Somewhere outside of Nashville, driving on an unremarkable road lined with car dealerships and fast food chains, I spotted a small sign. It flew by too fast for me to read all of it, but I saw a few words very clearly: "HISTORIC TRAIL OF TEARS". It turned out this road wasn't so unremarkable. Almost 200 years ago it was here that white Americans violently forced the Cherokee to march far from their land. Thousands died. Today, near the sign memorializing this ethnic cleansing, there's a strip mall with a Dunkin' and a Pizza Hut.
"Jesus Christ," I told Frankie. "Does it get any more American than this?"
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In Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, the authors state:
"The Palestinian Nakba is not only the compilation of the massacres of 1948 and the subsequent establishment of an Israeli state; it also comprises the occupation of Palestine’s land, the erasure of its people, and the physical and cultural attempt to destroy its history and identity. In this sense, the Nakba is reminiscent of the United States’ dispossession and erasure of indigenous Americans, from the colonization of “New England” to the Trail of Tears, and until today."
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If you have less than 24 hours in Tulsa, there are two things you can do.
The first is smoke inside a dive bar and play pool with withered old men who make their loneliness all the more obvious by the country songs they choose to play on the jukebox. They won't understand that you and your girlfriend are gay. They think they have a shot. But they only touch you once then immediately apologize so it's okay. They pay for the round of pool. They'll try to take you out to dinner too but you can say no and walk away laughing as their lugubrious eyes follow you.
The second thing you can do is visit Black Wall Street. On May 30, 1921, Tulsa's Greenwood District, aka Black Wall Street, was an affluent and thriving Black neighborhood spanning about 40 square blocks. On May 31, white supremacists obliterated the neighborhood. They attacked, maimed, and killed Black residents. They burned almost everything to the ground. It'll come as no surprise that the police were on their side. This massacre went on for two days. In the end, 10,000 Greenwood residents were left homeless, and collectively they lost the equivalent of $35 million today. Many ended up leaving the city.
When you visit the remains of Black Wall Street, you'll find a giant mural explaining what happened, and see plaques outside each building explaining what was there in 1921 before the massacre. There are so many plaques you may start to cry, thinking about the innocent community that was here, and the horrific violence enacted in the name of... what, exactly? What reason can someone give for this violence that isn't completely stupid and pathetic? You can't think of one. Who knows what would have become of Greenwood had it been allowed to exist. Maybe it would be as boring and forgotten as everything else in Tulsa. Or maybe it wouldn't. The residents deserved a chance to find out.
You will leave Tulsa depressed, its many ghosts weighing down on your heart.
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About a month ago, I saw a TikTok of an Israeli woman beaming about how after Gaza has been completely carpet bombed, and all 2 million Gazans have been killed or displaced, Israel can build a Sephora and Disneyland among the rubble.
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To put it politely, the beauty of northwest Oklahoma doesn't reveal itself easily. I felt restless looking out at the tallgrass prairie, searching for something interesting to focus on. I had read once about an art history professor who made her students go to a museum and look at one piece of art for four hours. The drive from Tulsa to Denver is eleven hours. That's a lot of prairie.
The prairie's beauty is more obvious in Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon (a mere three and a half hours long). Where I had only seen blank flatness, Scorsese's camera finds lush rolling hills, wildflowers, the delicate shift in color across a big empty sky.
And that's where the beauty ends. The movie, though not quite as good as the book (sorry1), is an unflinching look at the violent lengths white Americans would go to steal whatever wealth they could from the Osage. They planted a bomb in a house in Fairfax and killed an entire family. They would get rich Osage drunk and execute them out in the prairie, leaving their bodies to rot. Doctors poisoned their patients. In the end, hundreds of Osage died, and while the nascent FBI did investigate, they didn't catch everyone involved. Plenty of white Americans profited from these murders, one way or another, and faced no consequences.
Among those lucky few were the Drummonds, who ran shops and funeral homes that always charged the Osage more for their services. Being exploitative undertakers during a wave of murders turned out to be lucrative, and today the Drummonds still own 9% of Osage land. The most famous Drummond, Ree, is a successful food blogger known as The Pioneer Woman. She has a shop in Pawhuska, in the heart of Osage County. In a 2006 blog post, she refers to the Osage as "shrewd little boogers" for trying to keep their land. And I guess she'd know something about being shrewd: whereas the median household income in Pawhuska is about $25,000, Ree's net worth is $50 million.
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There are few things more romanticized than the cross-country American road trip. Open roads, big skies, quaint and eccentric small towns filled with hospitable, hard-working folk. There is a lot of beauty: I cried while riding a horse through the New Mexican desert, in awe of the vibrant landscape. And I appreciated the hospitality of old Cajun men who saw the kayaks on our car and took 30 minutes out of their day to draw a map of every lake and bayou we should visit. The road trip had its moments.
But then Frankie and I would drive past mass graves, past memorials to the victims of white supremacy, past landscapes that once had rich ecosystems and now grew one single crop, destroying the soil. Once we were officially in The West, we'd drive past reservations to get to the national parks, and I'd ask myself if I should even be on this land right now. I feel truly blessed to have seen the Grand Canyon, but it also felt wrong to be there without permission from one of the eleven tribes that call it home, and who hardly benefit from the tourist economy. And should such an awe-inspiring and singular landscape be covered in roads and fast food stands? At times, Frankie would look around and quip, "We really did pave paradise to put up a parking lot."
To drive across this country is to confront its history, and despair. In our hotel room in northwest Kansas I'd look out at the flat fields of nothing and I couldn't help thinking of all the bison that had been slaughtered to starve Native Americans and push them off this land so white settlers could come in and one day surround themselves with D-tier restaurant chains.
At one point in the last three months, I saw two pictures side by side: an infamous one of a giant pile of bison skulls, and one of burned down Palestinian olive trees. That was enough for everything to click into place for me. The ghosts I encountered in Tulsa, outside Nashville, in rural Oklahoma... they didn't belong only to the past. The same forces that killed them are killing Palestinians now.2 The American empire has never tired of slaughter.
I first started writing this newsletter after an incredibly rejuvenating road trip from Los Angeles to Yellowstone and back. It was then that I truly fell in love with the American West. And I still love it. I'll go on record saying that I honestly believe that America is the most beautiful country on earth.3 There ends my patriotism though. As I've come to learn more about the history of this place, that love has become... fraught. I can no longer enjoy the landscapes without some measure of grief. A few years ago I learned about the Native Americans who lived in what is now Yosemite and the ethnic cleansing "required" to turn the area into a national park. My ability to comfortably visit these areas came at an enormous human and environmental cost. I can't really argue it was worth it.
And so my grief expands to Gaza. I can't bear to see old growth olive trees burned down anymore than I can bear to see maps of how many redwoods California once had and how few remain in comparison. I can't bear to see Palestinians marching away from their homes that'll get bulldozed for condos. I can't bear to see video after video of Gazans screaming out in pain and grief as their entire families are exterminated. We've been here before, and it was as unjustifiable then as it is now.
I still enjoy learning about the history of the American West, but it's important to remember it's not unique, or even over. So long as the forces of American empire and white supremacy are at play, these acts of violence will happen over and over. Not just to indigenous populations and their land, but to the settlers who put down roots in burial grounds.
Plaques and historic markers often flatten history, packaging up events and tucking them away neatly. "This is over, and distinct, and will never happen again," they suggest. It may be comforting to believe that, but it's a fantasy. So whether you've been reading this newsletter for the past few years or are just finding it now, I ask you to sit with me and bear witness to the genocide happening in Gaza. Understand it as one link on the long violent chain of American empire, just like the Trail of Tears, the massacre of Black Wall Street, and the near extinction of the bison. Let the ghosts haunt you. Then do whatever you can to break that chain.
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There are many ways to help Gaza right now. You can read some free ebooks from Haymarket or Verso to better understand Palestinian history and their struggle for liberation, and then help educate others. You can use the 5 Calls app to reach out to your representatives and demand they support a permanent ceasefire. You can follow your local Jewish Voices for Peace chapter on social media and join one of their actions. You can support Palestinian businesses in your area; I’ve enjoyed eating at Beit Rima in San Francisco.
Beyond Gaza, I encourage you to learn more about the indigenous people whose land you’re currently on as you read this. If you’re in the Bay Area, grab a meal at Cafe Ohlone and pay the Shuumi Land Tax to help the Ohlone get their land back.
1 My main issue with the movie is that I don’t think it drove home the scale of the murders the way the book did. Also, Leo was horribly miscast and did not understand his character.
2 And I mean this literally: the bombs and white phosphorus dropped on Gaza are made in America. Israel gets almost $4 billion from the US every year. IDF soldiers may be the ones pulling the trigger, but America paid for the gun.
3 Well, the western half anyway, plus Louisiana.