574 NATIONS. PRESENT TENSE.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs publishes a list every year. The current one runs to 574 federally recognized tribes — 347 across the lower forty-eight, 227 in Alaska. Federal Register, 8 January 2024, published under a law Congress passed in 1994 for the express purpose of keeping that list current.
That is not a historical figure. It is a roster of governments the United States is dealing with this week.
Most of this store is about what was taken — the removals, the schools, the counts nobody reconciled. This part is not. Every design in it is written in the present tense, because the people it is about did not go anywhere.
The past tense is the comfortable one
A museum case ends around 1890. A textbook chapter ends around 1890. Say a thing in the past tense and it closes: nothing is owed, nobody has to be dealt with, and the land question is a matter for historians.
Present tense reopens all of it. It means treaties that are still in force, water rights still in court, and 574 governments that still exist — which is the harder sentence, and the true one.
That is the entire difference between remembering somebody and noticing them.
Four ways to say the same sentence
got land? — three words in lower case on a plain tee. It reads as a joke for about a second, which is exactly how long it takes to stop being one.
Make your body a home that feels more like your ancestors than your colonizers. — set small, in the middle of the chest, so it has to be approached to be read.
MAKE AMERICA NATIVE AGAIN — the loudest one in the collection, and the only one that argues with a slogan instead of a textbook.
Indigenous Mother — laid out as a dictionary entry: one who raises warriors with the strength of ancestors, a breaker of generational cycles created by colonialism. The definition is the design.
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