Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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In June of 2020 the “Black Lives Matter” movement included a few marchers holding “Indigenous Lives Matter” signs. The demonstrators, in support of the Black Lives protestors, reminded the nation that while Native Americans consist of only 0.8% of the population, they experience 1.9% of police killings (data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 1999 and 2011).

At the same time in St. Paul, Minnesota a statute of Christopher Columbus was brought down by protestors. Columbus, whose legacy for indigenous America was one of slavery and genocide, was removed from the public sphere. As cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor states, “Columbus and his civilization would discover no salvation in the New World. The missions, exploitations, racial vengeance, and colonization ended the praise of deliverance; the conquistadors buried the tribal healers and their stories in their blood.”⁸

Brendan Lindsay has noted in his book Murder State that “When one considers the actions of the press, state and federal governments, and the citizenry as a whole, the result was the creation of an inescapable system of democratically imposed genocide … devised to fulfill the demands of the newly minted citizenry of California.”⁹ Larissa Behrendt continued this theme by arguing that indigenous people’s claims of state-sanctioned genocide are still being defeated by legal traditions that reflect a legacy of colonialism and violence.¹⁰