The Untaught History of Indigenous Resistance

A few months after the Bush-Cheney administration attempted to remove oil-rich Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez from power via a coup in June 2002, the much smaller and poorer Bolivia held its presidential elections amidst widespread protests against the privatization of the water supply, which was being sold to California-based firms. 

Ultimately, an American citizen of aristocratic stock — Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada — won the six-way presidential race with only 22% of the vote. His candidacy was orchestrated by the political consultancy firm Greenberg Carville Shrum, best known for having served the Clinton family since the early 1990s. Sánchez de Lozada’s term would last only 14 months before he fled to Miami. The continued privatization of the national water supply, hikes in the price of gas and crackdowns on subsistence farmers — particularly the cocaleros, or coca leaf growers — led to riots that forced him from power. 

The runner-up in the 2002 elections, labor organizer and leader of the Movement for Socialism Evo Morales, swept into power in 2005. Thus began a 13-year-long administration, which was, for the first time in the Andean country’s republican history, led by an Indigenous person. This was significant, especially in a state where a fourth of the population is fully Indigenous, while an additional two-thirds of the population is estimated to have some Indigenous blood. 

In addition to placing water and other key resources back under state control, the Morales administration focused on modest industrialization, land reform and public investment in healthcare, education and social transfer payments to the poorest citizens. His inclusive Indigenista movement has been widely studied by economists, labor leaders, sociologists and historians. 

Like any politician, Morales is a character you wouldn’t want to unconditionally support or condemn, as many have criticized his shaky ecological record, autocratic tendencies and troubling sexual misconduct allegations. Yet the movement he embodies is the successful culmination of more than 500 years of Indigenous resistance, Indigenous power, social welfare and alliance-building.

Since modern countries were formed in the Americas, there have hardly been any Indigenous heads of state. For generations, the “white man’s burden” framed how the so-called savages were viewed. Alternatively, in today’s curricula for most American jurisdictions, if Indigenous history is taught at all, it is viewed with pity or outright condescension. 

The narrative goes something like this: The white European — who learned how to survive thanks to the unsuspecting hosts — obliterated Indigenous people with guns, germs and steel. Following this, survivors were pushed onto reservations. Today, we honor their memory. 

At the undergraduate level, there’s a bit more depth. Students in the humanities and social sciences may have the opportunity to delve into past atrocities and ongoing injustices, although the institutions that permit the teaching of this subject matter tend to have a hardline view when it comes to continued expansionism, violent resource extraction and accelerated ethnic cleansing. From Alabama to Quebec, members of the Association of American Universities have long turned to corrupt and racist court systems to halt investigations into the desecration of unmarked Indigenous graves on property slated for redevelopment. 

Across Latin America, university systems have done a better job of considering the region’s Indigenous past and present. However, at the elementary and secondary level — educational systems that desperately need teachers and lack funding, critical infrastructure and more class time — the memorization of innumerable battles between Indigenous peoples, Spaniards and independence movements have been prioritized over a more comprehensive study of history. Some authorities — particularly those that govern Argentina — are also uncomfortable engaging in this history, given the more systematic ethnic cleansing that took place in Latin American countries that have enormous European populations, namely Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. 

The failure to examine a continuum of events and causes — therefore allowing students to look at isolated periods of time and relate them to the present — results in a kind of lip service being paid to the Indigenous roots of the Americas, without tangible action being taken to redress the horrors of slavery, mass rape, land theft and forced displacement. Some examples of this hypocrisy include Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., claiming Native American ancestry during her academic and legal career, or Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who — after declaring Canada’s first National Truth and Reconciliation Day — took a private jet to a surf vacation, skipping a meeting with elders at the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc first nation in British Columbia, where the unmarked graves of children had been discovered. Meanwhile, Trudeau’s Zionist donors released statements of reflection that carefully omitted the word “Indigenous.” 

Another case was that of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who demanded via letter in 2019 that Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez apologize for the crimes of Spanish colonialism. Meanwhile, during López Obrador’s administration that ended this year, Mexico saw the continued murder of Indigenous environmental defenders, as well as soaring femicide rates that disproportionately affected Indigenous women and girls. Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who coined the phrase “perfect dictatorship” to describe modern Mexico, quipped that López Obrador “should have sent the letter to himself.”       

There is a lack of respect for — and a lack of complexity surrounding — the Indigenous past, present and future of this hemisphere. At the same time, we grapple with the weaponization of past colonial injustices as a way to ignore or cover up present-day crimes. This is similar to how an eclectic array of Zionist and Zionist-aligned groups — evangelicals, Jewish supremacists, weapons contractors, anti-semitic world leaders — weaponize the Holocaust to justify the ongoing genocide in Gaza and wider ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians and Lebanese from their land. Vice President Kamala Harris has done this deftly, posing for photo-ops with tribal members and youth groups while her government sends the Israeli settler colonial project billions of dollars worth of bombs to carry out the largest massacre of children in recent memory. 

The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are often treated as mere interest groups to be courted for votes or as second-class citizens in need of policing. For instance, from 1867 until the mid-1990s, Canada’s national police operated as a militia, kidnapping hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children and placing them in the residential school system, where those overseeing the boarding program often raped, killed and tortured the children with impunity. Pierre Trudeau, who served as minister of justice and prime minister throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, oversaw many of these transfers. Now, his son, Justin — in office since 2015 — has sought votes from Aboriginal and First Nations peoples and alliances with their chiefs to guarantee his long, uninterrupted term. His apologetic rhetoric and reluctant cash transfers are not matched by his administration’s neglect of reserves and mistreatment of the environment where most Indigenous Canadians live.  

Canada is not an exceptional case. In most countries in the Americas, societies have functioned more or less as veritable police states for Indigenous communities. Death squads — financed and armed by the U.S. government — committed genocide against the Maya people in Guatemala. Across Panama, Brazil, Argentina and the state of Nevada, countless Indigenous communities have been forced off their land or have had their water poisoned to make room for copper and lithium mines that provide metals for the electric cars driven by prosperous, “green-conscious” consumers. 

The unacknowledged racism and profit incentives aren’t the only factors that ground the perverse ways governments have treated the descendants of the original inhabitants of the land or shape the frustrations felt by many Indigenous youth as they clash with their local authorities. Histories of ignorance are also to blame. The stunning absence of mainstream discussion and memory of half a millennia of Indigenous resistance has made room for condescending narratives, dehumanization and disrespect for an entire people’s capacity and resilience. In short, it has allowed myths to engulf us — and these myths are the beginnings of supremacy and violence. 

In his book, “Indigenous Continent,” Finnish historian Pekka Hämäläinen writes that, in literature and film, while the European colonization of the Americas is often portrayed as inevitable, with the Indigenous peoples “reduced to mere props,” the truth is that, during an approximately 400-year-long period, the native inhabitants of North and South America held off the colonizers. Despite not producing guns — and despite being ravaged by the diseases imported from a plagued Europe — the tribes and Indigenous empires of the Americas maintained brutal military capacity. 

The resistance that took place following the arrival of Columbus demonstrated that there were no guarantees regarding the defeat of the pueblos originarios. Among the hundreds of anecdotes that Hämäläinen offers is a story about the powerful white trader Andrew Myrick. In 1862, in the Minnesota Territory, German settlers encroached on the lands of the Dakota people, destroying their ability to hunt, fish and gather wild rice freely. Myrick held sway over the new arrivals. When some elders approached and asked him to intervene, he snorted about the Dakota people: “So far as I’m concerned, if they’re hungry, let them eat grass.” 

The Dakotas went to war. Myrick was their first target; his severed head was found, mouth filled with grass. 

The war was eventually lost against the settlers. But despite being well-fed and armed to the teeth, about 500 white soldiers were slaughtered. In retaliation, Major General John Pope went after the women and children, overseeing rapes and the construction of concentration camps. He declared that the Dakota people were “to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts,” language still employed by American and Israeli officials today.

This particularly gruesome brutality has long been lamented by several popular historians. But Hämäläinen argues that this carnage was a sign of weakness, not strength. The colonizers lived in perpetual fear of the native peoples; they didn’t know the terrain well, and, despite religious justifications made for the conquest, they understood that they were intruders. 

“Their slaughter of Native women and children, mutilation of Indian bodies, and a sheer hatred and rage shook the colonists’ view of themselves as civilized people,” Hämäläinen wrote. More often than not, the puritanical whites turned on each other, seeing the devil everywhere as they descended into savagery and madness. It’s not a coincidence that witch-hunts and burnings in the Americas often occurred just a few miles away from the Indigenous frontier. 

As nations like Bolivia offer a modern-day example of what it means to reassert the roots of a territory while simultaneously opting for racial inclusivity, U.S. leadership and its Canadian and European partners continue to slide deeper into savagery. Beyond the casual, resource-hungry cruelty directed toward populations in rural Latin America and Africa, this is demonstrated most viscerally by the carpet-bombing of refugee populations in Lebanon and Occupied Palestine. Lebanese and Palestinian people continue to be displaced from their land by settlers who, like the shock troops of any colonial project, employ rape and torture with ease. 

The Palestinian story, through the reports of countless Palestinians on the ground and in exile, is being told in real-time, in a chronicle of genocide. Before them, there were pure scholars, like Edward Said and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod; pure fighters, like Yasser Arafat and George Habash; and even warrior-writers, such as the poet Ghassan Kanafani. Peaceful protest, the written word, as well as armed resistance have all gone hand-in-hand, struggling at the margins of a homeland that continues to be eaten away at by Zionist settlers, armed and funded by the governments of the U.S., Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France and by wealthy Jewish supremacist families possessed by a fanatical search for colonial dominance.

The history has been told the world over, and the present continues to be tirelessly documented. It is only absent from legacy outlets and institutions that are frightened by the Indigenous reality that continues to unfold. There are no myths here: the most technologically devastating manifestation of settler colonialism is being broadcast live. 

In the Americas, on the other hand, Indigenous history is often viewed as complete — complete and tragic. Nothing more. This is to the great relief of our rulers. Land acknowledgments are often tossed around by the same institutions that are heavily invested in weapons and mining companies — the same firms that continue to massacre and displace Indigenous peoples. These performative words are not history lessons; they flourish a poisonous myth that denies long centuries of fierce resistance, frequent triumph and modern-day revival. 

How does a society combat the romance of empire, the delusion of greatness? Suppose we removed the statues of European colonizers in Montreal; Washington, D.C.; Mexico City; Lima, Peru; and Kinshasa, Congo, and replaced them with freedom fighters or with deceased chiefs who may have enslaved other tribes. Would it make any difference in this instant world where little lasts? Hardly anyone notices the statues anymore, if they ever did. Many American states honor Confederate generals and slaveowners, even when the mayors of the cities that display them are often descendants of slaves. The little monuments have become quaint decorations. 

While looking at these statues as an Indigenous person in Peru or as a Black person in America can cause pain, the truth is that, on most days, these statues are relics. They mean nothing. They are merely the fixtures of an old system, a tired history. When we take down a statue of Francisco Pizarro from a prominent place in downtown Lim, and if we carefully replace him with an Indigenous figure from our post-conquest history who led revolts and never owned slaves, it enthralls the newspapers and amuses schoolchildren on a field trip for a few days, at least. Maybe even weeks. But then? 

If we truly wish to acknowledge that time is real, we do not need to devote ourselves to facades of stone and iron, which crumble and rust. We can instead try to tell each other and those who will inherit all of this when we are gone a long story of resistance. We can be less afraid to speak up for those fighting that same battle for liberation all these years later. 

Rather than trying to remember the name and date of a battle or emptily regretting the loss of life in another world, we can maybe spend some time making sure — in the Andes, in Palestine — that the struggle for dignity continues. The new masters of the Earth aren’t allowed to drain away our water, burn our children and leave us with nothing.