Imagine a timeline where one of the native nations of Turtle Island developed a survival strategy that allowed them to retain their society and identity intact despite destruction, disenfranchisement, and dispersal among the other colonized nations.
Imagine this nation never lost memory of their land and hope of returning to it, and bided their time and amassed their resources until they could begin buying back rights to resettle their homeland from the colonizers, and slowly build a nucleus of native society in their ancient land.
Until – imagine this – one day native diplomacy achieves a major goal and some of the colonizers decide to withdraw from the land and turn it back over to the native nation. At least, that’s what it would say on paper: imagine if the rest of the colonized countries around the land didn’t accept the new decision and decided to attack the returning native nation on its land?
And imagine what would happen if there were many descendants of families of the native nation who had never left the land in the first place? Natives who endured century after century of colonization, being forced to adopt the colonizers’ language and religion – what would they do? I’d imagine that some of them would join with their returning brethren, but whose side do you imagine the rest of these colonized natives would take?
Now imagine that the returnees of the native nation, reestablishing themselves in the land, did not recognize their colonized brethren – mistook the contemporary trappings of colonized culture for identity and history – and viewed them with suspicion of loyalty to the colonizing countries who attacked them; only slowly and partially integrating them into the renewed native society, even placing some of them under military administration.
And imagine that some of the colonized natives – some identifying so strongly with the colonizer that they adopted their values and agenda, some so broken by the war and its after-effects that they were consumed with vengeance – did in fact resort to acts of violence against their returning brethren, feeding the fears and suspicions of those who could not recognize their kinship.
In such an imaginative scenario, what would be your hope?
What is your dream for the descendants of the native nation?
For the world?
[If any of the above resonates with you, or maybe introduces a little cognitive dissonance into your psychic space, explore those thoughts. History is complicated and the struggle is real. The stories we tell ourselves can change the world. Stay Frosty Friends]