“We are the Indians now”

“We are the Indians now” is Circe Berman’s concise diagnosis of a reversal: people who regard America as a virgin continent can cast its present inhabitants as disposable outsiders, much as colonizers treated Indigenous people. The remark follows a pair of German businessmen’s covert interest in Rabo Karabekian’s beachfront property, and opens into a critique of land hunger, historical forgetting, and the stories a nation tells to excuse appropriation.

The Phrase in Context

Two young businessmen from Frankfurt visit to see Karabekian’s art collection. Their polished English carries upper-class British accents, but early in the visit they ask whether Karabekian and Berman understand German. The question reveals their wish to speak frankly in a language they assume their hosts cannot understand. Berman and Karabekian say they do not; in fact, Berman’s fluency in Yiddish and Karabekian’s experience hearing it as a prisoner of war let them understand much of the visitors’ conversation.

The pair’s apparent interest in the paintings is a cover. They are looking for signs that Karabekian’s health, intelligence, domestic circumstances, or finances might make him vulnerable to a real-estate deal. Their actual objective is his valuable beachfront, where they hope to build condominiums. They leave in a Mercedes coupe without securing the advantage they sought. The episode gives Berman’s words a specific material setting: the issue is not abstract identity alone, but who can claim land and who is presumed unable to protect it.

The Reversal of the Frontier Story

After the visitors depart, Berman tells Karabekian, “We are the Indians now.” She is the child of a Jewish pants manufacturer; he is the child of an Armenian shoemaker. Their backgrounds make the comparison more than a clever rejoinder to the Germans’ behavior. The visitors are West German, but Karabekian immediately observes that they might just as easily have been fellow Americans from down the beach. The predatory attitude, in his view, is not a foreign import that can be kept safely outside the nation. It can be found among its own citizens.

Karabekian identifies the underlying assumption as a belief that the continent remains virgin—that it is still available to whoever recognizes its value. In this myth, those already on the land become the equivalent of Indigenous people in the colonizer’s story: inhabitants represented as too weak or ignorant to understand, own, or defend what is theirs. Berman’s phrase turns that inherited perspective around. The people who imagine themselves as the rightful owners of a supposedly open continent are exposed as potential appropriators, while those they dismiss become the ones at risk of dispossession.

Family History and Survival

The encounter also resonates with Karabekian’s account of his parents’ survival of the massacre of Armenians under the Turkish Empire. He describes Armenian families as targets partly because they were educated and resourceful, and partly because relatives lived across the border in the Russian Empire, then Turkey’s enemy. In his account, the killings were not merely spontaneous violence but an organized operation that the perpetrators lacked the industrial capacity to carry out as efficiently as the Germans would later demonstrate. The scale of that history sits behind the smaller, quieter effort to identify a beachfront owner’s vulnerabilities and take advantage of them.

Karabekian’s mother survived by pretending to be dead among the victims. His father hid in a schoolhouse privy when soldiers came to the village; he later remembered the village’s stillness at nightfall, when he believed himself its only living inhabitant. Their survival does not make the later property episode equivalent to the massacre. Rather, the family history gives the phrase its weight: descendants of people nearly erased by a regime of exclusion recognize a related logic when others decide that an existing owner is merely an obstacle to profitable possession.

The violence of the past remains present in Karabekian’s understanding of family and citizenship. He tells Berman that without jewels his mother found beside a dead woman, he would not have become a citizen of the United States. He also recalls his father’s survivor’s shame and argues that his mother, who was directly caught among the killings, had even greater grounds for what Berman calls Survivor’s Syndrome. These memories make belonging feel contingent rather than secure. The family’s place in America is tied to survival, flight, and the material means that allowed immigration, while the visitors’ pursuit of land reprises the question of whose presence is treated as legitimate.

The American Past as a Continuing Claim

Karabekian extends the exchange beyond the two businessmen. He fears that many Americans imagine themselves to belong to a superior civilization somewhere else—or to an idealized past in which the country had not been altered by immigration and the enfranchisement of Black people. That imagined past provides cover for cheating, stealing, and selling harmful or degrading goods to fellow citizens. The rhetoric of superiority turns some of the population into supposed sub-humans, much as the frontier myth turns existing inhabitants into people who supposedly do not know how to value their own land.

This is why the line’s “now” matters. It does not simply say that descendants of persecuted peoples have inherited an Indigenous identity, nor does it erase the distinct histories at stake. It names the recurrence of a position: those with power tell themselves that the land is available and that its current inhabitants are incapable of making a valid claim. The scene shifts the focus from the visitor as foreign outsider to the domestic habits of entitlement that make such exploitation imaginable. Its small scale—a sales visit, a guarded conversation, a failed attempt to assess an owner—becomes a lens on the larger national story of who is allowed to belong and who is treated as an obstacle.