An Enemy Such as This

Colonialism has failed at the only thing it set out to do: eliminate the Native. The history of colonialism is as much a story of its own failure as it is a story of colonial violence and Native dispossession. Few histories of colonialism, however, explore the story of colonialism's failure. An Enemy Such as This offers a new history of colonialism through the story of the Casuse family, a Navajo family whose members lived and died in a world remade by colonial conquest and Native resistance to that conquest. The remarkable stories of Larry Casuse and his parents, Lillian Hutzler and Louis Casuse, offer a clear view of the world-making power of colonial violence; the ongoing, everyday, world-destroying nature of settler colonialism in the lives of Native people; and the committed, principled stand that so many, including Larry Casuse, took in struggling against colonialism.

From the genocidal Mexican war against the Apaches in the nineteenth century, through the collapse of European empires in the first half of twentieth century, and culminating in the efforts of young Navajo activists and organizers in the second half of the twentieth century to confront settler colonialism in New Mexico, the book offers a resolutely Native-focused history of colonialism.

Just weeks before police would kill him in Gallup, New Mexico, in March of 1973, Larry Casuse wrote that "never before have we faced an enemy such as this." An Enemy Such as This, for the first time, tells the history of that colonial enemy through the simultaneously epic and intimate story of Larry Casuse and those, like him, who fought against it.