Hacking Colonialism

Abstract

Listen: Dread, panic, and horror are the great teasers, and tragic wisdom is our best chance in a dangerous world.—Gerald Vizenor, Postindian ConversationsUntil that day . . .Until all are one . . .Continue the struggle . . .—Optimus Prime, in The Transformers: The Movie“American people are being pushed into new social forms because of the complex nature of modern communications and transportation, and the competing forms are neotribalism and neofeudalism,” the Standing Rock Sioux thinker Vine Deloria, Jr., wrote in 1970 (14). That insight was inspired in part by the work of Marshall McLuhan, which also led Deloria to suggest something even more provocative:Indian people are just as subject to the deluge of information as are other people. In the last decade most reservations have come within the reach of televisions and computers. In many ways Indian people are just as directed by the electric nature of our universe as any other group. But the tribal viewpoint simply absorbs what is reported to it and immediately integrates it into the experience of the group. . . . The more that happens, the better the tribe seems to function and the stronger it appears to get. Of all the groups in the modern world Indians are best able to cope with the modern situation.