Columbus Day: Dominant Culture Jamming

Columbus Day: Dominant Culture Jamming

Jonathan Gillis

8 October 2012

Updated 10,11 October 2012

Those that ignore and dismiss authentic history are dissociated from the present and neglect the future. The refusal to listen, deafens.
 

"[O]ne society [the United States]––the world's most ferocious destroyers and yet the most fanatic preservers of wilderness parks and endangered species."[1]
 

"America produces the world's most devoted protectors of wildlife, its greatest leaders in conservation, its most romantic wilderness literature, the first national parks, and the angriest opponents of the soiling of air and water...and it produces an ecological holocaust, the raping of a whole continent of forests and rich soils by uncomprehending destroyers, wrapped in patriotism, humanism, progress, and other slogans in which they profoundly believe."[2]
 

"The trouble with the eagerness to make a world is that, being already made, what is there must first be destroyed."[3]
 

"White, European-American, Western peoples are separated by many generations from decisions by councils of the whole, small-group nomadic life with few possessions, highly developed initiation ceremonies, natural history as everyman's vocation, a total surround of non-man-made (or 'wild') otherness with spiritual significance, and the 'natural' way of mother and infant. All these are strange to us because we no longer live them––although that competence is potentially in each of us."[4]

"The modern West selectively perpetuates [multiple] psychopathic elements. In the captivity and enslavement of plants and animals and the humanization of the landscape itself is the diminishment of the Other, against which men must define themselves, a diminishment of schizoid confusion in self-identity. From the epoch of Judeo-Christian emergence is an abiding hostility to the natural world, characteristically fearful and paranoid. The sixteenth-century fixation on the impurity of the body and the comparative tidiness of the machine are strongly obsessive-compulsive. These all persist and interact in a tapestry of chronic madness in the industrial present, countered by dreams of absolute control and infinite possession."[5]

"We all know the name of the man who came here from Europe, but none of us knows the names of the people who were here first––and there were...millions, of them."[6]

"Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts."[7]

Columbus wrote of the Arawaks: "They willingly traded everything they owned.... They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane.... They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."'[8]

"These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus."[9]

The Arawaks "wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears." Columbus took some Arawaks by force and "insisted they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic)...On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had ran aground, Columbus built a fort, the first European military base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and left thirty-nine crewmembers there, with instructions to find and store gold. He took more Indian prisoners...got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. When the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners began to die."[10]

"Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises [to the Court in Madrid], his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indian captives. But as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor."[11]

"In the year 1495, [the Europeans] went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were" sold into slavery. Columbus acted in the name of the "Holy Trinity." "In the province of Cicao on Haiti...all persons fourteen years or older [were ordered] to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death."[12]

"The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed."[13]

"Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead."[14]

"By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the Island."[15]

"Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous peoples, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass."[16]

"[O]ther nations rushed to emulate Columbus. In 1501 the Portuguese began to depopulate Labrador, transporting the now extinct Beothuk Indians to Europe and Cape Verde as slaves. After the British established beachheads on the Atlantic coast of North America, they encouraged coastal Indian tribes to capture and sell members of more distant tribes. Charleston, South Carolina, became a major port for exporting Indian slaves. The Pilgrims and Puritans sold the survivors of the Pequot War into slavery in Bermuda in 1637. The French shipped virtually the entire Natchez nation in chains to the West Indies in 1731."[17]

By the time of the American Civil War, "Congress controlled interstate commerce and, with their dominance in the House of Representatives, northern business elites controlled Congress. As long as the South remained in the Union, businessmen of the North largely controlled the flow of southern commerce as well. To those who backed Lincoln's war effort politically and financially, the Union was not an abstract ideal to be valued in itself. It was, and had always been, a speculative enterprise serving those with the economic capital and political influence to control raw materials, production, markets, and labor." "Resources", whether in the south or west, were coveted to fuel the fledgling money-making machine of empire. The American Civil War pitted Native peoples against each other, against Confederates, and against Federals alike; outlined in detail in David Williams' A People's History of the Civil War.[18]

"[I]n those vast stretches of the West where there was no Confederate threat, Federal forces used [the Civil War] as an excuse to quicken the pace of killing Native Americans and driving the survivors from their homelands. In the eyes of most whites, those lands hardly belonged to the Indians in any case. Lincoln expressed typical imperialist assumptions when he noted that 'the natural resources...are unexhausted, and, as we believe, inexhaustible.' Western resources belonged to the nation––Lincoln's nation, not the Indians'––and Lincoln wanted those resources for his war effort. Businessmen wanted them for the profits they could bring. If Indians stood in the way, they were by definition threats to national security and obstacles to 'progress.' As such, they were subject to extermination."[19]

"Heathen" as well as Christian Indians were slaughtered "for God, for country, or whatever small plunder [might be taken]. Gold and Silver strikes in California, Colorado, Nevada, and the Pacific Northwest drove much...killing. So did the desire for timber, minerals, and transportation routes for mail carriers, stage lines and a proposed transcontinental railroad. Some tribes expressed a willingness to share their lands, realizing only too late that sharing was the last thing whites had in mind. What followed would be but the latest chapter in an old story of indigenous peoples struggling to survive the ravages of an aggressively expansive American empire. Remnants of Indian nations remaining east of the Mississippi River had long and bitter experience with white expansion. Most had been forced off their lands well before the Civil War era."[20]

"In 1862, after years of losing lands, being cheated by government agents, and suffering near starvation, the Santee Sioux of Minnesota rose in rebellion." Colonel Henry Sibley, with over sixteen hundred volunteers under his command, was tasked with putting down the Santee rebellion. "'It is my purpose,' Sibley's commander, General John Pope, wrote him, 'utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so and even if it requires a campaign lasting the whole of next year....They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made.' Pope's policy, with which Sibley fully agreed, ignored the fact that their own government's failure to meet treaty obligations had led to the violence."[21]

"On December 26, 1862, Rda-in-yank-ka and thirty-seven other Sioux braves were publicly hanged in Mankato...A release order for one of the executed Sioux, pardoned for saving a white woman's life, arrived in Mankato a day after the hangings. A short time later, authorities discovered that three other men had been hanged by mistake through a confusion of names." Essentially, all of the men hanged were prisoners of war who were tried and convicted by a military tribunal in sham trials. This December 26 will be the 150th anniversary of "the largest mass execution in American history."[22]

"Most newspaper editors encouraged the ethnic cleansing, calling repeatedly for the Indians––all Indians––to be utterly wiped out. Few offered any criticism, direct or implied, of the ongoing slaughter. One brave soul who did was twenty-three-year-old Bret Harte, editor of the Northern Californian in Union (later renamed Arcata). In February 1860, Harte ran a story entitled 'Indiscriminate Massacre of Indians––Women and Children Butchered.' It told how a village of sixty friendly Indians on Humboldt Bay had been hacked to death with axes and hatchets. Soon after, the residents of Union threatened Harte's life and ran him out of town."[23]

"On the morning of January 29 [1863], the village of nearly five hundred Shoshoni men, women, and children [in Southern Idaho] became a free-fire zone [for Colonel Patrick Connor and his men]. Leaving their horses in the rear, Connor's troopers surrounded the Indians and began shooting into their camp. Confusion and terror reigned among the Indians. Warriors rushed out to face their attackers. Women and children took shelter in Beaver Creek, a ravine that flowed through the camp. The overwhelmed warriors too were soon forced back to the ravine as soldiers swept through the camp destroying lodges and food supplies. When they reached the ravine, it quickly became a death trap. 'The carnage presented in the ravine was horrible,' wrote a reporter who accompanied the troops. 'Warrior piled on warrior, horses mangled and wounded in every conceivable form, with here and there a squaw and papoose, who had been accidentally killed.' In fact, the killing of women and children was not accidental. It was indiscriminate. The soldiers did not care who they killed as long as the victim was an Indian." Some 250, or upwards of 400 Shoshoni men, women, and children were killed in the Bear River Massacre.[24]

The Confederates were no less genocidal than the Federals when it came to savagery against Indians. In 1861, Lieutenant Colonel John R. Baylor was deemed territorial governor of the region "stretching from Texas to California."[25]

"[T]he region's Apaches and Navajos were on the warpath" already, so Baylor's regime of domination meant virtually nothing positive to them. "Hunger forced many to turn violent after Federal posts shut down, cutting off annuity payments for land they had been forced to give up." "Baylor responded with a declaration of extermination against all Indians, friendly or hostile. In an act of chemical warfare, Baylor had a sack of flour poisoned and distributed to local Indians during peace talks. Sixty died an agonizing death after accepting Baylor's gift. When he got word in March 1862 that a band of Apaches had approached the Confederate garrison at Tucson to talk peace, Baylor sent a message to the post commander" indicating how a nonexistent law of Indian extermination enacted by the Congress of the Confederate States was to be enforced. "[Y]ou will use all means to persuade the Apaches or any tribe to come in for the purpose of making peace, and when you get them together, kill all the grown Indians and take the children prisoners and sell them [as slaves] to defray the expense of killing the Indians."[26] Apparently, notwithstanding  a strong consensus in Richmond that it was preferable to kill all adult Indians, and enslave the children for the purpose of "civilizing" them through the "method" of slavery, Baylor's initiative was too extreme; not in substance and execution, but rather because of the fact that his policy of genocide was not official Confederate policy––he was soon thereafter removed from office by Jefferson Davis. The savagery against the Indians was assured when the Federals "pushed the Rebels out of New Mexico for good."[27] Under General James H. Carleton, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher 'Kit' Carson and his 1st New Mexico Regiment "occupied Fort Stanton and began sending out patrols. One detachment led by Captain James 'Paddy' Graydon came across a party of Mescaleros heading for Santa Fe. When one of the chiefs raised his open palm in a sign of peace, Graydon ordered his men to open fire. Twelve Mescaleros fell dead, including two chiefs and at least one woman. As the rest tried to flee, they were ridden down by Graydon's soldiers, who killed five more and wounded several others before the remaining survivors got away."[28] Among Carleton's, and the United States' many other crimes, he was responsible for the deaths of three thousand Navajos when they were forced to march some 400 miles "during the freezing winter of 1863-64" during what is known as "The Long Walk".[29]

"Leaving aside the obvious points which could be raised...by Blacks and Chicanos and Asian immigrants right here in North America––not to mention the Mexicans, the Nicaraguans, the Guatemalans, the Puerto Ricans, the Hawaiians, the Filipinos, the Samoans, the Tamarros of Guam, the Marshall Islanders, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Cubans, the Dominicans, the Grenadans, the Libyans, the Panamanians, the Iraqis, and a few dozen other peoples out there who've suffered American invasions and occupations first hand––there's a little matter of genocide that's got to be taken into account right here at home. I'm talking about the genocide which has been perpetrated against American Indians, a genocide that began the instant the first of Europe's boat people washed up on the beach of Turtle Island, a genocide that's continuing right now, at this moment. Against Indians, there's not a law the United States hasn't broken, not a Crime Against Humanity it hasn't committed, and it's still going on."[30]

In her Seminal 1994 work, My Name is Chellis & I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization, psychologist Chellis Glendinning expresses that "In 1492, an estimated fifteen million native people, many of them hunter-gatherers, inhabited the territory that is now the United States. Through slaughter, slavery, relocation, disease, and the demise of the buffalo, the total had diminished to 237,000 by 1900; today it is 1.9 million. In Africa the hunter-gatherer !Kung are being overrun by technological encroachment, private property, corporate development, and government projects. Deforestation in Borneo is destroying the habitat of the nomadic Penan. Ninety of Brazil's original 270 tribes have disappeared in the wake of economic development and the demise of the rainforest, while more than two-thirds of the remaining groups have populations of less than one thousand people each. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study by linguist Ken Hale estimates that of the world's six thousand native languages, only three hundred have a secure future."[31]

In a Little Matter of Genocide, Ward Churchill articulates that "During the four centuries spanning the time between 1492, when Christopher Columbus first set foot on the 'New World' of a Caribbean beach, and 1892, when the U.S. Census Bureau concluded that there were fewer than a quarter-million indigenous people surviving within the country's claimed boundaries, a hemispheric population estimated to have been as great as 125 million was reduced by something over 90 percent. The people died in their millions of being hacked apart with axes and swords, burned alive and trampled under horses, hunted as game and fed to dogs, shot, beaten, stabbed, scalped for bounty, hanged on meathooks and thrown over the sides of ships at sea, worked to death as slave laborers, intentionally starved and frozen to death during a multitude of instances, deliberately infected with epidemic diseases."[32]

"At the time of Columbus's arrival in North America, it is estimated that fifty-six people inhabited every fifty square miles along the California coast. In the Southwest the number of people for every fifty square miles was fourteen, while west of the Mississippi it was nine. The average number of people per square mile among all documented hunter-gatherer groups is one."[33]

"Some ten thousand years ago, when all human societies on the Earth were nature-based, global population was stabilized at 5 million people."[34]

"Democratic decision-making is likewise [along with a sustainable population] a common characteristic among nature-based communities. Because of ongoing face-to-face contact, as well as councils for decision-making in some communities, every member has the opportunity to talk things out, make suggestions, have them heard and participate in guiding the group." In stark contrast, the United States, and civilization generally, to put it mildly, is an extremely undemocratic "large-scale social organization...[with an] expanding population, division of labor, social hierarchy, and centralized governance."[35]

"The idea that democracy is practiced at its best by nature-based people flies in the face of our perception of these 'primitive' cultures. In particular, it flies in the face of our projections of the chieftains and medicine men we think run them; in nature-based communities chiefs are rarely the coercive, authoritarian rulers we assume them to be. Hierarchy is not particularly developed, crystallized, or needed."[36]

"In communities that do have designated leaders, they are chosen for the purpose of embodying clan, family, or tribal heritage. To honor them is not a sign of giving over power; it is an act of communal self-respect. Leadership may also be situational, with chiefs chosen for their skills as facilitators and teachers or for their knowledge of medicine, fishing, or ceremony. The Plains Indians of North America had literally dozens of chiefs, and depending on the season or the event, the degree of prominence accorded to each would shift. No chiefs were ever assured of their role for a lifetime either; they performed their duties for as long as they listened well, responded well, and retained full support. Western people wouldn't necessarily know this, of course, because historically we sought after and valued only the war chiefs."[37]

"It goes without saying that those who live in the wilds eat organic food, uncontaminated by chemical preservatives, pesticides, and other additives. Descriptions of the diets of nature-based peoples throughout the world reveal that they uniformly match the standards of the National Research Council of America for consumption of vitamins, minerals, and protein, while erosion of the quality of the nature-based diet consistently occurs when outsiders invade, bring in technological agriculture, cattle, or mining, and set up trade networks and outposts of civilization."[38]

"Also, because of their healthy diets, relaxed life-styles, and clean environs, nature-based people do not fall prey to such modern diseases as cancer, coronary heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes."[39]

"[N]ature-based people neither force the Earth to produce at maximum levels nor impose wholesale realignments of nature's rhythms and physical layout. A commitment to ecological sustainability was the ground upon which our humanity came into existence, and the sustainable life is inseparably intertwined with full participation in social life, democratic decision-making, self-esteem for both women and men, a relaxed approach to daily life, good food, and a stable population. The key seems to be that we humans can only survive on this planet only so long as our presence contributes to and meshes with the life of the Earth."[40]

"The witch-hunts began in the fifteenth century. Eventually hundreds of thousands of people––mostly women, mothers, and healers––would be hanged, drowned, or burned in town squares all across Europe for nothing more than seeing life from the old elliptical, nature-based perspective. The perpetrators of this atrocity were people whose psyches had already become so detached from life's sacred pulse that they were capable of enacting, and rationalizing, mass public murder. At the same time, across the sea, the slaughter of the indigenous peoples of the North American continent was launched, peoples whose blatant participation in the natural world defied the emerging European insistence on alienation."[41]

"South Dakota [has] proclaimed this day as Native American Day. And it is a day for observation, celebration and, you know, looking at the contributions that native people have made, not only in South Dakota, but in Minnesota and all around Indian Country. And that's what this day should be about."[42]

"I was in boarding schools when punishment was very severe if you ran away. This was during the early '40s. I was taken to a boarding school when I was four years old, and taken away from my mother and my father, my grandparents, who I stayed with most of the time, and just abruptly taken away and then put into the boarding school, 300 miles away from our home. [T]he beatings began immediately, the––almost the de-Indianizing program. It was a terrible experience that the American government was experimenting with. And that was trying to destroy the culture and the person, destroy the Indian-ness in him and save the human being...kill an Indian, save the man. That was, you know, the description of what this policy is about."[43]

"The U.S. government paid––of course, they ran a lot of the schools themselves, but they also delegated a lot of it to the Christians, Christian communities. The Catholics had some. The Episcopalians had some. The Lutherans had some. The Methodists had some. And so, it was like a complicit––there was complicity between the churches and the state in taking care of Indian problem, solving the Indian problem, and trying to change who we were."[44]

"[T]hey cut off all communication with your parents, and a lot of letters, which I found later in––I stayed there for six years without communicating to––with my parents at all...Of course, we couldn't speak the language. We could only speak English."[45]

"[T]his not only happened to people in North Dakota and South Dakota and Minnesota, but all across the country, thousands upon thousands of young students, Native students, were taken from their homes, and some were forcibly taken, some because of economic times allowed that to happen, but it was always taking them away from the parent, separate them from the parents for long periods of time, and which they did with me. And all of a sudden, I lost my family relationship with my mother. I lost that feeling with my mother, because I thought she abandoned me."[46]

"And it wasn't 'til almost just three years ago when my daughter was...in the depository records of Kansas City. And she called me, and she says, 'Dad, we found...your school records.' And I said, 'Bring them back.' So she brought them back, and I started looking at them. And she says, 'Dad, we also found something else.' She handed me a shoebox. And I opened up the shoebox, and those were letters, letters from my mother."[47]

"In a Dine creation story, the people were given a choice of two yellow powders. They chose the yellow dust of corn pollen, and were instructed to leave the other yellow powder––uranium––in the soil and never to dig it up. If it were taken from the ground, they were told, a great evil would come."[48]

"The evil came. Over one thousand uranium mines gouged the earth in the Dine Bikeyah, the land of the Navajo, during a thirty-year period beginning in the 1950s. It was the lethal nature of uranium mining that led the industry to the isolated lands of Native America. By the mid-1970s, there were 380 uranium leases on native land and only 4 on public or acquired lands. At that time, the industry and government were fully aware of the health impacts of uranium mining on workers, their families, and the land upon which their descendants would come to live. Unfortunately, few Navajo uranium miners were told of the risks. In the 1960s, the Department of Labor even provided the Kerr-McGee Corporation with support for hiring Navajo uranium miners, who were paid $1.62 an hour to work underground in the mine shafts with little or no ventilation."[49]

"All told, more than three thousand Navajos worked in uranium mines, often walking home in ore-covered clothes. The consequences were devastating. Thousands of uranium miners and their relatives lost their lives as a result of radioactive contamination. Many families are still seeking compensation. The Navajo Nation is still struggling to address the impact of abandoned uranium mines on the reservation, as well as the long-term health effects on both the miners and their communities, many of which suffer astronomical rates of cancer and birth defects."[50]

"In 2005, the Navajo Nation passed a moratorium on uranium mining in its territory and traditional lands, which was followed by similar moratoria on Hopi and Havasupai lands, where mines are proposed adjacent to the Grand Canyon. 'It is unconscionable to me that the federal government would consider allowing uranium mining to be restarted anywhere near the Navajo Nation when we are still suffering from previous mining activities,' Joe Shirley Jr., Navajo Nation president, explained at a congressional hearing on opening uranium mines in the Grand Canyon area."[51]

"[T]he Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act––promoted by oil companies that deemed it necessary to negotiate some agreements between themselves and aboriginal people––established Alaskan Native Corporations, which today create a complex set of divided loyalties and communities. This is perhaps best illustrated by the case of the Gwich'in people, who find themselves not only opposing oil companies that want to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but also Alaskan Native Corporations, whose income has derived from the exploitation of the land and its resources."[52]

"22 Years ago here in South Dakota, Republican Governor George Mickelson replaced Columbus Day with Native American Day. That makes this the only state that honors the indigenous people of this land, rather than honor the beginning of their attempted genocide."[53]

"I always felt proud that our state didn't honor someone who murdered, enslaved, and raped indigenous people. Considering that it was the beginning of genocide, this would be like putting a day aside to honor the memory of Hitler...for the role he played in the world."[54]

"[A]s Lakota people, we have all experienced racism in the state of South Dakota. Every single one of us, many times. My first time was when I was six years old and moving off the reservation. I was called horrible names, but survived. And that was only the beginning."[55]

"22 years after Governor Mickelson's proclamation of 'the year of reconciliation', have the race relations in this state improved? We all like to think they did. But then, it's hard to ignore an incident like the one that occurred a few weeks ago, at the South Dakota State University, where Native American students from in-state reservations were subjected to graffiti in a dormitory bathroom that read 'Prairie [sic] niggers, go back to the rez' (listing students' room numbers)."[56]

"This recent incident has not stopped the Native American students from attending the university, and it is being investigated as a hate crime. But it shows that some of our citizens clearly still have a long way to go in learning to accept the people who lived here before them."[57]

"Your ancestors came, and we all come from a people, and that's part of our identity. And so, my job is just to be the vessel that allows others, those peoples that were––their stories were hidden and erased and silenced on this one day, to share and embrace that."[58]

"You know, you definitely can embrace the pain and the genocide that has been our history and our foundation, and that is definitely a valid emotion, a valid, you know, almost reaction for indigenous people. And I think as you grow in awareness and maturity and are given opportunities to present, we have to go beyond that. And what I mean by that, individually we all go through our own healing. We don't have a healing process in this country called the United States. There is no platform, no medium, no expectation of that. And, you know, as tribal people, we've––that's been a part of our worldview, you know, just like Noel said, where, you know, we see everyone as coming from a tribe, whether they acknowledge it or not. And it's super important for us to start that healing process and then, as well, to talk about it and to guide other people around their own trauma, which it is an historical trauma. It's legitimate, and it is as valid as the pain where some people have no idea where it came from...to give articulation to that is so powerful."[59]