Down with DiegoThis week, a Pueblo-led coalition of activists convinced Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber (founder of Fast Co.) to dismount three monuments celebrating Spanish conquistador, Don Diego de Vargas. Twelve years after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, de Vargas marched into Santa Fe on horseback to reclaim the city in a reign of terror. He brutalized my ancestors. Now, all these centuries later, that blood memory remains. As Confederate statues are being reconsidered nationwide - in New Mexico, a state where Black people make up only two percent of the population - the racial reckoning happening on my Indigenous homelands is one fixated on Spanish-Pueblo tensions pre-dating the arrival of colonizers at Jamestown. But like so much of the Indigenous timeline, this history is little known. I’m here to tell you, it’s not your fault. If I’ve learned one thing in my 20+ years of covering Indian Country, it’s that our present crisis is the result of grave neglect of the Indigenous narrative. In the modern sense, it begins mostly with a shared failure to enhance our public school curricula with essentially all sides of the American experience. What it means is that it will take all of us to work harder. It’s why I’m launching a newsletter called Indigenously: authentic, fact-based journalism intended to decolonize your newsfeed. If you sign up, you’ll get original reporting and analysis on the week’s headlines, told from an Indigenous perspective, and delivered to your inbox every Friday.
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