527 Years
On October 12, 1492 a Genoese mariner, entrepreneur, and slaver named Cristoforo Colombo made land in the Caribbean.
500 years after that, I was a senior in college, studying American History and Ethnic Issues, and writing a thesis about the boarding schools established by the United States Government to separate Native American children from their families and culture.
502 years after Colombo started the European invasion of the Americas, I was working in Detroit as a social worker, trying to connect Native American families and children to basic health and welfare services.
504 years after the introduction of devastating plagues of European infectious diseases to the Americas, I was a Kellogg Child Welfare Law Fellow at the University of Michigan, representing children in Michigan’s foster care system.
Last month some Americans commemorated 526 years of indigenous people’s survival in the face of genocide, theft, war, starvation, cultural hostility, substance abuse, and environmental degradation. (Some Americans also got the day off of work or school because we celebrate the foregoing as “innovation”. Or something. Columbus was a “disruptor”, that’s it!)
Last week I donated to Sharice Davids, running for United States Representative for Kansas 3rd Congressional District and to Eldena Bear Don’t Walk, running for the Montana State House, District 93. Maybe next year, 527 years after Columbus got the Atlantic and Pacific mixed up, a few more Native American woman can represent their fellow citizens. And bear witness to what humanity can survive.
Right now there is a human river of refugees fleeing violence in Honduras, perhaps including people of Lenca, Nahua and other indigenous origin. If they’re lucky, they’ll find back breaking labor in artichoke fields and orange groves. If they’re unlucky they’ll meet armed soldiers, tear gas, and people who abduct their children.
My professional training and personal observation give me some idea how really, really difficult it is to legally take children from their parents. In theory, again. In most states you have to screw up so badly or for so long, or both, that your kids are permanently damaged by the time they get away from you. (And that’s without even getting into the basic inadequacy of publicly supported alternatives to parental care). You can’t separate children and parents by accident. ICE isn’t just incompetent, or failing to consider the consequences of treating a minor border infraction like a felony. They know exactly what they’re doing.
Fucking up weaker people’s families is a thing humans have done to each other for a long time. Nothing is fair in love or war. Being “pro family” isn’t really a thing. Pro-ruling class families, sure. Pro-breeding of captive labor, fine. Pro-instilling compliance, definitely. Indigenous people in the Americas have been on the raw end of every variation of this for five centuries, as family destruction evolved from a natural, incidental part of colonialism to eugenic pseudo-scientific brainwashing.
Tomorrow hopefully millions of Americans will vote. I already voted. So have millions of other Americans. I’m not feeling optimistic. I’m feeling sort of queasy actually, thinking of all the things going wrong, that people like Steve King in Iowa, Duncan Hunter in California, Kevin Cramer in North Dakota, Ted Cruz in Texas want to continue to go wrong (deployment of troops to repel asylum seekers, men and boys perpetrating public spree killing of women, the rise of Nazism in the United States and Europe).
In my life I’ve met Lakota, Shoshone, Comanche, Kiowa, Diné, Tlinget, Oneida, Cheyenne, Ojibwe and Cherokee Americans. History leaves a mark on everyone. That’s its purpose. America’s first people are no different than anyone else in that respect. Some are strong, some are broken. But they’re not gone.
Some people are steel forged with the 17th century Japanese technique — mokume gane — metal folded over and over, bent and hammered again, leaving a pattern like wood grain or rippled water. How is it is possible for humanity to survive 526 years that included Columbus, small pox, Andrew Jackson, and railroad eminent domain? For each blow of the hammer, something else gets added on top, loss of land, loss of buffalo, loss of language, loss of children. For each trauma, something gets folded over and beaten in again, poverty, alcoholism, diabetes, sexual violence, and racist voter disenfranchisement. Millions of lives lost, or never lived at all. It’s not beautiful, or romantic. It’s so horrible the mind bends away and the heart cracks just thinking about it.
Some people survive anyway. Some people survive to become a sword, marked with ripples left by fire, hammer blows, and being drowned in water to quench the flame.
Tomorrow we vote. Maybe things won’t work out for us. Maybe we will be bent back into the fire. Maybe more hammering awaits us. But maybe next year we will have a sword to slice off the head of one house of congress.
Originally published at ragecreationjoy.wordpress.com on November 6, 2018.