”A race to innocence is what occurs when individuals assume that they are innocent of complicity of structures of domination and oppression... yet, in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behavior of living generations...”

The Shoah (Holocaust) is ingrained in my understanding of the world. It was in many ways a reckoning, and the words Never Forget have become its calling cry.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has tied together a lightning rod. She singlehandedly undid a lynchpin I did not even know was there in my mind; one that didn’t connect the genocidal massacres of the indigenous peoples of North America with the formation of an ethos that suffuses the oppressive violence of international struggles for self-determination all over the world. U.S. history is marked by the perfection of techniques steadily developed in the Colonial world through the Crusades and the invasion of Ireland that primed the utter bloodbath that would characterize America’s history. These techniques, once drilled into our nation’s bedrock by hundreds of years of fine-tuning with our indigenous groups, were then turned outward - to Korea, to Vietnam and Laos, to Iraq, to Gaza.

I couldn’t help but connect this back to Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash and Angela Davis’ book Freedom is a Constant Struggle, whose thesis specifically advocates for a truly global, international perspective on our struggles for freedom and dignity. How apt when the root of so many methods are centered in the same place?

At this stage I can’t say much more - only that I want a copy to take notes in and reference over and over. Much has been done to obfuscate the history of this land; to make conquest seem inevitable, courageous; at times even harmonious. The silent denial and deceit by which our nation avoids grappling with its history allows these pogroms of violence to spread the world over. What strength can we claim to have when we will not face our history?

The words “never forget” have an ever-expanding meaning to me; to never forget all struggles for liberation, to never forget the atrocities of history, and to fight back with everything we have got in us. 5 stars.