Guest Post: Michael Thompson on The New Othering of Amerika
In all the conversations I’ve heard about the present events playing out in the United States — A constitutional crisis? An autocoup? A hijacking of executive powers? — one set of voices has seemed conspicuously absent: those of Native American people. So when I heard that my Writing Project friend and colleague in New Mexico, Michael Thompson, was interested in disseminating a piece he felt compelled to write, I invited him to post it here on Writing With a Broken Tusk. Welcome, Michael.
The New Othering of Amerika: Welcome to Indian Country, My Friends
Michael Thompson and Tina Descheenie: image courtesy of Michael Thompson
by Michael Thompson
Whenever we travel together, my wife reads aloud as I drive — often Native fiction or poetry or memoir, but also history and nonfiction. Recently, between Counselor and Cuba on our way to Santa Fe, she was reading to me from Rebecca Nagle’s well-written account of the generations-long fight for tribal sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma: By the Fire We Carry.
It was a sunny February morning with pleasant blue skies, and I was listening closely to her soft Diné voice reading a passage about the historic and tragic betrayals of the Mvskoke people, my people, when she simply stopped in mid-sentence and I heard a slight intake of breath, then a long silence. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her struggling to regain her voice, tears in her eyes, and I realized that she was weeping — suddenly and simply overcome with sadness at recognizing the pain of my ancestors, for the great injustices they had endured at the hands of the United States.
I remembered then another journey we had made years ago — driving to Fort Sumner, NM, (Hwéeldi) to visit the Bosque Redondo Memorial, where Tina’s ancestors had been imprisoned in 1864-1868, where thousands died. The same moment had occurred, almost exactly. As we drew near the site of that great suffering, without warning, she suddenly began to cry — overwhelmed with emotion, with sorrow for the pain of her Diné ancestors, her entire body shaking.
We have both shed similar tears in hoghans, in tipis, in inipi lodges, around arbors and our sacred fires — in circles with our closest relatives — where in our safest spaces, we could release our collective grief to one another, to mother earth, to those ancestors who watch over us.
I can promise you that nearly every one of my Native relatives has had at least one experience similar to this. A deeply visceral moment of intolerable sadness for the great sufferings our ancestors survived. Intergenerational trauma is real for us. It is bone-deep in our blood memory. Though mostly out of sight, it is always there. And no matter what tribe we call our own, we know the stories of other Native nations just like ours — the broken treaties, the forced relocations, the imprisonments, the executions, the unceasing thefts of vast expanses of our homelands, the violent atrocities, the diminishment of rights, the despoiling of our beautiful earth, the relentless attacks and restrictions on our sovereignty. Generation after generation for more than 500 years.
And yet. We are still here.
Having had that brief epiphany, I decided to write this message to all my non-Native friends.
I feel that we are at a moment in our national history when many of you are about to discover the terrible nature of the existence we Natives have known since the first settlers/destroyers landed on our shores — with their Doctrine of Discovery in one hand and their Manifest Destiny in the other.
Because we now have a president who is a self-proclaimed admirer of Andrew Jackson (the one president for whom some of us would make a pilgrimage just to spit on his grave), whose open defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Worcester v. Georgia led directly to the Trail of Tears. We now have a president who wants to use those same colonizer/settler/destroyer principles to rename mountains and bodies of water, to claim Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, Gaza — and even Mars. One Executive order on his first day in office seeks to open oil and gas drilling in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and reverse restrictions on logging and road-building in a temperate rainforest that provides habitat for wolves, bears and salmon. His freeze on federal funding has already hit particularly hard, devastating critical Native health and nutrition programs. The proposed dismantling of the Department of Education would also be disastrous for Indian Country.
We Natives have seen this movie before. We were indeed the first “Others” of Amerika — although we were swiftly followed by numerous other marginalized racial, religious, and ethnic groups who were also oppressed in horrific ways.
But at this moment in time — this chaotic, deeply disturbing moment — it would seem that many of you are about to be “Othered” too. Who do I mean? I mean all of you who still believe in the American Dream — that ideal of individual rights, freedom, democracy, and equality. I mean all of you who believe in equal justice for all. I mean all of you who took to heart the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., when he said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
I mean all of you who have decided that you are unwilling to be easy marks in this massive national con. If you are not “one of them,” you too now have a target on your back.
We Natives have seen the ideal promises of this country manipulated by men with bottomless greed for wealth and power for centuries.
As my friend Chili Yazzie recently wrote, “The american government was designed by rich white men primarily to benefit rich white men. Money buys the politics. [This government design] is not broken, it works as it was designed to work, it continues doing what it was supposed to do.”
We Natives know that oligarch or mega-donor is just a fancy name for robber baron. And we know their kind all too well.
We know that one of the first things they will do is ban your language, your spiritual practices, your values and your beliefs, and demand that your children attend schools where Christian indoctrination is the norm.
We know they will find ways to destroy you with disease and lack of health care.
We know that, if they cannot swindle you out of your land, they will simply steal it.
We know that they and their bought-and-paid-for mouthpieces will practice yellow journalism against you at every turn, demonizing your every action.
We know that they will find ways to slur your names and your most fundamental personal and cultural identities.
We know that they will mock and marginalize the artists and champions among you.
We know that they will pack their courts with compliant judges who do their bidding, or they will simply ignore the courts when those court rulings favor you.
We know that whenever they feel threatened by your resistance, they will direct their law enforcement and then their military against you.
We know that they will exploit all your land — fence it, strip it, poison it with pipelines, uranium mines, coal mines — without the slightest regard for the destruction to our earth.
We know that, when their policies create for you disproportionally high rates of unemployment, homelessness, violence, mental illness and addiction, they will somehow blame you.
We know that they will relentlessly attempt to erase or rewrite your actual history, replacing it with their own narrative, one that privileges themselves as heroes, the chosen ones.
We know that they will doggedly seek your assimilation into their consumer-driven, technology- and social media-obsessed, capitalist economic system as their cheapest means of control.
We know that, if all else fails, they will seek to deny your birthright citizenship. And after that, your sovereignty could be next.
We know that their promises are all lies — each one bigger and more devastating than the last. Welcome to Indian Country, my friends. That’s the reality we have endured for more than 500 years.
And yet. We are still here.
My intention then is modest. I simply offer you a few strategies for survival, for outliving the waṡicu (the fat-eaters) who clearly do not care about your lives, your families, your values, your sense of right.
How have we prevailed in the face of those who sought to destroy us?
First, we do as some of you already know to do.
We will resist with every means available. We will speak truth to power, expressing with our many individual voices our anger at what is happening. We will pick our battles, but we will exercise our right to protest. We will refuse to lower expectations of our health care systems, our schools, our fire departments, our law enforcement, our local governments, our judges. We will advocate for counter-legislation, for challenges in court, using every existing tool at our disposal, just as our ancestors did.
But beyond that, as Native people, we know that the waṡicu can never define who we truly are
Because we know better than to believe their lies
Because our real, authentic lives do not depend on their worship of the almighty dollar
Because we still reside in our languages, our ancient values, our daily practices, and our prayers
Because we know that we are all earth surface people, five-fingered beings – relatives
Because our ceremonies and our worldviews have always existed far beyond their reach
As my friend Chili observes: “An Indian elder said, ‘our ancestors outnumber our fears, feel their power.’ There are teachings of how we should be in our physical and spiritual life ….relevant regardless of our life condition and circumstance. Absolutely, there is hope -- we were blessed with a tangible resource that is intended for our use, no matter the threatening force. The invoking of these teachings requires purpose, humility, understanding and courage. No fear!”
We can live just fine without GPS to tell us where we are and where we’re going. We don’t need artificial intelligence, the misinformation and disinformation of social media and state-controlled broadcasts, deepfakes, and all the rest. When I first began to learn sacred songs, I was given this teaching: “Don’t add anything, don’t change anything, don’t take anything away.” That is how our truths have remained with us for thousands of years. That is how we know our history. That is the power of the oral tradition.
The greatest strengths of Native people have always been our relation to our ancestors, our language, our holy people, and our relation to the earth we walk upon and all her beings.
That is how we are still here.
We have also been blessed by excellent poets from many nations who speak their own truths to power. So, I am going to end with a poem by Joy Harjo, who speaks her truth and perhaps yours, as well:
Once the World Was Perfect
Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world.
Then we took it for granted.
Discontent began a small rumble in the earthly mind.
Then Doubt pushed through with its spiked head.
And once Doubt ruptured the web,
All manner of demon thoughts
Jumped through—
We destroyed the world we had been given
For inspiration, for life—
Each stone of jealousy, each stone
Of fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light.
No one was without a stone in his or her hand.
There we were,
Right back where we had started.
We were bumping into each other
In the dark.
And now we had no place to live, since we didn’t know
How to live with each other.
Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another
And shared a blanket.
A spark of kindness made a light.
The light made an opening in the darkness.
Everyone worked together to make a ladder.
A Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world,
And then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children,
And their children, all the way through time—
To now, into this morning light to you.
© Joy Harjo. Conflict Resolution From Holy Beings. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.
