Editor’s Note: The following is a submission by Mvskoke citizen Tyler Speir.
Hidden in a valley in California’s White Mountains, affectionately named Methuselah by the U.S. Forest Service, is a bristlecone pine tree believed to be nearly 5,000 years old. From its rocky foothold, Methuselah has seen the world radically transformed countless times over. The tree has stood through the moon landing, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the first European to set foot in North America long before the land ever held that name. Methuselah has also witnessed the innumerous atrocities that have befallen this country including slavery, smallpox, removal, slaughter and allotment. The tree has stood silently over it all. Yet, for its lengthy eons, its immeasurable memories lost to history and man alike, what Methuselah does not remember is a time when our people and our ancestors did not walk this vast continent.
Contemporary estimates place the North American arrival of the Clovis, the earliest ancestors of nearly eighty percent of all Indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere, at approximately 13,000 years ago. From the Clovis, our ancestors branched off and spread across two continents, forming societies and cultures as unique and distinct from one another as they were from the European societies that would arise over 10 millennia later. Yet, for all of their differences, these disparate peoples remained connected with common values and practices, traditions spanning back beyond memory as if etched into the very bones of the land. Our presence on this land predates writing, arithmetic, and philosophy. Our imprint on the face of the continent is older than gunpowder, architecture, and currency. From the various descendants of the Clovis comes the Mississippians, the Mound Builders, our forefathers. Mississippian culture, one of the most complex and distinguished Indigenous societies in North American history, lasted nearly twice as long as the Roman Empire, the progenitor of what is commonly referred to as the modern West. From the Mississippians came, among countless others, the Five Tribes, the Seminole, the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Mvskoke as they exist today, carrying the banners of those who built the great mounds and the monumental legacy of Cahokia. The Mvskoke people have inherited a history and a birthright that is older than any nation on the face of the earth, and our traditions must reflect that.
For four hundred years our tradition has been at war with a foreign rite, carried over on ships across the Atlantic, forced upon us with guns and disease. The lawmakers in this state and their cohorts in Washington D.C. call for a return to traditional values, attempting to appeal to the nostalgia of an era long gone when they were not threatened by the unknown or a vocal dissent. They make these calls with the expectation that we will support them, that our steady anachronisms will manifest in a diminutive mandate, that surely we too, long for this time gone by. In that vein these lawmakers are not incorrect. Our masses yearn for a return, and rightfully so, but not to the mid-century sought after by conservatives, but to time much more ancient. For decades the Indigenous nations of this country have had a tenuous alliance with the conservatives, owing to a waning originalist sense of duty to finally make good on the promises of their fathers. Yet, this alliance has grown cold, its promises stale, and now it is often the conservative voices that scream the loudest for our compliance, our obedience and increasingly, our dissolution. Thinly veiled by gestures to an idealistic time of family values and wholesome Christian piety, this movement is one of oppression. To return to a time when these values were enshrined in society and law would mean to return to a time when our people were systemically denied the right to vote and form governments. Likewise, a time when our children were ripped from their homes, our religions and customs suppressed. We were deemed savages in need of reform and assimilation. Do these lawmakers not recognize that inherent call to return references to the era when their religion was forced on us by sword and gun point, an era in which they declared that legallly we were not Americans, not even people?
There is an air of cognitive dissonance present when a conservative-held government calls upon support from the largest independent sources of authority in the state, beckoning for cooperation and appealing to an era in which we were denigrated for our very existence. Now we have an opportunity for our Nation to recall what exactly our traditional values are, and what an Indigenous tradition can be in a modern age. Armed with legal and political autonomy and a vast reserve of resources, now is the time when the Indigenous nations of the United States, led perhaps by the Mvskoke people and the Five Tribes, can begin to define our presence and our role in a modern America. Neither as a noble effigy to a pastoral time long gone as the left sees us, nor as a bulwark blocking the road to a homogenous future as the right would have us. Instead, we as a race can and should take this opportunity to become something entirely distinct. By investing in our internal economies the Indigenous nations can foster a fiscal status independent of the state and federal government, perhaps one day becoming entirely self sustained. By investing in housing and real estate growth the nations can grow healthy, connected communities and support a wave of tribal homeowners to pass on the generational wealth that has so long been denied to us. By investing in our arts, our literature, and our history, we can show that our people are more than a weary ghost of a continent long pillaged and paved over. We are not the same people when Methuselah was a sapling, likewise we are not the same people who watched the Europeans breach our shores and drive us from our ancestral homeland. That history is still a part of us. Our strong, capable, adaptable ancestors live within us. The Mvskoke Nation has a place in the America of today, and it is not as a living museum or a political nuisance, nor is it a pawn in the forces of the governments that have so long pushed us aside, or more often underfoot. No, the Mvskoke Nation, and indeed all of us who have descended from the Clovis who walked these lands eons ago, must assert who they are and demand a place at the table.