'An Enemy Such as This' tells the history of colonialism from the perspective of those who suffered war and occupation.
An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents over Three CenturiesAfter Gallup, New Mexico police killed Larry Casuse on March 1, 1973, they dragged his body out of the sporting goods store where they’d shot him three times and onto the sidewalk along Route 66, where they took turns taking photos of themselves posing over his dead body. They framed one of those photos and hung it above the bar at the Gallup Fraternal Order of Police.
In the days after his violent death, Larry’s brother Donald tried to make sense of it all and thought immediately of Gallup. “You didn’t talk about the Gallup that everyone saw, the Gallup of the drinking and the violence and the poverty. You didn’t talk about it because it just was. It was just how it was. And Lillian, [their mother], accepted it, most everyone accepted that, in a way that Larry never could. Lillian accepted that the drinking was an Indian problem, not a political problem.
Maybe an answer could be found in the Casuse family’s move to Gallup when Larry was a teenager and where he witnessed the in-your-face misery of the bordertown. The KIVA Club issued a statement the day after police killed him. Larry, they wrote, “was tired of seeing everyday drunkards lying in the streets, lying in jails, of Indians trying to survive in a conquered oriented society.
The arc of the Casuse family follows the arc of US colonial war and occupation. The important moments of their lives overlay like a map onto the world-historical events of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Larry’s great, great grandfather, Jesus Arviso, the subject of the fourth chapter, is famous and revered among Navajos. He was kidnapped from his Mexican family as a child, traded from the Apache to the Navajo as a boy, raised among the Navajo, to whom he became a legendary leader.