Indigenous Lands
image credit: Marc Toso, AncientSkys
As a candidate for Congress in Utah’s 3rd Congressional District, I unquestionably support the legal preservation of Bears Ears National Monument and the reversal of President Donald Trump’s 2017 presidential proclamation because;
The sustainable living in Salt Lake and Utah Counties enjoyed by families and communities of Goshute, Paiute, Shoshone, and Ute peoples predates American-Immigrant colonization, when loved homelands, lives, and resources were taken by Christian pioneers. These populous counties are Indigenous lands, as are all other counties of the Utah 3rd Congressional District, with large regions ancestrally populated by Ute, Navajo, and Ancestral Pueblo people.
Because awareness is the seed of responsibility, I ask all citizens of Utah to join me in acknowledging the communities of these and other First peoples who call the modern State of Utah and these United States their home, acknowledging their elders both past and present, as well as future generations. As a candidate for the U.S. Congress, I acknowledge that this nation was founded upon exclusions and erasures of Indigenous peoples. This acknowledgement demonstrates a commitment to beginning the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.
Recognizing and addressing the foundational racial structures in our country is necessary to heal our past and to pursue racial justice, which has not yet been actualized in this country built on White supremacy. The colonies of 1776 and this united nation of people like me were built on diseases of “civilization”, including:
- enclosure and indentured servitude
- genocide of Indigenous people and appropriation of Indigenous lands
- chattel slavery and the Atlantic slave trade
- discursive construction of White race and supremacy
Colonial powers have disrupted life for the Indigenous people of modern Utah for over 400 years. Despite a history of colonial violence and impoverishment, it was not until the Euro–American settlement of Deseret (Utah) territory that dispossession of lands was carried forward with devastating effect — beginning in 1850, when members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints signed and carried out an Extermination Order against the Ute majority in Utah Valley, killing dozens and savagely beheading many corpses postmortem. This violence is not unique to Utah settlement — it is property of all U.S. occupied lands — but the past is obscure, and it’s more comfortable for White men like me to forget these histories. All is not well and histories covey responsibility.
“Just as surely as the needles that grow from Old Survivor are connected to its ancient roots, the present grows out of the past.”
Jenny Odell
Reproductions of violence — like persecuted pilgrims waging war against their New World hosts in King Philip’s War or Extermination Orders being employed by Christian populations driven out of Missouri with the same — tarnish our history. This cyclical violence and systemic oppression of racialized minorities continues in the 21st century with the War on Drugs and internment on the southern border.
“American exceptionalism is the coping mechanism for a nation in denial of its genocidal past as well as its current racist reality. … The mythology of American exceptionalism is rooted in the lie of white supremacy, and because the white supremacy props up land titles it is a bi-partisan value.”
Mark Charles, 2020 Presidential Candidate
Without recognizing the fundamental injustices of appropriation of Indigenous lands, from 13th–19th century Enclosure to 21st century Blockadia, we cannot fix the problems that will soon burn out our fossil fueled burst of economic flame. [watch me publicly raise the issue of White supremacy with John Curtis]