From “Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future” by Patty Krawec
To be a “person” in the United States and Canada is to be a particular kind of person: somebody who is white and Christian, owns property, holds European values. We may think that this is no longer true today. But 98 percent of private property, 856 million acres of it, in the United States is still owned by white Americans. In fact, just five white people own nine million acres of rural property, which is one million more that all Black Americans own combined. There are about fifty-five million acres in the United States that exist as reservations, but Native people only own eleven million of those acres; the United States owns the balance. Property ownership, European values, Christianity.