Here’s a word: Survivance. Here’s my understanding of its meaning in the context of indigenous people: the very act of their survival into the 21st century is in itself a multi-layered and perpetual act of resistance—to colonization, to genocide, to assimilation and erasure, to one-sided history, to stereotyping, to demoralization, to broken treaties (thousands of them). . . .
Very little of the story mainstream education teaches about Christopher Columbus is true. And even the bits that are true, such as October and 1492, are sanitized for American exceptionalism. Yes, he arrived when he said he did, but he had no idea where he was (we have Indians because he thought he was in India or some such place in southern or southeast Asia). Yes, he found beautiful lands inhabited by non-European, non-Catholic people, but he wrote, “. . . of them all I have taken possession” (the beginnings of invasion and colonization).
