Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

On first glance, the Indigenous histories of Arizona and Kentucky seem to have few commonalities. Twenty-two federally recognized Native Nations live within the borders of Arizona, while none reside in Kentucky since the forced removals of the nineteenth century. Histories of these states use different chronologies. Arizona celebrates 1912 for its statehood, focusing on the influx of white Americans as travelers, miners, ranchers, and settlers after the Mexican Cession of 1848. These early histories of Arizona often frame Native Americans according to stereotypical binaries of "friendly" or "hostile Indians" based on their responses to American encroachment. In contrast, [End Page 301] histories of Kentucky often begin in the middle of the 1700s with the arrival of white surveyors and traders and depict Native peoples as outsiders whose "permanent settlements" were located north of the Ohio River or to the south in present-day Tennessee. Moreover, these locales are separated by thousands of miles and feature drastically different landscapes, ecologies, and climates.

Despite these apparent differences, settler colonialism is a phenomenon that spans the continent, and the historical narratives of these two states and especially the place of Native peoples in those narratives share more commonalities than one might expect. Most importantly, Indigenous peoples continue to live and consider both the lands of Arizona and Kentucky as home, recognizing "this is Native land."¹ In settler colonialism, non-Native settlers consumed land by dispossessing Indigenous peoples and then created historical narratives to justify and solidify their actions.² While making such accounts, they also obscured Indigenous narratives and meanings of people and land. These settler narratives evolved into state histories and memories based on simple tropes of bifurcated opposites to create a distorted mirror of people's relationships with land. Like a carnival's house of mirrors, these histories present a maze and puzzle of reflections that distort the actual figures' image. Some mirrors make the image seem too large or long, while others render the image too short or small. Each curved mirror is a binary, or a misunderstanding of the past that warps the images of what happened. [End Page 302]

Scholars have described "colonial entanglements" as the complicated webs of interactions, power struggles, and historical developments between categorized binaries of settler and native, or colonizer and colonized.³ As Diné scholar Wendy Greyeyes has argued, disentangling Indigenous education from colonial systems is a central component of the decolonizing process that many Indigenous intellectuals and peoples have not only called for but fought over for generations.⁴ So too is Indigenizing the historical narratives that we remember, share, and teach our children. Our two essays unpack these colonial binaries to restore understandings of Indigenous meanings of land and to expose the state histories' distorted reflections. Disentangling Indigenous meanings of land from non-Native settler terms offers a key to escaping the house of mirrors and seeing more accurate depictions of the past.

Farina King underscores how the binaries of "friendly" and "hostile" Indians is part of the hijacking and erasing of Indigenous histories. She considers how this hijacking process targets the Indigenous meanings of ecologies, detaching the sacred relationality of Indigenous peoples and their ancestral homelands. Focusing on efforts to recenter narratives in Arizona, King refers to hijacked stories or "history" of the Onk Akimel O'odham (Pima) and Xalychidom Piipaash (Maricopa) peoples who came together by the mid-nineteenth century. Some white American "settlers" and "pioneers," who invaded the region targeted Indigenous water sources from the beginning, simultaneously hijacking sacred meanings and relations to the landscapes and ecologies of the waterways. The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community descends from the survivors of this early onslaught, Onk Akimel O'odham and Xalychidom Piipaash, persisting and fighting for waters of life and spirit to this day. [End Page 303]

Jacob F. Lee questions the binary between "hunting ground" and "permanent settlement" to consider Indigenous, specifically Cherokee and Shawnee, meanings and claims to their homelands in what later became part of Kentucky. While the public often falsely considers Kentucky to be a land without Indigenous peoples and inhabitants in the past and present, Lee reveals that Indigenous peoples have sustained a strong presence in what is eastern Kentucky, and there is much more to learn and understand about different parts of the region and Indigenous histories and people-land relationships. Indigenous peoples, including but not limited to Shawnees and Cherokees, shaped the land through intentional practices and relied on the land for education, subsistence, and ways of life—a part of being Indigenous. Indigenous figures such as Captain Will Emery and others sought to protect their lands and to explicate what the land meant to them in the eighteenth century. [End Page 304]