Seen in the window at Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, Maine.
Photo: Bill Roorbach
Except America wasn’t an endless expanse of forest with no certain borders. At least not while human beings inhabited it. The idea that native peoples did not cultivate or shape our land and that we had no borders is white propaganda meant to dehumanize and de-legitimize native peoples.
This illustration here show Apalachee people using slash and burn methods for agriculture. Fires were set regularly to intention burn down forests and plains. Why would we do this? Well because an unregulated forest isn’t that great for people, actually. We set fires to destroy new forest growth and undergrowth, and to remove trees, allowing for easier game hunting, nutrient enriched soil, and better growth rates for crops and herbs we used in food and medicine.
Pre-Colonial New England, where my tribe the Abenaki are from, looked more like an extensive meadow or savannah with trees growing in pockets and groves. Enough woodland to support birds, deer, and moose, but not too much to make hunting difficult. We carefully shaped the land around us to suit our needs as a thriving and successful people. Slash and burn agriculture was practiced virtually everywhere in the new world, from the pacific coast to chesapeake bay, from panama to quebec. It was a highly successful way of revitalizing the land and promoting crop growth, as well as preventing massive forest fires that thrive in unregulated forests. Berries were the major source of fruit for my tribe, and we needed to burn the undergrowth so they could grow.
That changed when white people invaded, and brought with them disease. In my tribe, up to 9 in 10 people died. 90% of our people perished not from violence starvation, but from disease. Entire villages would be decimated, struck down by small pox. Suddenly, we couldn’t care for the land anymore. There weren’t enough of us to maintain a vast, carefully structured ecological system like we had for thousands of years. We didn’t have the numbers, or strength. So the trees grew back and unregulated. We couldn’t set fires anymore, and we couldn’t cultivate the land. And white people would make certain we never could again. Timber, after all, was the most important export from New England.
Endless trees and untamed wilderness is a nice fantasy. But it’s a very white fantasy, one that erases the history of my people and of my land. One that paints native peoples are merely parasites leeching off the land, not masters of the earth who new the right balance of hunting and agriculture. It robs us of our agency as people, and takes our accomplishments from us. Moreover, it implies that only white people ever discovered the power to shape the world around them, and that mere brown people can’t possibly have had anything to do with changing our environment.
Don’t bring back untamed wilderness. Bring back my fire setters, my tree sappers, my farmers and my fishers. Bring back my people who were here first.
It’s one thing to read about history from an objective perspective. To know that it occurred. It’s another to read the story as told by an Indigineous writer, to really grapple with the meat of the conflict rather than the facts. Mean Spirit dramatizes many elements, and is far from a historical account- but if you want to really understand a tragedy, read books written by the survivors.
This Christmas, viewers in the UK will be able to watch a two hour long excerpt from the beautifully filmed slow TV show “Reindeer Migration 24/7”.
What both the Norwegian Broadcasting Company, as well as the BBC fail to mention, however, is that a majority of the reindeer that we get to follow will be forcibly slaughtered by the Norwegian state come New Year’s Eve. Not because they pose a threat to anyone, but because of a colonial law meant to strip the Saami of their right to self-governance, which has been imposed on territories that have never officially been ceded to the government of Norway (or any other colonial state currently occupying Sápmi, for that matter).
Despite the fact that the faith of Jovsset Ánte’s herd has been brought to the attention of the UN, the Norwegian government has decided to ignore the future outcome of these discussions, and they will instead go ahead with a decision that will, in short, strip a young Saami of his internationally recognised indigenous, human rights, which in turn will have a negative impact not only on his personal economy, but his mental health as well.
In short; Whilst this film of Jovsset Ánte’s herd is being used to promote tourism to Norway abroad, his entire future, livelihood and culture is at stake because of Norway’s still ongoing, brutal colonisation of Sápmi.
The story of William Barak and the Wurundjeri people in Victoria is instructive. Adopting British language, customs, religion, and becoming successful farmers got them precisely nothing: the Victorian state punished them for their success by withholding the fruits of their labour, giving their farmland to white farmers and forcibly relocating them to poor land much further away from Melbourne.
So, update on the asshole who got himself killed by deliberately trespassing on Sentinel Island… He was not a missionary, but a travel blogger masquerading as a missionary to gain access and treat the Sentinelese as a zoo exhibit (whilst exposing them to germs, and encouraging other intruders).
Again: It is illegal for outside people to barge onto Sentinel Island (borders: they kinda work that way. And a lot of white Americans seem real excited about ‘protecting the border’ with deadly force. Just saying.)
The last outsiders to arrive kidnapped a bunch of Sentinelese people and also introduced deadly diseases, so they have more than enough reasons to use force to fend off invasion.
This asshole was warned multiple time not to go there.
He was going for some extreme travel adventure blog, which is the epitome of colonizer nonsense: disrespecting indigenous sovereignty, endangering indigenous lives, and treating indigenous people like a zoo exhibit, all so he could make a quick buck.
PS. Thanks for getting the right-wing Christian crowd all riled up against indigenous people with your missionary stunt, bro!
Wow, and it got worse.
The article does say he was a travel blogger, but nothing about him pretending to be a missionary. How do you know he wasn’t genuinely both?
Those things really don’t seem mutually exclusive. Sweet setup, coming from a certain mindset 😱
Missionary or not, if you go somewhere where it is widely known they don’t want visitors and it is literally illegal to contact them or go on their land, and you get clapped, that is your own fault.
Stop trying to colonize everyone and mind your business.
this man wasn’t a tourist — he was an intruder.
Left out of the headlines and first paragraphs:
He was killed on his THIRD visit.
The first time the locals shot arrows at the kayak he used to get from the fishing boat he hired to the shore. That dissuaded him for a day. Then he came back with a large fish as a gift. The locals accepted the fish and told him to leave. He whipped out his Bible and they shot up the Bible (as one of his missionary relatives described it to the BBC “The Bible saved his life!”). Still not taking the hint he returned the next day and, having had enough of his bullshit, they filled him with arrows.
-waikiki was once a taro patch that fed all the native hawaiians on that side of the island.
-oahus current population numbers were once all native hawaiians. Now they comprise less than 5% of it.
-native hawaiians comprise less than 15% of the total population of hawaii but are most of the homeless and well over half the prison populace over non-violent petty offenses.
-native hawaiians have the lowest life expectancy, lowest income and least chances for education out of damn near all ethnic groups in the u.s.
-hawaii is stolen.
Living and working in the Waikiki is so sad sometimes for this reason. Especially when people claim that it’s a fake Hawai’i. Like, all of Hawai’i is the real Hawai’i and people need to put some respect on the stories of stolen lands like these.
As you celebrate thanksgiving, know that the Trump administration is taking away 321 acres of land from the Mashpee-Wampanoag, the tribe that helped the pilgrims survive and were present at the first thanksgiving. Tell legislators to support the Mashpee Reservation Reaffirmation Act. ]
For those who don’t live in Massachusetts, that is literally ALL THE LAND THEY HAVE! All of it. The state aims to make the entire ~3000 person tribe homeless.
As you celebrate thanksgiving, know that the Trump administration is taking away 321 acres of land from the Mashpee-Wampanoag, the tribe that helped the pilgrims survive and were present at the first thanksgiving. Tell legislators to support the Mashpee Reservation Reaffirmation Act. ]
If the tribe cannot retain control of the 321 acres in Mashpee and Taunton, it will be unable to build a planned $1 billion resort casino there. But the larger issue, members said, is the tribe’s cultural and moral claim to the land, which lies not far from where the Wampanoag greeted the Pilgrims who founded Plymouth Colony and later joined them in the first Thanksgiving.
If Congress does not pass legislation protecting the tribe and the legal challenge fails, the Mashpee would be stripped of their right to exercise sovereign jurisdiction over their land.
Jessie Little Doe Baird, the tribe’s vice-chairwoman, told Al Jazeera that loss of jurisdiction would prevent the tribe from running indigenous language schools, tribal courts, and housing projects, as well as its own police.
“We have our own police force, which is important because they’re tribal citizens and since we’ve had our own police force, none of our men have been beaten or shot, which we’ve had before with non-tribal police,” she said.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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