An image circulating on the Internet recently succinctly depicts colonialism’s impact on blacks and Indians. It shows a black and white vintage photo containing two faces blended into one. One half shows the face of a black man (presumably a slave, or perhaps a freed slave) while the other half shows a famous photo of Sitting Bull. The caption on the image reads:

“Name the Country Built on the Genocide of One Race and the Enslavement of Another.” The image reminds us not only of the devastation colonial processes brought to Africans and Indians, but that colonization and the historic trauma it inflicted on both groups signifies a common bond borne of oppression and its enduring legacy.

Colonialism necessitated genocide to clear the land for white settlement while slavery provided the labor to remake the land in the white man’s image. America’s history of slavery is not controversial, in that the fact of its occurrence is indisputable. Genocide, on the other hand, has not been widely acknowledged, and certainly not as a history officially recognized by the government. The United States has passed various resolutions and declarations acknowledging its “mistreatment” of and violence against Indians, and even an official apology (laughably buried on page 45 of a defense appropriations bill), but nowhere will you find the word “genocide.”