We must address the harm of the past to build a better future

Imagine that years ago, you and your entire family were swindled. Big time. You lost your home, your livelihood, your sense of place. You scrambled to get your footing. You sought restitution, but the authorities dismissed you. Every year, as you and your family became more depleted, the swindlers grew ever richer and more powerful.

Now imagine those swindlers one day approached you and said, “Let’s let bygones be bygones. Forget about the past; let’s look to the future.” For you, the future is bleak; for the swindlers, it’s another win if you take them up on their “offer.”

This is the analogy that occurs to me when I ponder Daniel Brown’s My Turn, “How will Taos advance into the future?” (Nov. 4-10). The simple truth haunts me: Because of colonialism and white privilege, I sit on land that was once inhabited by Taos Pueblo, and then by Hispaños; their descendants are now my neighbors —albeit mostly unknown neighbors because I live in the silo of whiteness. White supremacy and capitalism have granted me enormous privilege since birth, and that privilege is both literally and figuratively built upon the backs of Black and brown bodies. I know that white people did not earn their way to the top, and that I owe a profound debt to those who cared for this land long before my ancestors even knew it existed.

So I’m stunned when Daniel Brown says, “As a relative new arrival to Taos, I have little interest in snarling over who did what to whom in 1598, 1680 and 1847.” Mr. Brown deplores “‘Us versus Them’ tribalism.” And yet isn’t he suggesting that all who came after 1847 are “Us,” while all those who were already here are the snarling “Them”? I believe that the system that holds such views in place is taking its last gasps — that a generation from now, the idea that white people can simply proclaim the past as a bygone era, for which we bear little or no responsibility, will be as obsolete as commercials urging us to smoke Marlboros.

Mr. Brown also says, “I’m more concerned if we’ll survive the next two decades.” The implication is that we all must choose either social justice or climate action. Again, I see this thinking as a fundamental part of the problem. Anglos are the ones who, with rare exception, set up the dominant system, which has always relied on extraction and free or cheap labor; who constructed the notion of “whiteness,” imbued it with power and continually tweaked it so their power would be further consolidated and protected; who created the rules that displaced those who already lived on the land; and who helped reduce our one planet to a thousand categories of “resources.” Would the human species now be suffering from a thousand categories of disaster were it not for anglo ways? By contrast, community and sharing are baked into the traditions of pre-1847 life in this region. These are the very traditions that prove that humans are actually capable of averting complete climate collapse.

Views like those expressed by

Mr. Brown show just how insidious white privilege and its handmaiden, late-stage capitalism, are. Looking beneath the romantic stories about how my own ancestors arrived on this continent, I understand that they fled their homelands because they had been squeezed out; they were yesterday’s version of today’s refugees from the Middle East, Haiti, Central America and an ever growing number of other destabilized regions (many actively destabilized by the policies of our own government).

My ancestors were not considered “white” when they arrived. But after taking one look at how non whites were treated, they must have desperately stripped all vestiges of their own millennia-old, Indigenous traditions in hopes of eventually being accepted as part of the white fold. My ancestors’ pre-white days have been purged from family stories, yet

I get inklings of the high price of becoming white when I hear drumming at the Pueblo, smell grass after a rain, sit beside a stream or pitch in on a communal project. Wonder and awe abound when my individualistic shell momentarily melts.

I’m ready to work with the elders, the young people and everyone in between to address the harm of the past in order to build a better future for all. I don’t know how best to wed social justice with climate action; but given our history, isn’t favoring one over the other like choosing between inhaling and exhaling?