#bookreflection

Prior to reading this book, I hadn’t really approached Standing Rock from a historical perspective, and certainly not one that centered the sovereignty of the Oceti Sakowin before. It centered indigenous sovereignty from an indigenous perspective (being written, of course, by a native, sioux, person).

But I think that Nick Estes did a very good job recontextualizing historic events that I had heard about from settler perspectives and relating them to the continued fight for indigenous sovereignty that brought us to the events of the #NoDAPL movement. 

Old Wars

It recontextualized things like the “American Indian Wars.” According to Wikipedia’s “list of wars involving the United States”  there were 4 wars between the various Oceti Sakowin tribes and the United States; The Dakota War of 1862,  the Colorado War (1863-65), the Powder River War (1965) and Red Cloud’s War (1866-68) which led to the creation of the Treaty of Fort Laramine, which much of the book is based around. There were also 2 other wars after the treaty was signed: the Great Sioux War of 1876 (which seized the black hills that were given in the treaty), the Pine Ridge Campaign (which led to the massacre at Wounded Knee). In reading Estes's account of these events, I realized that the way that these wars are taught in my childhood history classes, was as if there weren’t real wars. They were not portrayed as sovereign nations resisting encroachment onto their territories by the United States. I mean, they were barely taught at all, because history class preferred to focus on the Civil War that was happening at the same time. 

When I was in Chicago at the cultural center, there was a sign that said: “The Civil War was also a settler colonial war.” This made sense to me in some way, because it was a war over land that belonged to neither group that was trying to claim it. The Indian Wars and the Civil War were both, as the sign said: “each part of the westward advance of the United States empire and the colonization of the west. The Civil War...was also a conflict over the way the United States empire would develop.” That sign, plus the realization that the dates of the American Indian Wars overlap almost completely with the Civil War made me realize just how wrong the United State’s history is taught. 

The history of the Oceti Sakowin - their origins to now - isn’t included in the curriculum. The United States gets to act like their expansion was inevitable, and ignore the historic wars that were waged against sovereign nations in a conquest for more land and resources. And ignore the modern war with the continued occupation of lands, breaking of treaties, and denial of modern sovereignty.  By simply thinking of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate/Great Sioux Nation as a nation it directly challenges the notion that it was inevitable. It recontextualizes the history and the supposed ‘greatness’ of the United States by proving that it is a nation built upon the destruction of other nations.

Ghost Dancers

Another thing that stuck with me from the book was the Ghost Dance. Settler history doesn’t portray it in the same way as Estes does. Its generally refered to as some kind of ‘crazy indian thing’ on par with the Dancing Plague of 1518 because of its mischaracterization by anthropologists. What isn’t mentioned is how much it makes sense in the true context of its time period. Estes calls it “an accumulation of prior anti-colonial experiences, sentiments, and struggles” and recontextualizes it as a true anti-colonial resistance movement, one that went against the US ‘concentration camp’ reservations, boarding schools, and the movement towards assimilation. A movement that posed a threat to US imposition of their sovereignty over the Oceti Sakowin, and was met with military force and violence. 

The title of the book, our history is the future was confusing to me at first, but the explanation of the ghost dance actually helped me to understand it. Estes description of the ghost dance as being “transported to a forthcoming world where the old ways and dead relatives lived” in contrast to the “horrors of their current reality” and that it offered “a reminder that life need not always be this way” to its participants, I was able to better understand (Estes 124). The idea of looking to our past in order to envision a future that is better than our current present makes sense. I think it’s a bit like envisioning the future that you want as the first step to making it a reality, like in Decolonization is not a metaphor, decolonization must first stop being a metaphor in order for “the very possibility of decolonization” to be real (Tuck & Yang 4). 

And similarly, I think, Standing Rock offered a similar window into the past and the future. Estes recounts Ladonna BraveBull Allard’s story from the Sacred Stone camp, seeing everyone working, roasting deer meat, kids playing, and people telling stories. “They were all speaking Dakota. I looked at them and I thought, ‘this is how we are supposed to live. This makes sense to me.’ Every day...I saw our culture and our way of life come alive.” (BraveBull Allard, via Estes pg 51-52)

Continued Resistance

There are so many “Standing Rocks” that have happened over and over again throughout Octei Sakowin history as their land has been taken, and dams have flooded their towns, their land, as police killed their people, and there has been resistance to all of these. Yet from my perspective, settlers see Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline as different from all these other events that the tribes didn’t want. 

But what really makes it different? Is it because there were other people involved? Because there were non-Sioux and non-native people who stood with them? What makes one act of resistance more important than another? Because all these acts of resistance are important to be recognized. “This Battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue.” (From inside cover, Our History is the Future)

When I was considering those questions,  a quote came to mind from Pualani Case, a Native Hawaiian who is a leader of the Protect Mauna Kea movement to stop TMT. 

“When the Native people of a place say, ‘not this time’ ‘no more’ ‘you have taken almost everything we have, and if we allow you to build on the most sacred’ without attempting to stop that, we may as just lay down, as a native people and say ‘take everything’ if you take the most sacred what will we have left.” 

-Pualani Case, Source

When I first heard this quote, it made me uncomfortable, because I thought, ‘just because someone takes one thing doesn’t mean they should take all of it, but when I rewatched the video for the third-ish time, and after I read Estes’ book, I think I understand it better. That quote isn’t about the settlers taking the land, it's about the importance for the native people to defend the land, to try to stop settler imposition and construction on the land. Some of what makes them still have a right to the land are because they have never stopped fighting for it in one way or another. 

Chicago Cultural Center is built on land that “consists of both territory ceded through treaties that the U.S. government coerced Indigenous people to sign and unceded territory created by landfill after those coerced treaties were signed.” (Decolonizing the Chicago Cultural Center, pg 20 ) Many other places in the united states are built like that, Boston is like that. But coerced treaties and made land doesn’t separate Native people from the land, it’s still theirs and they are still of the land.

And therefore, every act of resistance, every existence as resistance, is important, even if some are more important because they deal with the most sacred, and the most important things, like the water, and the right to live. 

Modern Sovereignty

“Internationalism” was another concept from Our History is the Future that I thought was super interesting and recontextualizing. Because if you consider all the tribes to be their own nations that retain their sovereignty, then gatherings like the sacred stone camps at standing rock, organizations like the American Indian Movement, are international movements. And interactions between the United States and native nations are nation-to-nation, they are international relations, or at least, maybe they should be considered international relations.

A lot of my thoughts on this book are still scattered, even after the weeks that I’ve spent processing and connecting it to my interactions in my daily life. But there’s one paragraph that I really like that I think does a good job, a better job, of relating all these things I talked about down. 

“The Ghost Dance was not a monolithic movement, but  an accumulation of prior anti-colonial experiences, sentiments, and struggles that informed #NoDAPL. Each struggle had adopted essential features of previous traditions of Indigenous resistance, while creating new tactics and visions to address the present reality, and, consequentially, projected Indigenous liberation into the future. Trauma played a major role. But if we oversimplify Indigenous peoples as perpetually wounded, we cannot understand how they formed kinship bonds and constantly recreated and kept intact families, communities, and governance structures while surviving as fugitives and prisoners of a settler state and as conspirators against empire; how they loved, cried, laughed, imagined, dreamed, and defended themselves; or how they remain, to this day, the first sovereigns of this land and the oldest political authority.”

This is my reflection on five selected chapters

Myth 6: “Indians should move on and forget the past” 

The very notion of this annoys me. When have any other people simply moved on and forgotten the past? America still celebrates independence day, nobody goes “Well you’ve been independent for 250 years, shouldn’t you just move on already?” The idea that because it ‘happened a long time ago’ Native Americans should move on when their genocide still has long-lasting impacts and oppressions is ridiculous to me. 

Additionally, the whole concept that “they were conquered” (pg. 44) is damaging because it undermines modern struggles of the American Indian Movement like the Alcatraz Occupation and even more recent efforts like Standing Rock and Carpenter v. Murphy. 

Myth 8: “The United States didn’t have a Policy of Genocide”

When I took AP US History, my teacher posed a question to the class. “Did the United States commit genocide against Native Americans” He tried to show both arguments for genocide and not-genocide as equal, and that it was an opinion. Now I know that there aren’t quite absolute truths in any History, but just the facts say something different. The comparison between US policies and the definition of genocide say something different. 

This is definitely something that settlers deny to avoid taking any blame for the colonization of the United States. Genocide is something that people generally consider to be morally bad, and therefore something that patriotic people wouldn’t want to affix to their country. But it’s not right to teach kids and high schoolers and false history of the United States just so that they don’t have to think about the harm that they don’t have to think about how they are “the beneficiaries of genocide” (pg 54).

Myth 17: “Indians are anti-science” 

I’ve seen this myth implemented against Native Hawai’ians many times in these past two months. People who frame the protection of Mauna Kea as a fight between indigenous people and science instead of what it is, a fight between indigenous people and colonialism. 

This chapter only briefly highlights how colonialism has masked itself as science many times to cause harm to Native communities and instead chooses to focus on the scientific advancements of Native communities pre-colonization. I like that about this chapter because I didn’t know that the Incas built many different kinds of technologically advanced bridges as a part of their road system. Or that the canoes of people of the pacific northwest could hold “as many as twenty people and thousands of pounds of cargo”(pg 127) That’s impressive and all these advances should be readily taught, not myths about how because they didn’t invent the wheel, Indians were less technologically advanced.

Myth 19: “What's the Problem with Thinking of Indian Women as Princesses or Squaws”

This entire book is basically about the dangers of misrepresentation, but I’m glad it goes into the more specific, i.e. the intersection of Native American misrepresentation and racism and misogyny in this case. This also feels really relevant to today, with the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women that isn’t nationally addressed.

Adrienne and Matika talked about Indigenous Feminism and I found that part of the first All My Relations Episode rather reminiscent of this chapter. Especially when talking about how native peoples existed in a world without patriarchy, and with much more equity. In this chapter, I also really appreciated the highlighting of the Native Women who were instrumental in the American Indian Movement and who founded Idle No More. Maybe I’m thinking about this from a White Feminism™ standpoint, but I think it’s important to showcase the accomplishments of Native women. 

Myth 21: 

This was probably my favorite chapter because it neatly wrapped some things in the book up, saying ‘here are the issues we have’ and then saying ‘we are working to fix these don’t do the thing that the Indian Rights Association did where they thought they can fix our problems for us because they read one book’ 

As a non-native person, I have to stand with Indigenous people not in front of them. I shouldn’t drown out their grievances with my settler tears, because that’s just rude and unhelpful. I have to listen to native voices. And I gotta be involved because “the work of achieving justice for American Indian people involves everyone” (p 158). “What happens to Indigenous peoples will eventually happen to everyone” (p 156) this rings particularly true in the face of the global emergency of climate change.

Part 1: Narrative

It’s often said that history is written by the victors. To what end? To ensure that the victors stay in power.  The narratives that society, as a whole, crafts are often ones to stay in power.

In this case, the settlers write the story, control the narrative, and create these myths about indigenous people. But they’re more than just myths really, they’re lies. I prefer to call them lies because it implies a harsh negative connotation that tells other people that they are harmful mistruths. 

“the narrative of Indian savagery is a lie told so many times that it became “truth” in the American mind”

And the same happens with other misrepresentations that are perpetuated by things like state flags and statues outside of museums and the textbooks that we give students. These lies becoming truth is dangerous. 

They were used by settlers to perpetuate violence against native people back in ‘ye olde days’ such as banning all Indians from the city of Boston. But also those old laws created out of those lies have modern consequences because old laws are used as a legal precedent to solve modern court cases. It scares me that a law that was founded on the doctrine of discovery or for the sole purpose of perpetuating genocide against indigenous folks could potentially be used in a case today or tomorrow. 

Part 2: Science

I think Science is a huge part of this narrative. I mentioned in my podcast reflection that the idea of ‘science as the most important thing’ erases native peoples voices. 

But it doesn’t just erase their voices by declaring them to be inferior to European voices or academic voices, doesn’t scientific racism change how people interpret laws? Like how scientists used scientific evidence to try to stop Kennewick man from being buried under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

I only heard of science as a tool for colonization recently. But I can see how it can be, both in the examples that Dunbar-Ortiz and Gilio-Whitaker give but also very recently, at Mauna Kea. This recent fight between supposed “science” and native Hawaiians over the Thirty Meter Telescope doesn’t really have mainstream media recognizing how often science and scientific racism is used to oppress indigenous people. 

The main conversation seems to be about the redefinition of the stylistic and artistic culture in the country after British control was over. One of the main conversations that takes place in this book is the idea of modernity, how it’s defined, and how the change took place in India.

Post-British colonialism, the country was left partially industrialized and partly taken advantage of. The Industry that Britain was able to set up allowed for India to become part of the modern market, but because of the exploitation of resources it was also left without structure. That lack of structure left a country that continued to grow and develop technology fairly quickly, but also left it with excessive amounts of poverty and governmental issues. Throw in the conflict between countries like Pakistan and India with the religious differences, the countries were left in a state of strife.

Despite that, there was a sense of nationalism in India that drove artists in the country to find a way to define themselves now that the reign of Britain was over. Because of the influence of a European Britain, a portion of the population was also practicing Christianity. This began to show up in the artworks and is a major point of importance. The three religions now in the area – Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam – began to influence what the visual culture was like since each has its own set of icons and emphases. Hand signs and figures began to cross the boundaries of the cultures, taking on a more universal representation of the spiritual views in the area rather than just a single position.

I think this is important to the region because it shows the blending of faiths. Additionally, it is a representation of the ideas and thoughts of the area, showing the history of the region. I say this because it includes the changes in power. The shift from the Mughal empire – mainly Islamic – back to Hindu leaders – to the British empire and their push for Christianity to Gandhi, who rose up against the British and brought back a focus to the Hindu faith. Having artwork that represents all three religions is an homage to the blending of thoughts and histories to acknowledge rather than ignore.

On the topic of acknowledgement, many artists in the area post-colonialism began considering what was left behind. When the British returned power back to the local community, what remained was a partially industrialized country – seen as a move towards modernity and progress – with phenomenal amounts of poverty because there was no attempt to create a structure for the country while the British occupied the area. Rather, they created a structure that was purely British, they retrieved what they needed, and then they finally returned the land and power back to the people; the problem being that the people had no outlet or understanding of what their country was now that they had it back.

This idea is represented in the artwork post colonialism. There was a resurgence of tradition from the Hindu faith, but also a comparison between how it existed now versus how it existed before British colonialism. Contrasts between modern structures and a sense of claustrophobia began to show up in the artworks as a representation of the progress being made compared to this sense of being stuck or unsure of how to move forward.

The idea of returning to the humble village became a way to show how tradition and modernity were conflicting with one another. Tradition continued to persist, but modern thought – which includes being influenced more by secular reasoning and science instead of religion and spirituality – was beginning to push communities farther into a sense of loss and confusion. Oftentimes, showing how areas would get stuck in poverty and lack of structure.

On the other hand, artists were also able to create representations that were inspiring and encouraging in their blend of past and present. Architecture became influenced by the geometric stylization and simplification commonly seen in Western cultures with hints from both Islamic and Hindu traditions. This was based on the revivalist style that aimed to bring back spirituality from the Hindu faith back into their visual landscape.

Because there is an attempt at the redefinition of the style and identity of art in the region, a question comes up about what is modern and what is primitive. The connotation associated with primitive is that those aspects associated with that word are “behind” or “not yet developed.” This stigma seems to find itself as an opponent to the nature of spirituality seen in Asian cultures – generally describe as primitive. My question is, how is it different from embracing spirituality in Western religions? After reading this book, I think it comes down to the fact that one nation is taking over another. There is a sense that Western nations saw themselves as more intelligent or progressive, so the split lent itself to saying that they were also more powerful. This separation found itself in what is considered primitive vs sophisticated because it is a representation of who places themselves in power. It is primitive because it seems less sophisticated.

Despite the struggle in power, artists are using this as a return to the “primitive” influences from their faiths. No matter if it comes from Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, etc, there is an increase in the use of icons in both a literal figural way and in an abstracted way to be a representation of the spiritual presence. Despite the push towards the secular nature of many other modernizing areas, the return to tradition is a way to recover a sense of identity and history rather than moving away from and removing it. I think doing this allowed the country the chance to reevaluate what has happened to them as a nation and how it has left them. The most important aspect being a blend between tradition and modern ideologies.

I think the most interesting is how modern ideologies is defined. Rather, how there is lack of definition. Despite there being an exclusion of definition, a lot of the traits being associated with “modernity” in relation to how it’s being mixed with tradition is based in European and Western forms of thought processes. This is unavoidable since India was under British control, so the thinking processes are going to be influenced by the visual culture that they brought with them. But, modernity in India is more a representation of what was left behind, and in most cases it was famine and poverty and war brought on by onset of somewhat arbitrary land divisions.

FEBRUARY READ | The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

“Professor Robert Langdon is in Paris on business when he's summoned to The Louvre. A dead body has been found, setting Langdon off on an adventure as he attempts to unravel an ancient code and uncover the greatest mystery of all time.”

BEFORE

I’ve tried to read Angels and Demons before but I just couldn’t. Not sure why - maybe it just wasn’t the right time. I’m really excited to read this though because it’s one of Kara’s favourite books and she is a book gorger like me. The last time I saw the movie though I was a little disappointed but I’m sure the book will take me on a completely different experience.

AFTER

I TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT THE TWIST. **SPOILERS**

I loved how Brown weaved between the consciousness of all the characters through the story but at the same time, remaining that third person. I did notice how he rarely dipped into Teabing’s stream until he was revealed at the end. It still felt authentic though that he didn’t dwell in his mind for too long but gave us enough to think he was innocent. The thrill, the mystery, the puzzles… I loved it.

Honestly though, I completely knew Sophie was related to the royal family as soon as I heard about the voice message.