I first read Blood Meridian when I was just coming into my political consciousness at the end of high school. It's staggering to reread it many years later with a more advanced understanding of American history and ideology. Enough has already been said about this to fill a million books but I'll remark that the most fascinating new revelation for me is that the violence of colonialism isn't just physical violence but also anthropological violence. In western understandings of academics and scholarship, we cannot preserve without also destroying, claiming the cultural heritage for our own and leaving only scraps of art and nature and life for anyone else to cling on.