Reflection Week #13

This week was packed with school work, theater, and anticipation for going home for Thanksgiving, but there was a very present theme of native peoples and their culture.

On Wednesday I attended a panel organized by AU's American Studies department called "Indigenous Lives in the DC Area." The panelists consisted of Dr. Gabrielle Tayac, a historian with the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and member of the Piscataway Nation from Southern Maryland, Ashley Minner, a community artist and organizer of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, and Dr. Elizabeth Rule, a CAS Post-Doctoral Fellow and enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. The panel itself was very interesting, shedding light on the rich past and present cultures of native peoples in the DC area from many different perspectives. A common theme they discussed was the dehumanization of Native Americans that was caused by being invisible, and that was something that I was able to relate to the book The Conquest of America. Dr. Tayac specifically spoke about how the history of Native Americans is hard to find because history isn't written by them which leads to their invisibility, and that's something that Todorov struggles with too. He is forced to rely on journals and other sources from the conquerors' perspective because there aren't really any sources from the "Indians" that are being conquered. He recognizes this on page 54, saying that "given the absence of native writings, they are all subsequent to the conquest and therefore influenced by the conquerors." He doesn't really have any choice in using them though, and so he writes that we can't "read these texts as transparent statements, but [must] try at the same time to take into account the action and circumstances of their utterance" (54). Dr. Tayac mentioned that her work on collecting and preserving native peoples' history involved working with elders in native communities as the keepers of knowledge and I found that to be an incredible way of shaping the narrative of native peoples' history.

Another somewhat unexpected way in which conflict and native peoples surfaced was in Frozen II. This is NOT a spoiler! In the movie there are two groups: those from Arendelle, Anna and Elsa's kingdom, and we learn that there's another group of people in the Enchanted Forest called the Northuldra. The Northuldra and the Arendellians have been at war in the Enchanted Forest because Anna and Elsa's grandfather decided he wanted to destroy the Northuldra by limiting their resources because of their connection to magic. The way their grandfather and the other Arendellians at the time went about limiting their resources by pretending to be friends and then attacking them out of nowhere reminded me of the actions of the Spaniards in The Conquest of America. The native peoples did not know who the Spaniards were, the threat they posed, or what they even wanted, and just like that they were conquered and subject to torture. It was a very one-sided attack, just like in Frozen II with the attack on the Northuldra.

It's definitely been interesting to learn and talk about native people more since it's not a topic that I discuss often, but I think it's really important to be able to have these conversations because there are still so many injustices facing Native Americans in our country to this day. I hope that through these discussions people become more aware of these systematic issues and we can talk about ways in which to address them on a national level.