Beginning over 500 years ago, the settler-Colonial attempts at ethnic cleansing have incorporated tactics of systematic land theft. Native people have also benefited from the racial awakening that many white people are experiencing, as, Like the Black Lives Matter movement, we want more than a costume change for white supremacy: we want a fundamental overhaul and dismantling of its systems. O'Brien uses the word "firsting" to refer to the belief of many Euro-American settlers that they were the first people to establish civilization in North America. Although A People’s Guide to Firsting and Lasting in Boston documents the “erasure” of indigenous peoples, it is ultimately about survival. Dr. O'Brien's analysis brilliantly demonstrates the way colonists--and the generations who followed them--used language to rhetorically place Native Americans continually on the cusp of extinction. What is the definition of firsting? Earliest known cultures in Mesoamerica. It’s your single place to instantly If (seemingly innocuous) local histories “performed the cultural work of seizing Indian homelands” (102), they also enabled and justified the political work and, more importantly, the physically violent work of dispossession. over 18 million articles from more than Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010; 269 pp., softcover, $25.00. “The end product of firsting,” O’Brien argues, “is the successful mounting of the argument that Indian peoples and their cultures represented an ‘inauthentic’ and prefatory history. Crucially, it absolves the United States from addressing injustices festering at its foundation — and the fact that Native people are still here resisting. Most importantly, we welcome your contributions to A People’s Guide to Firsting and Lasting in Boston. There was a problem loading your book clubs. During the tense gathering, I began chatting with one of the flag defenders, pointing out that the flag doesn’t represent all Americans or make everyone — for Help us document examples of firsting and lasting in and around Boston. The John Endecott monument, for example, tucked away on the east side of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, embodies and projects the idea of replacement far more than the famous Cyrus Dallin sculpture, Appeal to the Great Spirit, which is prominently located in front of the museum’s main entrance on Huntington Avenue. While Knopf 's analysis includes provocative ideas concerning the decolonizing process engaged with by Native filmmakers, she does not entirely follow through with several of the book's more intriguing avenues. Read from thousands of the leading scholarly journals from SpringerNature, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford University Press and more. This form of resistance is personified, O’Brien suggests, by the Pequot minister, political theorist, and activist William Apess, especially his famous Eulogy of King Philip speech. “Indians reside in an ahistorical temporality,” writes O’Brien, “in which they can only be the victims of change, not active subjects in the making of change” (105). We encourage you to read O’Brien’s book and listen to her interview on Indigenous Politics. To get new article updates from a journal on your personalized homepage, please log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one. Focusing on local history writing in southern New England, O’Brien carefully examines over 600 histories of small towns and cities in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island written between 1820-1880 and identifies three recurring narrative strategies used to literally write Indians out of existence.