230 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
of activists who seek to change the system; the incarceration of the
poor, particularly descendants of enslaved Africans; the individual
ism, carefully inculcated, that on the one hand produces self-blame
for personal failure and on the other exalts ruthless dog-eat-dog
competition for possible success, even though it rarely results; and
high rates of suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual violence against
women and children, homelessness, dropping out of school, and gun
violence.
These are symptoms, and there are many more, of a deeply trou
bled society, and they are not new. The large and influential civil
rights, student, labor, and women's movements of the 1950s through
the 1970s exposed the structural inequalities in the economy and
the historical effects of more than two centuries of slavery and bru
tal genocidal wars waged against Indigenous peoples. For a time, US
society verged on a process of truth seeking regarding past atroci
ties, making demands to end aggressive wars and to end poverty,
witnessed by the huge peace movement of the 1970s and the War on
Poverty, affirmative action, school busing, prison reform, women's
equity and reproductive rights, promotion of the arts and humani
ties, public media, the Indian Self-Determination Act, and many
other initiatives. 26
A more sophisticated version of the race to innocence that helps
perpetuate settler colonialism began to develop in social movement
theory in the 1990s, popularized in the work of Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri. Commonwealth, the third volume in a trilogy, is
one of a number of books in an academic fad of the early twenty
first century seeking to revive the Medieval European concept of the
commons as an aspiration for contemporary social movements. 27
Most writings about the commons barely mention the fate of Indig
enous peoples in relation to the call for all land to be shared. Two
Canadian scholar-activists, Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright,
for example, do not mince words in rejecting Native land claims
and sovereignty, characterizing them as xenophobic elitism. They
see Indigenous claims as "regressive neo-racism in light of the global
diasporas arising from oppression around the world."^28
Cree scholar Lorraine Le Camp calls this kind of erasure of Indig
enous peoples in North America "terranullism," harking back to the