OPINION
Palestinians still under threat of removal
Indigenous voices still needed
ICT
Last week marked the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a war that drew attention and wide-spread support for Ukraine from all corners of the globe. The blue and yellow flag was everywhere and declarations of “We Stand with Ukraine” proliferated in a fervor – and then subsided significantly. Now, with a second Putin-friendly Trump administration bullying Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, support for Ukraine has been revived.
Politics fuels and dulls the national attention span and capacity for compassion for those suffering under unrelenting military campaigns.
In the case of the war in Gaza few tribal statements supporting Palestinians have been made despite grave losses, dramatic destruction, a humanitarian crisis, Israeli abdication of war conventions and civil society norms, and the hard-to-miss historic parallels with Native peoples.
The month-old, three-phase ceasefire in Gaza has been called fragile. Underscoring ongoing threats, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect posted, “The ceasefire agreement offers a glimmer of hope for a permanent cessation of hostilities in Gaza, but the risk of ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide remains high.”
Although hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are returning to their homes, the conditions are described as unlivable. President Donald Trump has threatened to permanently remove all Palestinians to make way for a “Riviera of the Middle East,” diminishing hope for rebuilding.
The Associated Press reported that Raji Sourani, a leading human rights lawyer from Gaza, accused Trump of aiming to “complete the genocide.” Geneva Conventions forbid “mass forcible transfers” from occupied lands “regardless of their motive.” The International Criminal Court — where the US and Israel are not members — also holds that “forcible transfer” can be a war crime or, in some circumstances, a crime against humanity.
By all accounts, Palestinians are far from safe, stable ground with new threats afoot.
Out of 574 federally recognized tribes only five have expressed support for Palestine since Oct. 7, 2023. Calls for a permanent ceasefire were made by the Oglala Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne River Lakota, Winneman Wintu, Yurok, Red Lake Band of Chippewa, and the Oceti Sakowin Treaty Council – which represents a collective of almost 50 tribes.
Diné activists urged Navajo president Buu Nygren to call for a ceasefire, but he seemingly backed down to avoid upsetting Raytheon Technologies RTX, the world’s largest missile manufacturer. The Navajo Nation is home to the Raytheon Diné Facility which builds and stores parts for Tomahawk cruise missiles, Javelin weapon systems, and Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles.
NDN Collective, an Indigenous advocacy organization out of Rapid City, South Dakota, and Red Nations, out of Arizona called for a ceasefire and an end to US military aid to Israel.
Indigenous Solidarity with Palestine, created an online effort obtaining 1,122 signatures for an Indigenous solidarity letter of support.
In early November 2023, Coast Salish people took to their canoes in the Port of Tacoma blocking ships believed to be carrying weapons to Israeli forces.
That November, Native activists marched in the Free Palestine Ceasefire Rally in Washington, DC. In Cultural Survival, Nick Tilsen, the president and chief executive officer of NDN Collective, stated, “Indigenous voices have become especially prominent in support of Palestine in a spirit of kinship.”
Tilsen, Oglala Lakota and Jewish, said, “Sometimes when I talk to Indigenous leaders here, they’ll be like, ‘Gaza, that’s happening all the way over there in the Middle East. Why should I say anything?’ I reassure them that our priority is and will always be here, fighting for the return of Indigenous lands to the Indigenous Peoples of the United States. But it’s important to see how the U.S. has been directly funding the Israeli military — in the billions, for decades — as it commits genocide on the Palestinian people with resources extracted from our stolen lands.”
He continued, “Do we stand quietly as these people are being murdered? Or, do we step into our courage and bravery, aligned with our values, even when it’s not popular to do so?”
Many Native people who have publicly supported Palestine have been verbally attacked and accused of antisemitism.
Seth Allard, Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa, was one of the few Native OpEds writing, “If I say crushing Palestinian children into unrecognizable shapes via airstrikes is inhumane, I am anti-Semitic, supporting terrorism, enemy to America. If I say Israeli children, stacked in piles or captured by Hamas is horrific, I am colonialist, pro-Zionist, Islamophobic. I am neither. I am a Native American, Marine Corps Veteran, mental health professional decrying the unjust and criminal nature of war.”
Indigenous students across the country engaged in college campus protests, an April 2024 story discussed those. Portland State students and local communities organized a powwow to bring attention to the plight of Palestinians. The Portland State University students stated: “As Indigenous peoples of this land, we recognize the deep parallels between our struggles for justice and the plight of Palestinian people.”
At Cornell University Indigenous students protested, held vigils and discussions in an encampment calling for a ceasefire and for university divestment from companies supporting Israel’s military campaign. As told in Rematriation, Native students also held a four-day fast for Palestine.
Many campus protests were peaceful, but others caused disruption. At the start of fall 2024, many universities developed policies to quell student protests, minimizing opposition and imposing stiff punishments even for candlelight vigils and silent study-ins.
In September 2024 The National ran a story describing Indigenous Americans as “emerging as an important internal voice against the US government’s support for Israel.”
Two articles by non-Native writers in the Palestine Chronicle illustrate Indigenous peoples’ identification with the Palestinian experience relating the U.S. history of settler colonialism and removal policies with Israeli land theft, Palestinian expulsion, oppression, and genocide.
At the Democratic National Convention in August 2024, Native people participated in protests and panels in support of Palestine. The headline in Native News Online read: “Natives for Palestine, ‘We understand genocide.’”
The national Native radio talk show Native America Calling discussed Indigenous perspectives on the war in Gaza. The panel of guests shared the pushback, hostilities, and allegations of antisemitism they encountered while supporting Palestine and naming the genocide occuring there. Panelist Chase Iron Eyes, Oglala Lakota, was asked about tribes speaking out. Iron Eyes said, “I’ve been looking for it and I can't find it from the National Congress of American Indians. We should be asking why tribal leaders aren’t speaking out.”
The National Congress of American Indians, the leading tribal advocacy organization, gives a State of Indian Nations address at their annual convention, the largest gathering of tribal leaders in the country. The NCAI Youth Commission also gives a State of Indian Youth. The youth address, guaranteed in the bylaws, typically affords youth the opportunity to voice concerns, issues, and challenges they face.
Last February 2024, my daughter Yanenowi Logan, a Cornell senior at the time, was the President of the Youth Commission and prepared the youth address expressing solidarity with Palestine and the need for broader support from Indian Country. NCAI executives and legal counsel first pulled the youth speech from the program, then conceded to keep it; mindful of the bylaws They privately opposed the content and held hours-long meetings in which executives and tribal leaders scolded the youth commission, and subtly suggested the tenor and focus of the speech be changed. One attorney suggested the youth’s views were antisemitic. In the end, Yanenowi gave her address expressing the need for Indian Country to support Palestinians and Indigenous people globally who are suffering removal and oppression – but it wouldn’t have happened without an internal skirmish defending their position.
Tribes have big fish to fry fighting the state and feds to protect and maintain what is ours. Native communities have unique challenges and sometimes inadequate resources to address serious problems. But our daily obstacles are mere nuisances next to what Palestinians have endured for years. It is 2025 and while we are scrolling on our phones, stress-eating, and bracing ourselves for the next outrageous, merciless Trump edict, Palestinians go hungry in caves.
Since Trump 2.0 took office everyone in this country, including 20-year veterans working in the federal government, three-time Trump voters who lost their jobs in the past few days – we’re all at the mercy of the category-5 shitstorm ginned up by Trump, Elon Musk and a bystander Congress. Indian Country has – by necessity – quickly become more unified to protect tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, and to marshal a collective defense of federal funding for essential programs and services such as health, housing, and education.
It is no wonder then, with all the havoc and uncertainty unleashed, it is increasingly difficult for people to see past the daily crush of news instilling instability and fear, sidelining support for Palestine and Ukraine.
According to Al Jazeera the Palestinian death toll since October 7, 2023, is 61,709, with 17,498 being children. January data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the World Health Organization and the Palestinian government show Israeli attacks have damaged almost all of Gaza’s homes (damaged or destroyed), 80 percent of commercial facilities, 88 percent of school buildings, 68 percent of roads, 68 percent of cropland, leaving only 50 percent of hospitals partially functional.
“No Other Land”
I recently saw the film “No Other Land,” a documentary about the Palestinian expulsion from Masafer Yatta in the West Bank. I saw it at a small independent theater in Ithaca, New York, three hours from my home because it is not showing anywhere nearby. A New York Times article explained that no U.S. studio will touch it. With the documentary winning the Academy Award, maybe now it will get wider distribution.
I left the theater feeling sick. And helpless. It was difficult to watch.
Basel Adra, a young Palestinian, has used the only weapon he has, a camera, to document the Israeli military’s relentless attacks that have leveled his small village. He began documenting the gradual chipping away of humanity and dismantling of his community six years ago – well before Oct. 7. He shows the Israeli forces’ slow-moving bulldozers crackling down dry dirt roads, moving in to demolish homes. Villagers are required to obtain permits to rebuild and are denied those. They are forced to take what few worldly belongings they have and shelter in mountainside caves.
Then we see the bulldozing of their goat and sheep pens. The Israelis take their cars. And then they come for their generators.Then the Israeli military bulldozers crush their chicken coops. Another day comes and they flatten their latrines. Then gun-toting troops clear out children from the school and while the frightened children and teachers stand by watching, their school is reduced to rubble. There are shootings; people are killed, injured, paralyzed, and jailed for simply trying to live, survive, and protect the ground beneath their feet. There are daily and then nightly raids and unending terrorism unleashed on non-combatant civilians; unarmed families who refuse to be driven out of their homelands.
Masafer Yatta is effectively an open-air prison, a place they cannot leave; yet Israeli forces are trained to beat them down and run them out. Twenty years ago an apartheid road system was enacted by law. Palestinians are barred from driving on 40 percent of the roads in the West Bank. There are Jewish-only roads and if Palestinians are fortunate enough to have vehicles, they are not permitted to travel outside of their rapidly eroding village. In 2006, the law further restricted Palestinian movement. It is against the law to transport Palestinian passengers in Israeli-driven, Israeli-plated cars without a special permit.
While watching the mounting devastation on film, I kept it together until the soldiers arrived with chainsaws and cut the water lines then drove in cement trucks, filling their water wells with concrete. At that point I could no longer contain the tears I had been choking down. My body shook as I released audible sobs in the dark as the wreckage peaked in the flickering light of film. I could hear others in the theater too had reached their breaking point.
As the credits rolled, I lingered as the lights came up. The film left me anguished, short of breath asking: What can we do?
I couldn’t help but think of my Seneca ancestors and what they went through when George Washington ordered the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign in a scorched-earth military mission to eradicate Haudenosaunee villages from central New York in 1779. No one was spared the sword or musket: women, children, elders were killed. Longhouses were burned to the ground, orchards and cornfields were torched. This was a deliberate, unannounced, forced removal in the name of Manifest Destiny; a superior entitlement to land and resources.
We live in a world that is being ripped apart on many levels by an administration with a similar scorched-earth agenda that doesn’t care about its own people, much less Native people. President Trump cares even less about the oppressed people of Palestine whose lives are literally in ruins.
While we are at the mercy of a regime determined to decimate the department of education, ignore the Constitution, run roughshod over laws and social norms, and presumably, eventually our treaties too, as though this hasn’t already happened–we are still far better off than Palestinians. We are fortunate, privileged, virtually unaffected by the gruesome brutality, inhumanity, and torment inflicted half a world away. We can turn off the news, selectively scroll over feeds, pop in earbuds and tune out the world.
I am reminded of what Colson Whitehead’s character Curtis Elwood said in Nickel Boys. Elwood said, “If everybody looks the other way, then everybody’s in on it.”
The phrase “the power of the pen” used to mean something. In our Indigenous communities we talk about speaking truth to power. Given our history of removal and dispossession, we fist-pump self-determination and land back movements. We honor our ancestors who resisted and fought so we could be here today.
In November 2024, Nick Estes, Lower Brule Oglala Lakota/Jewish, an assistant professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota wrote: “The United States has clamped down on its own educational system, banning books teaching its true settler colonial history, while brutalizing college students and cracking down on educators opposing its genocide against Palestinians. And yet there is still hope for justice.”
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remain resolute about staying on their lands. They are not giving up, just like our ancestors refused to give up.
There have been some Indigenous voices that have stood up in solidarity with Palestine– plenty of Native students on college campuses, and six tribes. But with 568 tribes staying quiet, mostly there has been resounding silence throughout Indian Country; and a clear discomfort within the ranks of the largest national Native collective of tribal leaders. That voice has been noticeably, painfully silent as Palestinians fight to keep their feet on their lands–just like we did.
There is a George Saunders short story, “Love Letter”, written in 2022 that serves as a cautionary tale of the dangers of passivity and the need for resistance. The grandfather in the story writes a letter to his grandson. The times are terrifyingly bleak–perhaps prescient–under a tightly controlled kind of police state. There is a double-edged message the grandfather sends: lay low and stay safe, and yet what might we do? Dangerous times unfold when resistance is neutralized by fear, despair, and indifference.
I ask myself: What can we do? How can I make a difference? As Adra has taken up his camera, I have only my keyboard. I cannot stay quiet. Unlike the grandfather in “Love Letter”, I will not tell my children to stay silent. Because as with all wars and battles: if we submit, there is much to lose, and an even more constrained and dangerous future looms.
Accepting the Oscar for the film, Basel Adra said, “We call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.”
"No Other Land" should be seen, shared, and talked about. Indigenous eyes should not be averted; impassioned young voices should not be squelched, support for Palestine should not quietly die out. Just as with each and every one of our Native nations–their fight is not over.
Leslie Logan, Seneca, has been an occasional contributor to ICT for more than 10 years. She is the former associate director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at Cornell University. She is a freelance writer, public relations consultant and grassroots community activist currently working on community and youth engagement initiatives for the Seneca Nation.
This opinion-editorial essay does not reflect the views of ICT; voices in our opinion section represent a variety of reader points of view. If you would like to contribute an essay to ICT, email opinion@ictnews.org
Last week marked the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a war that drew attention and wide-spread support for Ukraine from all corners of the globe. The blue and yellow flag was everywhere and declarations of “We Stand with Ukraine” proliferated in a fervor – and then subsided significantly. Now, with a second Putin-friendly Trump administration bullying Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, support for Ukraine has been revived.
Politics fuels and dulls the national attention span and capacity for compassion for those suffering under unrelenting military campaigns.
In the case of the war in Gaza few tribal statements supporting Palestinians have been made despite grave losses, dramatic destruction, a humanitarian crisis, Israeli abdication of war conventions and civil society norms, and the hard-to-miss historic parallels with Native peoples.
The month-old, three-phase ceasefire in Gaza has been called fragile. Underscoring ongoing threats, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect posted, “The ceasefire agreement offers a glimmer of hope for a permanent cessation of hostilities in Gaza, but the risk of ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide remains high.”
Although hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are returning to their homes, the conditions are described as unlivable. President Donald Trump has threatened to permanently remove all Palestinians to make way for a “Riviera of the Middle East,” diminishing hope for rebuilding.
The Associated Press reported that Raji Sourani, a leading human rights lawyer from Gaza, accused Trump of aiming to “complete the genocide.” Geneva Conventions forbid “mass forcible transfers” from occupied lands “regardless of their motive.” The International Criminal Court — where the US and Israel are not members — also holds that “forcible transfer” can be a war crime or, in some circumstances, a crime against humanity.
By all accounts, Palestinians are far from safe, stable ground with new threats afoot.
Out of 574 federally recognized tribes only five have expressed support for Palestine since Oct. 7, 2023. Calls for a permanent ceasefire were made by the Oglala Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne River Lakota, Winneman Wintu, Yurok, Red Lake Band of Chippewa, and the Oceti Sakowin Treaty Council – which represents a collective of almost 50 tribes.
Diné activists urged Navajo president Buu Nygren to call for a ceasefire, but he seemingly backed down to avoid upsetting Raytheon Technologies RTX, the world’s largest missile manufacturer. The Navajo Nation is home to the Raytheon Diné Facility which builds and stores parts for Tomahawk cruise missiles, Javelin weapon systems, and Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles.
NDN Collective, an Indigenous advocacy organization out of Rapid City, South Dakota, and Red Nations, out of Arizona called for a ceasefire and an end to US military aid to Israel.
Indigenous Solidarity with Palestine, created an online effort obtaining 1,122 signatures for an Indigenous solidarity letter of support.
In early November 2023, Coast Salish people took to their canoes in the Port of Tacoma blocking ships believed to be carrying weapons to Israeli forces.
That November, Native activists marched in the Free Palestine Ceasefire Rally in Washington, DC. In Cultural Survival, Nick Tilsen, the president and chief executive officer of NDN Collective, stated, “Indigenous voices have become especially prominent in support of Palestine in a spirit of kinship.”
Tilsen, Oglala Lakota and Jewish, said, “Sometimes when I talk to Indigenous leaders here, they’ll be like, ‘Gaza, that’s happening all the way over there in the Middle East. Why should I say anything?’ I reassure them that our priority is and will always be here, fighting for the return of Indigenous lands to the Indigenous Peoples of the United States. But it’s important to see how the U.S. has been directly funding the Israeli military — in the billions, for decades — as it commits genocide on the Palestinian people with resources extracted from our stolen lands.”
He continued, “Do we stand quietly as these people are being murdered? Or, do we step into our courage and bravery, aligned with our values, even when it’s not popular to do so?”
Many Native people who have publicly supported Palestine have been verbally attacked and accused of antisemitism.
Seth Allard, Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa, was one of the few Native OpEds writing, “If I say crushing Palestinian children into unrecognizable shapes via airstrikes is inhumane, I am anti-Semitic, supporting terrorism, enemy to America. If I say Israeli children, stacked in piles or captured by Hamas is horrific, I am colonialist, pro-Zionist, Islamophobic. I am neither. I am a Native American, Marine Corps Veteran, mental health professional decrying the unjust and criminal nature of war.”
Indigenous students across the country engaged in college campus protests, an April 2024 story discussed those. Portland State students and local communities organized a powwow to bring attention to the plight of Palestinians. The Portland State University students stated: “As Indigenous peoples of this land, we recognize the deep parallels between our struggles for justice and the plight of Palestinian people.”
At Cornell University Indigenous students protested, held vigils and discussions in an encampment calling for a ceasefire and for university divestment from companies supporting Israel’s military campaign. As told in Rematriation, Native students also held a four-day fast for Palestine.
Many campus protests were peaceful, but others caused disruption. At the start of fall 2024, many universities developed policies to quell student protests, minimizing opposition and imposing stiff punishments even for candlelight vigils and silent study-ins.
In September 2024 The National ran a story describing Indigenous Americans as “emerging as an important internal voice against the US government’s support for Israel.”
Two articles by non-Native writers in the Palestine Chronicle illustrate Indigenous peoples’ identification with the Palestinian experience relating the U.S. history of settler colonialism and removal policies with Israeli land theft, Palestinian expulsion, oppression, and genocide.
At the Democratic National Convention in August 2024, Native people participated in protests and panels in support of Palestine. The headline in Native News Online read: “Natives for Palestine, ‘We understand genocide.’”
The national Native radio talk show Native America Calling discussed Indigenous perspectives on the war in Gaza. The panel of guests shared the pushback, hostilities, and allegations of antisemitism they encountered while supporting Palestine and naming the genocide occuring there. Panelist Chase Iron Eyes, Oglala Lakota, was asked about tribes speaking out. Iron Eyes said, “I’ve been looking for it and I can't find it from the National Congress of American Indians. We should be asking why tribal leaders aren’t speaking out.”
The National Congress of American Indians, the leading tribal advocacy organization, gives a State of Indian Nations address at their annual convention, the largest gathering of tribal leaders in the country. The NCAI Youth Commission also gives a State of Indian Youth. The youth address, guaranteed in the bylaws, typically affords youth the opportunity to voice concerns, issues, and challenges they face.
Last February 2024, my daughter Yanenowi Logan, a Cornell senior at the time, was the President of the Youth Commission and prepared the youth address expressing solidarity with Palestine and the need for broader support from Indian Country. NCAI executives and legal counsel first pulled the youth speech from the program, then conceded to keep it; mindful of the bylaws They privately opposed the content and held hours-long meetings in which executives and tribal leaders scolded the youth commission, and subtly suggested the tenor and focus of the speech be changed. One attorney suggested the youth’s views were antisemitic. In the end, Yanenowi gave her address expressing the need for Indian Country to support Palestinians and Indigenous people globally who are suffering removal and oppression – but it wouldn’t have happened without an internal skirmish defending their position.
Tribes have big fish to fry fighting the state and feds to protect and maintain what is ours. Native communities have unique challenges and sometimes inadequate resources to address serious problems. But our daily obstacles are mere nuisances next to what Palestinians have endured for years. It is 2025 and while we are scrolling on our phones, stress-eating, and bracing ourselves for the next outrageous, merciless Trump edict, Palestinians go hungry in caves.
Since Trump 2.0 took office everyone in this country, including 20-year veterans working in the federal government, three-time Trump voters who lost their jobs in the past few days – we’re all at the mercy of the category-5 shitstorm ginned up by Trump, Elon Musk and a bystander Congress. Indian Country has – by necessity – quickly become more unified to protect tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, and to marshal a collective defense of federal funding for essential programs and services such as health, housing, and education.
It is no wonder then, with all the havoc and uncertainty unleashed, it is increasingly difficult for people to see past the daily crush of news instilling instability and fear, sidelining support for Palestine and Ukraine.
According to Al Jazeera the Palestinian death toll since October 7, 2023, is 61,709, with 17,498 being children. January data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the World Health Organization and the Palestinian government show Israeli attacks have damaged almost all of Gaza’s homes (damaged or destroyed), 80 percent of commercial facilities, 88 percent of school buildings, 68 percent of roads, 68 percent of cropland, leaving only 50 percent of hospitals partially functional.
“No Other Land”
I recently saw the film “No Other Land,” a documentary about the Palestinian expulsion from Masafer Yatta in the West Bank. I saw it at a small independent theater in Ithaca, New York, three hours from my home because it is not showing anywhere nearby. A New York Times article explained that no U.S. studio will touch it. With the documentary winning the Academy Award, maybe now it will get wider distribution.
I left the theater feeling sick. And helpless. It was difficult to watch.
Basel Adra, a young Palestinian, has used the only weapon he has, a camera, to document the Israeli military’s relentless attacks that have leveled his small village. He began documenting the gradual chipping away of humanity and dismantling of his community six years ago – well before Oct. 7. He shows the Israeli forces’ slow-moving bulldozers crackling down dry dirt roads, moving in to demolish homes. Villagers are required to obtain permits to rebuild and are denied those. They are forced to take what few worldly belongings they have and shelter in mountainside caves.
Then we see the bulldozing of their goat and sheep pens. The Israelis take their cars. And then they come for their generators.Then the Israeli military bulldozers crush their chicken coops. Another day comes and they flatten their latrines. Then gun-toting troops clear out children from the school and while the frightened children and teachers stand by watching, their school is reduced to rubble. There are shootings; people are killed, injured, paralyzed, and jailed for simply trying to live, survive, and protect the ground beneath their feet. There are daily and then nightly raids and unending terrorism unleashed on non-combatant civilians; unarmed families who refuse to be driven out of their homelands.
Masafer Yatta is effectively an open-air prison, a place they cannot leave; yet Israeli forces are trained to beat them down and run them out. Twenty years ago an apartheid road system was enacted by law. Palestinians are barred from driving on 40 percent of the roads in the West Bank. There are Jewish-only roads and if Palestinians are fortunate enough to have vehicles, they are not permitted to travel outside of their rapidly eroding village. In 2006, the law further restricted Palestinian movement. It is against the law to transport Palestinian passengers in Israeli-driven, Israeli-plated cars without a special permit.
While watching the mounting devastation on film, I kept it together until the soldiers arrived with chainsaws and cut the water lines then drove in cement trucks, filling their water wells with concrete. At that point I could no longer contain the tears I had been choking down. My body shook as I released audible sobs in the dark as the wreckage peaked in the flickering light of film. I could hear others in the theater too had reached their breaking point.
As the credits rolled, I lingered as the lights came up. The film left me anguished, short of breath asking: What can we do?
I couldn’t help but think of my Seneca ancestors and what they went through when George Washington ordered the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign in a scorched-earth military mission to eradicate Haudenosaunee villages from central New York in 1779. No one was spared the sword or musket: women, children, elders were killed. Longhouses were burned to the ground, orchards and cornfields were torched. This was a deliberate, unannounced, forced removal in the name of Manifest Destiny; a superior entitlement to land and resources.
We live in a world that is being ripped apart on many levels by an administration with a similar scorched-earth agenda that doesn’t care about its own people, much less Native people. President Trump cares even less about the oppressed people of Palestine whose lives are literally in ruins.
While we are at the mercy of a regime determined to decimate the department of education, ignore the Constitution, run roughshod over laws and social norms, and presumably, eventually our treaties too, as though this hasn’t already happened–we are still far better off than Palestinians. We are fortunate, privileged, virtually unaffected by the gruesome brutality, inhumanity, and torment inflicted half a world away. We can turn off the news, selectively scroll over feeds, pop in earbuds and tune out the world.
I am reminded of what Colson Whitehead’s character Curtis Elwood said in Nickel Boys. Elwood said, “If everybody looks the other way, then everybody’s in on it.”
The phrase “the power of the pen” used to mean something. In our Indigenous communities we talk about speaking truth to power. Given our history of removal and dispossession, we fist-pump self-determination and land back movements. We honor our ancestors who resisted and fought so we could be here today.
In November 2024, Nick Estes, Lower Brule Oglala Lakota/Jewish, an assistant professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota wrote: “The United States has clamped down on its own educational system, banning books teaching its true settler colonial history, while brutalizing college students and cracking down on educators opposing its genocide against Palestinians. And yet there is still hope for justice.”
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remain resolute about staying on their lands. They are not giving up, just like our ancestors refused to give up.
There have been some Indigenous voices that have stood up in solidarity with Palestine– plenty of Native students on college campuses, and six tribes. But with 568 tribes staying quiet, mostly there has been resounding silence throughout Indian Country; and a clear discomfort within the ranks of the largest national Native collective of tribal leaders. That voice has been noticeably, painfully silent as Palestinians fight to keep their feet on their lands–just like we did.
There is a George Saunders short story, “Love Letter”, written in 2022 that serves as a cautionary tale of the dangers of passivity and the need for resistance. The grandfather in the story writes a letter to his grandson. The times are terrifyingly bleak–perhaps prescient–under a tightly controlled kind of police state. There is a double-edged message the grandfather sends: lay low and stay safe, and yet what might we do? Dangerous times unfold when resistance is neutralized by fear, despair, and indifference.
I ask myself: What can we do? How can I make a difference? As Adra has taken up his camera, I have only my keyboard. I cannot stay quiet. Unlike the grandfather in “Love Letter”, I will not tell my children to stay silent. Because as with all wars and battles: if we submit, there is much to lose, and an even more constrained and dangerous future looms.
Accepting the Oscar for the film, Basel Adra said, “We call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.”
"No Other Land" should be seen, shared, and talked about. Indigenous eyes should not be averted; impassioned young voices should not be squelched, support for Palestine should not quietly die out. Just as with each and every one of our Native nations–their fight is not over.
Leslie Logan, Seneca, has been an occasional contributor to ICT for more than 10 years. She is the former associate director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at Cornell University. She is a freelance writer, public relations consultant and grassroots community activist currently working on community and youth engagement initiatives for the Seneca Nation.
This opinion-editorial essay does not reflect the views of ICT; voices in our opinion section represent a variety of reader points of view. If you would like to contribute an essay to ICT, email opinion@ictnews.org
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