Another World Is Possible

Editor's Note: This piece is an excerpt from Rebecca Solnit's new book, 'Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities,' published by Nation Books.

The law of unexpected consequences prevails so frequently that perhaps it should not be so unexpected. For example, Laura Bush's attempt early last year to hold a symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice" while her husband was planning to saturation-bomb Baghdad so appalled poet, publisher and symposium invitee Sam Hamill that he circulated a letter of outrage to Ms. Bush; his e-mail box filled up; he started poetsagainstthewar.org, to which more than ten thousand poets submitted poems; and so he became a major spokesperson against the war and an organizer of antiwar poets. Laura Bush's symposium was cancelled. In much the same way, the plans to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's crash into the Americas were overwhelmed by opposition to that celebration. Indigenous people throughout the western hemisphere used the occasion -- not just a single day, but a discussion that began long before and continues yet -- to assert their own history of the Americas, as a place that was not discovered but invaded. Invaded but not quite conquered, for though much was lost, the Quincentennial was an occasion for many native groups to assert that they are still here, that they remember, and that this history is not over.

Thus the Quincentennial became an occasion for many nonnatives to relearn the genocidal history of the Americas and sometimes address those parts of the history still with us -- questions of sovereignty, visibility, representation, reparation, and land rights, among other things. Thus, remembering the past became the grounds to make changes in the present. Thus, culture becomes politics. In the end, the day did not commemorate the start of an era but marked in some subtle way the beginning of its end.

After the Second World War, one of the programs to dissolve Native Americans' identity, diffuse their power and detach them from their land base involved resettling them in the cities to assimilate. For many, cities instead gave them access to new resources and information and fostered intertribal political alliances. Out of this, in Minneapolis, came the American Indian Movement, AIM, in 1968 (and out, as well, of the hope for justice and the tactics for achieving it offered by the Civil Rights Movement and out of the carnival of the later 1960s). Out of an AIM conference in 1974 came the International Indian Treaty Council. In 1977, the Treaty Council went to the United Nations, where it became the first indigenous organization to apply for and receive non-governmental -- NGO -- status. So you can trace the Quincentennial back to 1974, or 1968, or for that matter 1492, along a zigzag trail of encounters, reactions, and realizations.

Treaty Council activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was at the UN General Assembly in 1980 when Spain proposed that 1992 be declared the "year of encounter of civilizations" and "it was the most amazing thing -- every African government representative stood up and walked out, so I walked out. They were not thinking about indigenous people, but this was the onset of slavery and they sure knew that." South Africa's African National Congress and African NGOs would prove important allies for the UN-based struggle for indigenous rights. Spain had planted the idea of the quincentennial of Columbus's arrival, but indigenous-rights activists would reshape it into an antithesis of Spain's agenda.

"We never got one single line of media attention," says Dunbar-Ortiz of the early years. Getting the word out was "just really hard work" carried out by speakers traveling to reservations, groups, and conferences, and by publishing a newsletter put together by the poet Simon Ortiz, among others. Word spread, and ideas began to shift. Dunbar-Ortiz told me, "It is exactly what gives you hope when you see this happen -- when you see how hungry people are for the truth. When it is offered to them, they seize it." Truth has been at least as important as law in the shift of status of indigenous Americans, for even the legal gains seem to be built on a foundation of changed imagination and rewritten history. Columbus Day became an occasion to rethink the past, and rethinking the past opened the way to a different future.