Malice enough in their hearts and courage enough in ours: reflections on US Indigenous and Palestinian experiences under occupation

To see for ourselves the conditions under which Palestinians live and struggle---this was the mission of the delegation of Indigenous and Women of Color Feminists that traveled to Occupied Palestine in June 2011.1 All of us had been part of social justice struggles in our respective communities and all of us sought to increase our capacity for effective solidarity action with Palestinians. I traveled with the delegation as an Indigenous woman living under US occupation seeking to understand how another Indigenous population struggled under settler colonialism. Sometimes it takes seeing the suffering of others to realise the full magnitude of our own suffering. As a Dakota woman in Palestine, I had the painful experience of witnessing the monstrous destructiveness of settler colonialism's war against a People and a land base. I told one friend that it was like witnessing a high-speed and high-tech version of the colonisation of our Indigenous homelands. Colonisation ought to be one of the most easily recognised forms of oppression in the world, but it is not. In fact, colonising powers work so steadfastly to rationalise and justify this crime against humanity that it eventually becomes normalised, acceptable, and even righteous. I come from a place where the government denies that it is colonial---it denies that it is a government of occupation. I recognised this same colonial deception at play in Israel's disavowal of itself as a colonial entity.