Off the reservation
Minneapolis and ICE
Thank you for your patience.
As quickly as our world has been turning, with the constant whiplash of breaking news alerts sideswiping us, I have been dormant. Trying to catch my breath. Trying to grasp at sunlight as my personal darkness creeps in.
On the ancestral homelands of the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota in what is now called Minnesota, my Native relatives have been racially targeted, brutalized, and detained by ICE. This is an echo of a history not distant for our people.
Go back to the reservation. You are not welcome here.
Colonization relied on the policing of Native people. Indian Agents representing the Bureau of Indian Affairs controlled our populations by policing our bodies, restricting movement off reservations, controlling access to food, allowing government rations to rot when Native people resisted, and maintaining detailed lists of those they oversaw.
Our people were not allowed to leave. When rations were withheld and starvation set in, hunting beyond colonial borders was forbidden. If someone did leave, they were hunted down, bounties placed on their heads for defying oppressive power.
Today, we are witnessing something hauntingly familiar. Native people are being reminded of a truth we hoped was behind us: Indigenous people are not welcome in this settler-colonial project. Yes, we are citizens of the United States, but citizenship does not necessarily align with the goals of the current administration. We share strikingly similar features with our Indigenous relatives south of the Mexican border, a living reminder that this country exists on Native land. And because of that reminder, Native people are pushed aside, targeted, and removed.
We are a direct contradiction to the myths that uphold white nationalist thought, that this country was God’s gift to them, a home of justice, honor, and equality.
That is why we must keep fighting.