Donald Trump disparages Native Americans frequently and relentlessly. He refers to mass killings as though they are punchlines, hisses the name of Native women as if they are slurs, and expresses glee when his mockery spills over into tense encounters. All the while, by holding the federal government hostage in his demands for a border wall, he is perpetuating a shutdown injurious to Native Americans, depleting services that are federal government treaty obligations.
“Shutting down the American government for the longest period in history to build a racist monument, putting thousands of federal employees serving Indian Country at the Department of Interior, Indian Health Services and other vital areas of everyday life for us, is wrong,” wrote Oglala Sioux President Julian Bear Runner in a Jan. 14 letter decrying Trump’s racism. He sent this message to the Indigenous Peoples March.
The first Indigenous Peoples March on Washington on Jan. 18 brought together thousands of Indigenous people, including the first two Native American women elected to Congress, Rep. Deb Haaland (New Mexico) and Rep. Sharice Davids (Kansas). In this show of strength and solidarity, marchers highlighted many important issues, from climate change to the violence perpetuated against Indigenous women, a crisis so looming it has coalesced into a movement called Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women. (Learn more on this movement on social media at #MMIW and in the Feb. 1-7 edition of Street Roots.)
Trump’s disparagement of Native American women is hauntingly abusive in this context.
As is now widely documented through a series of videos from many angles, Covington Catholic School boys from Kentucky – many wearing “Make America Great Again” caps – encountered some of the marchers at the Lincoln Memorial, including Omaha elder and veteran Nathan Phillips. When Phillips began drumming and singing, some of the boys responded with mockery, including the Tomahawk chop that later thousands of fans of the NFL team Kansas City Chiefs enacted at the Sunday football game.
These two events – the boys response and the NFL fans actions – are not separate. This is what Jacqueline Keeler, Diné/Ihanktonwan Dakota writer and co-founder of Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry, calls “mascotry.” Mascotry is about the whole culture of stereotypes that dehumanizes Native people. It’s not just the costumed characters running in circles, or the paintings centered on gym floors. It’s about how legions of amped-up fans thrust their hands in and out and call it the “Tomahawk chop,” and how in the frenzy of fiery sports chants, fans yell threats about scalping.
For too many of us, the mental library of references to Native Americans is both shallow and steeped in stereotypes, and this serves to make Native Americans invisible. When the Covington schoolboys encountered an Indigenous elder drumming a spiritual song, they failed to honor him as an elder and listen to his song. Rather, any chance of openness was shrouded in a culture of stereotypes.
This is not insignificant. When suicide rates are higher among Native youths than other ethnic groups, when Native Americans are killed by police at high rates, and when Indigenous women are missing and murdered, this is a matter of life and death. White supremacy is lethal, and Trump trades in white supremacy – with glee – for political and personal gain.
In a state with nine federally recognized tribes, and in a city with the nation’s ninth-largest Native American population, Native American Portlanders disproportionately struggle with homelessness. On average, they earn half that of what white Portlanders earn. Historic injustices course through these facts, and present injustices perpetuate them.
As the story at the Lincoln Memorial was told from more and more video clips over the course of the week, including the role of the Hebrew Israelites, the mainly white Covington high school boys were afforded a nuance that Native Americans and people of color are rarely afforded in the media glare.
So, in the context of a melee in which schoolboys did not know how to listen to a living Native American elder, I close my column by stepping back and encouraging readers to turn to the many Native American and First Nations writers, leaders and public intellectuals for analysis. Here are some of the Native American and First Nations writers who authored commentaries in the past few days: Local author Jacqueline Keeler in the Sierra Club magazine (“Land Gets Stolen. That’s How It Works”); Julian Brave NoiseCat in The Guardian (“The U.S. is still not ready to look at the ugly racism against Native Americans”); Rebecca Nagle in ThinkProgress ("I know what I saw when I watched the Covington video"); and Kaitlin Curtice in Sojourners Magazine (“The Voices of Indigenous People Continue to Be Silenced”). It serves non-Native people well to learn from perspectives of contemporary Indigenous writers.
Correction: The last paragraph is updated to include First Nations as well as Native American writers because Julian Brave NoiseCat is is an enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen in British Columbia.
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand.
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