Nick Estes - The Empire of All Maladies: Colonial Contagions and Indigenous Resistance

One of the most potent myths of mainstream U.S. historiography concerns what Indigenous archaeologist Michael V. Wilcox calls “terminal narratives”: an obsession with the death, disappearance, and absence of Indigenous people rather than their continued, visible presence and challenge to colonialism. The most obvious example of this tendency are historical models that assign blame for the mass killing of the Indigenous to invisible, chance forces—above all, the diseases colonizers unwittingly carried with them—rather than to calculated warfare and theft over centuries of relentless European invasion. - Estes, Nick. "The Empire of All Maladies: Colonial Contagions and Indigenous Resistance." The Baffler #52 (July 2020)