Advocacy Note: Thoughts on a (Not) Empty Land, Part 1
From the 1940s to the 1960s, the Western, in films and TV series, dominated screens across the U.S. Especially after World War II, Westerns seemed ubiquitous, and the saga of how the West was 'won' helped build the popular perception of our national identity. Growing up in those decades, I absorbed the media’s premise of empty, wild lands ready for a people to bring progress and a love of liberty. That empty land was ready for ranchers and railroads, farmers and loggers, miners and municipalities. As I watched those shows, I took in scenes of brave pioneers crossing the Great Plains in covered wagons, heading west despite danger from the 'Indians.' My heart raced as bands of fierce warriors suddenly appeared atop a ridge, ready to swoop down on the wagon trains below.
I never thought to ask why the people on the ridge tops might be resisting the white settlers' westward movement—or even if events had actually unfolded as shown on the screen. My education unfortunately reinforced what I learned from the media: that the western half of North America was largely unpopulated and that white settlers were simply coming to tame an empty land and bring civilization to the few primitive societies they encountered. The reality was different.
I hadn't yet learned of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that pushed Indigenous societies westward, displacing them far from their homelands. I hadn't yet read historical accounts that offered different scenes than the movies did. For example, in 1846, Methodist minister A. B. Meachem watched the Meskwaki people being removed from their beloved home in Iowa to be forced hundreds of miles west to Kansas. He wrote: “Who shall ever recount the sorrows and anguish of these people, while they formed in line of march, and turned their eyes for the last time upon the scenes that had been all the world to them.”1 Even when Indigenous nations accommodated the U.S. government and moved west peacefully, the settlers kept coming. The U.S. military also came to help secure the settlements—presented as the heroic cavalry in Western films.
I didn’t yet know that the reservations onto which the Indigenous people were eventually placed didn’t belong to them but were held in trust by the U.S. government. I didn’t know that situations can happen on reservations against the Indigenous people’s will—like the building of the Poston Internment Camp on the Colorado Indian Tribes Reservation near Yuma, Arizona, to detain Japanese Americans during World War II. The tribes protested, not wanting reservation land to host such a painful project, but they lacked legal power to assert their will.
I didn’t yet know about the U.S. government's Termination policy, lasting from the 1940s to the 1960s. The policy meant to end tribal sovereignty and the trust lands relationship. It meant to force Indigenous people to give up their cultures and assimilate. Once lands were allotted to individual Indigenous people and no longer held communally, the way was paved for development on what once were reservation lands. The idea was sold as progress. Finally, in the mid-1960s, President Lyndon Johnson stopped enabling the Termination policy, and President Richard Nixon officially ended it, stating that, in his judgment, it was wrong.
Sarah Augustine, a Mennonite of Tewa heritage, is a cofounder of a coalition called Dismantling of the Doctrine of Discovery. She helps fellow people of faith reframe the settler narrative. She widens the frame so that we see not only the Euro-American perspective but that of Native peoples too. Then, she asks us to advocate. In her book, The Land Is Not Empty: Following Jesus in Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery, she cites the Prophets and Jesus to remind us "...that God’s people are responsible for more than their individual sins..." We must address our societal transgressions, too. Together, we can explore how, as people of the ELCA, we can continue our own work toward Truth and Healing with our Indigenous siblings.
Judy Messal