Native Pride

On some post or other that crossed my path, I saw this map. “Where is that,” I wondered. Then I saw Florida. “Wait, that’s my country? Huh?”
This map should be in every American history book. This map of our continent before my Hinckley ancestors arrived on the scene, shows all the different tribal territories that made up North America. Two hundred years later? We conquered it all, and more tragically, and it fills me with shame, we wiped out almost an entire civilization of Native Americans.
Native Americans lived in their own spaces for centuries. Lots of them. And, while some of them were not so peaceful with their neighbors, they can’t even come close to our brutality, lies, slaughter, and destruction.
I was talking to a friend about the map and how it shook me last night and he said, “We also wiped out the buffalo.”
“Do you know why we destroyed the buffalo,” I queried. - “No, why?”
“Because we knew it would kill the Indians. They needed the buffalo for warmth food and winter sustenance. So the government had the military slaughter them. And the tribes starved. And they froze. Yep. That’s the reason.” One colonel, four years earlier, had told a wealthy hunter who felt a shiver of guilt after he shot 30 bulls in one trip: “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”
The banned version of To Kill a Mockingbird is the least of our nation’s efforts at hushing history. We have ignored our brutality for all our time on this continent, and when I look at this map, I wonder how we can repair what we decimated. I fear that, like the climate we have destroyed, it is too late.
America is one of the most brutal, destructive nations of all time. I just didn’t know it for most of my life. Most civilizations die, peter out - destroy themselves. Sometimes it’s a virus. Sometimes it’s battles, but whatever happens next, we have earned the right to say our time is done.
So that is one of the thoughts that will fester for me. This map is imbedded in my soul now and all I can do is apologize to those who were destroyed.
🦅 See more details about this map in the comment section. Thanks for reading! 👇

“The Map That Should Have Been in Every Book"
This map breathes —
not ink on paper,
but bloodlines and voices
woven through rivers and roots.
Before borders carved the earth,
these lands had names that sang:
Navajo, Haida, Lakota,
Carib, Maya, Shawnee.
Every mountain had a memory,
every lake, a legend;
the wind itself spoke
in a thousand mother tongues.
Yet the classrooms stayed silent,
and the children learned
that discovery began with ships—
not with hearts that already belonged.
If only this map hung
in every school, every home,
perhaps the world would remember
who first called this land Mother.
Let them see the colors of the tribes,
the stories drawn in smoke and soil,
and know:
the map was never lost —
only hidden.