The arc of settler colonialism bends toward tyranny

When a white man can imprison an innocent brown man and proclaim it loudly

While Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an innocent man, sits in a gulag in a nation named The Savior, US courts hem and haw over the nuance between “facilitate” and “effectuate” in requiring his return. Trump, seizing upon their lack of moral clarity, now boasts that he will start sending American citizens to this steel cage warehouse that more closely resembles a Costco wherein the boxes have been replaced by humans.

We’ve seen this before. In 1832, SCOTUS ordered the release of two men from a Georgia prison. They were Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler, missionaries to the Cherokees and allies in the tribes’ fight against ethnic cleansing, known by the euphemism “Indian Removal.” One of my ancestors was arrested with them.

When the Court ordered their release, Andrew Jackson reportedly said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” That’s considered apocryphal, but the spirit is true. Jackson called the ruling “stillborn” and noted that the Court “cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.” And Jackson was not inclined to use federal marshals or the US military to effectuate their release.

Georgia kept them imprisoned, at hard labor, another ten months.

In the end, they were released only because other political events set in motion what Georgia really desired, the ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee. My great-great uncle drove a wagon on the Trail of Tears. His father led the 11^th Detachment. They left behind two thousand dead, mostly children, in the detainment camps just outside today’s Chattanooga. We have copies of the US Army’s request for wood for small coffins, but that’s all we have. The children still lay there today, in our original homeland – one of the largest unmarked mass graves in the nation.

Prior to that, after the detainment of Worcester and Butler, but before the US Army arrived and put all of us Cherokees in stockades, before the white people of Georgia auctioned off our lands, there was resistance. Because many Cherokee leaders were university-educated, reading and writing in both English and Cherokee, we waged a legal battle in the white man’s courts. There were no guns or tomahawks; we worked within the system like good little Indians.

But favorable SCOTUS rulings never did much for us in the end.

We responded with petitions – which nearly 90% of all Cherokees signed – presented to Congress. There were long speeches by allies, and more petitions from white liberals from small towns across New England, all appealing to the moral conscience of conservative congressmen and leaders in the Executive Branch.

None of that made a difference. We didn’t have the cards. Due to the 3/5ths compromise, the southern congressional delegation gained an extra 21 seats in the House for representing their enslaved. Yes, the vote was rigged. We lost by five votes.

In the end, at the bottom of the slippery slope, white allies did not come to our rescue, but merely waved to us and sometimes brought us food and water on the route to Indian Territory. And they enjoyed cheap cotton sold in New York City, because, after our ethnic cleansing, across the South, they turned the fertile fields of the Mvskoke (Creek), Choctaw, and Chickasaw into the Black Belt of slave plantations.

Just that passing reference to the 3/5ths compromise reveals the horrors of the past, of the white nationalism that underlies this nation.

The Indian Removal Act, which allowed the ethnic cleansing of most Natives east of the Mississippi, was one of the most contentious bills ever debated in congress, and required an enormous percentage of the US federal budget.

Which gets us to the present moment. Despite literally thousands of warnings from witty essays and memes on social media, Trump has implemented a rapid ramping up of loyalty tests and legal tests and public tests, from the silly “Gulf of America,” which I was told was not a hill to die on, to the arrest of Mahmood Khalil, which was apparently not a hill that Democrats in Congress wanted to die on, to the strong-arming of universities through illegal threats, which Congress has ignored, to the arrest and deportation of an innocent man, which is our current hill, upon which Trump now stands and proclaims the will and power to send any American citizen to that concentration camp in a foreign land called The Savior.

We know it’s a test because Trump has basically told us so. The Administration has waved in our face that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was sent there by “administrative mistake.” Trump is proclaiming him an innocent man.

For Trump, we have seen that the measure of a leader is the amount of power they wield. And the measure of power is suffering. To quote George Orwell, as recently quoted in The Atlantic, “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power… Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own. Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.”

Thus Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an innocent man, sits in prison.

Now Trump has declared, on national television from the White House, that he wants five more of those prisons to which he will send American citizens.

The chain connecting Kilmar Abrego Garcia to us is now bright.

The Democrats in Congress cannot save him.

The courts cannot save him.

As a descendent of dozens on ancestors from the Trail of Tears, I have no answers. This country, as described in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, was founded as a white male ethnostate and struggles to move beyond that.

I do believe in AOC’s words, “It will ALWAYS be the people – the masses – who refuse to comply with authoritarian regimes who are the last and strongest defense of our country and our freedoms.”

Hoping for more than a glass of water and petitions this time. If it’s not yet time to storm the castle, it’s at least time to surround it.