From ... in History Literature Research Genocide Propaganda — Feb 27, 2025

Seeing My Settler Ignorance in the Mirror of This Moment

This essay is excerpted with permission from Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers toward Truth, Healing, and Repair, by Hilary Giovale. (Green Writers Press, 2024) A decade ago, I sat on the floor of my living room in Flagstaff, Arizona with a new friend named Marie Gladue.

We have tagged this article as propaganda as it imposes a serious spin on the topic.
If not more explanation provided, this article is included as propaganda because it shows clear manufacture from a government controlled dialectic, where a topic is misdirected by some actors in order to mislead people during early stages of a narrative.

This essay is excerpted with permission from Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers toward Truth, Healing, and Repair, by Hilary Giovale. (Green Writers Press, 2024)

A decade ago, I sat on the floor of my living room in Flagstaff, Arizona with a new friend named Marie Gladue. Marie’s loving heart is seasoned with a spicy dash of temper and her sharp intellect is mixed with a generous portion of humor. She is a Diné grandmother, scholar, and community organizer who raises sheep in the tradition of her grandmothers. A warm breeze blew through the open windows, caressing us with aromas of the nearby Ponderosa pine forest and an approaching monsoon rainstorm.

Marie and I had recently bonded over our shared interest in historical trauma,* and we were developing a curriculum that combined her cultural knowledge with my background in movement and embodiment. Over the next couple years, we facilitated our Healing with Earth and Sky workshop series for survivors of sexual and domestic violence, Indigenous groups, visitors from African nations, and Euro-American settlers. In the process, our relationship deepened as we learned more about how colonization has impacted each of these groups in different ways.

My interest in historical trauma had been sparked by a visit to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where I had recently joined a delegation on sexual violence in conflict. In contrast, Marie’s interest in historical trauma had been a longstanding part of her life. Marie is descended from ancestors who survived the Navajo Long Walk.† In 1864, under President Abraham Lincoln’s administration, Kit Carson led a campaign to destroy the homes and foods of Diné people.[i] The United States Government used these brutal techniques to push Diné communities off their land at gunpoint, in today’s Arizona and New Mexico. The survivors were held captive for four years and were not allowed to return home until 1868.‡

On that warm summer day in my living room, Marie and I brainstormed, made lists, experimented with movement, and talked about how to care for the people who attended our workshops. As we worked, a story bubbled up out of Marie. This story was passed down through her community’s oral history of the Long Walk.

“The Diné people were force-marched for three hundred miles. Along the way, the Elders, pregnant women, sick people, and children who could not keep up were either shot or left to die. They were freezing and starving. When the survivors of the walk finally made it to the Bosque Redondo at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, they were held there for four years in a concentration camp. They were forced to assimilate to the American way of life. Many more died. Soldiers raped the women, and so a lot of the people who came back from the Long Walk were mixed-blood. Nothing would grow in the soil, and the people were starving.”

“In 1868 our leaders negotiated a treaty, and the people were allowed to return to some parts of our homeland. Our land was now called the Navajo Reservation. Before they could leave, they were made to stand in a courtyard, where the soldiers tied a goat to a post. The people were told: ‘You must follow the laws of the United States government. You must send your children to school. If you don’t, you will be breaking the law. This is what we will do to you if you break the law.’

“And then,” continued Marie, “They beat that goat to death.”

Silence filled the room and ice gripped my heart. Although I had been living for over twenty years on the same lands from which her Diné ancestors were forcibly removed, I hadn’t fully grasped that they were her ancestral lands. I had a vague memory of learning about the Long Walk during graduate school, but my perception was that it had happened “a long time ago” and that it was “in the past.” In an academic setting with my settler denial intact, its cruelty didn’t register. Because I didn’t have any relationships with Diné people at that time, I had no idea how much the displacement was still impacting them. Now, I could feel that the Long Walk was still haunting my dear friend Marie, sitting next to me on the floor.

Over time, I would learn more about the impact of settler colonialism on Marie’s family—the shaming of their identity as Diné people; the stealing of their language as generations of children were punished for speaking Diné Bizaad in boarding schools; the pressure to abandon traditional lifeways in order to survive within a capitalist economy; the collusion by corporate and government interests to once again relocate Diné people from their homelands in 1974;”* the racial capitalism that would desecrate one of their holy mountains with snow manufactured from treated sewage water, to enable settler recreation.

Sitting on the living room floor, I did not yet understand these far-reaching impacts. But I could viscerally sense Marie’s pain. With tears in my eyes, I said, “Marie, I didn’t know. I am so sorry.”

With a prayer, Marie quickly lit a single leaf of dry sage. She held the smoking leaf between her fingertips as we bent our heads toward each other. She shared the importance of cleansing ourselves when we speak of such difficult things. She said, “This is why we need healing for our people.”

***

Years later, I understood that my ignorance about this history has roots within heroic American mythology that was engineered for the descendants of colonizers to believe and uphold. I learned it by osmosis as a child while watching cartoons that depicted “Indian savages” as a form of comedy. In our elementary school textbooks, the 1872 painting “American Progress” showed an angelic lady in a white dress floating through the sky. She was the idealized embodiment of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion.[ii] At school, church, and home, the underlying assumption was that this is “our” land. We did not read the books or watch the films that could have educated us about what really happened. In our segregated neighborhoods, Indigenous histories were invisible to us. We didn’t have any relationships with those communities, so there was no one to contradict our heroic mythology.

A few generations after the Long Walk, the descendants of the government officials and soldiers who enacted the atrocities would gradually forget what transpired. Or, if they chose to remember, they would sometimes pass these horrific stories down to future generations as a point of misguided family pride. In the coming generations, the settlers who claimed the stolen Diné homelands as their own would tell themselves that they were just buying “private property” at a fair market price.

As children, we would be immersed in stories that normalized our perceived superiority. We would be told that such historical events were unfortunate, but that they had happened a long time ago … so long, in fact, that they may as well be forgotten. Our ancestors’ inherent “innocence” would become the air we breathed, generation after generation. Our unquestioned belief in the innocence of our people keeps us in a perpetual childlike state that prevents us from becoming the good relatives who are needed now.

European colonizers obliterated many of the Indigenous inhabitants of this continent with disease, massacres, sterilization, and displacement. Subsequent generations of white settlers would be raised to perceive that (so-called) Indians lived on (so-called) reservations and that was just how life had always been. Our European ancestors intentionally impoverished the Original Peoples of this continent by destroying their foods and homes, and then passed down a lie depicting “Native Americans” as poor, homeless people. In some parts of the United States, particularly in the east, Indigenous presence and identities were almost entirely erased. Our settler ancestors enacted profound physical, sexual, and emotional trauma upon the First Peoples of this land, and then taught us to think of their descendants as alcoholics and drug addicts. In my experience, settler colonialism tends to make white settlers ignorant of our people’s history on this continent and thereby, complicit in its ongoing perpetration.

At this moment in the United States, the ugliness of settler ignorance is on display for the whole world to see. Perhaps this disheartening reflection can serve as a mirror to help us see what has been hiding in the consciousness of white settler culture for centuries. Now that we are collectively facing the mirror of this moment, will we choose to look away? Or will we make the courageous choice to gaze into the mirror until our hearts crack open with remorse and grief? The pain of this moment offers a profound invitation: to re-educate ourselves, transmute our settler ignorance, and rise together in loving solidarity.

* For an explanation of historical trauma, please see pages 168–72 of Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, by Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah.

† Prior to colonial contact, the people referred to themselves as Diné. Navajo is a name that was imposed by Spanish colonizers. It was later adopted by the United States government.

‡ To learn about the Navajo Long Walk, I recommend:

The young readers’ book Navajo Long Walk: The Tragic Story of a Proud People’s Forced March from Their Homeland by Joseph Bruchac; illustrated by Shonto Begay.
The Long Walk: The Forced Navajo Exile, by Jennifer Denetdale.
Navajo Stories of the Long Walk Period, edited by Broderick H. Johnson; illustrated by Raymond Johnson and Teddy Draper Jr.

* To learn more about the so-called Navajo–Hopi land dispute:

Marie recommends the film Broken Rainbow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5z8OgMfXXc) and the book Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West, by Judith Nies.
Diné Elder Viki Blackgoat recommends The Wind Won’t Know Me: A History of the Navajo–Hopi Dispute, by Emily Benedek.

[i] Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019.), 154.

[ii] Brian Calvert, “The myth of American progress,” High Country News, August 20, 2018, https://www.hcn.org/issues/50.14/editors-note-the-myth-of-american-progress.

Read the full article at the original website

References:

Search Results

Bookmarks

Seeing My Settler Ignorance in the Mirror of This Moment

Search Results

Bookmarks

Subscribe to The Article Feed