in alien forms we refuse to recognize. And we can afford less and less to think of these social spaces, to imagine the languages of their protest, for such imagining would keep us . . . in continual contradiction with ourselves.”60 The result, he observes, is that “we talk to ourselves about ourselves, believing in a grand hallucination that we are talking with others.”61
Silent Spaces
We turn now to some of the silent spaces in the master(’s) narrative, the voids that “raise the most profound questions.”62 There are many for whom the hegemonic American narrative rings hollow, their experiences irreconcilable with its storyline of ever-expanding prosperity. The “progress” promised by the civil rights era—the abolition of legalized apartheid, the temporary expansion of social welfare and affirmative action programs, the purported recognition of American Indians’ right to self-determination—brought a degree of material benefit to many individuals. But the disparities and exclusions have persisted, leaving people of color collectively no better off, no more secure, than we were. The dominant narrative neither adequately accounts for this reality nor provides effective remedial options, and the exclusion of the perspectives of subjugated peoples makes it almost impossible to have meaningful dialogue across racial, ethnic, or class lines.
The Violence of Colonization
The lived realities of Indigenous peoples and others who, as a rule, have been excluded from the settler class are notably absent from the master narrative. While the specifics of their experiences differ widely, the most consistent shared theme may be the violence visited upon them as a means of achieving the colonizers’ objectives; a violence that always seems to be minimized, distorted, or erased by the silent spaces of the dominant narrative. This warrants emphasis as we think about social transformation because maintaining the status quo is almost inevitably portrayed as a nonviolent—usually, the nonviolent—option; the violence inherent to constructing and preserving that status quo is rarely acknowledged.
American history as disseminated through the popular media and public education generally provides a highly sanitized version of the exploitation of Indigenous peoples, persons of African descent, externally colonized peoples, and certain immigrant groups. As a result, the violence attending such exploitation becomes invisible. Thus, for example, American Indians are typically depicted as “inadvertently” being killed by disease or miraculously “vanishing.” When violence on the part of the colonizers is admitted at all, it is almost invariably characterized as individual or collective self-defense.63
The horrors of enslavement endured—and resisted—by African as well as American Indian peoples for several centuries are collapsed into a sidebar, the main story of slavery being the conflicts it engendered within the settler class and their eventual (triumphal) resolution. Several hundred years of slavery and economic exploitation, exclusions from citizenship or political participation, and legalized apartheid are depicted as passing phases in the gradual extension of democratic rights to White women and to people of color.64 To the extent that violence in the interest of racialized repression is admitted, the mainstream narrative relegates it to a past for which no one is today responsible.65 And the violence faced by people on a daily basis as a result of their (perceived) race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion is continuously dismissed as anomalous.66
The legitimacy of acquiring Indigenous lands in violation of treaties, by aggressive warfare, or through agreements with other colonial powers is never seriously questioned, for the narrative begins from the premise that the United States was divinely ordained to exist in its current form. The seizure of northern Mexico in 1848, the “purchase” of Alaska in 1868, the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i in 1893 and its subsequent annexation, the colonization of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines beginning in 1898—these are just color-coded building blocks on the map of US territorial expansion, evidence of the settlers’ “manifest destiny.”67 Neither the violence entailed in these invasions nor their consistently questionable legal rationales are acknowledged. In essence, all the United States’ wars have been “good” wars, enabling its territorial consolidation as well as its rise to global power and influence. The underlying realities cannot be interrogated for fear of exposing the conflict between the means used and the “ideals of justice, political representation, and opportunity” central to the settlers’ justification for the establishment and maintenance of “their” country.68
All of this is important to understanding where we are, collectively, and how we got here. But if we want to develop liberatory visions of the future, we will need to look beyond the silent spaces of the narrative that is being told to the narratives that are not being told. This means making the effort to understand what was here before the colonizers arrived and opening our minds to the fact that there are many perspectives from which the world around us, and all of our relationships, can be and is understood.
Indigenous Worlds
The master narrative cannot accurately recognize the myriad Indigenous cultures that long predated the colonization of this continent, because doing so would disrupt its story of linear progress, discredit its “civilizing mission,” and expose the crude motivations underlying the racialization of American Indians and, subsequently, other peoples of color. To justify the United States’ very existence, as well as the wealth and power it has derived by appropriating Indigenous lands and resources, the settler narrative contends, implicitly or explicitly, that this was, or might as well have been, uninhabited land.69 As we question the prevailing paradigm and consider more liberatory options, it is particularly important to address this “silent space.” This is not because returning to a precolonial past is an option but because there is much it can teach us about human relations, forms of social and political organization, and ways of relating to other societies and the natural world outside the colonial paradigm. These insights, in turn, undermine the narrative’s disempowering message that what we see, here and now, is the best of all possible worlds.
We can start by noting that as of the fifteenth century, “most likely, over 100 million inhabitants who spoke at least 1000 languages inhabited the Americas”70 and, prior to the European invasion, some fifteen million people probably lived in what is now the continental United States and Canada.71 Indigenous narratives are rooted in epistemologies very different from those of the colonial powers, and generally begin with origin stories. None support the settlers’ assertion that American Indians walked from Siberia to North America some fifteen thousand years ago, a story that conveniently sets the stage for settler claims that Indigenous peoples are really just immigrants, too. Thus, for example, Hopi history incorporates the destruction of their lands by volcanic fire, flooding, and ice, events that geologists correlate to floods as well as glacial and volcanic activity that took place twenty-five thousand or more years ago.72 In other accounts, the People emerged from worlds beneath this one, or came from the sky when the earth was still covered with water.73 Many peoples trace their origins to specific geographic sites, such as the Lakotas’ understanding of their emergence from Wind Cave in the Black Hills;74 others tell of traveling great distances, “listen[ing] to the Earth” in order to find where they were supposed to be.75
Whatever their particularities, Indigenous “origin stories connect the People to the land.”76 Their cultures, histories, and identities are usually rooted in a given location—defined, perhaps, by particular mountains or rivers—and they are correspondingly responsible for ensuring the well-being of these nonhuman relatives. As Cree attorney Sharon Venne notes, “Every indigenous ‘legal code’ devolves upon . . . requirements that humans shoulder an individual/collective responsibility to preserve the balance of the natural order.”77
This approach allowed the Indigenous peoples of the Americas to develop complex cosmologies and cultures, sophisticated systems of agricultural production, and extensive networks of trade and communication that survived for millennia.78 American Indian scholars John Mohawk
