An Empty Story

Steve Russell
5 min readMay 9, 2019
Photo by Russ McCabe on Unsplash

The master narrative of civilization in the Americas claims that brave European explorers “discovered” continents sparsely populated by stone age hunter-gatherers who had no use for land titles. When the hunting played out or the harvest season for fruits and vegetables ended, the Natives moved on, leaving little evidence of their presence other than grave goods and the remains of buffalo jumps or fish camps.

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Steve Russell

Enrolled Cherokee, 9th grade dropout, retired judge, associate professor emeritus, and (so far) cancer survivor. Memoir: Lighting the Fire (Miniver Press 2020)