The book An Enemy Such as This of David Coreia tells the readers the remarkable true story of an indigenous family who fought back over multiple generations against the world destroying power of subtler colonial violence. It does this through the epic story of Larry Casus and those like him who fought against it from the genocidal American war against the Apaches in the 19th century. The historical background of the book is the collapse of the European empires in the first half of the 20th century. The story culminates in the efforts of young Navajo activists and organizers in the second half of the 20th century to confront federal settler colonialism in New Mexico. The book offers a resolutely native-focused history of colonialism.
The author was aimed at showing the political, economic, and racial dynamics of Gallup as well as how violent the way s colonialism and capitalism operated on the native people was. Larry is significant to the history of indigenous liberation to organizations such as the red nation that carry that tradition on. The context of history is the ongoing settler colonialism and frontier town violence supported by U.S. law (Hintz 157). Overall, the author situates the history of the Kasuze family within the world-historical context of Western colonialism, both world wars, and the U.S. wars against indigenous peoples.
The main character’s family is used as a lens through which to view the treatment of Native Americans by the U.S. and Mexican governments over hundreds of years. As everyone knows, this treatment has been terrible. The two countries have sunk to the lowest point in this abyss with blood contracts, rewards for Native scalps. The military strategy before the use of scalp rewards was based on a ration-based pacification strategy, but “Mexico found that it was cheaper to pay Americans to kill Apaches than to maintain Mexican armies to pacify them” (Correia 28). The scalping of Native Americans has become big business, attracting murderers from all over the United States.
In the first three chapters, the author gives a historical perspective of what is happening. The Chihuahua set an official state-regulated price for Apache scalps: “one hundred pesos for an adult male, fifty pesos for an adult female, and twenty-five pesos for a captured child twelve years old or younger” (Correia 46). The book addresses this gruesome account of cutting off people’s tops because it was a colonial response to indigenous attacks on the Santa Rita copper mine. And this mine looms as an inescapable curse in Cazuse’s family history. Indeed, Correia describes the history of the mine because Larry Cazuse’s father, Luis, worked there and belonged to a very radical miners’ union.
The lives of father and son were iconic; they illustrated in two different ways the indigenous response to the domination and brutality of the colonial empire. Correia pays as much attention to Louis as to Larry: Louis, whose mother died when he was young and who was sent with his older brother to Standing Rock near Chaco Canyon to live with his grandmother (Correia 98). His father remarried and reunited all his children into one capacious family. Louis grew up poor and fought in World War II in Germany (Coreia 62). By some miracle, he survived that bloody fight in the forests, where almost all of his fellow soldiers died, and survived his miserable time in captivity. He married an Austrian war bride, took her to the Southwest, and worked as a miner. Much later, after his divorce, the hero worked in another mine, slept in his station wagon, and gave his paycheck to his ex, so she could support their children in Gallup.
The brutal hatred of Indians, Correia writes, cannot be overstated. In the 1950s, Navajo people died of tuberculosis almost ten times as often as white people; dysentery thirteen times, invasive gastroenteritis twenty-five times. Measles claimed Navajo lives almost thirty times as often as white people. Where white people expected to live to almost seventy, the Navajo were lucky to live to twenty; few unions supported their cause (Rose-Redwood et al. 152). Moreover, Larry Cazuz has taken it upon himself to document the purpose of settler colonialism. The story of the protagonist’s struggle and its historical significance is described by the author in the following three chapters (Correia 76). Casus defended his nation by photographing visitors to the Navajo Inn as they stumbled into ditches or onto the road and lost consciousness. Native activists like Larry called the border town of Gallup the exploitation capital of the world. He did his best to shut down the Navajo tavern and was eventually killed for it. Like his heroes in Woonded Knee, Larry Casus fought back. This led to his forced disappearance.
Thus, despite Larry’s grim fate, this book not only praises him but implicitly calls for resistance. However, the author shows that even if it is legitimate, resistance, if not neglected, often leads to cruel insults. The story of the protagonist convinces the readers that there is no better time than the present to take decisive steps in defense of the well-being of the indigenous people.
Works Cited
Correia, David. An Enemy such as This, Haymarket Books, 2022.
Hintz, Paul. Environment and Society: A Critical Introduction. S.L., Wiley-Blackwell, 2021.
Rose-Redwood, Reuben, et al. “Decolonizing the Map: Recentering Indigenous Mappings.” Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, vol. 55, no. 3, 2020, pp. 151–162.