Interesting article about Indigenous Peoples' Day.
In a forthcoming book, I write this:
The July 2022 issue of National Geographic is titled, “North America's Native nations reassert their sovereignty: 'We are here'.” ... The wistful myth of the noble but doomed, “vanishing Indian” is very strong. But to linger in that myth is to neglect understanding how tribes have preserved their culture and language, pushed for honored treaties, and promoted sovereignty—and still do. ....
Tocqueville himself, erroneously, believed that Indians were extinct in New England: “None of the Indian tribes which formerly inhabited the territory of New England, --the Narragansetts, the Mohicans, the Pequots--have any existence but in the recollection of man.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Translated by Henry Reeve, Esq. Third American Edition (New York: George Adlard, 1839) 335.
A fascinating book is by Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America. New York: Liveright Publication Corp, 2022. A dominant perspective of American history focuses upon settlement by those of European descent. Hämäläinen provides a counterbalancing view: that Indigenous peoples continued to thrive and flourish through the late 1800s. While the French and British were “removed” from the American continent, Indigenous populations were not victims of an inexorable destruction, though they certainly suffered death, tragedy, and removal over the decades. America can be called an “Indigenous continent” because Native Americans long remained at or near the center of social policy and U.S. history. The Native American nations, of course, continue, and their people still press for their well-being, sovereignty, and land repatriation. Writing in The New Yorker, Ojibwe author Davie Treuer writes that Hämäläinen’s view is helpful for him, having read the more elegiac Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee as a college student (Nov. 14, 2022, 73-76).
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