The rising visibility and power of Native nations in the Americas felt of a piece with the nonviolent revolutions that had toppled the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union a few years later, which I’d followed closely, with exhilaration. That was my golden age, not because I had escaped the evils of this world but because I had found ways to think about them and sometimes do something about them, valiant companions in the efforts, places to fall in love with, and ideas that transformed me.
