America was Great Before the Europeans Arrived
Today, it’s indecent. At best.
Mount Rushmore is situated in the Black Hills, sacred land of the Lakota Sioux, land promised to their people in the Treaty of 1868. Not ten years later, white prospectors discovered gold on that land, and the federal government broke the treaty to “relinquish the Black Hills portion of their reservation.” Later, the federal government commissioned the carving of the faces of white presidents into the hills, celebrating genocide on land promised to the victims of the very same genocide.
The question many liberals have asked rings truer by the day: When in the hell was America great, when was it better than it is today, and why are you trying to make it worse?
The United States of America was never great, but, geographically speaking, America was great. It really was. It was absolutely pristine. The water was clean, the air was clean, and the food was clean and humanely treated and never wasted. There was no history of slavery, no environmental crises, no prison system, no mass shootings, no 10+ hour workdays, no poverty, and no international pissing contests.
It’s easy to visit a National Park and say: “This is great.” Ironically enough, our most protected and pristine land still isn’t great. We’ve created so much smog and pollution, some National Parks have air quality “as bad — or worse — than in some major cities.”
In fact, some parks received an F grade in air pollution, the worst of which is Sequoia National Park. I was there last year. It was the freshest air I’ve breathed in a long time, and it has the worst air quality of any National Park. It was also inhabited by the Mono, who were largely wiped out by smallpox before white settlers even beheld the giant trees.
I live in Chicago, a city built on stolen Kaskaskia land, where Trump Tower stands obscenely over the highly polluted water of the Chicago River. Not only did late-1800s Chicagoans dump sewage and pollution into the river at an insane rate, they reversed the river’s flow to empty the filth more rapidly into Lake Michigan, a move my fellow white people later called a “Civil Engineering Monument of the Millennium.”
America used to be great when property and ownership were foreign concepts. When homophobia and xenophobia and racism were foreign concepts. When environmentalism was unnecessary and, more importantly, irrelevant.
Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean and wiped out most of the indigenous people in the Caribbean, Central America, South America, and North America. Within the borders of what later became the United States, there were over 10 million Indigenous people in 1492. By 1900, there were less than 300,000.
Here’s an interactive map illustrating the spread of white supremacy and the annihilation of an entire population from 1809 through 1891 courtesy of Slate:
If modern white Americans aren’t to blame for America being taken by force in acts of violence and the spread of diseases that never existed in the region, then who is to blame? No one? Or are they all dead, and we’re just left to throw our hands up in innocence while we reap the rewards?
And if we as white Americans are not to blame, we sure as hell embrace it. We depict Indigenous people as cartoons and mascots. We celebrate Terrorist Day (Columbus Day). We continue to ignore reservation boundaries, most recently and specifically with the Dakota Access Pipeline. But that’s stuff you probably already knew.
“5.2 million identified as American Indian or Alaska Native in the 2010 census.” Here are some things they endure you probably didn’t realize because the white journalistic coverage on it is nil:
Here’s a fun little Huffington Post tidbit: “Indian nations do not own their reservation lands. Rather, the lands are held in trust by the federal government. This prevents Native Americans who live on reservations from leveraging their assets for loans, making it difficult for them to start businesses or promote economic growth in the area.”
Capitalism was forced upon them, and then its “benefits” refused.
As activist and cofounder of Indigenize OU, an organization “unapologetically critical of all peoples, spaces, & institutions that contribute to the silencing, erasure, & genocide of indigenous people,” put it: “Every day, it’s life/death for us in this settler colonial terrorist regime.”
Before you say that colonialism isn’t your fault, consider your contribution. Forget supporting an abhorrently racist sports team like the Redskins or Indians or Blackhawks or Braves or Sooners or Chiefs or Mohawks or Warriors or Thunderbirds or Eskimos. Are you ignorant to the current problems? Are you wondering why you haven’t heard about any of this and blame Indigenous activists for your ignorance? Have you wished people a happy Columbus Day? Have you taken pictures at Mount Rushmore? Do you regard the DAPL as the only example of modern injustice to Indigenous peoples? Do you think the history of North America started in 1492?
Since even liberals have a constructed idea of what America is in the colonial sense, the idea of a great America is total equality for all in that everyone is brought up to the same level of capitalistic opportunity within determined borders. Equal Western education. Equal chance of making money. Equal chance of owning land. Equal law enforcement treatment. Equal overall opportunity in the Established States of America.
And I’ll admit that I like how equality sounds, particularly in that sense. It’s ingrained in my every fiber to embrace the fairest version of colonialism. Its comforts now seem like a necessity, its conveniences natural.
But I wonder if equality can really be the answer given the fact that colonialism and its modern result make cultural equality inherently impossible. If equality is the answer, then I’m just ignorant to the form in which it would be.
Maybe all this has led up to the ultimate justice against white people and the final act of injustice on everyone else in the form of a complete nuclear annihilation, something white people have the power to cause and seem well on track to causing exactly that. It certainly wouldn’t be justice for all, but it begs the question: would it be what white people deserve?
From where I’m sitting, which is in a segregated city on stolen land, it’s tough not to wonder.
America was great. It became decidedly horrific. Today and at the very least, it’s indecent.
Based on the government’s current path of environmental destruction and international tension, we might be, as white Americans, deciding that nothingness is better than indecency, a mindset I’m finding increasingly difficult to argue with.
Learn every day, but never expect to understand. Let yourself be schooled, and you’ll at least start to get it.
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