The Rewriting of History and Theft of Symbols as a Means to Colonize

By: Yasmeen Farran

“Perhaps the greatest battle Palestinians have waged as a people has been over the right to a remembered presence and, with that presence the right to possess and reclaim a collective historical reality, at least since the Zionist movement began its encroachments on the land.” [1]

“They came for our land, for what grew or could be grown on it, for the resources in it, and for our clean air and pure water. They stole these things from us, and in the taking they also stole our free ways and the best of our leaders . . . . And now, after all that, they’ve come for the very last of our possessions; now they want our pride, our history, our spiritual traditions. They want to rewrite and remake these things, to claim them for themselves.” [2]

As the two quotes above show, the colonization of a people cannot solely be measured by territorial lines on a map. Although land theft is paramount in the atrocious process of colonization, an equally atrocious component to colonization is the effort to colonize the mind and spirit.[3] One tool colonists use in this effort is by rewriting history and the misuse and theft of symbols that belong to those native to the land. The pattern of misrepresentation, misuse, and theft can be seen through a similar lens in the colonization of two different groups: Native Americans and Native Palestinians. As the two quotes above indicate, the first describing the Palestinian experience from Palestinian author, Edward Said, and the second describing the Native American experience from Native American musician, Margo Thunderbird, these narratives have a great deal of crossover that calls for active preservation of not only the land being stolen but also the attempts to steal history and culture. This blog post looks at how theft of history and symbols contributes to the colonizer’s ultimate goal of placing those native to the land in a state of antiquity. 

The process of stealing history and symbols starts with the stripping away of cultural values of the minority group by the colonizer. Within the “colonization complex” the second step is described as “the colonizing power alters basically or destroys the indigenous culture.”[4] A large part of accomplishing this goal is through historiography which is the study of the writing of history.[5] In the United States, colonizers found that the cheapest way to enforce assimilation was to coerce children into boarding schools where the colonizers’ culture and values could be forced onto children.[6] Much of what Natives learned in these schools about their culture was in direct contrast to what they learned at home.[7] From the moment the colonizers arrived in this country, their historical perspective displayed Native Americans as savages and colonizers as the victorious saviors.[8] As time progressed, many white historians continued to alter the representation of colonization in America and limited the history of Native Americans to the nineteenth century.[9] By doing so, this incorrectly limits the presence of Native Americans in the United States to antiquity.[10] By doing so, this gives the colonizer greater control over the narrative and further asserts the goal of dominance over the colonized and the colonized culture.

A similar situation is occurring in the history concerning Palestine. However, in Palestine, colonizers took a more accelerated approach by immediately writing Palestinians out of history at a more aggressive pace.[11] An ideology of a land that was free of people waiting for settlement was the narrative that was asserted despite the fact that the world witnessed waves of Palestinians being forcibly removed both internally and to neighboring countries.[12] Many Israeli colonizers asserting these theories claim that the Palestinian identity is a product of colonization and was not present prior to this, despite clear contradictory evidence.[13] This has forced the Palestinians into a unique role where they not only have to assert their continued existence but also their existence in the first place.[14] Just like in America, the colonizers in Palestine have taken control of the narrative in order to write Palestinians into antiquity or, worse, complete nihility.

Despite the lack of historical representation, Americans are captivated by the Native American symbolism that they have formed into caricatures that ignore the unjust history of “genocide, disease, and cultural devastation.”[15] This is another method of control that colonizers use:

“[M]embers of the dominant culture are unable to retain their sense of distance and separation from what they dominate. Instead over a period of generations, they increasingly develop direct ties to the “new land” and, consequently, exhibit an ever-increasing tendency to proclaim themselves “natives.” This, of course, equates to a quite literal negation of the very essence and existence of those who are truly indigenous to the colonized locales ... It is genocide of an extremely sophisticated type, to be sure, but it is genocide nonetheless.”

“This process of genocide assumes the form the appropriation of the identity of the colonized by the colonizer.” [16]

The image of a Native American in a feathered headdress is a trope that has been used to sell everything from toys, health products, alcohol, butter, baking soda, jewelry, and more.[17] The misappropriation of Native American symbols can often be overtly racist, but it also comes in more subtle but equally harmful forms.[18] For example, a simple bag of blue corn tortilla chips trivializes Native American spiritual beliefs.[19] From afar it does not seem to be racist, but when you understand that the core religious beliefs of a people are being cheapened by display on a consumer product such as tortilla chips, it is demeaning.[20] The history and true culture of Native Americans has largely been ignored by history books and displaying that culture on a bag of tortilla chips is not the answer. These images diminish the separation between colonizer and colonized furthering the goal of colonization which is placing the colonized in a state of antiquity.[21]

A similar story is true for the Palestinians but appears in a different form. Symbols that are a product of the land are battled for: the olive tree, the cactus, and the orange tree.[22] Unlike in America, where those native to the land were turned into characters, Israel completely adopted the symbols of the land as its own completely bypassing any claim Palestinians had.[23] In 1948, Israel began a policy of uprooting groves of olives, oranges, and cactus.[24] This was to uproot the historical presence of Palestinians in their homeland to further the myth that Palestine was a land without people.[25] To further this narrative, the colonizers then started a program where the land seized and uprooted was then allotted to colonizers to re-farm the land with the same crops that were uprooted.[26]

“The preoccupation with forging a connection to this place, in the face of anxiety about non-connectedness and non-rootedness, has manifested itself in many ways in Zionist discourse and practice. Two the most salient of these have been and wide-spread institutionalization of tree-planting, perhaps the most literal attempt to “put down roots” in the country, and the appropriation of contested symbols of indigenousness and native status.” [27]   

Today, Israel’s largest export is the orange and the image can be seen across the country.[28] By erasing Palestinian symbolism from the land and appropriating it to Israel, the colonizers are furthering their efforts of placing those indigenous to the land into a state of antiquity.

However, despite the obstacles imposed by colonization, these two cultures continue to thrive which is due, in part, to the assertion of identity through several means. One of which is though poetry. For example, see the two sets of verses below: 

“A traitor, outlaw, ­—what you will, / He is the noble red man still. / Condemn him and his kind to shame! I bow to him, exalt his name!”[29]

“Write down / I am an Arab / and my I.D. card number is 50,000 / and my children are eight in number / and the ninth / arrives next summer / Does this bother you?”[30]

These two sets of verses were written nearly seventy years apart in different counties across two different hemispheres.[31] However, the similarity of the message is a testament to the shared experience of dehumanization through colonization. More importantly, they both display a strong assertion of identity as a proud Native American and a proud Palestinian. In the early 1900s, Native American poet and author, Alexander Posey of the Muskogee Creek Nation wrote the first set of verses in a poem titled, “On the Capture and Imprisonment of Crazy Snake.”[32] In his poem, he asserts a Native identity against the colonizer’s desires. Similarly, Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, wrote the second set of verses in a poem titled “Identity Card” in 1973 in which the author is having a fictitious dialogue with the colonizer in which he asserts his Arab identity against the colonizer’s desires.[33]      

Native Americans and Palestinians continue to strongly assert their identity despite the struggles. However, historical and symbolic theft can have major repercussions on communities being subjected to colonization. The best way to combat this colonialist tactic is as Edward Said wrote, “. . . the interplay among memory, place, and invention can do if it is not to be used for the purposes of exclusion, that is, if it is to be used for liberation and coexistence between societies whose adjacency requires a tolerable form of sustained reconciliation.”[34]   

#BlogPost #YasmeenFarran #Palestine #CulturalSymbolTheft

[1] Edward W. Said, Invention, Memory, and Place, 26 Critical Inquiry 175, 184 (2010).

[2] Wendy Rose, The Great Pretenders: Further Reflections on Whiteshamanism, The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance 403 (M Annette Jaimes, ed.) (1992) (quoting Margo Thunderbird).

[3] See generally Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Setterler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation, 1 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 54 (2015); Majdi Shomali, Land, Heritage and Identity of the Palestinian People,  8 PIJ 4 (2001).

[4] Martin N. Marger, Race and Ethnic Relations: American and Global Perspectives 120-21 (Cengage Learning, ed., 7th ed. 2005).

[5] Francis Flavin, Native Americans and American History, 1 (NPS), https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/resedu/native_americans.pdf.

[6] Christopher Oliver, The Internal Colonialism Model: What the Model Has Done to the Education of Native Americans 7-13 (A research paper submitted to ERIC, Apr. 15, 1996), https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED396883.pdf.

[7] Id.

[8] Flavin, supra note 5.

[9] Steven Crum, Making Indians Disappear: A Native American Historian’s Views Regarding the Treatment of Indians in American History, 4 J. of Am. Indian Higher Educ. (1992). 

[10] Id.

[11] Christine Pirinoli, Erasing Palestine to Build Israel: Landscape Transformation and the Rooting of National Identites, No 173-174 Etudes Rurales 67, ¶ 27 (2005).

[12] Id.

[13] Issam Nassar, Reflections on Writing the History of Palestinian Identity, 8 Palestinian-Israeli J. (2001).

[14] Id.

[15] Mark Trahant, Native American Imagery is All Around Us, While the People are Often Forgotten, National Geographic (Dec. 2018) https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2018/10/indigenous-peoples-day-cultural-appropriation/.

[16] Marchell J. Wesaw, Finders Keepers? Adulteration of Native American Cultures in the Name of Profit, 18-4 Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine (Dec. 1994).

[17] Id.

[18] Id.

[19] Id.

[20] Id.

[21] Id.

[22] Pirinoli, supra note 11 ¶¶ 45-46, 49.

[23] See generally Id.

[24] Id. ¶ 50-54.

[25] Id.

[26] Id.

[27] Carol Bardenstein, Threads of Memory and Discourses of Rootedness: of Trees, Oranges and the Prickly-Pear Cactus in Israel/Palestine, 8 Dartmouth College 1, 5 (1998).  

[28] Bardenstein, supra note 27; Pirinoli, supra note 11.

[29] Alexander L. Posey, Song of the Oktahutche: Collected Poems 187 (Matthew W. Sivils ed. 2008).

[30] John Collins, Occupied by Memory: The Intifada Generation and the Palestinian State of Emergency 58 (2004).

[31] Alexander L. Posey, Song of the Oktahutche: Collected Poems 187 (Matthew W. Sivils ed. 2008); John Collins, Occupied by Memory: The Intifada Generation and the Palestinian State of Emergency 58 (2004).

[32] Posey, supra note 1.  

[33] Salman Hilmy, “ID Card” by Mahmoud Darwish- A Translation and Commentary, Washington Report (Nov. 2017) (quoting Mahmoud Darwish).

[34] Said, supra note 1 at 191.