Indigenous Peoples Day 2024 (or, what even is the United States?)
It’s indigenous People’s Day 2024 and I’d like to take a moment to explain a little bit about where we USians live. It’s not quite where you think.
Some will whimper and whine, ‘why do we have to keep adding holidays to the calendar…aren’t we woke enough yet?’ To which, I’d answer that, on Native issues specifically, we are all still very much asleep. And in acknowledging an Indigenous People’s Day, there is a pathway to understanding just what the United States of America actually is.
The Nations of Native America are a case study in the diversity of humanity. No two Nations are alike. Many of them are as different from each other as Britain is different from China. There was (and still is!) an immense array of cultures, worldviews, languages, styles of governance, religions, philosophies, art, legal systems, and economies across both American continents at the time that the European invasions began. There was never a shared consensus among these American Nations, save for a few empires and confederacies that emerged here and there. A singular ‘Native America’ was a reaction to the forces of Europe, a creation of European colonialism. The many Native Nations were forced together in order to survive.
In the fires of colonialism, the forces of Europe began the multi-generational effort of erasing these Indigenous Nations, of assuming arbitrarily that their time was passing and then acting to make it so. Europe attacked the thousands of independent Nations, confederacies and empires of the Americas through repeated chapters of war, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. Some of these Native countries have been wiped completely off the face of the map. Some countries were eaten so quickly, we barely know their names today. Whole civilizations of people vanished like wisps of smoke in the face of European colonialism. Hundreds of millions of people, living in towns, cities, farmsteads, pueblos and hamlets, quite literally minding their own business…all faced the unnecessary music of a foreign invader.
Europeans engaged in this massive multi-century conquest even while blending their own cultures with the cultures of the various Native Nations they were conquering. This blending took the form of food, of music, philosophies, styles of governance, of technologies, of systems that regulated natural resources and land ownership. Immigrants from Europe to the colonies began to resemble the Native peoples that were being conquered more than they resembled citizens back home in distant Europe. This cultural blending is called syncretism and it went on for nearly 300 years before the United States was born.
The US is an empire of nations, states, and territories; a syncretic blend of hundreds of kinds of people, from North America, Africa, and Europe. As such, the US is a continuation of the contexts of the colonial period. In a few circumstances, this was absolutely a conscious decision. The founding fathers of the United States, for example, learned as much as they could from the democracies of North America and combined it with what little they could glean from the small moments of democratic impulses back in theocratic, monarchy-mad Europe. The founders blended these traditions and stoked a modern fire of democracy that is still burning today. That fire is a Native fire, by the way. The very ideal of liberty in America has Native fathers as much as it has European fathers. Even as a new ethnic group came to dominate the United States, a ‘white people’ born of many European peoples in the colonial period, the United States was, and remains today, a deeply syncretic, imperial creature. So much Native, European, and African cultural DNA flows through its veins that it is sometimes difficult to see where one begins and the other ends.
However, while that syncretism was building a new cultural force in the world, the US continued to eat one Indigenous Nation after another, forcing them into bondage, subjugation, through continued genocides, ethnic cleanings, and cultural erasures. Policies like Manifest Destiny, boarding schools that touted to ‘kill the Indian, save the man,’ the Dawes Act, the Indian Relocation Act…the policy of the United States, one generation after another, was that the time of Native America was done. And so federal policy worked to fulfill that arbitrary decision, treating it as prophecy. No one understood until now just how much of the United States was and still is a syncretism of the Native. You are what you eat, after all. C. G. Jung described it better than me: “North Americans have maintained the European level with the strictest possible puritanism, yet they could not prevent the souls of their Indian enemies from becoming theirs.”
The Nations of Native America not only survived through the nightmares of colonialism and the many assaults of the United States. They are rebounding today, using their inherent and acknowledged sovereignty to defend themselves against the larger forces surrounding them. If colonialism and US imperialism represents a flash flood, the Native Nations alive today represent spires of rock holding steadfast against the watery onslaught. And it is in this image of the country that we can see what the United States of America actually is. It is an empire.
The US is not the image of the map of 48 states that you see plastered in classrooms and on moving vans across the country, with Hawai’i and Alaska often tacked on to the edges as afterthoughts. In many, many ways, that map is a lie. We live in an imperial system, built through an ad-hoc territorial expansion through four continual phases of empire (land, sea, air, and now, space). The Indigenous peoples who find themselves caught inside of this empire now legally represent 574 ‘domestic, dependent’ Nations. Their sovereignty has been challenged and promised both legally and culturally with each generation. Sometimes Native Nations gained through that process, but mostly they lost.They had most of their land taken from them, and they were banned from leaving what territories they managed to hold, and, inconceivably, banned from practicing their own religions and languages until the early and middle 20th century. Native Sovereignty was assumed from the very beginning of the US, until it became inconvenient. The United States has worked very hard for a long time to pretend that Native Nations weren’t legitimate and weren’t American. But, it turns out that Native America is the very beating heart of the United States. And, in looking to indigenous spaces, we can better understand the US as a whole.
The United States of America is an imperial system, which is made-up of a hierarchy of provinces that consists of those previously mentioned 574 ‘domestic, dependent’ Nations at the top, who exist in a direct government-to-government relationship with the US Federal Government. Below them are the 50 states, then the 14 territories, territories which contain 3.6 million people. There are an additional four territories that are disputed with other countries (Columbia, Jamaica, Haiti, New Zealand, and the Marshall Islands), mostly islands. Then you have the District of Columbia, Washington D.C. This imperial system was never fully designed to be this way — much of its organization is a reaction to the contexts of history. Most empires are. But, this is literally who we are. It’s who we’ve always been.
There is a power in understanding this reality. I feel that knowing that the US is shaped this way keeps the Nations of Native America centered appropriately in the American story. On an Indigenous Peoples Day and on many other days of the year, you should reflect on the various cultural strands coming out of Native America who make you who you are, which makes a modern United States what it is. There is an overwhelming amount of justice owed to Native America and those Nations are in the trenches fighting for that justice now. You can do your part by acknowledging them, by understanding their contributions to the world, by learning about them, their languages, their ideas, their histories, and the challenges they currently face. But especially, understand them as modern peoples — as whole countries ensnared in the US system, yes, but countries full of bright, thoughtful people who have given so much, willingly and unwillingly, to the United States.
