The Painful Truth of America’s Colonization by Maya Hesse

We were sitting at our campsite, cradled between the beehive domes of the Navajo sandstone, eating warm bowls of tortilla soup. As the sun slowly sank behind the smooth rocks, painting a sky of pink wispy clouds, the cold began to nip at my fingertips and nose. Looking across the road, we had a clear view of Lake Powell. Facing us was Darrell Marks, one of our guest speakers who is a member of the Navajo Nation. Sitting with the lake to my left side, Darrell told us of the Indigenous communities and cultural sites that now lay beneath the man-made lake. When the Glen Canyon Dam was built, he says, water not only filled the side canyons that feed into the Colorado River but also the ancestral homes and cultural sites that had been there for generations.

Despite growing up in a progressive town and attending liberal schools, l was taught a romanticized and inaccurate history of America’s colonization. I don’t think I got a fully unbiased history lesson on colonization and how it affected Indigenous peoples until my time with WRFI on the Colorado Plateau.

In “Yes, Native Americans Were Victims of Genocide” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, genocide is defined by the UN as, “Any one of five acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

During the colonization of America, Native Americans were subjected to every single one of these classifications of genocide.

By this point the sky had gotten dark enough that I could no longer see Darrell’s face but I could hear the sorrow in his words. I was in awe of the way he remained equanimous, his voice never wavering or reflecting anger despite the subject.  As the stars emerged above us, forming familiar constellations, he told us a Navajo story of how the stars came to be scattered across the sky. Hearing traditional Native stories from Darrell himself, while being immersed in the pertinent landscape, was invaluable and not something I could have learned from reading a textbook or sitting in a lecture hall. He ended his lesson by reminding us that it is one of our responsibilities to use our white-ness and privilege to make a change in this world. I will carry these words with me through the rest of my life.

I am a white person, living on stolen land, with settler ancestry, and the thought that I am a descendant of people who committed genocide can be hard to swallow. I understand that many people can feel personally attacked when they are confronted with the history of this country’s colonization; but it must be understood that we are not our ancestors and we have the knowledge, power, and resources to address the inequities and biases that still affect Native Americans in the present day.

This brings me to my question for you: What steps can we take to mend the lasting effects of colonialism and create a more equitable future?