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Miles Morrisseau
ICT
Award-winning journalist and teacher Dan David, the first news director of APTN in Canada and an agent of change in post-apartheid South Africa, died Jan. 12 following a long illness. He was 73.
David, Mohawk from Kanehsatà:ke, is being remembered as one of Canada’s most impactful Indigenous journalists, including his work in 2000 helping launch the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, the world’s first all-Indigenous national television network.
“He changed the course of Canadian history, and I say that because there was no Facebook and there was no Twitter or anything like that when we started, and people in one community to another didn’t have a way of speaking to each other,” said Karyn Pugliese, a Pikwakinagin First Nation journalist, who was part of that fledging newsroom and returned to APTN recently as host and producer of “Face to Face.”
“We did a lot of stories that showed that people weren’t alone,” Pugliese told ICT. “They think something’s only happening in their community, and then they realize, ‘Wait a second, it’s not just my daughter that’s missing. There’s a lot of missing women out there.’”
Jim Compton, Keeseekoose First Nation, was program director at APTN when the network launched, and he worked closely with David in developing the news department.
“Dan David and I spoke in a blog recently on the launch of APTN,” Compton said. “We had not talked for quite a while. But I’ll never forget the times we had launching APTN News and the network.
“Every day we would ask each other, ‘Wonder what fresh hell awaits us today?’ There was always something to be handled with whatever diplomacy we could muster,” he said. “At the time, we were living the dream of creating a national network with a flagship news department covering news from coast to coast. Rest in Peace, my friend.”
A personal view
Dan David had a knowing smile.
It wasn’t that he was supercilious, it was that he appreciated ideas and opinions and he wanted to know what you really thought. We connected for the first time when we met at CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
I was working for “Sunday Morning,” CBC Radio’s flagship documentary program, and he was the national Native Affairs broadcaster for the corporation, a job I would take over after he left for greener pastures.
We were the only two Indigenous people at CBC in Toronto, including radio and television, but he was the first. We both attended the journalism program for Native Peoples at Western University in London, Ontario. He graduated in 1981 and I graduated in 1985.
Journalist Dan David, right, seen here with Karyn Pugliese and Duncan McCue, was honored for his contributions to Indigenous journalism, including as a co-recipient of the Charles Bury Award in 2023. Credit: Photo via APTN
Dan enjoyed laughing at the absurdity of situations and at the same time taking them deadly seriously. It was a dichotomy that I came to understand more as I spent time listening to elders of various nations. I began to see that laughter was an essential component of resiliency. The elders who really connected could bring you down with some hard truths and then lift you up with an unexpected joke.
Sometimes you need to say something unexpected or inappropriate to the moment just to break free of the yoke of oppression.
During one of the most fraught moments in modern Canadian history, Dan and I took to the airwaves of Kanehsatake and acted like fools. Dan was from Kanehsatake and was living at home when the Sûreté du Québec , the province’s police force, raided the community with intent to take down a barricade that was halting the construction of a golf course. What followed was the longest armed standoff in Canadian history.
Sent to cover the story by CBC, I crossed the Lake of Two Mountains with a small group of people who were smuggling food and medicine into the community. The people were under siege and we had insulin for diabetics and other medications and supplies.
I contacted Dan and he took me to the family home and let me sleep on the couch. I would spend much of the evenings at the local rez radio station, and one night Dan asked if I wanted to get on the air with him and we started to do a show together. We both figured it would not be a good idea to use my real name and so Dan dubbed me Hank, after Hank Williams and my love for classic country music.
We joked around, talking music and making bad jokes and puns, entertaining ourselves and hopefully entertaining the people in the community living under siege and the warriors at the barricades and checkpoints around the community.
Dan had told me that we were not going to talk about the events of the day, an update on the negotiations or anything like that. The people were living the story and they didn’t need anything more than a respite from the stress of the day.
Indigenous identity
In addition to his work in Canada, David is remembered for the work he did in South Africa turning the state-run apartheid media into a news service that served all the people. In a tribute published by the South African Broadcasting Corporation, Davdi’s significant impact was acknowledged.
“Danny has been an important part of my life. As his spirit departs, the gap he leaves behind is tangible, almost unbearable,” wrote Sylvia Vollenhoven, former executive producer at SABC-TV. “Hamba Kahle Comrade Thaioronióhte Dan David. Thank you for the lessons, the laughter, and the love you left in your wake. You taught us to listen more carefully, to travel with courage, and to meet adversity without losing gentleness. We will carry your stories forward.”
David was born June 2, 1952, in Syracuse, New York, but his family moved to Kanehsatà:ke Mohawk territory when he was four to help care for his mother’s parents.
After attending the Native journalism program at Western University, he went to work for CBC Radio, then produced for TVOntario and VISION TV. He also served as chair of diversity at Toronto Metropolitan University, taught at the University of Toronto and provided training through Journalists for Human Rights, according to APTN.
In addition to his work in South Africa, he also worked to train journalists in Indonesia and Azerbaijan.
David wrote an essay about Indigenous identity that means as much today as when it was published in 2012 for the online magazine Open Canada.
“Identifying myself as a citizen of my Indigenous nation should be enough,” he wrote. “After all, who gave a foreign, faraway king the right to declare non-existent my peoples’ governments, laws and institutions simply by planting a damn flag? We had civilizations, religions and science. These I know to be self-evident and true. But, oh Canada, none of that mattered, because you have done a grand job of whitewashing my peoples out of your history.”
One of Canada’s most accomplished playwrights, Drew Hayden Taylor, Curve Lake First Nation, was David’s longtime friend.
“I was privileged to have known Dan David for a number of decades,” Taylor said. “As an up-and-coming writer, our conversations were inspiring and educational. He had the background many of us could only imagine — running the journalism division at the fledgling APTN, working in South Africa to help train the new generation of reporters in an essentially new country. I saw him more as a friend than a colleague.”
Taylor said they shared “innumerable dinner parties.”
“He was an amazing cook. I watched him make pasta from scratch once, with far too much wine,” Taylor said. “Hanging out with friends at his place in wintery Quebec, talking about stories in all their many forms. During the last few years, we kind of drifted apart, as can sometimes happen with friends, but every time I think of him, I smile and laugh. Dan was a proud journalist, a proud Mohawk, and the kind of friend everybody should have.”
In 2021, David received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Journalist Federation,the first Indigenous journalist to receive the prestigious award.
“Dan David was a trailblazer whose vision fundamentally changed the landscape of Canadian journalism,” Natalie Turvey, the federation’s president and executive director told ICT.
“We recognized his remarkable career and his profound understanding that journalism advances reconciliation,” Turvey said. “By launching APTN’s news service, Dan created space for Indigenous voices to tell their own stories. He didn’t just build a newsroom; he built pathways for Indigenous journalists, training and mentoring a generation of storytellers who continue to shape our national conversation.”
Turvey noted his commitment to journalism as a force for justice, including his transformative work in South Africa.
“He saw the universal power of truthful storytelling to strengthen democracy,” Turvey said. “At the CJF, we are grateful for Dan’s legacy and the standard he set. His life’s work reminds us that excellence in journalism means ensuring all communities can see themselves reflected in the stories that shape our nation. Our deepest condolences to Dan’s family, friends, and the many journalists whose lives he touched.”
The post OBITUARY: Award-winning Mohawk journalist Dan David lauded as ‘trailblazer’ appeared first on ICT.
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Anita Hofschneider*Grist*
Russian authorities have detained an Indigenous climate advocate, accusing her of participating in a terrorist organization in what international observers are calling “retribution” for her United Nations advocacy on behalf of Indigenous peoples.
Daria Egereva, an Indigenous Selkup woman from the city of Tomsk in western Siberia, has been involved in international advocacy at the United Nations for several years and has been a co-chair of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change since 2023 — an official forum that facilitates the participation of Indigenous peoples in U.N. meetings and gatherings, including the annual Conference of the Parties climate change conventions, also known as COP. During COP30 in Brazil, Egereva advocated for the inclusion of Indigenous women in climate negotiations. “If we don’t protect women, we don’t have a future,” she said in a video published on social media on November 21.
In addition to her work at COP, Egereva advocated for better inclusion of Indigenous peoples at the United Nations and researched the effects of the green transition on Indigenous communities. “The transition to a green economy without an appropriate framework or with disregard for the rights of Indigenous peoples will continue to result in historical injustices, marginalization, discrimination, and dispossession of their lands and resources,” she wrote in a 2024 report that criticized the lack of inclusion of Indigenous peoples in the green transition.
According to the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change, on December 17, Russian authorities searched Egereva’s home, confiscated her digital devices, and arrested her, in what the organization called “a direct retaliation for her Indigenous rights advocacy,” which included her work at COP30.
“These reprisals are part of a broader pattern of repression affecting Indigenous peoples across the globe, and are an unacceptable attack on the right of Indigenous peoples to engage in the global human rights and climate change processes,” said Sineia Do Vale, who is Wapichana from Brazil and co-chairs the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change along with Egereva.
A 2023 U.N. report concluded that advocates from multiple countries have been discouraged from participating in U.N. processes because of fear of reprisals. In 2024, the Indigenous Peoples and Minorities Section at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reported an increase in the number of cases of reprisals, but did not publish specific numbers. More than 2,000 environmental and land defenders were killed or disappeared for their work between 2012 and 2024, nearly a third of them Indigenous, according to Global Witness.
In October, the U.N. Human Rights Council passed a resolution criticizing the Russian Federation’s designation of 55 Indigenous organizations and other groups as “extremist organizations,” and calling on the country to abide by international human rights law.
Luda Kinok, a Yupik woman from Russia who spoke to Grist as a friend of Egereva’s, said that Egereva is expected to be detained until her next court hearing on February 17, after which she could be sentenced to as long as 20 years in prison.
Kinok said Egereva was targeted in part because of her affiliation with the Aborigen Forum network, a group of Indigenous advocates that was designated as an “extremist” organization by the Russian Federation in July 2024. The forum advocated for the protection of Indigenous peoples’ rights as countries sought to develop the Arctic. Egereva was also a member of the Centre for Support of Indigenous Peoples of the North, which Russian authorities shut down in 2019.
Valentina Vyacheslavovna Sovkina, a Saami advocate based in Russia and one of 16 members of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, said through an interpreter that she was also subjected to a search by Russian authorities the same week that Egereva was arrested.
“During the search, they seized technical equipment and searched the premises, folders, books, and boxes for four hours. They compiled a report without leaving a copy and without allowing me to call a lawyer,” she said. “I believe I am being persecuted for my activism and my steadfast commitment to protecting the rights of Indigenous peoples.”
Egereva’s arrest has been decried by several Indigenous international organizations, including Cultural Survival, the SIRGE Coalition, and the International Indian Treaty Council. The IITC called the situation “a grave case of intimidation and reprisal against an Indigenous leader in direct connection with her participation in the UNFCCC process,” referring to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The Basmanny District Court of Russia and the United Nations did not respond to messages seeking comment on Egereva’s case.
Correction: This story originally misidentified Valentina Vyacheslavovna Sovkina.
The post Daria Egereva fought for Indigenous voices at the UN. Now she’s in a Russian jail. appeared first on ICT.
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U.S. lawmakers in two red states are attempting to shield the fossil fuel industry from climate liability.
In Oklahoma, a newly introduced bill would bar most civil lawsuits against oil companies over their role in the climate crisis, unless plaintiffs allege violations of specific environmental or labor laws. A similar proposal in Utah would block lawsuits over climate-warming emissions, unless a court finds the defendant violated a statute or permit.
“I think anyone in America who breathes the air around them and also believes in corporate accountability ought to be very concerned about these types of end-runs against accountability,” said Jay Inslee, the former governor of Washington state and a former trial attorney.
The proposals appear designed to prevent parties in either state from joining the growing wave of U.S. climate accountability litigation, which has seen more than 70 states, cities and local governments sue major oil companies for allegedly misleading the public about climate risks.
The Guardian has contacted the bills’ sponsors for comment.
The measures come as fossil fuel companies and their political allies push for broader protections from climate lawsuits nationwide. Last year, 16 Republican state attorneys general urged the justice department to provide a “liability shield” for oil companies, while lobbying disclosures show that ConocoPhillips and the American Petroleum Institute pressed Congress on draft legislation to limit climate liability. Lawmakers have also pursued narrower efforts, including a failed attempt to block Washington, D.C., from enforcing consumer protection laws against oil companies, and a Maryland bill last year that would have barred state and local climate lawsuits but never reached a vote.
Both Oklahoma and Utah are oil-producing states where the fossil fuel industry wields significant political influence. The Guardian has asked the American Petroleum Institute and the bills’ sponsors whether industry groups lobbied for the proposals.
“These proposals are clearly part of a larger coordinated effort to strip communities and states of their right to hold Big Oil accountable,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit supporting climate accountability litigation. “If you have not violated the law, there is no reason to seek immunity.”
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If enacted, the measures would likely face legal challenges, said Pat Parenteau, environmental law expert at Vermont Law School. “This kind of blanket waiver of liability could raise serious state constitutional issues,” he said.
Neither Oklahoma nor Utah has seen statewide or city-level climate accountability lawsuits filed. But the bills still pose “a threat to democracy,” said Inslee.
“The ultimate foundation of democracy is the American jury system,” he said. “These efforts are attempting to deny Americans the right to that key democratic institution.”
If enacted, the measures would restrict future litigation — particularly Oklahoma’s, said Michael Gerrard, a climate law expert at Columbia University. That bill seeks to block claims alleging fraud, misrepresentation, deception, failure to warn or deceptive marketing, all of which are central to existing climate lawsuits against oil companies. Utah’s proposal is narrower, targeting only emissions-based claims.
Oil companies have repeatedly argued that climate cases aim to regulate emissions and are therefore preempted by federal law. But plaintiffs say their suits focus not on emissions, but rather on alleged deception about climate harms. Because Utah’s bill is limited to emissions-focused litigation, some cases could still be filed, Gerrard said, “though I’m sure the fossil fuel industry would find a way to push back.”
The state bills arrive as advocates await a U.S. Supreme Court decision on whether it will review a climate lawsuit brought by Boulder, Colorado, a ruling that could either embolden or constrain climate accountability litigation nationwide.
Big Oil is not the only industry seeking limits on legal accountability. Pharmaceutical giants have pushed state and federal lawmakers to block some pesticide-focused lawsuits, successfully lobbying for such measures in Georgia and North Dakota. More recently, lawmakers attempted — but failed — to weaken pesticide regulations via a national bill. Tech companies have also raised concerns about lawsuits over harms linked to artificial intelligence, prompting federal and state proposals — including in Colorado and Texas — that would shield companies from certain civil claims.
Attempts from the oil industry to skirt liability are “expressions of fear,” said Inslee.
“They are right to be afraid,” he said. “When a jury finds out what these CEOs in their corner offices have been doing to Americans … they’re going to be boiling mad.”
Advancements in attribution science, which links specific extreme weather events to the climate crisis, have made climate accountability litigation even stronger, said Parenteau.
“It’s really only a matter of time before a jury hands down a multi billion dollar verdict,” he said. “I’m positive.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Red-state Republicans seek climate ‘liability shield’ for fossil fuel industry on Jan 18, 2026.
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Stewart Huntington
ICT
The wave of federal immigration agents swarming the Minneapolis area might be unprecedented in law enforcement history, but the response in the Indigenous community is not.
Half a century ago, the American Indian Movement was founded on Franklin Avenue, the heart of the urban Indian diaspora in South Minneapolis, to counter overzealous municipal policing.
Today, AIM patrols are back, watching over elders, youths and aunties along the same avenue in what is now known as the city’s American Indian Cultural Corridor.
“History shows us time and time again, it doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes,” said Heather Bruegl, an activist, historian and Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin citizen who has studied the American Indian Movement. “So you can look throughout history and see different examples of what we see today happening in the past.”
And if the history rhymes, some of the names do even more. Some are the same.
Crow Bellecourt, Bad River Band of Chippewa, has been out on the recent patrols. His father, the late Clyde Bellecourt, was a founding member of AIM in 1968 along with Russel Means and Dennis Banks.
“I grew up in the movement,” said Bellecourt, executive director of the Indigenous Protector Movement, a group with AIM roots. “I always like to say, ‘I’m second-generation American Indian Movement.’ It’s, like, full circle for me.”
AIM members attend a demonstration in 2020 in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd at the hands of police. Credit: Photo by John Arthur Anderson
The confrontations between law enforcement and protestors in Minneapolis – including the shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good – have brought reports that Indigenous people have also been swept into custody.
A cohort of Indigenous patrollers has now reached close to 100, Bellecourt said.
“We’re running from seven in the morning to seven in the evening,” he said. “And even more. We still have some patrollers going out until like 11 or 12 at night.”
And just like in 1968, the patrollers are on the street to help community members feel safe.
“It’s really scary here,” said Mary LaGarde, executive director of the Minneapolis American Indian Center, which operates from its base on Franklin Avenue.
Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have surged into the Twin Cities area to counter what the Trump administration has called corruption and criminality in area immigrant populations. At this point, there are more federal law enforcement officers in Minneapolis than metropolitan police.
The dramatic presence has prompted widespread protests and rebukes from state and local officials. There have been at least two shootings involving the federal officers.
“We woke up and we had all these ICE agents everywhere,” said Bellecourt. “They’re all over our neighborhood. I’m scared for our old people and the young ones who just wanted to catch the city bus to go to the grocery store. … I worry about them getting picked up from ICE.”
LaGarde, White Earth Band of Chippewa, knows the feeling.
“It’s like you don’t want to leave the house,” LaGarde told ICT. “That’s how most of our people are feeling right now. Our elders are scared. Our young people, too. This is really impacting our kids.”
LaGarde said the patrols — by AIM members and other groups such as the Many Shields Warrior Society — are needed.
“it’s really important that we’re out protecting,” she said.
The numbers of volunteers out patrolling are growing.
“We have relatives coming in from South Dakota, Wisconsin and neighboring states,” Bellecourt said. Some have come from as far away as Oklahoma, he said.
Just like in the old days, AIM members are gathering along Franklin Avenue just as they gathered for occupations of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco in 1969, the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in 1972, and the Wounded Knee massacre site in 1973.
American Indian Movement leaders watch as the U.S. Department of Justice removes government forces from around Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on March 10, 1973. Shown in foreground are AIM leaders from left, Clyde Bellecourt, Dennis Banks, Russell Means and Carter Camp. Credit: AP Photo/FILE
AIM members also turned out in force in Minneapolis in 2020 after the death of George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement.
What’s different from the early years? Modern communication tools.
“We didn’t have these cell phones and all this social media back in them days,” Bellecourt said. “Everybody called on house phones and it was amazing how many people would show up. My dad called it the ‘moccasin telegraph’ and people would just call one another and, wherever they needed people to be, everyone would show up.”
They came to help the people.Then and today.
“One of the first acts that AIM did when they were forming was patrolling the streets and making sure that if their community members were stopped or pulled over by the police, that their rights were being followed, like, you know, ‘Hey, you have the right to this, you have the right to that,’” Bruegl said.
“And we see that now happening again [because] people’s rights are being violated. We see Indigenous folks, tribal members being detained,” Bruegl said. “It’s important that groups like AIM and other groups are coming out again, working in community and making sure that we’re protecting each other.”
The post ‘Full Circle’: AIM patrols back on Minneapolis streets as tensions rise appeared first on ICT.
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2421
Associated Press
TUBA CITY, Arizona — An 8-year-old girl who went missing on tribal lands in northern Arizona was found dead Friday, authorities said.
Navajo Nation officials say Maleeka Boone was last seen Thursday evening in the Coalmine Canyon area, located 240 miles north of Phoenix.
A spokesperson for the FBI, which is conducting the investigation with tribal police, declined to provide details of her death. A Navajo Police Department spokesperson said they did not have any further information.
In a social media video, Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said Maleeka’s death was devastating. “This tragedy weighs heavy on my heart,” Nygren said.
Her disappearance led to the issuance of a Turquoise Alert, an alert system for Native Americans who have gone missing.
In Arizona, the legislation creating the alert was referred to as “Emily’s Law” to honor Emily Pike, whose remains were found Feb. 14 more than 100 miles from a group home she left in Mesa, Arizona. Pike’s death spurred a resurgence of activism aimed at bringing more awareness to the disproportionate number of disappearances and violent deaths that have gripped Native American communities for decades, and prompted lawmakers to amend the bill to recognize her.
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2422
B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster*High Country News*
Recently, while reading a draft of a story by another writer for this magazine, I tripped over a familiar phrase: time immemorial. If you read (or write) Indigenous affairs journalism, it comes up a lot. As in Indigenous cultures have been here since time immemorial — I’ve seen it so often it disappears into the wallpaper, an invisible cliché. But this time, I realized I had questions. Why do Indigenous affairs writers — myself included — rely on this phrase so much?
Natives have been told our whole lives — in classrooms, through academic research and in popular myth — that humans first migrated into North America around 12,000 years ago. Native histories consistently disagree, however, asserting that humans were here much earlier than that. Using the phrase time immemorialis a way to push back; it succinctly communicates longevity without quibbling over exact numbers and dates. But when overused, it can come off as pandering or sanctimonious, a dog whistle for progressives — which could irritate some readers who might otherwise care about Indigenous sovereignty and suffering. When writers appear to slip from reporting to soapboxing, they risk sacrificing credibility.
*Isn’t there another way to say this?*I wondered. I left a comment on the draft for the story’s editors and embarked on a side quest to find an alternative to the phrase *time immemorial.*First stop, Harvard.
“I take it to mean the deepest possible kind of human memory,” Harvard history professor Philip J. Deloria (Yankton Dakota descent) told me. “Beyond recorded history, beyond oral tradition, beyond oral memory, into what we call the deep past.” Western science has long asserted that humans populated the Western Hemisphere around the Clovis era — named for an archaeological site near Clovis, New Mexico — by migrating over a land bridge across the Bering Strait sometime around the end of the last ice age.
“I take it to mean the deepest possible kind of human memory. Beyond recorded history, beyond oral tradition, beyond oral memory, into what we call the deep past.”
Harvard history professor Philip J. Deloria, Yankton Dakota descent
Since the 1920s, Deloria said, anthropologists and archaeologists have connected Clovis spearpoints with melting ice and the extinction of a lot of Pleistocene megafauna. Together, they suggest a pretty tidy story of humans migrating into North America.
Non-Natives have used this narrative to undermine the legitimacy of Indigenous land title and to characterize Natives as being no different from their colonizers — just another batch of recent arrivals who kill everything in sight. “It was a very anti-Indian way of seeing things,” Deloria said. The Clovis-first story and the Bering land bridge theory quietly and conveniently justify settler colonialism.
But correlation is not causation, and the idea that the Bering land bridge is how humans first reached the Americas is now under increasing scrutiny. Still, it has persisted as scientific canon in education and popular thought alike. “It was elegant because it lined up so well,” said Deloria. “But the problem with it, the trap that these guys laid for themselves, was if you found anything that was earlier than that, the theory was screwed.”
And that, I learned, is exactly what happened.
In 1963, at the Calico early man site in California’s Mojave Desert, world-famous archaeologist Louis Leakey studied a cache of what looked like stone tools — including flintknapping debris, blades, piercing tools and hand axes — that he dated to over 20,000 years ago, possibly even hundreds of thousands of years ago. But instead of overturning the Clovis-first story, the findings kneecapped Leakey’s professional reputation, and his marriage.
“Even the most well-known global expert on human evolution got called a crazy old man when he published on this, and that site is still denied by a lot of people,” Algoma University archaeology professor Paulette Steeves (Cree-Métis) told me. In her book *The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere,*Steeves asserts that for the past century, academia has not just ignored but vigorously suppressed archaeological evidence of pre-Clovis humans in the Americas.
And not just at the Calico site: There’s the Monte Verde site in Chile, the Cactus Hill site in Virginia, the Gault site in Texas, Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, Chiquihuite cave and the Hueyatlaco site in Mexico. The latter particularly infuriates the colonial-minded, as it’s potentially hundreds of thousands of years old. “It’s bias,” Steeves said. “It’s embedded racism.” And it’s persistent: “To this day, when you do publish on an older site, before it’s even published you are going to be severely, severely critiqued.”
In the past century, any archaeologist publishing about pre-Clovis sites in the Americas was committing “career suicide,” Steeves said. Many scientific findings simply didn’t get published. Much of this evidence ended up characterized as pseudoscience, alongside ancient alien theories. Even today, some non-Native scientists continue to explain away Leakey’s findings, arguing that the Calico artifacts were carved by the elements rather than humans.
But cracks are now showing in the settler-colonial narrative. When Science magazine published a 2021 report on 20,000-year-old human footprints near White Sands, New Mexico, it signaled institutional support for pre-Clovis human habitation here. “These findings confirm the presence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum,” the report’s authors wrote. The academy can no longer deny that someone was here during the last ice age, and before the makers of the Clovis spearpoints.
“Time immemorial is saying ‘since the beginning of our people as a cultural group, as a community, and we don’t know how long that is,’” Steeves said. “And maybe it’s not important to us, but it sure as heck, in North and South America, is a lot more than 11,000 or 12,000 years.’”
Other disciplines also provide scholarly support for *time immemorial.*Some linguists, for instance, believe the language families of the Americas would have taken at least 30,000 years to develop. DNA researchers, Deloria told me, have found links between Indigenous South Americans and Austronesians.
Although civilizations rose and fell in North America, the oral histories preserving their legacies carry little currency with Western science, since they’re not written records. But oral histories are not just legends or fanciful tales, and they’re certainly not schoolyard games of telephone. They were memorized under the instruction of elders, Deloria said, and retold with a sense of responsibility toward the community.
“Time immemorialis saying ‘since the beginning of our people as a cultural group, as a community, and we don’t know how long that is.’”
The physical monuments of North American civilizations buttress the older timelines of the oral histories: The weathered remains of the tamped-earth step-pyramids of Cahokia and Poverty Point on the Mississippi River, which are now referred to as “mounds,” but once supported wooden temples overlooking cities; the remains of the Hohokam canals on Arizona’s Salt River, hundreds of miles of technologically sophisticated agricultural irrigation in a system that Popular Archaeology says “rivaled the ancient Roman aqueducts”; and the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, a series of earthen constructions that aligned with solar and lunar cycles.
Deloria said this is all evidence of North American Classical civilizations. But instead of designating a classical period in North American history, settler narratives routinely skirt this evidence, too, omitting it from classroom curricula and the popular imagination. Historians, Deloria noted, usually reserve the term classicalfor early Western European cultures. European Americans are allowed to lionize their predecessors, while North Americans are not. “If the Mediterranean gets to have Greeks and Romans, then we get to have our equivalents of Greeks and Romans,” said Deloria. By establishing the longevity of North American cultures, the expression time immemorial illustrates their sophistication as well.
I like to report on good news in Indian Country. But when there’s good news for us, hateful comments often follow. It’s strange to me. I feel proud when I think of Poverty Point and the Mississippian ancestors who built the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a religious culture that spread across the Southeast and even up to the Midwest and included the temples of Cahokia. They were part of a fruitful civilization that enjoyed the kind of freedom, abundance and stability that most contemporary Americans don’t seem to believe ever existed anywhere on Earth. If America taught our histories in its schools, would Americans hate us less?
Our histories, which live on both in the soil and in our continued existence as cultures, undermine colonial stories like Clovis-first and the Bering land bridge populating the Americas. Without those stories, the Empire’s legitimacy erodes — and the other stories they prop up, like white supremacy, American exceptionalism and the so-called “New World,” begin to collapse.
Not only were we here long before America, with its relentless, shortsighted oppression disguised as progress and its hateful, ahistoric vitriol, we will still be here long after it’s gone. Arguing over the numbers with degree-wielding “debate me” bros is a fool’s errand. Time immemorial sweeps the debate itself aside and makes space for our ancestors to speak their silent gravitas from beyond the grave, prophesying a future so beautiful it defies the colonized imagination. Though I’d initially set out to find an alternative phrase, time immemorial was revealing its power. “It’s really important right now to decolonizing settler minds, to decolonizing education, and to decolonizing ourselves,” Steeves told me. “I hear some tribes say, ‘Oh, we’ve been here 10,000 years.’ You don’t know that you haven’t been here 50,000. So don’t say 10,000. Say ‘time immemorial.’”
The post What does ‘time immemorial’ really mean? appeared first on ICT.
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