From Indian Country Today’s “America 250” series comes this overview of the history of Turtle Island indigenous erasure. Rarely in the history of humanity has there been a genocide as sweeping in scope, as thorough, and as prolonged as this one, nor one in which the perpetrators are remembered as highly civilized, let alone the world’s foremost defender of human liberty and human rights. And yet, we the inheritors of the spoils of this erasure are about to embark upon a celebration of that very premise.
painting by Charles M. Russell shows Native Americans on horseback during the June 26, 1876, Battle of the Little Bighorn
Sicangu Lakota journalist Kevin Abourezk breaks down the erasure of our native peoples into five steps: break their spirit, assimilate them, take their lands, take away their rights, and erase their history. He describes the very deliberate tactics used to accomplish each of these steps, including destruction of food stocks, kidnaping and imprisonment of children in indoctrination centers, appropriation of land and resources, denial of personhood, and of course creation of a historical framework that promotes an entirely different storyline. It’s a history with which we should be familiar, one which stands in stark contrast to the one we are about to celebrate, a history that the current regime is determined to wipe away from memory and relegate to the obscurity of fakery and victim-blaming.
Read here:
A step-by-step guide to Indigenous erasure