were destined to lose, because their very immunesystems were so...naive (I did not come up with that terminology).And it’s true, there were a shocking number of people who died inthe Americas from European diseases. But it is also true that therewere many who didn’t, and simply being introduced to a diseasewasn’t in and of itself a death sentence.

NormanNaimark’s Genocide:A World History was thefirst book I read to affirmatively call BS on the narrative thatindigenous people died primarily of diseases and not brutality. Yes,exposure to novel diseases wasn’t something that induced health,but far more important were the conditions that people lived in whenthey were exposed. Those who have inadequate shelter, food, andclothing while they are forced to perform heavy labor for long hoursare, not surprisingly, more vulnerable to diseases—novel ornot—than those who have better living conditions (and this is tosay nothing of having access to medical care). BothNative Nations andRoxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s AnIndigenous Peoples’ History of the United Statesnotethat many nations lived through their initial encounters withEuropeans who were disease carriers, andhundreds lived through voyages to Europe, a place that would beteeming with novel pathogens.Native Nations pointsout that the numbers of fatalities didn’t begin to spike untilEuropean colonists settled and raised families (as anyone who hasever been a parent knows, young children are not only speciallysusceptible to disease, they can also be hazardous vectors of thoseillnesses). Regardless, the initial European estimates of indigenouspopulations were frequently unscientific atbest, and using those as abaseline to establish population losses isn’t going to give a clearpicture of how many people actually succumbed.

Iwould also point out here that populations by and large survive evenplagues. The Black Deathmight have killed as many as fifty percent of Europe’s populationin the fourteenth century. That hadlong-lasting repercussions,and it’s something we should work very hard to avoid, but itshouldn’t be overlooked that fifty percent of the populationsurvived. We need to believe that indigenous Americans wereextra-special vulnerable—”naive”—for it to be possible thatdisease *alone* killed, by some estimates, ninety percent of thepopulation.

Really?

Dunbar-Ortizisn’t having any of that for a second. While there were otherscholars of indigenous American history before her, she is the onethat, in my opinion, has focused attention on justice more than otherpopular authors (or should that be “popular”, since we aretalking about historians?). The title of her book made my eyes widenas I imagined it would explore the history of Native Americans duringcolonization. While it’s still a book worth reading, that wasn’texactly right. It is still a history of the United States, but fromthe point of view of the Native Nations. (The fact that the book isunder 250 pages should maybe have been a give away.) Dunbar-Ortiz ispowerful but blunt: she will lay out horrific history, but you neverget the impression that she’s wiping any tears, or that she wouldhave much patience for yours. And for what it’s worth, I didn’tcry while reading this, but I was filled with outrage going over thenumerous times European and then American governments made bad faithagreements with their native counterparts as part of a slow-rollingcampaign of genocide. (And I will never hear the term “red skins”again without wanting to vomit.)

Dunbar-Ortizmakes it clear that the history of exploitation of IndigenousAmerican lands and erasure of Indigenous American human beingswas—is—part of a toxic class-based system that reaches back topre-colonizing Europe. As Sabrina Strings outlined in Fearingthe Black Body, it is a system so racist it excluded theIrish (and when we get to Erika Lee’s Americafor Americans, we’ll get the chance to see what thevenerable Ben Franklin had to say about Germans). Dunbar-Ortizexplores how the newly arrived Scots-Irish were used as the footsoldiers in the long running war against the Native Americans.Whatever benefits they and other waves of arrivals realized for theirefforts—and those benefits almost always included stolen Nativeland—they were ultimately acting in the service of a larger nexusof power which they had no hope of breaking into for generations.

Native Nationswas the book I had thought Dunbar-Ortiz’s was going to be, thoughmaybe it’s fairer to say that it was one-percent of the book I hadenvisioned, since DuValexplores about a dozen Native Nations, and there are many more. Whileshe doesn’t reach as far back as Mann or Crosby in tracing theorigins of indigenous arrivalin North America, she does trace their history back millennia. WhileDuValis primarily concerned with residents of what is now the UnitedStates, she does note the similarities between the legendary Cahokiaand the empires of Mesoamerica (though, to pick up on her point about“lessons learned”, I’ll note here that the Aztec empire Cortesencountered wasn’t even a century old, and given their infamousbrutality, one wonders how long they would have lasted evenwithout Europeaninterference).

DuValmoves forward in time, but around the continent. Because I’ve livedin Massachusetts most of my life, I note that she doesn’t spendtime on “New England”, in large part because this area was suchan outlier (Boston exceptionalism, forthe win). Thiswas one of the few places where Europeans had the numbers tooverwhelm the indigenous inhabitants earlyon, and thuswere less dependent on theirsocial and economic goodwill. This was not the case in the rest ofthe country, where Native Nations had the power and the agency thatcame with it. This was *not* something that they were unaware of,either. If they might not have been at all times privy to thegenuinely genocidal policies of European governments, they did getglimpses of maps that showed the vast holdings claimed by thosekingdoms. To read DuVal’saccount, it’s hard to imagine that they’re not snickering.

NativeNations’ central thesis is that it is not until almost themiddle of the nineteenth century that the European-Americanpopulation has the ability to make good on its ambitions to controlthe continent, and it was Native Nations who were in control of therelationships up until that time. To that end, European and laterAmerican powers had to make themselves useful to their indigenoushosts. DuVal relentlessly emphasizes that the nations of theAmericas were deeply sophisticated, not only in their management oftheir natural resources, but in trade. While many made the decisionafter Cahokia to live in decentralized polities, they did not chooseto live in isolation from others, and they saw trade not only as theexchange of goods, but as the establishment of a bond with anotherparty. This goes some way toward explaining why many have gone downin American history as generous to people they might have been betterto be wary of, but for the most part, it was a strategy that not onlycreated a strong network among the nations, but also set the termsfor what was a successful collaboration strategy with Europeans fortwo centuries.

Thisis not to imply that trade always smoothed over political differencesto the point that all lived in peace. The very mention of the word“Mohawk” drove fear into European imaginations, and while many ofthe stories about them were exaggerated, they earned their reputationas fearsome and efficient warriors, particularly against the Huronand other nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. But it is overlookedhow powerful they were as traders, or how long they had been tradingwith Europeans.

Iwas shocked to read that the Mohawks had traded goods with the Norseas far back as possibly the tenth century. While the Norsesettlements famously didn’t endure in North America, traderelationships did, and the Mohawk were using glass beads and iron andbrass from Europe, both via trade networks and from the residue ofshipwrecks. While most did not have contact with Europeans but ratherwent through intermediaries, the Mohawk were beginning to integrateinto the global trade networks even before “conquest”.

Inthat light, it should not be surprising that theMohawk were an early ally ofthe Dutch. While it’simpressive that they traded with Europe before Columbus’ arrival,it’s even more so that Dutch industry was tailoring products justfor them, whether that was kettles with Mohawk markings, lighterguns, or wool blankets of different colors. By the seventeenthcentury, the majority of Mohawk towns used iron nails, imported wood,iron hinges, and linen shirts. By the end of that century, allHaudenosaunee warriors had a musket if not a pistol.

TheDutch are not known for their kind treatment of anyone who wassubservient to them in their colonial systems, and we might almost beable to judge the lack of exploitation duringthis period as evidence of the dynamics of their relationship withthe Mohawk. Fortunately, we can settle on firmer stuff by looking atthe prices the Mohawkcommanded. While willing to trade hidesand pelts, they set a highenough price that the only way for the Dutch to profit from it wasthrough the sale of the metal weapons mentioned above. Similarstories are to be found in, of all things, baked goods: the economicsof the sale of cakes and breads inthe towns the Dutch established evolvedto the point that the only people who could afford to buy the finecakes and breads made with refined flour were the Mohawk; the Dutch,it seems, had to settle for whole-grain loaves.

Theabove demonstrates the extent to which the Mohawk were in control ofthe trade with the Dutch, and it’s fair to say that they had a goodidea of the costs of that trade. To wit, the capture of beavers forthe pelts the Dutch wanted had an environmental cost that Callowayalludes to in New Worlds for All(and not just for the Mohawk—recallthat the continent already had well-established trade networks).Sharply reducing the beaver population had an effect on the physicalenvironment, in some cases changing the course of rivers. I bringthis up because it’s yetanothercounterpoint to the narrative that Native Nations are mystically intune with the needs of the land and would never compromiseenvironmental integrity. Indigenous people made these choices, andnot because they were somehow corrupted by European coins—or guns.They were sophisticatedactors exercising their agency, and for a long time they got thebetter end of the bargain.

Ipromise, DuValwrote about many more people than the Mohawk, but there’s one moreimportant facet to their relationship with the Dutch. The Mohawk andDutch lived in close quarters, and both communities had men andwomen. Close companyeventually resulted in mixed heritage offspring. (As was the case inmany similar cases, children were presumed to have their mother’scultural identity.) None of this is surprising, except that it’spart of the nuance of the early relationships between Europeans andNative Nations that is glossed over.

DuVal’spoint throughout the book is that while Europeans and then Americansdid harbor,indeed, genocidal, colonial intentions, they couldn’t act on themuntil the influx of European immigrants gave them the numbersthey needed by the middle ofthe nineteenth century. As she says, it’s difficult to call many ofthe relationships “colonial” since the European powers were doinga relatively lousy job of “extraction”. For a long time, whathappened in the continent would be better classified as “trade”.I think this is an important distinction, not to be an apologist forthe later brutal actions that followed, but as a reminder thatorganized Native resistancewasn’t invented in the twentieth century. For all of thepropaganda, Native Nations were never as naive or innocent as theywere said to be.

Noneof this is to say that NativeAmericans haven’t been harmed by interactions with European andAmerican settler-colonialism, because once we had the numbers, weused them. We have encroached on land from the beginning, and we havebroken treaty after treaty. BecomingKinand Kyle Mays’ AnAfro-Indigenous History of the United Statesexplore some of that damage and what, possibly, is needed to beginaddressing it.

Perhapsit’s because I’m married to an attorney, but outof all that I’ve read of Native history, the 2005 Cityof Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New YorkSCOTUS decision authored by Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasthe most galling. (Another person you’re advised not to invoke as amoral authority to me.) That someone in the twentieth century wouldinvoke the Doctrine of Discovery is outrageous, and maybe it shouldhave been a clue as to the limitations of RBG’s advocacy. That thePopeeventually got out in front of this before the United States’judiciary did is an embarrassment.

BecomingKincites this case in a calm, measured, powerful way as part of theevidence of Krawec’s argument that settler-colonialism has beenlethal to Native bodies and culture as soon as it was able to be. Thelaws are illogical and in some cases just bad, but that’sirrelevant when the aim has been to lay claim to Native land. Krawecdraws a distinction between the treatment of Native and BlackAmericans, the former of whom had to prove their ancestry to beconsidered Native by the state, regardless of their acceptance into aculture, and the latter of whom werepresumed to be Black even if their last ancestor was agreat-grandparent. Why? Because when you want Native land, you needto eradicate—erase—Native people, but when you want Black labor,you need to *create* Black people. But both strategies are to thesame end: to increase the power of the settler-colonial state.

Denialof identity goes beyond not getting recognition from the Bureau ofIndian Affairs. One of the most horrific things to read about is thelegacy of residential schools in North America: children removed fromtheir homes, family, and community at heartbreakingly young ages,being ordered to change their appearance to conform to theEuro-American standard, being forced to change their names, not beingable to speak in their languages, and being told how deficient theywere in every way. There are generations of people who weredisconnected from their cultures as adults because of what theysuffered as children. It shouldn’t be overlooked that their ordealsincluded watching their peers—their friends—be murdered,sometimes at ages that can only make you weep. The discoveries in2020 and 2021 of suspected mass graves at former residential schoolsin Canada confirmed the horror stories “graduates” reported thattoo manywere loath to credit. Whileresidential schools have been closed, Nativechildren are still twice as likely as white children to be placed infoster care, and that is the average for the United States. A Nativechild in South Dakota is *eleven* times more likely to be in fostercare than a white child, and Native children are over half of thechildren in care (fifty-three percent, to be exact—which is just alittle bit more than the national average for Canada).

Krawec’sbook is a call for theNatives of the Americas to reconnect with their traditions as a wayof healing the present and forging a stronger future, but it alsooffers a way for everyone, whether Native or not, to connect to eachother. Indeed,muchof the cultural toxicity she describes is not confined to Nativecommunities, but affects everyone who might stand out from theEuropean-Christian “ideal”. Laws and policies make it all tooeasy for authorities to disrupt families who organize themselvesdifferently than the norm, and Krawec notes that vagrancy laws havealways been a way to weaponize normal human behavior against thepoor, who aremore likely to do in public what people with greater means can do inthe privacy of their homes. Shehighlights, in ways similar to Gikandi, Strings, and McCormack, thata civilization that sanctions inhumane treatment of one group has arot at its core.

Krawecdiscusses yet another scourge on the Native community, and this oneis indeed something they suffer disproportionately with: Missing,Exploited, andMurderedNative Womenand Children.While it is generally true that if a woman is killed or assaulted itwill be by someone in her ethnicity or community, that is not truefor Native women. They are more likely to be in sexual relationshipswith white men, to be sexually exploited by white men, and to bemurdered by white men. In general, they are an incrediblesix times more likely to be murdered than non-Native women. These areshocking statistics, and they should be inspiring all of us toprotect Native women. Instead, they are largely unknown or, at least,unremarked upon.

AnAfro-Indigenous History of the United Statesismessier than the other books because Mays is talking about theintersected histories of two groups in the United States that aregenerally seen to be in contest if not conflict with each other. Andit’s true that there have been instances and periods of both, butthere have also been significant periods of collaboration andsolidarity. Civilrights luminaries such as Angela Davis, Kwame Ture (StokelyCarmichael), and Martin Luther King, Jr. saw more common cause thannot.

Theconflicts are difficult to look at if we’re hoping to construct aclean narrative. WhileMays,who is himself Black and Saginaw Chippewa, wouldagree, asI do,that Black people have a right to reparations, where it can getuncomfortable is when the demand includes land, all of which wasstolen from Native Nations. On the flip side, Black people are morethan entitled to their share of bitterness at certain nations—lookingat you, Cherokee—for enslaving African captives.

Thereis the capacity of both parties to minimize the other, whether that’sNatives whousethe n-word a little too freely, or the denial that it is actuallyNative people who are killed by the police more than anyoneelse (thehair-raisingstatistics just keep on coming).ButMays, perhaps more than any of the other authors,is future-focused, and he sees opportunities for continuedcollaboration. Agreed.

Inthis country, at least when I was growing up, we liked to tellourselves a comfortable story about World War II, the Holocaust,fascism, and genocide. We, the United States, were the good guys, andwe were so horrified by what happened in Europe because we couldn’timagine doing such horrible things. The truth is that we did many ofthem first (read, for example, Isabel Wilkerson’s Castefor a discussion of how Nazi leaders drew on our race laws to come upwith their own). If you had any doubts, any of these books willdispel them for you.

Istarted by taking about modernity as an illusion—delusion—of astrictly rational and just existence that wills into being materialprosperity. It was dependent on enslaved Black labor, and that couldnot be negotiated. But the American version also literally resided inthe land of Native Nations. The land, and the numerous resources itcontains, is also an essential component...but Native peoples andtheir cultures were not. They were, in fact, an uncomfortablereminder of what the project of modernity really was. Hence, thedrive to erase.

KathleenDuVal cites the term coined by Ojibwe professor Gerald Vizenor to sumup what the actual history of Native Nations encompasses: survivance,a combination of survival and resistance. You live to fight anotherday, and what you’re fighting for isn’t merely physical survival,but also the preservation of your history. It is based on recognizingtruth and facts, even when they make you squirm, but it is the onlyway to build a truly durable future.

Perhaps this is a good time for all of us to start paying attention.

Deb in the City