The Moral Arc Isn’t Bending—It’s Breaking

Maybe justice isn’t ahead of us. Maybe it’s behind us.

You ever noticed how people love to say, “The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.”

You hear it all the time—on T-shirts, protest signs, Instagram captions. It’s like the go-to phrase when people are too tired to riot. Like, “Don’t worry, the arc’s got us.”

But here’s the thing: That quote? It came from Theodore Parker, a 19th-century white abolitionist Unitarian minister. It went like this: "I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."
— Theodore Parker, 1853

In 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. paraphrased the quote in a commencement speech he gave at Wesleyan University. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” Dr. King said in closing, “but it bends toward justice.”

I mean, I want to believe it bends. I do. But have you seen the world lately?

Book bans. Forced births. CEOs with $400 million escape yachts. Billionaires arguing over who gets to live on Mars. I’m not seeing a bend. I’m seeing a full-on snap. Like the arc said, “Actually, I quit.”

So I’m just saying: What if the just future everyone’s waiting for… was actually just the pre-Christian past we bulldozed and forgot?

My Ancestors: Both the Invaded and the Invader

I come from the Tanoan/Keresan puebloan people of northern New Mexico, where land wasn’t owned—it was relatives. You didn’t buy a mountain. You brought her corn and prayed with her. Your role in the animal kingdom was not to dominate and control; it was a peaceful, respectful co-existence in the interdependent web of life. The goal among my Cicuye and Tewa ancestors, for tens of thousands of years on what is now the Pajarito Plateau and the Upper Pecos River Valley, was not to acquire the most nor to boast or “win,” but to share all things and live in kindness. Among the Tewa, there was never a word for “art,” though everyone was an artisan and everything they made was art. Beauty was worship. In a world of beauty, the Tewa reasoned, the way to honor the Creator was to Walk in Beauty, too. In deed, in thought, in action, in all things.

We were matrilineal. Women held power, homes, and the memory of who we were. Harmony—not hustle—was the point. Honestly, it sounds like a dream and a cult I’d willingly join.

But I’m also descended from the Spanish conquistadors who showed up mid-Inquisition, with swords and guns and crosses, smelling like they hadn’t bathed in their entire lives (and many hadn’t), with the audacity to rename everything. Rivers, people, gods—everything. Like a colonizer version of a mean kid with a label-maker, the took all the things named for the natural world, and rebranded them for Catholic saints.

So yeah. I’m both the invaded and the invader. Which means my family reunions are messy.

The Caddo

I live in Texas now, and it’s pretty much the same story here. The Caddo Confederacy had permanent towns, sustainable farming, and matrilineal governance. Women had land, power, and way better meetings than your HOA.

Fun fact: The word “Texas” comes from the Caddo word “Taysha,” meaning friend.

Imagine.

Current Texas: [waves vaguely at Greg Abbott’s policies of Hate as Fun, rampant pollution]
Historic Texas: sustainable, matrilineal, land-honoring diplomacy.

The arc didn’t bend. It got hit by a monster truck.

Other Better Worlds We’ve Force-Forgotten

This isn’t just an Indigenous thing. This is a worldwide amnesia problem.

• The Celts had warrior queens and sacred groves. Then Rome was like, “Cute forest, ladies. Here’s a road and shame and genocide and a crucifix.”

• In southern Africa, the San people lived in egalitarian communities for millennia. Shared everything. Then colonizers came and said, “Mine now.”

• In Japan, the Ainu lived in spiritual sync with animals and rivers. Then their language got erased by a system that thought Tokyo skyscrapers and neon lights were the only kind of “progress.”

• In China, the Mosuo ran female-led households with no husbands and no shame. Now they’re a tourist attraction in their own homeland, like a feminist Epcot habitrail.

So when people say “The arc of history bends toward justice,” I want to ask: Whose arc, exactly?

Because it’s sure not mine. It’s not the arc of my great-grandmothers, whose names were replaced by church records and trauma.

It’s not the arc of any land-based, woman-powered, community-honoring, pre-Christian society we lost under empires of crucifix, factory farms, plastic bags and asphalt.

Justice isn’t some distant Star Trek utopia.

It’s the past. And we paved over it to build another Walmart.

We Don’t Need to Wait. We Need to Remember.

All those people in the distant past who lived in balance with the land, who held ceremony and kinship and compassion above profit and war?

They weren’t behind. They were ahead. Justice ain’t coming somewhere in the future. If it comes at all, it’ll be coming BACK.

We’re the ones who fell off the arc.

Shameless Plug: A Story to Help Us Find Our Way Back

My new novel, Where Rabbits Gathered, is about this. It comes out April 22. It tells the story of six generations of Tewa women, from 1580 to 1680. It’s historical fiction, but funnier than you probably think stuff in that category should be. It’s based on my own family tree. It starts with the arrival of the Spanish expedition of Don Juan de Oñate, the last of the conquistadores. He was the not-very-bright son of a wealthy racist segregationist mining magnate who’d made his fortune off silver mines in a country that wasn’t his own, using local slave labor. Sound familiar? The only thing missing is the Teslas. I promise. It’s timely. In the best way.

It’s a novel, but it’s also a time machine. A love letter. A ledger of what they tried to steal and what we still carry. What we can get back, if we really try.

If you’ve ever felt that haunting ache for something you can’t name—
If you’ve ever wanted to walk backward to find what was dropped—
If you suspect the world is missing something we already had—

This story’s for you.

Read an interview with me about this book in Foreward here.

Order your copy today, from Bookshop.org. Or, if you’d like to order directly from me, including a signed copy, you can do that on my website.