Seeking Indigenous Justice from Within: A Family Legacy
November 1, 2021 | Lisa R. Sullivan (she/her/hers) | Financial Analyst
Indigenous peoples lived through a time when the land belonged to all of us. The Nuciu (Ute), the Tsétsėhéstȧhese (Cheyenne), the Hinono’eino (Arapaho), the Ndee (Apache), the Shoshone people, the Numinu (Comanche), the Ka’igwu (Kiowa), and the Diné (Navajo) tribes roamed the Southwest of what is now the United States.
Then, we survived through a time when the land was no longer ours. Colonizers claimed the region as their own, first by the Spanish, then Napoleon Bonaparte of France, and ultimately the U.S. via the Louisiana Purchase for the eastern half of Colorado, followed by the rest of the territory after the Spanish-American War. We watched our world transform into an unrecognizable terrain. Settlers dehumanized native existence, public policy targeted our lives, and most indigenous culture was buried with our ancestors.
My ancestry can be traced over five centuries to the northern New Mexico/Southern Colorado region, but we have been here for longer than any written record could ever trace.
I was always in awe of my father – he served the state of Colorado as a police officer for 30 years. To a stranger, he doesn’t fit any police stereotype. He has long, thick, black hair and an impressive sunglasses collection (but not a single Oakley).
Beyond my siblings and me knowing his job title, he never talked about what he did for a living. As much as he tried to shield me from the problems of the world, I would catch rare glimpses of his personal and professional worlds overlapping. Not infrequently, my brother was the target of racism; his darker complexion than my sister’s and mine would invite a plethora of racially driven accusations from educators, friends’ parents, and strangers. Once, a neighbor scapegoated him when their children were too afraid to tell their parents they broke a garage window. The infamous Aurora Police Department responded and attempted to arrest my brother, a minor. It took my dad’s extensive knowledge of the law and the dilatory problem-solving skills of the two officers to figure out my dad was also the police.
Even then, I didn’t understand why that happened that day. My parents created a world for me where I didn’t have to contemplate my place in society as a child, and it wasn’t until I was much older when I realized we existed under a different set of rules, hidden between the lines of written law.
My dad hadn’t been so lucky. He was ten years old when a police officer ventured into the east side of Pueblo, Colorado, to question why he was trespassing on the property that my grandparents owned. When my dad stated that was his home, the officer called him a liar and searched his pockets without reasonable cause. He was ten years old when he learned that the systems set up to protect our communities saw us as outsiders on the land we had always called home.
Forty-two years later, that ten-year-old boy, now 52, would be in an Aurora, Colorado movie theatre with his family as the theatre manager approached and asked, “Hi sir, are you, Sergeant Barela?” My dad hesitated to answer; he had only just retired. “Uh… Yes, why?” he asked. It was then that this young man detailed a story from his youth where he and his brother had been caught committing an in-process crime. The officer that found them, however, sought accountability differently than expected. He spoke with them about their offense, encouraged them to choose a different path before it was too late, and sent them on their way. He ended his story by thanking my father for giving him a chance to change the trajectory of his life.
My dad has never been the police officer to demand praise from the public or paste a thin, blue-line flag onto his bumper in response to protests demanding racial equality. Growing up, I had never imagined how my dad spent his days at work. I never suspected that he spent every day over thirty years laying a foundation of change, forging a better path for our people to exist in a more equitable society.
Listening to this man’s story, I realized how much I never grasped who my father was as a police officer. He was the ten-year-old boy who was racially profiled and searched on the steps of his own home, and as a man, sought justice and change by joining the ranks of his oppressors.
Significant change can take many forms: millions of citizens marching on Washington, communities taking down racist monuments, demanding police reform, or small, incremental change strategically performed within broken systems over thirty years. Reflecting on the span of hundreds of years and the atrocities that shaped us, we can also see, right below the surface, everyday people choosing to be the change – no matter how small or how long it may take.
I think about this every day I go to work as a civil servant for the people of the United States.
To discover the indigenous territories of where you stand today, visit:
Native-Land.ca | Our home on native land
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