Sure, I could point to the big stuff: politicians buying votes with gas fill-ups, cozying up to gangs whose meth labs blow up and burn our prairie. But what really gets to the core of things are the “little” abuses, the daily grind of a system working exactly as intended.

Last week, an elder called the cops because her dog came back with a snare around its neck. The cops said it was “probably just cattle ranchers expanding their grazing territory” and refused to file a report. Their advice? Move into the tenements owned by the same politician cashing in on meth labs and broken communities. Meanwhile, the agencies that are supposed to get her essentials like food and water won’t even pick up the phone, much less deliver what she needs.

This infrastructure isn’t broken. It’s doing precisely what it was built to do: leave people stranded if they don’t fit the right profile. Settlers aren’t ready for this kind of abandonment. When it comes for them, they’ll think it’s some personal failure of “the system” rather than its default setting. They’ll waste time trying to “fix” it or go off on some fantasy about starting over fresh—as if that mindset isn’t exactly what got us here.

What won’t occur to them is to look to the people who’ve been dealing with this violent system for centuries, to ask how they survived, how they’re surviving, and how they plan to keep surviving. That’s where real resilience lives. But instead, the settlers will double down, rebranding the same old beliefs, and call it progress.