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Donna M. Loring, a Penobscot Nation Tribal elder, Vietnam War veteran, and former Tribal representative to the Maine Legislature, is an author, playwright, and nationally award-winning radio host. She is recognized for her decades-long leadership in advancing Wabanaki sovereignty, preserving Indigenous history, and advocating for justice.
The American experiment has always cast a long shadow. That shadow stretches from the Trail of Tears to Gaza, from President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal to President Donald Trump’s vision of conquest — wrapped in nationalism and real estate.
When Trump placed Jackson’s portrait in the Oval Office, he wasn’t just decorating. He was signaling. Jackson — the architect of the Indian Removal Act — oversaw one of the darkest chapters in this country’s history: The forced displacement and death of thousands of Indigenous people to make way for white settlers and plantations. His policies weren’t just brutal. They were genocidal.
Now, as Palestinians are being displaced, starved, and their homes bulldozed into dust, Trump and his allies call for what they describe as a “Riviera in the Middle East” — a place for development and recreation on land cleared of its people. The words may sound like foreign policy. But for Native people in the United States, they sound like memory.
We’ve seen this before.
We live it still.
Trump’s admiration for Jackson was never just symbolic. His administration’s freeze on tribal funding, his cuts to Native health and education services, and his opposition to tribal self-determination were all part of a long-standing pattern: undermine tribal governments, suppress Native voices, and weaken legal protections until nothing is left to defend.
Whether in Indian Country or Gaza, the method looks the same. First you legislate. Then you criminalize. Then you starve. Then you pave.
This is the logic of Manifest Destiny, dressed up in modern language — law and order, budget discipline, national security. But underneath, the goal hasn’t changed. And now we are watching that same logic exported, globalized, and televised.
As a Penobscot elder, I know what it means to be erased. I know what it means when a state calls your people “obstacles” to development. When your sovereignty is treated as a nuisance. When the media looks away. When the promises of protection turn into policies of removal.
But I also know what it means to survive. And I am not alone.
“Our teachings remind us that every child is sacred, that land is not a possession but a living relative, and that dignity belongs to all peoples, no matter how far from our own homeland they may be. … Yet, there are moments in history when silence becomes too heavy to bear,” the Wolastoqewi Mothers, Grandmothers, and Aunties wrote in a recent letter.
We are speaking now.
From “Turtle Island” to the shores of Gaza, Indigenous people see what is happening. And we know that the tools of removal — military force, legal maneuvering, bureaucratic delays — are not isolated strategies. They are part of an old playbook, refined over centuries.
Trump didn’t invent this. But he is reviving it.
He glorifies Jackson while echoing the same policies of removal — using financial constraints instead of force, and legislation instead of warfare.
And make no mistake: what begins in Indian Country rarely ends there. Too often, when injustice is aimed at Native people, the country shrugs. We are treated as the exception, the outlier, the footnote. But history tells us what happens when early warnings are ignored.
First, they came for the immigrants, and I did not speak out — because I was not an immigrant.
Then they came for the universities, and I did not speak out — because I was not an academic.
Then they came for the judges, and I did not speak out — because I was not a judge.
Then they came for the media, and I did not speak out — because I was not part of the media.
Then they came for the Palestinians, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Palestinian.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
We must not be silent. Because our silence will not protect us.
And because we remember what it means when the world looks away. Do not be silent.
