[News] Go Back to Where You Came From

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2019/11/go-back-to-where-you-came-from/?fbclid=IwAR3aQ2Af18dv07nCraWAhHPKja5HbVJNoHIoFdCIdhOqmJEzYLC2efjV8pk 



  Go Back to Where You Came From

by Nick Estes <https://openspace.sfmoma.org/author/nickestes/> - 
November 4, 2019
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“Go back to where you came from!” a white woman screamed at us at the 
Los Angeles International Airport. We laughed at the absurdity of the 
notion. The biting humor of the late Haudenosaunee and Cree comedian 
Charlie Hill quickly came to mind: “A redneck told me to go back to 
where I came from, so I put up a tipi in his backyard!”

That sunny day in early 2017, we marched behind Tongva drummers, the 
original people of what is currently Los Angeles. We held placards that 
read “No Ban On Stolen Land!” protesting Donald Trump’s executive order 
barring travel to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries 
in Africa and the Middle East. This defiance is the living legacy of 
centuries of Indigenous resistance: the active refusal to cede moral 
authority over who belongs and who doesn’t to a settler nation.

But America has only room for winners and losers, we’re told. By that 
standard, Indians are the constant losers of history. And, for that 
matter, so too is anyone who doesn’t immediately buy what America is 
selling. The narrative we’re sold is that Indigenous resistance is a 
string of failures. That same year, Water Protectors “lost” at Standing 
Rock because the Dakota Access Pipeline was built. Later, the 
Wetʼsuwetʼen “lost” because Unist’ot’en Camp had been raided by police 
and the land occupied by Coastal Gas Link pipeline workers. More 
recently, the kia’i “lost” at Mauna Kea because the mainstream media was 
obsessed with “science versus culture” — not Indigenous land rights — 
and the Kanaka Maoli needed to relinquish “superstition” and accept 
“progress” as “inevitable” by having a $3.4 billion telescope built next 
to twenty-two other telescopes on their sacred mountain.

While Indigenous people are told to “quit living in the past,” settlers 
are urged to “Make America Great Again” by invoking the country’s mythic 
halcyon days. That’s the story America likes to tell itself: the story 
of winning the future of this land by winning its past. The truth is 
quite the opposite: America fears the past.

Reduced to its basic components, the history of colonization boils down 
to three things: gold, God, and glory. Natives had all the gold. 
Settlers brought God. Now the Natives have God and the settlers have all 
the gold, the story goes. But glory is the most precarious elements of 
this formula. Is there honor in invasion, slavery, genocide, and theft? 
The answer to that question changes throughout time. But we don’t have 
to journey too far into history to see that the response, by Indigenous 
standards, is clearly /no/. If anything, paradoxically, glory belongs to 
history’s losers.

In 1971, Richard Nixon ordered the police to evict Indians of All Tribes 
from Alcatraz Island, after nineteen months of steady Indigenous 
encampment in the former federal prison. The protest, however, is not 
remembered for its failure to achieve its stated goals of reclaiming the 
Ohlone land for all Indigenous peoples and creating an “all-Indian 
university.” Instead, it is remembered for the movement that sparked an 
era of Red Power militancy. And Alcatraz resonated beyond the confines 
of /just /the Indigenous movement.

In 1969, a young Black revolutionary who later took the name Assata 
Shakur visited the island, offering her services as a medic. She 
marveled at the “the quiet confidence” of the Indigenous activists who 
had founded a new community, one based on their cultural and spiritual 
traditions, in and around what was once a notorious penitentiary. Shakur 
had discovered some of the current Native occupiers were once former 
Alcatraz prisoners.

The prison island was also the site where four Modoc were hanged, and 
where Pauite and Apache prisoners of war and other Western Indigenous 
nations were imprisoned in the late nineteenth century for resisting 
invasion by the United States. In 1894, the military imprisoned nineteen 
Hopi men at Alcatraz as punishment for refusing to send their children 
to government- and church-run boarding schools. The Indigenous prisoners 
of Alcatraz had faced similar conditions that Red Power activists had 
faced: a harsh landscape purposefully isolated from the rest of the 
world, uninhabitable, abandoned, and in disrepair, much like the Indian 
reservations from which they had come.

“They [Indians] damn sure had the same enemy,” Shakur recalled, seeing 
similarities in Black and Indigenous experiences. She told her new 
comrades that if they ever visited New York to look her up in Harlem. 
“Sure. When are you going to liberate it?” they asked her.

Alcatraz catalyzed an Indigenous movement that kicked off occupations of 
federal lands and buildings across the continent, the height of which 
occurred during the seventy-one-day siege at Wounded Knee, where 
Indigenous activists took over the small town in the Pine Ridge Indian 
Reservation, demanded the ouster of a corrupt tribal administration, and 
declared independence from the United States. While a captivated public 
only saw the spectacle of militant Native men in braids and shades 
brandishing firearms, James Baldwin saw something else.

“What Americans mean by ‘history’ is something they can forget,” he 
said, reflecting on this period of Indigenous uprisings. “They don’t 
know they have to pay for their history, because the Indians have paid 
for it every inch and every hour. That’s why they’re at Wounded Knee; 
that’s why they took Alcatraz.”

Perhaps because they have paid such a heavy price for history, Natives 
have capacious notions of freedom and belonging. At Alcatraz and at 
Standing Rock, Indigenous peoples turned those seen as different into 
familiars, into allies. They made relations. This is the quiet strength, 
the victory of Indigenous movements over time, the power of love and 
humanity that doesn’t make headlines.

At the LAX airport protest in 2017, the Tongva drummers surrounded a 
Muslim family, singing them an honor song. The singers welcomed them to 
their homelands. Tears streamed down a young girl’s face. She wore a 
hijab. Moments earlier she appeared frightened. Now at peace. This is 
what it means to go back to where you came from. Nothing about the 
complex human condition of shared grief, love, and solidarity is alien 
to that place of freedom. Call it home.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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