It was the experience of apocalypse, not just the fear of it, that my ancestors faced. On Turtle Island, the name many Indigenous nations give to North America, the apocalypse began its inexorable consuming of our Indigenous way of life from the moment European settlers reached our shores. Our people died from a host of diseases for which they had no immunity or cure. The Mayflower was a plague ship. It, and countless others like it, brought smallpox, measles, and influenza--diseases we had never known before that wiped out whole communities to the last person.
At the same time European colonialism, with it rapacious hunger for our land brought war and destruction upon us no matter how many peace treaties we signed. Whatever we gave, it was never enough. Many of us were forced onto death marches, like the Trail of Tears, that claimed the lives of thousands of people, especially our elders and infants.
Over time, our children were taken from us. They were taken to boarding schools where they suffered physical and sexual abuse. They were forbidden to speak their language or wear their cultural styles of hair or clothing. The animals on which we relied for good were systematically slaughtered and left to rot. Racism made us objects of derision and scapegoating. Even our ways of prayer and worship were outlawed. We were left in poverty and isolation, with the expectation that our genocide would soon be complete.
If you wanted to find an experiential example of an apocalypse, you would be hard pressed to find one more total than what North America's Indigenous civilization confronted for more than four hundred years. If apocalypse means cataclysmic destruction--in essence, an end of the world--my ancestors went through it.
But they did not all die. They did not become victims of genocide. They did not disappear. They survived. Even if only as a remnant of what once had been, they came through the nightmare to live another day.
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