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by
Patty Krawec
“Grief is the persistence of love,”
We were first colonized when they took away our collective sense of a future.
Our language does not divide into male and female the way European languages do. It divides into animate and inanimate. The world is alive with beings that are other than human, and we are all related, with responsibilities to each other.
Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants come to a place and become part of the existing political system.
I like the term displanted, a word coined by an African Canadian human rights lawyer, because it describes the violence of this movement as well as one’s ability to put down roots again and again.
These communities are isolated by design and deliberately underresourced. We describe them as “remote,” which begs the question: remote to what? Certainly not remote to places their ancestors lived, where their families still live. But when you strip away everything that makes living somewhere possible, trading promises of a better life for land, you need to deliver on those promises.
“History is the story we tell ourselves about how the past explains our present, and the ways we tell it are shaped by contemporary needs,”
colonialism is a process and not an event.
It is an ongoing process of destruction and replacement, destroying Indigenous beliefs and lifeways and replacing them with churches and board meetings.
order to understand these relationships, we need to listen to the histories that we were not told so that we can begin to remember the things buried beneath the histories we were.
The Anishinaabe tradition includes a series of prophecies, eight in total, that are identified as a series of fires.
But it is more of a proclamation: a statement of truth that takes on meaning in particular circumstances.
look for Black and Indigenous people. Look for us in your life, on your bookshelf, in the music you listen to and the movies or television you watch. Look for us on your social media feed. Look for us in the collective nostalgia of your country.
Humans are the last form of life to be created, lowered down onto the earth, the least and neediest of all creation. This is a lesson in humility: We are the least of all creation. Creation existed
Our migration was not a search for home; it was a return. The history of the Christian West revolves around a different center. Beginning with possibility, it ends in punishment as the first man and woman are cast from Eden.
Pacific. It is a story of continual wandering and searching for a place to make a home, often through violence. This is a central theme in literature and movies; from Wagon Train to Star Trek, Americans admire this desire to boldly go and then bravely defend themselves from those who resent discovery.
Christians are unmoored, landless people. Maybe that disconnection from land is what has led to other disconnections.
She probably ate dates, not apples, and lived with others like her, not with a man in a garden.
Creation stories, whether Christian or Hebrew, Anishinaabe or Hopi, aren’t meant to be histories—not in the sense that the Western world has invented the idea of history as an unbiased set of facts. They are meant to explain who we are and create a communal sense of self.
It goes back far enough that our word for north not only knows about glaciers; it knows they had not always been there.
Forcing us into a different creation story begins our disconnection from the land. We have always been here: this is how we understand ourselves.
Anishinaabe communities, across the vast geography of our territories, dot the lakes where it is found. Just as in hunting season, when we went to where the animals were, in ricing season, we settled near the rice beds. Many of our contemporary reservations are near former rice beds.
There is not a single story to which we must all be reconciled. Not a single story with a single message. Not a single narrative that provides its bearer with authority and power to control the lives of others.
It was Acosta who redefined Christian suffering to mean living alongside unbelievers—something we hear echoes of today in the way that many Christians feel persecuted by the war on Christmas or taking official prayer out of school.
What if the early European colonists, instead of thinking of us as having wandered from the truth, had considered our own emergence as people in relationship with this place? What if they had seen God’s presence in this place instead of emptiness and absence? What if the settlers, instead of reenacting the conquest of Canaan, had pursued relationship? What if they had sought kinship?
Land acknowledgments are a moment to pause and reflect on the relationship that exists between the current residents and those who were displaced. What does it mean to live on stolen land? You may not be guilty of the act of dispossession, but it is a relationship that you have inherited. Who lived in your area before colonization? Who still lives there?
European peninsula of Asia.
?
“Settler colonialism destroys in order to replace,”
From the very beginning, the newcomers worked to destroy Indigenous people. Their aim included destroying our beliefs about ourselves and our relationship with the seen and unseen world and replacing them with European Christian beliefs.
The Doctrine of Discovery said that lands discovered by European powers belonged to those powers because it wasn’t owned by Christians.
The Doctrine of Discovery still forms the basis for US law even today and indeed the very existence of the American nations.
They have an obligation to consult Indigenous communities, but we do not have the power to say no.
Both the Dish with One Spoon and Two Row treaties provided a way for distinct peoples to live together without conflict.
Indigenous peoples measured wealth by what was given away.
Using a website like Native Land Digital (https://native-land.ca/), find out which treaties govern the relationships with Indigenous people in your city or state.
we and our words are background noise.
The missionaries often came first, then traders and settlers, all with the protection of the military and laws that justified theft and displacement. By the late nineteenth century, the West was won. Manifest Destiny rested on Enlightenment beliefs about correct land use, racial hierarchies, and a certainty that their authority was derived from ancient roots, if not from God himself.
immigrants come to a place and join with the existing political order. Settlers come to a place and impose a political order. Those who came here by force—such as African people who were enslaved—or those who come through desperation—such as economic or climate refugees or those fleeing war—are welcomed by that political order only according to their usefulness. Those seen as threats are contained in prisons and migrant detention centers,
In order to gain access to the land of my ancestors, the colonists needed to separate us from it, to make it not-ours. Settlers needed to make us Indians instead of Anishinaabe,
order to enslave Africans, enslavers needed to separate them from their land, and in that way the ancestors of my friends stopped being Igbo or Yoruba and became Black.
Concepts of race are malleable and strategic, always benefiting those in power. A particular understanding of race allowed Americans to increase the population of those they wanted to continue enslaving and to erase the population of those they wanted to disappear.
even today people will say that they are “part Indian” as an entitlement to belonging. But this kind of claim to being Indian isn’t about belonging to a community; it works to erase us, to shift us off the land and replace us with white settlers who are “part Indian.”
But 98 percent of private property, 856 million acres of it, in the United States is still owned by white Americans. In fact, just five white people own nine million acres of rural property, which is one million more than all Black Americans own combined. There are about fifty-five million acres in the United States that exist as reservations, but Native people only own eleven million of those acres; the United States owns the balance.
Disappearance was and is policy.
They fought us when they had to, contained us when they needed to, and disappeared us into reservations, jails, and residential schools.
chosen solitude is much different from forced isolation.
Civil rights are precarious victories, and every backlash is clothed in the language of safety.
The homicide rate for Native women is almost six times as high as the rate for non-Native women, and while most women tend to be killed by somebody within their racial group, this is not true for Native women.
Colonialism has disconnected us from land, severed us from that first relationship, often through violence. We need to restore our relationship with the land around
So we cannot talk about restoring our relationship to the land
