Who is the Diaspora?
In what is now referred to as the “united states of america,” essentially all of us are members of the Diaspora. Very few of us are indigenous to this land, and those that are native have almost entirely been either slaughtered, relocated, assimilated, or all three. Thus of the 250 million some members of this “nation” only perhaps a few thousand remain on ancestral lands, with a distinct language, culture and spiritual traditions. All of the rest of us are “dispersed” peoples. Within all intact indigenous nations, an uncompromising defense of the land, people and history is always present. This is true whether we are speaking of Palestinians, Aborigines, Basques, animist Africans or the natives of Turtle Island. Those who have sustained their ancestral traditions in the midst of the omnipresent assault of capitalism and whiteness, have survived exactly because they have resisted the predominant tendency towards a rootless and a-historical “globalization.” Thus, when we say that we are
