I’ve spent the last few years devouring Soviet history. Books, papers, blog posts, podcasts, all of it. I can’t get enough. Not to brag, but I do feel as though I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding about the USSR, its history, and eventual collapse. But I’ve also put the work in.
And yet, whenever I engage people I know IRL or online, I’m amazed by how doggedly people will defend what they just inherently “know”: that the Soviet Union was an evil totalitarian authority dictatorship that killed 100 million of its own people and eventually collapsed because communism never works. None of these people (at least the people I know IRL) have learned anything about Soviet history beyond maybe a couple days of lectures and a textbook chapter in high school history classes. Like, I get that this is the narrative that nearly every American holds in their heads. The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
This isn’t about me, I’m just sharing my experience with this. I’m just amazed at how Americans will be completely ignorant about a topic (not just the USSR) but will be utterly convinced their views on that topic are correct, despite their own lack of investigation into that topic. This is the same country where tens of millions of people think dinosaurs and humans walked around together and will not listen to what any “scientist” has to say about it, after all.
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Forced relocation, residential schools, starvation, contaminated blankets, bounties and U.S. Cavalry troops may have been replaced by police shootings, incarceration, desecration of reserve lands, foster care, lack of infrastructure and services, and poverty as the tools of ethnic cleansing, but I argue the genocide continues today.
They’re the smallest racial group at just 8 percent of the population but are the most likely to be killed by police at 1.9 percent of all police killings. They are also incarcerated at a rate 38% higher than the national average and victims of violent crime at more than double the rate of all other citizens, with 88 percent of those crimes being committed against women by non-indigenous peoples. Young people are 30 percent more likely than whites to be referred to juvenile court than have charges dropped, and children are removed from their homes by state social service agencies at a far higher rate than other children.
Obviously you probably know all of this so I’m writing it for the benefit of others. I don’t think you gain at all by accepting the narrative that they’ve stopped. Changing methods doesn’t mean it stopped. You’re entitled to think otherwise but I really don’t think you should soften your language on it, you lose out by doing so and you absolutely deserve better.
congrats on shacking up with a well off native from a well off native family, but their experience is not universal to their people nor is it universal to all the nations in the US. there is no chance you are operating in good faith by extrapolating one person’s claimed experience into the reality of indigenous life in the US today.
i have worked with and developed friendships with individuals and families on the largest reservation (by size and population) in the US. young men, younger than me, were physically abused in school by their white public school teachers for speaking their native language and told it was the devil’s language. in the fucking 2000s.
none of that gets into the absolute disregard for missing and murdered native women by settler law enforcement. or the ongoing resource theft of settler governments prevent natives from their water rights.
so yes, it is happening today.