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James Whorton Jr. | Longreads | October 13, 2026 | 5,932 words (25 minutes)
I live in Edgewood, a subdivision of quarter-acre lots in the town of Brighton, New York. Before the house was here, Edgewood was a farm, and before the farm, there was a forest. On a July day in 1788, a 55-year-old man named Hugh Maxwell set out to cross the forest in straight lines.
Not kind of straight. Maxwell’s job was to walk 1,100 miles on ruler-straight lines through this vast, obstacle-filled forest, to divide it into a grid of parcels that could eventually be sold as property. To shrink it down to the scale of human imagination. To look at the forest and see something else in its place.
I first learned about Maxwell from Mary Jo Lanphear, Brighton’s town historian. I had gone to Lanphear to research the racially restrictive housing covenants that made home ownership in Brighton exclusive to white people for decades. Whose fault was this? I wanted to know. Some racist real-estate developer? Something to do with the Federal Housing Administration? Lanphear printed out a copy of an old deed linking the Edgewood land to the Phelps and Gorham Company, a group of New England speculators. For a bargain price, Phelps and Gorham had acquired the title to 2.6 million acres of forested country along the Genesee River, in what is now western New York. The company then hired Maxwell—a Revolutionary War veteran, father of seven, and the first recorded white person to pass within shouting distance of the place where I now live—as surveyor.
As Maxwell crossed the forest, he imagined the nation he believed would one day replace it. “The land in this country is exceedingly good, but it wants good inhabitants,” Maxwell wrote to his wife, Bridget, imagining “many worshipping assemblies of Christians where now the wild beasts howl.” In place of the forest, he envisioned schools, churches, cash crops, and county clerks. However, he wrote, “these things are in the womb of futurity, and will be brought about in the proper way and time, as also by the proper means.”
Maxwell’s walk—through leechy ponds and tick-infested brush, down and up creek banks, over the rocky exposures that rattlesnakes prefer, in those remarkably straight lines—was like the act his fellow new citizens were performing daily, striving and pretending a nation into being. At the time he set out, the United States were only loosely joined, under the Articles of Confederation. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the first essay of The Federalist Papers, had recently asked “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” Neither the new government nor the grid of lots for sale were to be discovered on the ground. They were ideas in people’s heads, notes on paper. In the “womb of futurity,” maybe.
The forest, however, was real.
Have you ever retraced your steps looking for some lost thing you had no hope of ever finding again? More than two centuries after he walked the forest into the future, Maxwell’s path persists, as lines on a map and on the ground in my neighborhood. I wanted to find the forest he walked through.
So I set out to follow Hugh Maxwell—through books and archives, on maps and over the ground, across the state of New York and, finally, across my neighborhood, looking for traces of the forest in what is here now.
On July 25, 1788, Maxwell set off from the southeastern corner of the Phelps and Gorham purchase, on the Pennsylvania line, headed due north. He led a small crew, whose job it was to drag a Gunter’s chain, a surveyor’s tool used to measure distance. The chain was 66 feet long; 80 chains made a mile. Every six miles he marked a township corner, hacking Roman numerals into the sides of a convenient tree, Vs and Xs being easier to cut in bark than 5s and 10s.
While his helpers dragged the chain, Maxwell carried the grid in his head. The job was to lay this imaginary grid over the forest itself, to parcelize the land into numbered squares—to cut it up and shrink it. In a notebook that first day, he wrote:
From the 82 mile Stone
120 Rods the groth is Beech
Maple birch ash Basswood
and Hemlock mixt
Throughout Maxwell’s young life, the forest had been a chaotic place, subject to accident and force, to the wars that would determine its fate. During the French and Indian War, Maxwell, in his early 20s and part of a Massachusetts militia, barely escaped a violent death at Lake George. Following a surrender, Indians pulled militia men from the retreating lines, killing some on the spot and taking others prisoner, to be ransomed in Montreal. Maxwell was pulled aside, too, and had his boots, coat, and shirt stripped from his body. But he got loose somehow and escaped into the forest, running at least 14 miles to Fort Edward, barefoot in his pantaloons. Later, during the Revolutionary War, Maxwell was shot at the Battle of Bunker Hill. A musket ball entered his body just beneath the right collar bone, breaking Maxwell’s shoulder blade and exiting through his back. He survived field surgery and gangrene, and wrote home to Bridget with his left hand, fretting that his nurses fussed too much over him.
Now, as Maxwell walked off the eastern line of the Phelps and Gorham purchase, the forest wars were coming to an end. Still, the forest itself resisted him in its way. It did not lend itself to being crossed in straight lines, as though it were a blank page awaiting the pen’s touch. Branches snagged his clothes. “I am of the opinion,” he wrote to Bridget from his walk, “that if I live to return, I shall stand in need of some winter shirts for I think my old ones will be pretty much worn out.”
What makes a forest? How do I know when I’m standing in one, and not just under some trees?
To reach Maxwell’s starting place—his “82 mile stone,” a roadside block of granite 82 miles west of the Delaware River—I drove a hundred miles south to Caton, New York. A welcome to caton sign marked the town line, which was also the state line. I took my phone out, opened a map on the screen. The phone is able to locate itself using pings from four satellite systems: GPS (“a global public service brought to you by the US government”), GLONASS (same, but brought to you by Russia), Galileo (European Union), and BeiDou (China). The screen suggested there should be a marker right in front of me.
Crouched inside a brushy spot, I shoved skinny branches out of my face and slapped at my hair. I found a tangle of rusted barbed wire. I found a deer skeleton. But no mile marker. Feeling things crawling on me, I climbed out into the sunlight and slapped down my shirt and pants.
The growth I saw around me now was not so mixed as what Maxwell described in his notebook. I was standing on a stone chip road, looking across a hay field. My phone screen showed a satellite image with a red pin to the west of the road, in the brush I’d climbed out of, and a blue dot in the road, which was me. This had to be the spot, though. I walked to my car, felt my head for ticks again. Then I walked back up the road, to check under the welcome to caton sign. There, I found a block of pink and gray granite with an “82” cut into the side and several loops of orange surveyor’s tape tied around it. It wasn’t hidden—I’d simply been looking on the wrong side of the road. Looking for what was in my head instead of seeing what was there.
It was a slow march from here for Maxwell and his crew, dragging their chain in a straight line through the thickness of mixed trees and across creek cuts. It took them two weeks to cover the first 54 miles. For me it was an easy drive, a straight shot north between fields of sweet corn. I stopped to examine an occasional historical marker, and again at a roadside farm stand, hoping to say hello to someone who lived on this line. The little stall was well stocked with honey and dried garlic, but there was nobody to say hi to: Sales were on the honor system, with a Mason jar on the counter to leave your cash in. I had only brought a credit card.
Maxwell’s notebook was a memento of a different world. He passed massive chestnut trees such as I could only read about. One spot he judged “moist and good and springy,” another “good for grass.” He noted with approval where a stream was big enough to support a sawmill. And yet the gaps in his notes are astonishing. A few weeks into his survey, he crossed “some old clear land” and “through the old castle.” Castle was the colonial way of referring to an Indian town. Here was proof on the ground of what Maxwell already knew: People had been living in this forest for a very long time, cultivating this land in a different way than European settlers did. And yet Maxwell found little to note about the old castle. He carried on instead with his catalog of trees—”white ash, basswood, elm, &c.”
What makes a forest? How do I know when I’m standing in one, and not just under some trees?
The Latin precursor of the word “forest” meant something like an unenclosed outdoor space. In early English law, the silva forestis was a place for lords to chase game and for ordinary people to gather wood. In the 13th century, as the Magna Carta encoded the rights of English barons, the Carta de Foresta laid out the rights of commoners to pasture cattle in the open places among the English forests. Similarly, the forest Maxwell entered in the summer of 1788 was more than just mixed trees. Its openings included the towns, orchards, and farm fields of the Seneca Nation. The Senecas had long used fire to manage areas of the forest, clearing thick undergrowth to attract deer, and they moved their farming fields from time to time to prevent exhausting the soil.
A forest is too big to see all at once, and maybe too big to describe. Writing about it, one is moved to grand language and weird leaps of perspective. The historian Francis Parkman devoted his career to what he called “a history of the American forest,” which is really a history of empires. Writing in the 1880s, with no satellite photos at hand, Parkman borrowed the point of view of a flock of Canada geese flying north from Albany. “As the aërial travellers winged their way, the seat of war lay spread beneath them like a map. First the blue Hudson, slumbering among its forests, with the forts along its banks. . . .” Parkman’s geese paid special attention to military architecture, noticing Fort William Henry by the “glistening breast of Lake George” and the white flag of the French at Ticonderoga. Onward they flapped:
“Lake Champlain now spread before them, widening as they flew: on the left, the mountain wilderness of the Adirondacks, like a stormy sea congealed; on the right, the long procession of the Green Mountains; and, far beyond, on the dim verge of the eastern sky, the White Mountains throned in savage solitude.”
This is silly poetry, but I am in deep sympathy with it, having also spent countless hours staring at different maps, trying to transplant a whole forest into my head.
At the heart of Parkman’s seven-volume France and England in North America was a question about property. “To whom belonged this world of prairies and forests?” he asked. Parkman wrote that France had “claimed it by right of discovery and occupation,” adding that the French had an “excellent system” for distributing land: “Whoever received a grant from the Crown was required to improve it, and this within reasonable time. If he did not, the land ceased to be his, and was given to another more able or industrious.” The English eventually outdid the French in this regard, Parkman wrote: “New England was pre-eminently the land of material progress . . . nay, in defiance of the four Gospels, assiduity in the pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty.” The quickest way to gain from the forest was to sell or burn the timber and put a cash crop in the ground.
Sir Albert Howard, an English botanist, saw the forest as a model for sustainable farming. In what he called “Nature’s agriculture,” variety is the first rule: “Many species of plants and of animals all live together,” he wrote in the early pages of An Agricultural Testament, published in 1940. Economy is another rule: “Nothing is wasted” and “nothing is lost.” Somehow, life and decomposition continue across millennia with no one in charge.
Wendell Berry, referencing Howard in The Unsettling of America, writes that the forest is a place where “the forces of growth and the forces of decay are in balance.” I like this way of putting it very much. A forest tree dies in place, and its slow decay swells with life—mosses, fungi, beetles, and things that eat beetles. A living hardwood tree throws its leaves away every year. In The Great American Forest, Rutherford Platt calls this “the deciduous idea”—a funny way to imagine it, as though the founding fathers of the forest had written this leaf-shedding principle into their charter. But it is a brilliant idea, a world-changer. In balance, growth and decay work in cycles. The mat of discarded leaves becomes the food of millipedes and the habitat of worms. In spring, the snow sinks into it. A thick, black soil builds.
This is silly poetry, but I am in deep sympathy with it, having also spent countless hours staring at different maps, trying to transplant a whole forest into my head.
I had already traveled to Maxwell’s starting place; now, it occurred to me that I had never followed Hugh Maxwell’s route where he passed nearest to my house, along the eastern township line, which is not a road at all and which happens to be covered over with trees. From my front door, I followed the sidewalk along Edgewood Avenue, where the utility poles shrink away into the distance like an exercise in single-point perspective.
The place where I live has gone through a lot of changes in the 20,000 years since the most recent ice age, from deglaciation to migration and cultivation. At the time Maxwell began his walk, the towns, orchards, and farm fields of the Seneca Nation were openings in a vast forest that still covered half of North America, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. The houses in my part of Brighton were built beginning in the 1930s, but the older eras of this place are visible on any road map. The early roads go from some important place to some other important place. Monroe Avenue, a very old road, follows a route from the north end of Canandaigua Lake to a shallow, fordable spot in the Genesee River. It is not straight, but bends sensibly between Cobbs Hill and Pinnacle Hill. People have been walking that way for a long time, since long before Maxwell arrived.
After Maxwell, there came an era when all new roads were cut parallel to his township lines. The logic of the Brighton-Henrietta Town Line Road, for instance, has nothing to do with terrain, and the things one passes when driving it—an auto body shop, a small church with three steeples, an Asian market, a sex shop, Dunkin’—have little to do with each other. It’s as though Maxwell set the place to auto-arrange, so that every major surface road for the next two hundred years would snap to grid.
I stopped at the former site of the old Rowland farm. My friend Roger lived next door to the farm as a boy. Mr. Rowland had a stand of virgin timber on his place, Roger recalls, and the soil in his fields was so fertile that a person had to take care not to get knocked over by his produce. “Dig a hole, drop a seed in, and stand back,” Mr. Rowland warned.
As late as the 1950s, there still were some farms along Edgewood Avenue. But it wasn’t long before they were subdivided into residential lots.The timber now is mostly whatever people have chosen to set out in their yards. Norway maples are common—tough street trees, not from around here, indifferent to road salt and car exhaust. Rows of arborvitae make living privacy fences. Shading the Briar Manor apartments are seven big sycamores, handsome monsters with paint-by-number bark of yellow, gray, and lilac brown.
Past the row of sycamores, I turned onto a paved bicycle path that follows a chain-link fence. A little further, a sign marked the town line. I found a low place in the fence and stepped over, into the trees, following Maxwell again.
It was dark under the high canopy, and the underbrush was sparse. Maxwell had once described this section of his route as “very good beech and maple land with a mixture of ash, elm, oak, basswood, etc.” I found a beech tree, its pale sides smooth, its trunk a good two feet across. Beneath the beech tree was a shattered porcelain toilet. There was no plumbing attached; somebody had brought this toilet out here, set it on the ground, and taken a hammer to it.
I checked the map on my phone. In the satellite photo, the woods were more or less featureless except for the town line, superimposed in yellow over the treetops, and a blue dot, me, on top of that yellow line. I was still on Maxwell’s course. There was no trail on the ground for me to follow, though. The only trails were the soft, narrow animal trails that passed under blown-down branches or veered away into low cover.
The growth was mixed: saplings, mature trees, dead standing, and dead fallen. I found a red maple with circular fractures erupting like a target in its bark. I found an ash tree, its bark split open and buckling, the meandering tracks of an emerald ash borer scoring the bare wood. A lean musclewood with ten trunks, one with its bark chewed at the height of my knee. A basswood with a stripe of red spray paint on it and rings of woodpecker holes.
If this was a forest, it was a half-wrecked one. Much of the soil was exposed and cracked from flooding. Variety was here, though, and life among the decay. Deer tracks crossed a muddy trench. Bright moss blanketed the softening fallen trunks, and ferns grew. I heard chattering overhead and a rainlike sound in the leaves. Somebody was up there taking nuts apart. Chunks of green and yellow hull hit the ground around me, cycling back to the soil.
In September of 1788, Hugh Maxwell took a fall in the woods and hurt his shin. He made things worse, he wrote, “by wading in the swamp and through wet brush.” For three weeks, he was laid up in the Seneca town of Kanadesaga, where he had nothing to do but think and write home.
He missed Bridget. “I feel anxious for your welfare,” he wrote to her. “I long to hear from you and love to hear from you.” He reminded Bridget to have their son get the haying done, get some long shingles to fix the roof, cart the dung to the field, plow the field on time, and do the sowing.
He also missed church. Shortly after his near-death experience at Lake George as a young man, Maxwell had joined a church and, judging from his letters, devoted himself to a stern code under which he must strive constantly for an approval that he would never earn. For Maxwell, life on earth became a moral exercise, an attempt to deserve immortality. God, he wrote, “is Daily Loading us with his Benefits, though we are evil and unthankfull.” Now, once more wounded far from home, Maxwell wrote to his wife of “unprincipled fellows and drunken savages,” adding, “Religious society is quite out of the question here.”
It had been only nine years since the Continental Army’s expedition across Seneca country. After Senecas joined with Tories to raid White settlements along the Mohawk, the young United States had set aside European conventions of war in an attempt to drive Seneca communities from their land. “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible,” George Washington wrote in his orders. “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” At Kanadesaga, the Continental Army had burned at least 50 Seneca houses, tore ripe corn and beans from the fields, and bayoneted pumpkins. A whole orchard of apple trees was girdled, a circle of bark stripped from around each trunk, creating an unhealable, fatal wound. The Continental Army took few hostages: The Senecas moved west just ahead of the approaching troops and then returned again when the troops went home, rebuilding their houses and replanting their fields.
Nine years later, laid up in Kanadesaga while his shin healed, Maxwell now found himself surrounded by Indians. “I am in hopes their time with us here is short,” Maxwell wrote to Bridget. “I do think that the Great Governor of the universe is about to plant a glorious gospel in this wilderness,” he predicted—with the help of his own survey, of course. “May it be so and soon spread over this land.” Maxwell, in effect, had two tough jobs: crossing the forest in straight lines, and convincing himself that he was a good person for doing so.
After more than a month’s recovery, Maxwell resumed his survey. “First mile through excellent land,” he wrote from the woods, on the line of a future township along the east bank of the Genesee River, noting nearly a half-dozen different trees in the area. The next mile: “Same sort of excellent land and growth but considerable mixed with chestnut.” The third mile was less good: “80 rods over a wet low land.” Then more very good land again. He crossed a brook that ran one way, then the other. Both Maxwell and the brook were headed to the same place, north to Lake Ontario. The brook took the easy way, downhill. Maxwell took the straight way, leading his team and their chain through swamp and timber, mile after mile.
At the end of the 18th mile, he chopped a “XIII” into the side of a small basswood tree, marking a corner of the 13th township—“with trees marked for witness about it,” he wrote, for the benefit of some future settler searching for the corners of his lot.
Maxwell, in effect, had two tough jobs: crossing the forest in straight lines, and convincing himself that he was a good person for doing so.
When the blue dot on my phone told me I had reached the southeast corner of the town of Brighton, I spent some time looking for the basswood tree with the XIII in its bark. But I was kidding myself, of course. Maxwell’s hatchet marks were meant to last years, not centuries. I slapped at mosquitoes, scanning for some connection between the forest Maxwell had walked through and the place I was in. A scrap of fluorescent pink tape caught my eye. I’ve been seeing this stuff in the woods for my entire life, weatherproof trash that will outlive me and, I suppose, every other individual living thing in the woods as well. I looked past it, because I can’t pick up every piece of garbage in the woods and carry it out. Then I looked again and my understanding of the place shifted.
The pink plastic was a piece of surveyor’s tape, tied to a branch. Near the branch was a short, square concrete pillar. This was the marker—a “monument,” in surveyor-speak—that had taken the place of the basswood with the XIII in its side. It was a more durable monument than a tree, and though it was short and unobtrusive, the little non-decaying flag of pink plastic made it hard to miss, even for me.
Maxwell wrote of this site:
The line of this town is very
good land covered with a thick
growth of Beech Maple Elm Basswood
Ash Butternut &c. Not very uneven.
No elms now, but I had seen the others he mentioned. This wasn’t “virgin timber”: The nearest big tree was a two-trunked silver maple, second growth, sprouted back from a stump. This was the place, though.
I stayed there awhile doing nothing, a little dazzled, a little jarred by the impression of two forests coming together—the one Maxwell crossed and the one I was in. The forest wasn’t gone, but it had changed, and so had the way we live with it. In imagining the forest as a wild place, it seemed to me, we had imagined ourselves right out of it. It’s become a place to visit, a resource or a park, not our home.
Or something like that. Half-stumped, I managed to stand there motionless long enough that a red fox, not noticing me, stopped nearby with its nose in the air and its tail extended. I watched it for a while as it watched something else. Then a leaf blower whined, and the fox and I went our separate ways.
In a healthy forest, the forces of growth and the forces of decay are in balance. But those same forces are the conditions of life everywhere—balanced or not.
Reaching Lake Ontario, Maxwell cut his initials into a tree, then went home to Heath, Massachusetts. In years to come he served as a deacon and justice of the peace in that town. He applied for an invalid officer’s pension, but was denied. At 67 years old, in debt, he bought some horses and embarked with them for the West Indies, where the animals, along with enslaved humans, were in demand on sugar plantations. It was a nightmare world where both humans and horses were routinely worked to death in brutal heat. I wonder how he justified that new venture to himself. Maxwell took a profit from the sale, but died of yellow fever on the voyage home, and his body was buried at sea.
I couldn’t visit Maxwell’s final resting place. Instead, I drove to western Massachusetts, to his house. On Route 2 I locked on to an excellent Albany radio station whose signal held through the Taconic Mountains as far as Williamston, Massachusetts. The road had been graded and guard-railed in the 1920s, on top of an older road that people had been walking since the last ice age, for all one can know. The road sided a stream tumbling over rocks. And what was so important about that? Why did I love it? I loved this road because it was no one’s idea. A glacier put this road here, and people followed.
The house that once belonged to Maxwell was surprisingly modern-looking, with its solar panels and a Prius in the driveway. I knocked and a woman came to the door. Sue, the owner, invited me in. In the kitchen, one wall was almost all fireplace, paneled above with a single blond board 20 inches wide—spruce, Sue thought. In the next room, there was more of that broad paneling, and a row of cupboards over a smaller fireplace with a grow-light installed inside it over a collection of potted cacti. Sue showed me a copy of Maxwell’s only portrait, a silhouette on horseback that was made during the Revolutionary War. She also had a copy of The Christian Patriot, a biography written by Maxwell’s daughter, Priscilla, who recalled her father’s strong singing voice and a gory song about the courage of the Bunker Hill heroes that he liked to sing for the children. Near the house was a cemetery with a marker for Maxwell, a tall obelisk with worn stories in its sides.
I also drove to Lake George to see the place where 22-year-old Maxwell had first spied death coming for him through the forest. I followed US Route 9 past a sprawling outlet mall and Bloody Pond, where the bodies of slain men had been thrown at the end of that chaotic day early in the French and Indian War. Then I emerged from under clustered trees to what Thomas Jefferson once called “without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw.” Lake George was “ limpid as crystal,” he wrote, the mountains on either side “covered with rich groves of thuja, silver fir, white pine, aspen, and paper birch.” Today the groves of thuja are interrupted with summer mansions and the sandy parking lot by the beach is jammed with cars, but the mountains are still mountains and the long lake still stretches far away between them. When I arrived, the beach was crowded with boogie boarders, volleyballers, and people just splashing. A man threw a tennis ball into the lake, and a dog took a fierce running leap to retrieve it.
I’d booked a camp site nearby at the Lake George Battleground Campground. A few pines were all that separated my site from Route 9, its four lanes roaring with traffic. I set up my folding camp stool by the sidewalk, across from an Exxon.
I tried to picture a young Maxwell loping through here shirtless in his bare feet, enveloped by the forest and afraid for his life. Among the English-speaking settlers, the events at Lake George would be remembered as a massacre, and the Indigenous people whose home this was, whose conventions of war did not match those of the European empires, were called savages. It was powerful storytelling, indispensable to the colonial project.
Every story I could imagine about this place, and about Hugh Maxwell, seemed another work of fiction, a mechanism for assigning blame.
Maxwell trained himself on a version of that story: He had outrun death, sought God, and sought profit while declaring himself unthankful. He hardened himself into a professional fighter, banking on the next life while he improved an ancient forest by drawing a checkerboard on it. He wrote home about the “womb of futurity,” a bizarre metaphor I still do not understand. Whom did he think made futurity pregnant? Was it God, or the Phelps and Gorham Company? I didn’t understand the guy. On the other hand, I didn’t go to war when I was 22. I was working in a restaurant and writing stories.
Every story I could imagine about this place, and about Hugh Maxwell, seemed another work of fiction, a mechanism for assigning blame. Blame has to be assigned—Indigenous communities did not displace themselves, nor did the forest wreck itself—but it is also necessary to keep looking and to try to keep noticing how much one does not understand. Among the Native allies who joined the French at Lake George all those years ago was a band of ten Iowas who had traveled a thousand miles, from beyond the Great Lakes, to fight the English. What were they thinking, and what had their journey been like? They had only themselves to tell their story to, because no one at Lake George spoke their language.
As I tried to conjure the experiences of these men nearly 270 years ago, it occurred to me that I ought to be more concerned for the daring pedestrians trying to cross Route 9 from the campground to the MiniMart attached to the Exxon. There was a crosswalk, but the traffic was coming in fast.
There was too much here for me to make sense of. The seat of war was now a vacation spot. War is violent and so are four-lane highways. Lake George is beautiful, and it puzzled me to notice that the MiniMart was pretty, too, with its high-wattage red-and-white Exxon sign and its glass front glowing softly yellow.
I walked over. Inside, the MiniMart was lit up like a minor carnival, aggressively air-conditioned, and it had a sweet, grimy, convenience-store smell of burnt coffee and potato logs. People were getting chips, jerky, gasoline, and party ice. The forces of growth and the forces of decay were jostling. I liked being there. I selected two cold singles, thanked the cashier, and followed the crosswalk safely back to my campsite and my folding camp stool, from which I watched the people coming and going late into the night.
When Hugh Maxwell wrote home to Bridget with his story about the womb of futurity, he got a couple things wrong.
He was right that the country was changing. While he was in the forest tramping out lines, trying to get his head around this thing that was too big to fit inside anyone’s head, the United States ratified their second constitution. The document was a little over 4,000 words long, and it relied heavily on the word “shall,” a modal verb used to indicate a future action, which was used 191 times. The official copy covered four big sheets of parchment in ink made from oak galls.
He was wrong about the Senecas’ time being short. They are still here. On the Tonawanda Territory, an hour’s drive west from my house, Senecas still govern themselves according to the Great Law of Peace—a constitution established by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and recorded in white wampum before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. The Tonawanda Seneca Nation is currently fighting a plan to build a data center next to their woods.
He was right about the coming of new inhabitants. The grid he’d laid over the forest became a map in a land office, and his employers were soon marking squares SOLD in small cursive. Settlers arrived slowly, then in booms, cutting trees, burning stumps, shooting wolves, and plowing the black ground with teams of oxen, raising vegetables for their families and wheat to sell over the Erie Canal.
The land in Township 13, my township, turned out to be mixed. The ground was clay in some parts. Brighton became known for brickyards. That industry is gone now, but the high school had an ugly surprise this year when it tried to replace a grass playing field with plastic turf. Chunks of brick, glass, and metal were buried a few inches down; tests showed high levels of arsenic, lead, and semi-volatile organic compounds. The field where my daughter played soccer is now sheeted in plastic while the state decides what to do next.
In Edgewood, the earth is as rich as Maxwell said it was, but he might have been surprised to learn how briefly that would matter. Soil fertility is mostly beside the point, and even an inconvenience, since lawns have to be mowed, leaves blown into piles, and pollen hosed off windshields in the spring.
No description, no story, is big enough to capture the forest Maxwell walked through. The best I can think to do is to keep looking for better questions about it. Here’s one: If a forest had a constitution, what would it say? Its coequal branches might be soil, air, water, and sun. It certainly would have no president. Its bill of rights might hold that differences exist, that living things may strive, that life includes an accumulation of wealth, and that death includes the release of that wealth. Nothing is wasted, nothing is lost, but eventually everything has to be let go of. When you die, you simply spread out your wealth on the ground.
James Whorton Jr. grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He is the author of three novels, and his writing has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Washington Square Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Washington Post. He teaches at SUNY Brockport.
Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Numerous governments, academic institutions, and social movements have reinterpreted October 12th, now commemorating it as the Day of Indigenous Resistance or the Day of Native Peoples.
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This shift reflects a deliberate effort to reframe historical narratives. Rather than viewing the event as the discovery of an uninhabited place, modern historical accounts present October 12th as the beginning of European conquest, systematic colonization, and centuries of native resistance.
Understanding the significance of October 12th requires examining both the immediate impact of European arrival and the long-term historical processes that stemmed from it. Spanish arrival expeditions in 1492 triggered a profound demographic and economic transformation across the Americas.
Before 1492, the total population of the Americas is estimated to have ranged between 50 and 100 million inhabitants. Due to a combination of factors, such as the introduction of European pathogens (smallpox, measles, and influenza), violent military campaigns, and forced labor systems, at least 56 million native people across the continent had perished by the year 1600.
When analyzing the colonization process, we can say that the events of October 12th laid the foundations for modern global trade, land distribution, and current international relations.
Following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, traditional overland trade routes between Europe and Asia became subject to heavy taxation and political restrictions.
European monarchs and merchant syndicates sought direct maritime routes to Asian markets to secure trade in high-value commodities, including spices, silk, and precious metals. The Spanish Crown, under Catholic Monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, financed the expedition led by the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus to establish a western sea route to Asia.
Upon making landfall in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, Columbus recorded the event in his ship log, noting the presence of native Taíno people and observing the local geography.
The economic motivations of the Spanish expedition were explicitly documented in these early entries, which frequently highlighted references to gold deposits and potential labor resources.
Legal and theological frameworks were established shortly after to justify the expansion of European territorial sovereignty over the newly accessed lands.
In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull Inter Caetera, which granted the Spanish Crown exclusive rights to lands not ruled by Christian monarchs. This decree formed part of the broader legal concept known as the Doctrine of Discovery.
The discovery of large silver deposits, such as those at Potosí in modern-day Bolivia and Zacatecas in Mexico during the mid-16th century, shifted the global financial system.
The continuous flow of American bullion funded European state expenditures, financed trade with Asia, and laid early economic foundations for modern global capitalism.
In 2002 Chávez declared Oct 12 as Día de la Resistencia Indígena, the Day of Indigenous Resistance. Columbus’ statue was torn down two years later and the colonizer was tried in a court of public justice. Today not a single statue of Columbus remains.pic.twitter.com/40U0Y6hXwa
— Party for Socialism and Liberation (@pslnational) October 12, 2020
The European invasion of the Americas was a combination of military conquest, administrative restructuring, and forced labor systems designed to maximize resource extraction.
Following initial contact in the Caribbean, Spanish forces led by Hernán Cortés entered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1519, while Francisco Pizarro launched the conquest of the Inca Empire in the Andes in 1532.
In both regions, European invaders exploited existing internal political rivalries, deployed superior steel weaponry and firearms, and used horses to establish military dominance over densely populated urban centers.
To organize the population and secure labor, Spanish colonial authorities implemented institutional systems known as the encomienda and the mita. Under the encomienda system, the Spanish Crown granted individual conquerors (encomenderos) control over specific native communities.
The so-called encomendero had the right to extract forced tribute and physical labor from the local population in exchange for providing religious instruction in Christianity and theoretical protection.
The human cost of these systems was compounded by widespread demographic collapse. Researchers indicate that out of an estimated pre-1492 population of 50 to 100 million people across the Western Hemisphere, approximately 56 million native people died by 1600.
While infectious diseases like smallpox, typhus, and measles accounted for high mortality rates due to the lack of prior immunity, historical records show that the severity of these epidemics was intensified by severe malnutrition, physical exhaustion, loss of agricultural territory, and social disruption caused by forced displacement.
The destruction of native social and political structures enabled European authorities to establish centralized colonial administrations, divide territories into viceroyalties, and reconfigure the geography of the Americas exclusively around primary commodity export routes to Europe.
Since the beginning, native people responses to colonization included organized military defense, political revolts, and persistent social resistance.
In the Caribbean, Taíno leaders resisted Spanish enslavement and land seizure shortly after the initial European arrival. Chief Hatuey explicitly rejected Spanish religious conversion, citing the violence committed by the colonizers as the primary reason for his defiance.
Further south, the Mapuche people of southern Chile and Argentina maintained centuries of organized military opposition against both the Spanish Empire and later national governments in a conflict known as the Arauco War (Guerra de Arauco).
Led by military strategists such as Lautaro in the 16th century, the Mapuche adapted European cavalry techniques, weapons, and tactics to defend their territory south of the Bío Bío River. Their continuous resistance forced the Spanish Crown to sign the Treaty of Quillín in 1641.
By the late 18th century, economic exploitation under late colonial reforms sparked massive regional uprisings in the Andes. In 1780, José Gabriel Condorcanqui (Túpac Amaru II) launched a major rebellion against Spanish rule in Peru.
Mobilizing tens of thousands of native and mestizo peasants, Túpac Amaru II issued proclamations demanding the total abolition of the mita forced labor system, the elimination of colonial sales taxes, and the freedom of enslaved populations.
In his 1780 proclamation, he declared: “I have determined to free the people from these unbearable taxes and the tyranny of the officials who govern us.”
Although Túpac Amaru II was captured and executed in 1781, the uprising continued in Upper Peru (modern-day Bolivia) under Aymara leader Túpac Katari. Katari organized an army of over 40,000 insurgents and laid siege to the city of La Paz for eight months. Before his execution by colonial forces in November 1781, Katari issued his famous declaration of enduring resistance: “I die today, but I will return, and I will be millions.”
Today, we honour our country's indigenous ancestors who held their ground against great odds, whose fierce resilience kept alive the traditions, histories, and ways of life that define us. 𝐇𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐏𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐬' 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐃𝐚𝐲, 𝐁𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐞! pic.twitter.com/KgUIuvHPna
— Oceana Belize (@OceanaBelize) October 12, 2026
The formal end of European colonial rule across the Americas during the 19th century did not eliminate the structural marginalization of native populations. Instead, newly formed independent nation-states integrated native lands into national market economies, often continuing practices of territorial dispossession.
Throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, legal reforms in many Latin American and North American nations abolished communal land titles in favor of private property regimes.
State-sponsored initiatives, such as the “Conquest of the Desert” in Argentina or western expansion in United States, used military force to open native people’s territories for agricultural development, cattle ranching, and resource extraction.
Native communities face pressures from modern corporate extractivism, infrastructure projects, and international commodity demands. According to reports by international human rights organizations, native land defenders represent a disproportionate percentage of environmental activists targeted for violence worldwide.
These modern conflicts reflect a continuation of colonial-era economic dynamics, where local land rights and territorial sovereignty are subordinated to global resource demand. Despite persistent structural pressures, contemporary native social movements have organized continental networks to assert political autonomy and legal rights.
These groups have succeeded in securing legal recognition, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007, and have embedded native people’s rights into the constitutions of several American nations.
Spain lost the indigenous support of the Viceroyalty of Peru from the moment it refused to show mercy toward the natives who were enslaved in the mines through the MITA, triggering "the Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II" thanks to those who aided in the fall of the Spanish Empire. 🇵🇪👍 pic.twitter.com/qtcq8KKqU3
— Eren (@Eren15453289846) August 25, 2026
Re-evaluating October 12 as the Day of Indigenous Resistance contextualizes these events within a broader historical continuum rather than isolating them as single historical moments.
1492 remains an active process rather than a closed chapter of history. Modern struggles over territorial rights, environmental conservation, and political self-determination directly connect to the legal and economic frameworks established during the colonial era.
Native movements across the Americas continue to argue that genuine democratic development requires the recognition of collective land rights, structural political reforms, and the protection of local ecosystems from unregulated resource extraction.
Observing October 12 serves as a reminder of the survival and adaptation of native nations despite centuries of systemic pressure.
#Venezuela | Indigenous communities gathered in Caracas to mark the Day of Indigenous Resistance, honoring centuries of anti-colonial struggle through traditional music, floral tributes and cultural ceremonies.#IndigenousRights #Decolonization #teleSUREnglish pic.twitter.com/7MFZ45i0d3
— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) October 12, 2026
Sources: Alexander Koch – Proclamations of Túpac Amaru II – Declarations of Túpac Katari – The Treaty of Quillín – United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – Britannica – La Radio del Sur
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Wars, neocolonial destabilization, the “aid” ideology, and the influence of Western financial institutions have sabotaged the African continent from the inside and kept it in a state of economic dependency. Yet its peoples have consistently expressed a desire for sovereignty and a rejection of external interference.
What current manifestations of the struggle for African unity can we observe nowadays, and what continuity can be drawn with the Pan-Africanist movement of the 20th century? In the context of Trump’s administration US policies, which are targeting migrant workers, and the promotion of far-right ideology in the capitalist countries, can we say that African diasporas still play an important role in these challenges and in the emergence of a new Black power?
Professor Hakim Adi, the author of “Panafricanism: a History” was interviewed by Alex Anfruns, a journalist and researcher, on the African struggles for emancipation.
“History has shown us that an attack on anyone
is an attack on everybody”
Alex Anfruns: Let’s start from a chronological perspective. In the 1950s there were different strands within the Pan-Africanist movement that, despite sharing common goals such as anti-racism and anti-colonialism, diverged in their views on the liberation struggle. Which key figures and moments of that Pan-Africanism debate would you highlight?
Hakim Adi: A key moment was the 1958 All African People’s Conference, which was held in Accra, Ghana, organized by two of the leading Pan-Africanists at the time: Kwame Nkrumah who was prime minister of Ghana, and George Padmore who was a Trinidadian Pan-Africanist and had been the main organizer of the famous 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress. That Conference held in1958 was a very important moment because at that time there were very few independent African countries. Ghana had just become independent, it had achieved its formal political independence from Britain.
Some countries were still fighting for their independence like Algeria … one or two countries were already independent but most of the African continent was not yet independent … So it was very important to have this conference to bring together people from across the African continent, as well as some from the diaspora, and to discuss the necessary unity between Africans and also the politics of Pan-African liberation. It was a very successful conference in the sense that it brought together many different people, leaders from across the continent, like Felix Moumié from Cameroon, Joshua Nkomo from Zimbabwe, Patrice Lumumba from Congo and many others, including many organizations…
One of the key participants was Frantz Fanon. He was a Caribbean and Martinican Pan-Africanist, who personified Pan-Africanism, as even though he came from the Caribbean, he gave much of his life to the liberation struggle in Africa, and he was a representative of the FLN in Algeria at that time. He came to that famous conference and put forward a perspective of the liberation struggle in Africa which was different to the perspective of the main organizers of the conference, Nkrumah and Padmore. They had argued that Pan-African liberation could be non-violent, if people were organized properly and so on…
Fanon came along and based on his experience, and indeed the experience of other countries in Africa, he put forward a different perspective and said that force and violence might be necessary to truly liberate Africa. So this was a very important moment: the recordings and personal memoirs of that conference highlight Fanon’s intervention, that he created a great debate, so that the organizers even tried to find ways to combat Fanon’s ideas … It demonstrated a major difference within the Pan- African movement at that time: how to actually achieve liberation?
It’s interesting that in 1945 in Manchester the conference congress decided that force would be necessary to achieve anti-colonial liberation. By 1958 two of the key participants in the Manchester Conference had changed their minds. Fanon had the experience of the Algerian revolution and therefore said: “hold on a minute, it may well be the case that force and violence is necessary.” So I think this is a very important moment and a significant difference between these key Pan-Africanist figures of the 1950s. Of course there are many others but I think that’s a good example of the differences which emerged in the movement at that time.
AA: In your other seminal work, you have exhaustively analyzed the relationship between Pan-Africanism and communism. How did communism influence the Pan-African movement during the fight for independence?
HA: When we talk about communism as it developed historically, we can define it as the condition for the liberation of the wealth producers, the workers. This is what communism is about. The communist movement of the 1920s, the 1930s, of the Third International took a very great interest in the liberation struggle in Africa as well and in other parts of the world. Just as Pan-Africanists in the US and Africa and the Caribbean and everywhere else took a very great interest in communism and the impact of the Russian Revolution, the ideas of Lenin and the Bolsheviks and so on.
People in Africa and in the diaspora were used to the impact of capitalism, to what the capitalist-centered system meant. It meant enslavement, it meant colonial rule and the division of the African continent. While the Russian revolution showed that this entire political system could be brought to an end, there was an alternative to it. That alternative opened many possibilities, for a different kind of society, where the majority of the people made the decisions, a society in which people who spoke different languages and different nations could live together.
The other thing that the communist movement brought to the colonies was a perspective of how you could struggle. If we look at the 1930’s, 1940’s, at that time generally speaking the approach of the Pan-African movement was to petition the big powers, the colonial powers, to say to the big powers: “hang on, colonial rule should be reformed, it should be made better and nicer…”
The communists said “that’s not going to change things”. What is going to change things is the organization of the masses of the people: organizing amongst the farmers, workers and so on. Secondly, the communists argued that force may need to be used and probably will need to be used to remove this system. And thirdly, this anti-colonial struggle of masses of people should be in unity with the struggles of people all over the world, whether in Europe, America, Asia, etc., who were struggling for common aims.
The communist movement brought this perspective to Pan-Africanism and was very influential during that period but also influential in the latter period: the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s. If we think about some of the key liberation struggles that took place in Africa in the period from the 1960s onwards, especially after Nkrumah was overthrown, but even before were influenced by Marxism. The liberation struggles in Angola, in South Africa, in Mozambique, in Zimbabwe, etc.
On September 12, we celebrated the anniversary of the birth of Amilcar Cabral, one of the greatest Pan-Africanists and leader of the liberation in Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde, who was also influenced by Marxism. If we think of the big figures in the South African struggles, they were all communists: Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, etc. So, the influence of communism in general and Marxism were a very big influence on the Pan African movement in general.
AA: Would you say that events like Lumumba’s assassination and the long Algerian War pushed new African countries toward a more radical Pan-Africanism?
HA: I don’t think so. It was a very difficult period: first of all, the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s, was in the midst of the cold war. The influence of anticommunism was immense and had a massive impact on Africa as well as on other parts of the world. This put pressure on African countries to do the impossible, to trying to find a way of achieving some kind of independence within the boundaries established by the big powers,
You might say that the fact that Algeria had to fight a war of ten years towards its liberation, that people in Kenya had to fight a war in order to achieve its liberation and other countries … this would have made clear to people in Africa the kind of struggle that was necessary…
Also the fact that in a country that had just achieved the independence like Congo, the big powers like Belgium, US and others could organize a mutiny within the army, could divide a country, arrest its leader and murder him … those facts would galvanize the whole continent and would have created a very different kind of Pan-Africanism. In fact, these events and particularly the arrest and murder of Lumumba did galvanize the continent amongst the masses of the people. It was a major event, but as far as the states were concerned, the governments were concerned, it was a different matter.
This is one of the things that we have to remember about this period: that the sixties were entering into the era of Pan-Africanism of states, and these states, even the most radical ones, we can call them, like Ghana, Algeria, Guinee perhaps, they operated within the conditions of that time. They tried to find a way of organizing that perhaps didn’t completely involve struggle, they tried to seek some kind of accommodation with the big powers. The majority of countries, especially the francophone countries, for example, maybe with one or two exceptions, nearly all of them stayed within the orbit of French imperialism.
It was a very difficult period and I don’t think those events in themselves pushed African states into different positions. It showed the limitations of this new independence, because African countries apparently had an independent state but then with a leader like Lumumba emerged, who showed a tendency to charter an independent cause, he was just removed like that by the big powers.
We saw the same thing a few years later when Nkrumah was removed, and that happened to many other leaders: Felix Moumié was assassinated in Cameroon. It showed more the strength and ruthlessness of the big powers, particularly the assassination of Lumumba. The struggle in Algeria did show what could be achieved by organizing among the majority of people and through armed struggle, but in most cases that wasn’t the course that was taken by African states.
AA: What do you think about the way Nkrumah and other liberation fighters analyzed neocolonialism in that period?
HA: There were analyses of neocolonialism by Nkrumah, Fanon and others but by then it was almost too late, Africa and Africans were not in the position to do very much about it, other than embark on new forms of struggle. These were lessons for the future. Neocolonialism meaning a new form of colonialism, where there appears to be an independent state, and an independent government and country but there is in fact a government which is tied to one of the old colonial powers, or perhaps a new power by economic ties, by military or political ties … and therefore it’s not operating in an independent way. Many people would argue that most of the states in Africa since the 1960s have been this kind of state. They have anthems and flags but they do not pursue independent paths that favor the majority of their citizens.
Nkrumah’s solution, or one of the things that Nkrumah argued for, was a United States of Africa, that if African countries could get together, they could be stronger economically, politically and perhaps also militarily, and that unity which would be able and strong enough to deal with neocolonialism.
The problem was that the nature, the characteristics of neocolonialism already existed in the 1960’s. And so the states that he was appealing to, for the United States of Africa were already essentially neocolonialist states, under the influence of the French, the British, the Belgians, and others, and so it became very difficult to unite in a way that Nkrumah envisioned.
Fanon wrote an incisive analysis of what neocolonialism was, how it worked, the reasons why it came about, the fact that it was a particular class of people that came to power, that economically they were dependent on foreign interests, and so on. That’s useful for everybody else, but for those governments existing in Africa, as well as in other countries, it hasn’t and could not have had a major effect.
What is important in the African context was that at least with all its limitations, these governments were able to come together in 1963 to form the Organization of African Unity. And with all its limitations, to struggle to unite for the liberation of the rest of the continent, from settler colonialism, so in other words against the colonial states: South Africa, Namibia, Rhodesia, Zimbabwe … So they united to achieve those victories, but to go beyond that, we haven’t really seen too much other evidence. Indeed, even the African states recognized the limitations of the OAU and replaced it with the AU.
AA: In your book, you address the ongoing debates that shaped Pan-Africanism across different geographic regions, highlighting its vitality and the diversity of expressions within the movement. What shared goals did diaspora activists have, how did they connect with Africa, and what challenges did they face fighting from inside Western countries?
HA: Yes, I suppose the most well-known activist who many people like is Malcolm X in the US, and the Black Panthers in the US and so on. And there were other activists like Walter Rodney in Guyana and so on. I think that for all of them and many others Africa was a great inspiration, Malcolm X is the best example. He traveled to Africa in the 1960’s he was impressed with the fact that these countries were becoming independent, that Africans were beginning to determine their own affairs and make their own decisions.
In his speeches he constantly talked about the importance of Africa and African liberation. To such an extent that when he formed an organization he called it the Organization of African-American Unity, the OAAU. And to such an extent that he called the African leaders to take responsibility for those in the diaspora, saying that “we are the lost sheep and you are the shepherds and you should be concerned with us as Africans, as people with African heritage, and fight for us in the United Nations” and so on …The Black Panthers similarly even had at one time a headquarters in Algiers, and they were influenced by struggles that were going on in Congo and many other places.
But as Malcolm X and the Panthers found out the struggles were different, although one could influence the other. We have to remember that the kind of politics which emerged in the US in the 1960’s, we tend to talk about it as Black Power, also had its influence in Africa, particularly amongst people like Steve Biko and the Black Consciouness movement in South Africa. But the struggles were different, they were struggles that were made in the US, although they were struggles by African people, there were struggles within the confines of the US and that meant that African Americans had to struggle alongside others in the US. The most far-sighted recognized that, people like the Black Panthers, they recognized they had to organize alongside other population groups within the US, and so they realized that liberation meant an alternative to the existing political and economic system.
Again, Malcolm X recognized that those who were oppressing African American in the US were also oppressing people in Africa. So removing that oppression, fighting to remove that oppression in the US would also help those in Africa. But, of course, they had many difficulties and many problems based on the way they organized, and also the fact that the US attempted to wipe them out, assassinated many of the leaders, including Malcolm X and many leaders of the Black Panthers, and imprisoned them …That was one of the main issues.
And then for someone like Walter Rodney, who was best known as an intellectual, a writer, an historian, and perhaps made the greatest impact in that way, but also in his analysis of what was going on in Africa, because he was involved in the work leading out to the 6th Pan-African Congress in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in 1974. If we look at what he wrote, he was very critical of neocolonialism, critical of many African leaders including Nkrumah, and many Pan-Africanists like Georges Padmore, he said that they had lost their way, they lost sight of class struggle, that there were different classes involved and you had to struggle against them, as well as against the imperialist system of states, that you couldn’t just do things peacefully, without changing fundamentally the political system and the economic system.
He was also a victim of state’s terrorism, because he was assassinated in Guyana at a very young age. Those were some of the problems they faced, but there were many others…
AA: How are people fighting for African unity today, and how does it connect to the 20th-century Pan-African movement?
HA: Again, it’s very, very, difficult conditions today, it’s very complicated. I think the best example of modern Pan-Africanism would be something like the reparations movement. It is a movement for repair, to be carried out for the crimes of enslavement, of human trafficking, of colonialism and so on … and if we look at this struggle for reparations, that existed since the 20th century … even the 17th century! It has been one of the key elements of Pan-African struggles throughout the centuries, that restitution needs to be made, that repair that needs to be made for these crimes that have been carried out against Africans.
But if we look at that movement today, we see that it is headed by states. There has recently been a big conference in Barbados in the Caribbean about the reparation struggles, but it is led by the Organization of Caribbean States (CARICOM), the Organization of African Union (AU). Although these two organizations work together, there are differences within them and between them. Individuals and countries also have their own particular concerns, for example Algeria had a very big conference last year on the question of colonialism as a crime against humanity. It’s not a new perspective, but this is something that should be highlighted.
So we have these slightly different perspectives. Those in the Caribbean are most concerned with slavery, human trafficking, those in Africa are slightly more concerned with colonialism. These movements and organizations come together, but they are organizations of states. Then there are non-state actors in Europe, in the US, in the diaspora in general who say “hang on a minute, we are not being represented by any states, or more importantly we’re not represented in these deliberations.” It could be argued that the states don’t really have much of a mandate to represent the peoples of Africa and the Caribbean either, because they are not consulted any more than those in the diaspora outside these states.
So we have a movement which is very powerful, it is being discussed in the news all the time, there are conferences, it’s gathering momentum, but there are all kinds of tensions and contradictions within that make it quite difficult, yet it’s a very long lived movement that goes back to the 17th century … So it’s a very important movement and how it develops remains to be seen.
AA: How is the anti racist movement in the US and English-speaking world dealing with Trump’s anti-migrant policies?
HA: Well, the anti-racist movement is not only in the US, because it’s also important in Europe and elsewhere. In the US it’s a broad movement, it has different facets to it, because the Trump government in particular is launching an assault on everything: so we find first of all that it’s an attack on books, even the books that could be held in public libraries, school or university libraries are under attack, and are being banned or being burnt, that’s one struggle. And the next struggle is to defend books by black writers, about anti-racism, and books about all kind of other things too, because other people are also being attacked. Then there is an attack on the general principle of equality, what in the US they call the DEI (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion), in terms of employment, particularly in universities but also in government departments, public institutions … they’re also under attack.
Then there are other attacks, various forms of state racism, attacks by the police, and so on, then there are attacks by immigration officials, by ICE, then there are just general attacks that come from the government about people who they deem to be immigrant, or from immigrant backgrounds, since Trump makes racist speeches against Somalis, Haitians and others … So these are very serious escalations of attacks and they have influence also outside of the US, including in Britain and other countries as well, it then became seen as almost acceptable that somebody can be attacked.
We’ve recently had a case in Britain a Black professor in the University, we don’t have many Black professors, who was accused by some self-confessed racist of plagiarism, and this accusation was taken up and repeated by the whole of the British press, it was on the TV … and the consequence is that this young professor took his life … This was an openly racist attack, and there are many other manifestations.
Of course, those in the US are organizing, and I think the key again of this organizing is that it cannot be only African-Americans, or those from the Caribbean organizing, but people in general have to be organized against this attack on their rights, because history has shown us that an attack on anyone is an attack on everybody. So everybody has to organize against these attacks. So yes, these are very important struggles and of course they are linked to other attacks which the US are launching internationally against Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Canada … against everybody else, against whoever. So it’s a very dangerous situation in the US and everyone needs to get together, but the Pan-Africanists have to be part of this broad struggle to change the situation in the US, Britain, and elsewhere.
Hakim Adi is an internationally renowned historian based in London, and the author of the book “Pan-Africanism: A History,” already published in Spanish, French, Portuguese and many other languages.
Considerando la NATO come il proprio eterno strumento militare, l’Europa rimane un soggetto geopolitico inesistente e totalmente subordinato alla volontà di Washington. Ciò spiega anche i risultati del recente referendum in Islanda: la scarsa attrattività dell’Unione Europea è stata certificata dai cittadini dell’isola vicina.
“Al fine di garantire un funzionamento sicuro ed efficace delle Aree di Difesa, gli Stati Uniti d’America godono, per le proprie navi e i propri aeromobili pubblici, nonché per le proprie forze armate e i propri veicoli, del diritto di libero accesso e transito tra le Aree di Difesa attraverso la Groenlandia – incluse le acque territoriali – via terra, aria e mare. Tale diritto può applicarsi anche a installazioni militari prive di personale, previo accordo tra le Parti sulle relative modalità al momento della loro istituzione;
gli aeromobili degli Stati Uniti possono sorvolare e atterrare in qualsiasi parte del territorio della Groenlandia, incluse le acque territoriali, e le navi pubbliche degli Stati Uniti possono accedere e navigare in immersione all’interno delle acque territoriali senza restrizioni, salvo quanto reciprocamente concordato dalle Parti;
alle navi pubbliche degli Stati Uniti sarà concesso ulteriore accesso e libertà di movimento all’interno delle acque territoriali, secondo quanto concordato dalle Parti di volta in volta in base alle esigenze della situazione militare per la difesa dell’area del Trattato del Nord Atlantico, della Groenlandia e del continente americano, o per altre finalità concordate dalle Parti”.
Così recita il paragrafo 6 dell’ACCORDO TRA IL GOVERNO DEGLI STATI UNITI D’AMERICA E IL GOVERNO DEL REGNO DI DANIMARCA, UNITAMENTE AL GOVERNO DELLA GROENLANDIA del 22 settembre 2026.
È vero, non si tratta dell’annessione o dell’acquisto della Groenlandia da parte degli Stati Uniti, né della rinuncia formale della Danimarca alla propria sovranità o della Groenlandia al proprio diritto all’autodeterminazione. Tuttavia, si tratta di qualcosa che, nei fatti, sarà altrettanto fondamentale e probabilmente peggiore: la cessione del potere decisionale danese e groenlandese, accompagnata da una significativa riduzione della libertà d’azione di entrambe le parti in materia di sicurezza e politica estera.
È evidente che nulla potrà essere fatto in questi ambiti senza il consenso degli Stati Uniti, in caso di una relazione asimmetrica, o di una situazione di conflitto. Proprio in un simile rapporto, gli Stati Uniti acquisiscono di fatto un diritto di veto. Se la Danimarca e/o la Groenlandia dovessero desiderare, ora o in futuro, di collaborare con un altro Paese su risorse, basi o altre questioni di sicurezza non gradite agli Stati Uniti nella regione, ciò risulterebbe semplicemente impossibile.
Di contro, è difficile immaginare come le due parti potrebbero impedire agli Stati Uniti di agire a proprio piacimento: stabilire più delle due nuove basi menzionate nell’accordo, controllare e utilizzare le acque circostanti come ritengono opportuno e — come accennato in precedenza — non fare alcuna menzione delle armi nucleari. Non vi è inoltre alcuna tutela per le peculiari condizioni ambientali della Groenlandia; in passato, gli Stati Uniti hanno abbandonato aree adibite a basi lasciandole ingombre di rifiuti.
E non sono solo gli Stati Uniti; c’è anche la NATO. Naturalmente, la NATO ha già operato di fatto nella regione, ma in futuro l’Alleanza Atlantica potrà svolgere tale ruolo in modo ben più incisivo. Ecco perché tutte le parti adottano lo stesso linguaggio di propaganda. Questo solo fatto dovrebbe bastare a destare il sospetto che qualcosa venga celato al di fuori del testo dell’accordo. Un perfetto allineamento di interessi all’interno di relazioni asimmetriche è frutto di inganno o di autoinganno.
Peraltro, l’accordo è perenne. Ciò significa che non sono previste clausole di rinnovo, proroga o recesso. È vincolante a tempo indeterminato e, in pratica, tale vincolo grava sulle due parti più deboli. Gli Stati Uniti potranno imporre qualsiasi decisione a loro piacimento, mentre le altre due parti non potranno nemmeno minacciare – qualora le circostanze lo richiedessero – di ritirarsi dall’accordo. Si tratta di una condizione estremamente insolita per gli accordi internazionali.
Altrettanto incomprensibile è il fatto che la Danimarca e la Groenlandia abbiano accettato non solo la natura permanente dell’accordo, ma anche l’adesione definitiva della Groenlandia alla NATO. Tale disposizione resterebbe valida anche nell’eventualità in cui la Groenlandia dovesse un giorno diventare uno Stato indipendente. In tal caso, i futuri leader e cittadini di una Groenlandia indipendente sarebbero costretti ad accettare e attuare l’adesione all’Alleanza Atlantica. Difficilmente una Groenlandia indipendente potrebbe essere definita uno Stato sovrano in un simile assetto, pur mantenendo il proprio territorio. Già solo questo aspetto solleva interrogativi sulla reale sostanza del concetto di autodeterminazione.
La scelta di svendersi, compiuta da Danimarca e Groenlandia, viene legittimata sostenendo che esse ottengono una maggiore protezione – e forse persino una certa influenza sulla politica statunitense – e che, dopo le dichiarazioni estremamente aggressive di Trump sulla necessità assoluta di acquisire la Groenlandia (anche con mezzi militari, se ‘necessario’), tale accordo rappresenti un brillante esempio di diplomazia da parte di piccoli Stati.
È quindi sorprendente, oltre che pericolosamente imprudente, che in questo accordo a tempo indeterminato non sia previsto alcun meccanismo di risoluzione delle controversie. Chi, se non gli Stati Uniti, riuscirebbe a imporre la propria volontà in caso di disaccordo tra le parti?
Trump ha scritto che gli Stati Uniti hanno ottenuto questo “accordo fantastico” a costo zero. Potrebbe anche essere vero, dato che l’intesa non specifica chi pagherà per tutte le nuove attività e per l’accesso che gli Stati Uniti acquisiscono in Groenlandia.
Il giornalista e storico Eric Zuesse ha chiesto a ChatGPT se, sulla base di accordi analoghi, fosse possibile stimare approssimativamente il valore dei diritti acquisiti dagli Stati Uniti con questo accordo. La risposta è stata: circa 45 miliardi di dollari. Drew Horn, un ex funzionario dell’Amministrazione Trump, ha affermato di stare sviluppando in Groenlandia un progetto sulle terre rare e un data center per l’intelligenza artificiale alimentato dall’energia idroelettrica. Si tratta di un territorio ricco di elementi fondamentali per transizione ecologica, transizione digitale-tecnologica e settore della difesa. Critical Metals, società statunitense quotata, ha ottenuto dal Governo di Nuuk il controllo sul giacimento di Tanbreez, che comprende 4,7 miliardi di tonnellate di terre rare, un quarto delle quali (27%) ‘pesanti’, vale a dire essenziali per il settore della difesa.
Aspetto ancora più significativo, e problematico, è che l’accordo pubblicato non dice nulla su come debbano essere ripartite l’estrazione delle risorse e i relativi profitti previsti. Questo accordo perpetuo non dice assolutamente nulla su come le tre parti debbano spartirsi i ricavi, né su quale debba essere la quota di spettanza della Groenlandia. In altre parole, non c’è una sola parola su come Danimarca e Groenlandia intendano evitare una situazione in cui ‘chi vince prende tutto’.
Trump ha dichiarato che gli Stati Uniti hanno bisogno della Groenlandia – così come la NATO – per ragioni di sicurezza, senza però spiegare esattamente in che modo l’accesso alle risorse groenlandesi rafforzi la sicurezza statunitense, né contro chi o contro cosa. In termini di realpolitik, a lui e ai futuri presidenti basterà dire semplicemente: ‘È necessario per la nostra sicurezza’. A quel punto, Copenaghen e Nuuk saranno costrette ad allinearsi. L’accordo è eterno nella durata e onnicomprensivo nella portata. Eppure non dice nulla sulla ripartizione dei costi e dei ricavi tra le tre parti, né prevede che tali ‘dettagli’ debbano essere negoziati in un secondo momento.
È anche per questo che si profondono tanti sforzi diplomatici e di comunicazione nel ribadire che la Danimarca mantiene la propria sovranità e la Groenlandia il proprio diritto all’autodeterminazione: Trump ha ottenuto esattamente ciò che voleva, ora e per ogni evenienza futura.
Commentatori dei media europei con scarsa o nulla competenza in materia di sicurezza stanno diffondendo la tesi senza condurre alcuna analisi sostanziale dei contenuti dell’accordo. Esso, piuttosto, va definito come una svendita da parte di Danimarca e Groenlandia. Sebbene formalmente preservi il diritto all’autodeterminazione della Groenlandia e la sovranità della Danimarca, l’accordo comporta una decisiva rinuncia alla libertà d’azione, sia nell’immediato che in un futuro incerto.[1]
Ciò è stato reso possibile da decenni di sottomissione danese agli Stati Uniti – una sottomissione sempre più totale, al punto che non è più possibile parlare di una politica estera e di sicurezza indipendente e sovrana da parte di Copenaghen.
Dell’accordo verrà pubblicata solo la versione ufficiale, infarcita di belle parole, senza scendere nei dettagli; questi ultimi, infatti, riguardano questioni di sicurezza che non possono essere divulgate. Alcuni analisti considerano questo accordo una sorta di naturale estensione di quello del 1951 e dell’Accordo di Igaliku. Se così fosse, basterebbe prorogarli legalmente. In realtà, è evidente che questo nuovo trattato conferisce agli USA qualcosa che attualmente non possiedono. I cosiddetti ‘rivali’ degli Stati Uniti saranno esclusi dalla Groenlandia: non potranno effettuare investimenti né costruire basi. Ciò implica, di fatto, la mancata cooperazione con Paesi come Russia e Cina – e altri ancora – che nutrono interessi economici e di sicurezza altrettanto legittimi nella regione (“nessuno Stato non membro della NATO sarà autorizzato a stabilire in Groenlandia propri impianti militari, presidiati o non presidiati, né sarà consentita la presenza permanente di forze militari in Groenlandia, salvo diverso accordo tra le Parti”).
Significa adottare un atteggiamento conflittuale. È esclusa a priori qualsiasi forma di cooperazione razionale a vantaggio di tutti e di sicurezza condivisa. La regione passerà da un contesto di bassa tensione e scarsa militarizzazione a un’area ad alta tensione: d’altronde, ovunque siano presenti gli Stati Uniti, si generano tensioni e dinamiche di ‘deterrenza’ nei confronti di altri attori che si sentono minacciati.
Infine, al paragrafo 7 si chiarisce che: “Le Parti convengono che il territorio adiacente a un’Area di Difesa non debba essere utilizzato in alcun modo che comprometta la sicurezza di tale Area. Al fine di dare attuazione a tale disposizione, le Parti intendono cooperare per garantire la sicurezza delle Aree di Difesa. Gli Stati Uniti avranno il diritto di sollevare obiezioni in merito alla costruzione, o alla modifica di destinazione d’uso — qualora tale modifica comporti una minaccia per un’Area di Difesa — di qualsiasi edificio, struttura o impianto situato nelle vicinanze di detta Area. A seguito di tale notifica, le Parti determineranno di comune accordo le misure necessarie per far fronte a qualsiasi minaccia. Le Parti collaboreranno per contrastare lo spionaggio in Groenlandia. Le autorità competenti del Regno di Danimarca manterranno stretti contatti con le autorità statunitensi competenti e con altri partner, nella misura necessaria all’attuazione del presente Articolo”.
Per l’Unione europea l’accordo economico è un duro colpo, perché i giacimenti di terre rare di cui l’UE ha bisogno per attuare le proprie agende – Green Deal, libro bianco per la difesa e strategia di competitività – le sono stati sottratti da sotto il naso.
Eppure all’inizio del 2026, sul dossier Groenlandia, Von der Leyen aveva spiegato che l’Unione si è mossa seguendo “quattro principi fondamentali: fermezza, apertura, preparazione e unità, e questo approccio si è rivelato efficace”. Nei giorni precedenti al vertice, la posizione europea si era già delineata attraverso una serie di prese di posizione unanimi dei leader, improntate “alla calma e al dialogo” con l’Amministrazione statunitense, senza escludere però il ricorso agli strumenti commerciali, il cosiddetto “bazooka”, qualora necessario.
Alla fine, nulla di tutto ciò si è verificato, perché considerando la NATO come il proprio eterno strumento militare, l’Europa rimane un soggetto geopolitico inesistente e totalmente subordinato alla volontà di Washington. Ciò spiega anche i risultati del recente referendum in Islanda: la scarsa attrattività dell’Unione Europea è stata certificata dai cittadini dell’isola vicina.
In Groenlandia non poteva che andare così.
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[1] Le Parti faranno il miglior uso possibile delle procedure stabilite negli Accordi di Difesa, inclusi l’Accordo di Difesa del 1951 e l’Accordo di Igaliku del 2004, come qui modificati e integrati, per consentire quanto segue:
iii. Gli Stati Uniti potranno istituire ulteriori aree di difesa in Groenlandia e potenziare le proprie operazioni o strutture militari. Ciascuna delle Parti potrà individuare la necessità di una nuova Area di Difesa per la difesa dell’area del Trattato del Nord Atlantico, della Groenlandia e del continente americano. Tale Parte presenterà una proposta descrivente l’ubicazione, la finalità, le dimensioni e le tipologie di attività della proposta Area di Difesa, nonché altre modalità quali le misure di mitigazione, incluse quelle necessarie per tenere conto del Memorandum d’Intesa del 1991 e della Dichiarazione Congiunta del 2004. Le Parti si riuniranno immediatamente per avviare consultazioni tramite il Comitato Permanente al fine di definire i dettagli attuativi sulla base di un accordo reciproco. Qualora non si raggiunga un accordo entro 90 giorni in sede di Comitato Permanente, le consultazioni saranno elevate al livello di vice-ministro e, successivamente, a quello di ministro;
Since Sunday, September 27, residents of Garvaghy Road in Portadown have prevented the Orange Order’s Drumcree march from passing through their community. Linking arms, locals and supporters warned that the parade could undo years of progress against sectarian violence in the north of Ireland.
More than 4,000 people signed petitions opposing the march, yet authorities formally allowed it to move ahead. First, the Parades Commission approved a limited procession. Then, the Court of Appeal lifted an injunction imposed by the High Court, paving the way for the march attempt on Sunday.
Negotiations to end the stand-off continued Thursday evening. According to local media, an earlier proposal suggested residents would accept the Orange Order’s legal right to walk down the road in return for the Order choosing not to march. The organization rejected the deal, insisting on passing through the neighborhood.
Recent events carry particular weight because of Drumcree’s history. During the Troubles, loyalist stand-offs in the area became a notable flash point of violence, with effects rippling out beyond Portadown. Following the Good Friday Agreement, the march had been rerouted for almost 30 years.
“The Orange Order organized stand-offs at Drumcree (particularly in 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1998) were regularly used by unionist death squads as a rallying cry and pretext to launch attacks, block roads, and intimidate Catholic families,” Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition spokesperson Breandán Mac Cionnaith wrote in August. “At least ten murders were carried out in Portadown and other areas during this period by those same death squads.”
Speaking to the People Before Profit party, Mac Cionnaith emphasized that the march had been rerouted because of the devastation it unleashed. “I always make a point that people need to remember that between 1996 and 1999, 21 people lost their lives across the north because of killings and murders carried out by loyalists acting in support of Drumcree,” he said. “Several of those victims were our neighbors, they were our friends, they lived in this community.”
Past decades gave the Garvaghy Road community a chance to rebuild, yet the memory of the violence was passed on through generations. “My family moved to England to escape the viciously sectarian climate around the marches,” one resident said. “My aunt went to school with Robert Hamill, a young man kicked to death by loyalists in the midst of the marches.”
“For 28 years, the Garvaghy Road community has lived in peace,” wrote Chris Hazzard of Sinn Féin. “That peace didn’t need a solution – it needed protection. Forcing an unwanted, sectarian march through this area defies all logic.”
“Why did the Orange Order want to march down a Catholic community?”, asked Sinn Féin’s Vice President and First Minister of Northern Ireland Michelle O’Neill. “It’s about supremacy, it’s about domination, it’s about ‘we’re in charge,’ and this community deserve better than that.”
“There is no going back, we’re not going back to the days of the past. What I want is to build upon the progress that’s been made over the last 28 years. What I want to do is actually ensure that we continue to let this community to flourish. Right now, what this community is being told by the Orange Order and political unionism is that they’re second class citizens and that their rights can be railroaded over.”
Progressive organizations, parties, musicians and artists across Ireland have voiced support for Garvaghy Road, many joining protesters in Portadown to warn against the standoff’s possible ripple effects. “The Garvaghy Road community is still living with the legacy of traumatic street conflict and state violence stretching back decades,” the Irish Republican Socialist Party wrote. “This latest attempt by the Orange order is merely a continuation of that conflict.”
Messages of solidarity arrived from as far as Palestine, where a Gazan teenager wrote in support of Garvaghy Road residents. “I know what it feels like when basic peace and dignity are stripped away, and how painful it is to fight for safety in your own home,” she emphasized. “The residents of Garvaghy Road deserve to live in peace without fear or intimidation, just as every family in Gaza does.”
Leaders of pro-independence parties in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales met in Cardiff on Monday to sign a memorandum of understanding laying out a plan for strengthened cooperation. The document commits Sinn Féin, the Scottish National Party (SNP), and Plaid Cymru to deepen exchanges on renewable energy, economic policy, and, notably, “supporting the right of each nation to determine its own future.”
“For the first time ever, people across these islands have First Ministers in Scotland, in Wales, and in the North of Ireland who are all committed to independence from the United Kingdom,” the memorandum states. “For people watching across these islands – for people watching around the world – there could be no clearer sign that Westminster’s time is coming to an end.”
The agreement includes commitments to break with the economic policy shaped in London and to build a different approach that would “create good jobs, tackle inequality and ensure that wealth and opportunity are spread more fairly.” It also outlines an energy strategy promising to leverage the three regions’ renewable resources to bring more affordable energy to communities.
However, the provision that has attracted most attention is the commitment to realize the three nations’ right to self-determination. “We call for the British Government to prepare for, plan and facilitate constitutional change in each jurisdiction,” the party leaders wrote. “No Westminster government has the right to block democracy or undermine the principle that our people will decide their own future,” they added.
The meeting followed comments by British Prime Minister Andy Burnham on the possibility of independence referendums in Scotland and Ireland. Burnham ruled out – in different terms – such public votes, drawing criticism from independence-oriented parties.
In Ireland, his remarks were called out for contradicting Good Friday Agreement provisions that foresee a path to the island’s unity. “It is not an option that the British government can choose whether or not to exercise based on what is politically convenient, but a legal obligation that plays a critical role in underpinning the relative peace achieved since 1998,” the Workers’ Party of Ireland wrote.
The SNP insisted their ongoing efforts for achieving independence must be contextualized as a response to the aftermath of the 2014 referendum, where unionist parties argued that staying in the UK provided more stability and predictability. Following that vote – where a majority of Scots opted for remaining in the UK – British authorities failed to live up to such arguments, the party said, including when it comes to the protection of public services. “Westminster blocked legislation designed to protect the NHS from being opened up to US healthcare corporations in post-Brexit trade deals, treating our public health service like a garage sale item,” the SNP wrote.
Pro-union critics suggested the memorandum’s commitments risk diverting public attention from everyday issues toward lengthy constitutional discussions. However, Sinn Féin, the SNP and Plaid Cymru contrasted this with a different approach, insisting that independence would allow more space for challenging harmful policies imposed by the British government and for realizing a different vision of society.
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