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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
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href="https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2019/11/go-back-to-where-you-came-from/?fbclid=IwAR3aQ2Af18dv07nCraWAhHPKja5HbVJNoHIoFdCIdhOqmJEzYLC2efjV8pk">https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2019/11/go-back-to-where-you-came-from/?fbclid=IwAR3aQ2Af18dv07nCraWAhHPKja5HbVJNoHIoFdCIdhOqmJEzYLC2efjV8pk</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Go Back to Where You Came From</h1>
by <a href="https://openspace.sfmoma.org/author/nickestes/">Nick
Estes</a> - November 4, 2019<br>
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<p>“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!”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>no</em>. If
anything, paradoxically, glory belongs to history’s
losers.</p>
<p>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 <em>just </em>the Indigenous movement.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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