Go back to where you came from. A white woman screamed at us at the Los Angeles International Airport.

We laughed at the absurdity of the notion. The biting humor of the late Hodnoshoni and Cree comedian Charlie Hill quickly came to mind.

A redneck told me to go back where I came from so I put up a teepee in his backyard.

That sunny day in early 2017 we marched behind Tengva drummers, the

original people of what is currently Los Angeles. We held placers that read no ban on stolen

land protesting Donald Trump's executive order barring travel to the United

States from seven Muslim majority countries in Africa and the Middle East.

This defiance is the living legacy of centuries of indigenous resistance.

The act of refusal to cede any moral authority

over who belongs and who doesn't belong to this

settler nation. But America only has room for winners or losers, we're told, and

by that standard, Indians are the constant losers of history, and

for that matter, so too is anyone who doesn't immediately buy what America is selling. The narrative we're sold is that indigenous resistance

is a string of failures. That same year water protectors lost at Standing Rock

because the Dakota Access Pipeline was built.

Later, the Watsodin lost at Unestoten camp

because it had been raided by police

and Len occupied by Coastal Gas Link pipeline workers. And more recently. and with science versus culture, not indigenous land rights.

And that Kanaka-Mowley needed to relinquish so-called superstition

and accept progress as inevitable by having a 3.4 billion dollar telescope built next to 22 other

telescopes on their Sacred Mountain. While indigenous peoples are told to quit

living in the past,lers are urged to make America

...