In 1893, at the meeting of the American Historical Association at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Euro-American Fredrick Jackson Turner delivered a speech stating by 1890, “frontier of settlement… cannot… any longer have a place in the census reports”, coinciding with the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 29th, 1890.
Knowing this coinciding of events, it becomes clear what the true message of historian Turner really wished to convey. “We have conquered the Indigenous. Manifest Destiny has been completed and our conquest achieved.”
The message is truly one that is historical. Of course not one that is factual, but still, nonetheless a historical claim. It is the beginning of Euro-American settler history and the end of the history of the Indigenous history. Among Euro-American scholars and historians, it is seldom we see such a refusal of this claim. There is a sense of defeatism, a truly settlerist ideal for it accepts the completion of the settler-colonial project of the so-called United States.
But one who wishes for the end of the settler-colonial project must resist this defeatist version of history. For Indigenous people still live and their past and present lives within them. Their very survival is history. And their very resistance is history.
We cannot solely rely on the books and writings of Euro-American settler historians for us to conceptualize what history is. To confine ourselves to such would be a form of suffocation to such a narrow and backwards view of history. History is defined through struggle, through resistance movements of Indigenous movements such as the American Indian Movement and their resistance on top of Wounded Knee on 1973, a vengeful reverberation of the events of 1890. History will continue so long as the settler-colonial state exists. For oppression breeds resistance. And resistance breeds history.