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The fight to voteNative Americans‘They don’t include Native voices’: tribes fight to ensure their votes countAs the Native American population grows to the largest in modern history, groups say it’s vital that they organize to make sure they’re not left out of the redistricting process The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentK More
OpinionUS politicsWhy is the US right suddenly interested in Native American adoption law?Nick EstesA 1978 law tried to remedy adoption practices created to forcibly assimilate Native children. Now conservative lawyers are arguing that the law constitutes ‘reverse racism’ Mon 23 Aug 2021 06.23 EDTLast modified on Mon 23 Aug 2021 12.05 EDTGeorge Armstrong Custer of the Seventh Cavalry was infamous during the 19th-century Indian wars for riding into the enemy camp, holding Native women, children and elders hostage at gunpoint, and forcing the surrender of the tribe. He systematically attacked and captured civilians to crush Indigenous resistance, which is partly how he defeated the Cheyenne at the Battle of Washita River in 1868. Cheyenne, Lakota and Arapaho warriors later killed Custer as he fled after trying the same hostage-taking ploy at the Battle of Greasy Grass in 1876.Attacking non-combatants, especially children, to enable the conquest of land by destroying the family, and therefore Indigenous nations, wasn’t unique to Custer or the US military.There’s a reason why “forcibly transferring children” from one group to another is an international legal definition of genocide. Taking children has been one strategy for terrorizing Native families for centuries, from the mass removal of Native children from their communities into boarding schools to their widespread adoption and fostering out to mostly white families. It’s what led to the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978, touchstone legislation that aimed to reverse more than a century of state-sponsored family separation.Yet the spirit of Custer still haunts the fate of Native children even today. The fight has shifted from battlefield to courtroom.In the new season of the This Land podcast premiering this Monday, Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle shows how corporate lawyers and rightwing thinktanks like the Cato Institute have teamed up with non-Native families to not only dismantle the ICWA but the entire legal structure protecting Native rights. And so far, they’ve made small but important victories.Last April, an appeals court upheld parts of a federal district court decision, in a case called Brackeen v Haaland, that found parts of ICWA “unconstitutional”. The non-Indian plaintiffs contend that federal protections to keep Native children with Native families constitute illegal racial discrimination, and that ICWA’s federal standards “commandeer” state courts and agencies for a federal agenda. Put plainly, the mostly white families wanting to foster and adopt Native children are claiming reverse racism and arguing that federal overreach is trampling states’ rights – two codewords frequently associated with dismantling anti-racist policies.According to this upside-down logic, ICWA – monumental legislation consciously designed to undo genocidal, racist policy – is racist because it prevents mostly non-Indians from adopting Native children. The thinking is as old as the “civilizing” mission of colonialism – saving brown children from brown parents.Native child welfare in practice, however, is quite different, and, as Nagle shows in story after heartbreaking story, it very often works against the interests of Native children and families and in favor of families like the plaintiffs in Brackeen.Court records show that two of the three non-Indian families in Brackeen have successfully fostered or adopted Native children despite ICWA protections and with tribes agreeing to the adoption. But they still claim discrimination.A mountain of evidence suggests that Native families, particularly poor ones, are the real victims.In two studies from 1969 to 1974, the Association on American Indian Affairs found that 25-35% of all Native children had been separated from the families and placed in foster homes or adoptive homes or institutions. Ninety percent were placed in non-Indian homes.ICWA aimed to reverse this trend. Today, Native children are four times more likely to be removed from their families than white children are from theirs. And according to a 2020 study, in many states Native family separation has surpassed rates prior to ICWA. This is mostly due to states ignoring or flouting ICWA requirements.A common cause for removal is “neglect”, a form of abuse and a highly skewed claim especially when the Native families most targeted are poor. Failure to pay rent, for example, can result in eviction and homelessness and the placement of a child in state foster care system because of unstable living conditions. Some state statutes may provide up to several thousands of dollars a child per month to foster parents, depending on the number of children in their care and a child’s special needs.Why doesn’t that money go towards keeping families together by providing homes instead of tearing them apart?And there’s the dark side of foster care.Much like the boarding school system which preceded it, foster care is rife with stories of sexual and physical abuse, neglect and forced assimilation into dominant, white culture. To say nothing of the lifelong trauma of being torn from one’s family and nation during the formative years of childhood.So why are corporate law firms like Gibson Dunn – which has represented Walmart, Amazon, Chevron and Shell and is a former employer of the far-right Arkansas senator Tom Cotton – showing up at custody battles to square off with poor Native families and tribes? Are they really interested in the welfare of Native children?It’s foolish to think Custer had the best interests of Native children in mind when he captured them at gunpoint to slaughter and imprison their parents or that the Indian boarding school system, which disappeared thousands of children and raped, tortured, and traumatized countless more, was about “education”.Powerful conservative forces want to bring Brackeen v Haaland to the supreme court not just to overturn the ICWA but to gut Native tribes’ federal protections and rights. Like their counterparts the anti-critical race crusaders, anti-ICWA advocates use the language of “equality” to target Native nations. The collective tyranny of the tribe, the thinking goes, violates the rights of the individual.It’s the libertarian spin on the genocidal logic of Richard Henry Pratt’s nineteenth century maxim to justify child removal: “Kill the Indian, save the man.” The “Indian” is the tribal consciousness; the collective rights of a nation and its sovereignty must be weakened or destroyed to gain access to its lands and resources.Without the tribe, there is no Indian. When there is no Indian, there’s no one to claim the land.White congressmen from western states used the same reasoning to terminate tribes in the 1950s, making the argument that the collective rights of tribes shouldn’t trump individual rights of US citizens. The results were catastrophic. The legal abolition of dozens of tribes led to the privatization of their lands for the benefit of white settlers and businesses.Indigenous people are trying to drag the people of this land into the twentieth-first century by advocating for the protection of healthy water and land, the very elements necessary for all life, a true universal aspiration for a future on a livable planet that benefits everyone. And Native journalists like Rebecca Nagle reveal how nefarious corporate interests are trying to undermine that project by attacking the most precious among us – our children.
Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a journalist, historian, and host of The Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019)
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STARR SCHOOL, Mont. — One week before the 2020 election, Laura Roundine had emergency open-heart surgery. She returned to her home on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation with blunt instructions: Don’t go anywhere while you recover, because if you get Covid-19, you’ll probably die.That meant Ms. Roundine, 59, couldn’t vote in person as planned. Neither could her husband, lest he risk bringing the virus home. It wasn’t safe to go to the post office to vote by mail, and there is no home delivery here in Starr School — or on much of the reservation in northwestern Montana.The couple’s saving grace was Renee LaPlant, a Blackfeet community organizer for the Native American advocacy group Western Native Voice, who ensured that their votes would count by shuttling applications and ballots back and forth between their home and a satellite election office in Browning, one of two on the roughly 2,300-square-mile reservation.But under H.B. 530, a law passed this spring by the Republican-controlled State Legislature, that would not have been allowed. Western Native Voice pays its organizers, and paid ballot collection is now banned.“It’s taking their rights from them, and they still have the right to vote,” Ms. Roundine said of fellow Blackfeet voters who can’t leave their homes. “I wouldn’t have wanted that to be taken from me.”The ballot collection law is part of a nationwide push by Republican state legislators to rewrite election rules, and is similar to an Arizona law that the Supreme Court upheld on Thursday. In Montana — where Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican, was elected in November to replace Steve Bullock, a Democrat who had held veto power for eight years — the effects of that and a separate law eliminating same-day voter registration are likely to fall heavily on Native Americans, who make up about 7 percent of the state’s population.Laura Roundine at home in Starr School, Mont., on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. She and her husband were two of the last beneficiaries of Western Native Voice’s get-out-the-vote program last year.Tailyr Irvine for The New York TimesIt has been less than a century since Native Americans in the United States gained the right to vote by law, and they never attained the ability to do so easily in practice. New restrictions — ballot collection bans, earlier registration deadlines, stricter voter ID laws and more — are likely to make it harder, and the starkest consequences may be seen in places like Montana: sprawling, sparsely populated Western and Great Plains states where Native Americans have a history of playing decisive roles in close elections.In 2018, Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat, won seven of eight Montana counties containing the headquarters of a federally recognized tribe and received 50.3 percent of the vote statewide, a result without which his party would not currently control the Senate. (One of the eight tribes wasn’t federally recognized at the time but is now.) In 2016, Mr. Bullock carried the same counties and won with 50.2 percent. Both times, Glacier County, which contains the bulk of the Blackfeet reservation, was the most Democratic in the state.In recent years, Republicans in several states have passed laws imposing requirements that Native Americans are disproportionately unlikely to meet or targeting voting methods they are disproportionately likely to use, such as ballot collection, which is common in communities where transportation and other infrastructure are limited. They say ballot collection can enable election fraud or allow advocacy groups to influence votes, though there is no evidence of widespread fraud.On the floor of the Montana House in April, in response to criticism of H.B. 530’s effects on Native Americans who rely on paid ballot collection, the bill’s primary sponsor, State Representative Wendy McKamey, said, “There are going to be habits that are going to have to change because we need to keep our security at the utmost.” She argued that the bill would keep voting as “uninfluenced by monies as possible.”Ms. McKamey did not respond to requests for comment for this article.Geography, poverty and politics all create obstacles for Native Americans. The Blackfeet reservation is roughly the size of Delaware but had only two election offices and four ballot drop-off locations last year, one of which was listed as open for just 14 hours over two days. Many other reservations in Montana have no polling places, meaning residents must go to the county seat to vote, and many don’t have cars or can’t afford to take time off.Renee LaPlant, a Blackfeet community organizer for Western Native Voice, said she couldn’t begin to estimate how many miles she had driven to help people return their ballots.Tailyr Irvine for The New York TimesBrowning, Mont., in June. Glacier County has a satellite election office in Browning, the county’s only office on the 2,285-square-mile reservation.Tailyr Irvine for The New York TimesAdvocacy groups like Western Native Voice have become central to get-out-the-vote efforts, to the point that the Blackfeet government’s website directs voters who need help not to a tribal office but to W.N.V.Ms. LaPlant, who was one of about a dozen Western Native Voice organizers on the Blackfeet reservation last year, said she couldn’t begin to estimate how far they had collectively driven. One organizer alone logged 700 miles.One of the voters the team helped was Heidi Bull Calf, whose 19-year-old son has a congenital heart defect. Knowing the danger he would be in if he got Covid-19, she and her family barely left their home in Browning for a year.Asked whether there was any way she could have returned her ballot on her own without putting her son’s health at risk, Ms. Bull Calf, the director of after-school programs at an elementary school, said no.Members of Western Native Voice at a three-day community organizing training in Bozeman, Mont., in early June. Tailyr Irvine for The New York TimesThe ballot collection law says that “for the purposes of enhancing election security, a person may not provide or offer to provide, and a person may not accept, a pecuniary benefit in exchange for distributing, ordering, requesting, collecting or delivering ballots.” Government entities, election administrators, mail carriers and a few others are exempt, but advocacy groups aren’t. Violators will be fined $100 per ballot.In May, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Native American Rights Fund sued the Montana secretary of state, Christi Jacobsen, a Republican, over the new laws. The lawsuit alleges that the ballot collection limits and the elimination of same-day voter registration violate the Montana Constitution and are “part of a broader scheme” to disenfranchise Native voters. It was filed in a state district court that struck down a farther-reaching ballot collection ban as discriminatory last year.A spokesman for Ms. Jacobsen did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement shortly after the lawsuit was filed, Ms. Jacobsen said, “The voters of Montana spoke when they elected a secretary of state that promised improved election integrity with voter ID and voter registration deadlines, and we will work hard to defend those measures.”The state-level legal process may be Native Americans’ only realistic recourse now, because on Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld a ballot collection law in Arizona, signaling that federal challenges to voting restrictions based on disparate impact on voters of color were unlikely to succeed.Voting difficulties are acute not just for the Blackfeet but also for Montana’s seven other federally recognized tribes: the Crow and Northern Cheyenne, based on reservations of the same names; the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation; the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre of the Fort Belknap Reservation; the Assiniboine and Sioux of the Fort Peck Reservation; the Chippewa Cree of Rocky Boy’s Reservation; and the Little Shell Chippewa in Great Falls.On the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations, many residents have no internet. Often, the only way to register to vote is in person at election offices in Hardin and Forsyth, 60 miles or more one way from parts of the reservations..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}This made same-day voter registration a popular option for people who could make the trip only once. But under a new law, H.B. 176, the registration deadline is noon on the day before the election.Heidi Bull Calf, of Browning, said she would not have been able to vote safely without the help of Western Native Voice.Tailyr Irvine for The New York TimesKeaton Sunchild, the political director at Western Native Voice, said that last year, hundreds of Native Americans had registered to vote after that time.Lauri Kindness, a Western Native Voice organizer on the Crow Reservation, where she was born and lives, said: “There are many barriers and hardships in our communities with basic things like transportation. From my community, the majority of our voters were able to gain access to the ballot through same-day voter registration.”State Representative Sharon Greef, the Republican who sponsored H.B. 176, said its purpose was to shorten lines and reduce the burden on county clerks and recorders by enabling them to spend Election Day focusing only on ballots, without also processing registrations. She said that if people voted early, they could still register and cast their ballot in one trip.“I tried to think of any way this could affect all voters, not only the Native Americans, and if I had felt this in any way would have disenfranchised any voter, discouraged any voter from getting to the polls, I couldn’t in good conscience have carried the bill,” Ms. Greef said. “Voting is a right that we all have, but it’s a right that we can’t take lightly, and we have to plan ahead for it.”At a community organizing training in Bozeman in early June, Western Native Voice leaders framed voting rights within the broader context of self-determination and political representation for Native Americans.With the State Legislature adjourned for the year and the lawsuit in the hands of lawyers, organizers are turning their focus to redistricting.Montana will get a second House seat as a result of the 2020 census, and Native Americans want to maximize their influence in electing members of Congress. But arguably more important are the maps that will be drawn for the State Legislature, which could give Native Americans greater power to elect the representatives who make Montana’s voting laws.Redistricting will be handled by a commission consisting of two Republicans, two Democrats and a nonpartisan presiding officer chosen by the Montana Supreme Court: Maylinn Smith, a former tribal judge and tribal law professor who is herself Native American.Ta’jin Perez, deputy director of Western Native Voice, urged the group’s organizers to map out communities with common interests in and around their reservations, down to the street level. W.N.V. would send that data to the Native American Rights Fund, which would use it to inform redistricting suggestions.“You can either define it yourself,” Mr. Perez warned, “or the folks in Helena will do it for you.”The Northern Cheyenne Reservation in June. On the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations, many residents have no internet and must register to vote in person. Tailyr Irvine for The New York Times More
The US government will investigate the troubled legacy of Native American boarding schools and work to “uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences” of the institutions, which over the decades forced hundreds of thousands of children from their families and communities.The US interior secretary, Deb Haaland, has directed the department to prepare a report detailing available historical records relating to the federal boarding school programs, with an emphasis on cemeteries or potential burial sites.“The interior department will address the inter-generational impact of Indian boarding schools to shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past, no matter how hard it will be,” Haaland said in a secretarial memo. “I know that this process will be long and difficult. I know that this process will be painful. It won’t undo the heartbreak and loss we feel. But only by acknowledging the past can we work toward a future that we’re all proud to embrace.”Haaland announced the review on Tuesday in remarks to the National Congress of American Indians during the group’s midyear conference.Starting with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, the US enacted laws and policies to establish and support Indian boarding schools across the country. For more than 150 years, Indigenous children were taken from their communities and forced into boarding schools that focused on assimilation.Haaland talked about the federal government’s attempt to wipe out tribal identity, language and culture and how that past has continued to manifest itself through long-standing trauma, cycles of violence and abuse, premature deaths, mental disorders and substance abuse.The recent discovery of children’s remains buried at the site of what was once Canada’s largest Indigenous residential school has magnified interest in that legacy in Canada and the US.In Canada, more than 150,000 First Nations children were required to attend state-funded Christian schools as part of a program to assimilate them into society. They were forced to convert to Christianity and were not allowed to speak their languages. Many were beaten and verbally abused, and up to 6,000 are said to have died.After reading about the unmarked graves in Canada, Haaland recounted her own family’s story in a recent opinion piece published by the Washington Post.“Many Americans may be alarmed to learn that the United States has a history of taking Native children from their families in an effort to eradicate our culture and erase us as a people,” she wrote. “It is a history that we must learn from if our country is to heal from this tragic era.”She continued: “I am a product of these horrific assimilation policies. My maternal grandparents were stolen from their families when they were only eight years old and were forced to live away from their parents, culture and communities until they were 13. Many children like them never made it back home.”Haaland cited statistics from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which reported that by 1926, more than 80% of Indigenous school-age children were attending boarding schools that were run either by the federal government or religious organizations. Besides providing resources and raising awareness, the coalition has been working to compile additional research on US boarding schools and deaths that many say is sorely lacking.Officials with the interior department said aside from trying to shed more light on the loss of life at the boarding schools, they would be working to protect burial sites associated with the schools and would consult with tribes on how best to do that while respecting families and communities.The report from agency staff is due by 1 April.During her address on Tuesday, Haaland told the story of her grandmother being loaded on a train with other children from her village and being shipped off to boarding school. She said many families had been haunted for too long by the “dark history” of these institutions and that the agency has a responsibility to recover that history.“We must uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences of these schools,” she said. More
Last week, Rick Santorum repeated a widely held myth of US exceptionalism. “We came here and created a blank slate, we birthed a nation from nothing,” the former US senator and CNN commentator told the rightwing Young America’s Foundation’s summit. “It was born of the people who came here.” His “we” doesn’t include Indigenous people who were already here or African people who were brought in chains. And that “blank slate” required the violent pillaging of two continents – Africa and North America. If the United States was “birthed from nothing”, then the land and enslaved labor that made the wealth of this nation must have fallen from the sky – because it surely didn’t come from Europe.It’s not the first time a CNN employee has espoused anti-Indigenous racism. Last November during live election night coverage, CNN labeled Native American voters as “something else”. The Native American Journalist Association (NAJA) asked CNN to issue an apology, which it refused to do. And just last week, CNN host Poppy Harlow misidentified the Minnesota lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, as “a white woman”. The network has yet to correct the error. NAJA (of which I’m a member) has since called for the firing of Rick Santorum and its membership to avoid working with CNN for its lack of ethics and accountability around various racist views among its staff.Racist depictions of Indigenous people in the media, however, points to a deeper issue. The erasure of Native histories and peoples – which existed long before and despite a white supremacist empire – is a founding principle of the United States. In fact, it’s still codified in US law. So when Rick Santorum and his ilk stress that Europeans possess a divine right to take a continent, create a nation from “nothing”, and maintain cultural superiority, they’re not entirely wrong. It’s the default position with a long sordid history.And maybe Santorum and his kind are right when they position the US as a Christian theocratic nation. After all, the founding principles of land theft, enslavement and dispossession stem from religious justifications. A 1493 papal decree known as the doctrine of discovery, justified the Christian European conquest of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. As secretary of state in 1792, Thomas Jefferson declared the doctrine, implemented by European states, was international law and thus applied to the nascent United States as well.Those views later inspired the Monroe doctrine, the assertion of US supremacy over the western hemisphere, and manifest destiny, the ideological justification of US westward expansion and colonization. An 1823 US supreme court case, Johnson v M’Intosh, upheld the doctrine, privileging European nations, and successors like the United States, title via “discovery” over Indigenous lands. Indigenous nations and sovereignty, the court ruled, “were necessarily diminished”.Such a legal and political reality for Indigenous people is so taken for granted that it is rarely mentioned in history books let alone mainstream commentary. Instead, a culture of amnesia permeates the United Sates. But purposeful forgetting can’t erase intent, it only perpetuates injury. Erasure makes the taking of Indigenous land easier.Although the United States quickly accuses other nations of genocide, it hasn’t acknowledged its own genocide against Indigenous people. To affirm it would mean to take measures to prevent it from happening again. That would mean halting ongoing theft and destruction of Indigenous lands, cultures and nations. A process of justice would have to follow suit. An entire legal order that underpins the backwards racist views and practices towards Indigenous people would have to be overturned. Indigenous land and political rights would have to be restored. A savage nation built of untold violence would have to be finally civilized and make amends with the people and nations it has attempted to destroy. After all the elimination of Indigenous nations was not only about taking the land, it was also about destroying an alternative – a world based on making and being in good relations versus that of a racialized class system based on property and conquest.That world still exists, and its stories still need to be told by Indigenous people.That’s a tall order that takes willpower, courage, and truth-telling we simply don’t see emanating from corporate newsrooms like CNN, to say nothing of political and ruling elite in this country. Firing Rick Santorum won’t solve these deep-seated inequalities and anti-Indigenous racism. But Indigenous genocide denial – the ultimate cancel culture – should have no platform if we are to finally transcend the 15th century racialist views codified in the doctrine of discovery. More
The former US senator and CNN political commentator Rick Santorum has sparked outrage among Native Americans, and prompted calls for his dismissal, by telling a rightwing students’ conference that European colonists who came to America “birthed a nation from nothing”.“There was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture,” Santorum told the ultra-conservative Young America’s Foundation’s summit, entitled standing up for faith and freedom, and shared by the group to YouTube.“We came here and created a blank slate, we birthed a nation from nothing,” he said.Santorum’s comments, effectively dismissing the millennia-long presence of Native Americans and the genocide inflicted on them as the Christian settlers transformed and expanded their colonies into the United States of America, angered many within the Native American community, and beyond.“The erasure of Native people and histories, which existed before and survived in spite of a white supremacist empire, is a foundational sin of a make-believe nation,” the activist Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe and host of the Red Nation podcast, said on Twitter.“According to Rick Santorum, the US was founded as a ‘Judeo-Christian’ theocratic state. He might be right about that, but the idea that the first colonizers escaped religious persecution is laughable. Invasion was an economic enterprise for god, glory, and gold.”In his remarks, Santorum, a two-term US senator for Pennsylvania and a twice-failed candidate for the Republican party’s presidential nomination, likened the colonization of Native lands to an act of religious freedom.“I don’t know of any other country in the world that was settled predominantly by people who were coming to practice their faith,” Santorum said. “They came here because they were not allowed to practice their particular faith in their own country.”Others were outraged but not surprised by the comments of Santorum, who joined CNN as a senior political commentator in 2017.“Rick Santorum is just saying what the majority of Americans silently believe – the only ‘real history’ is US history,” said Brett Chapman, a Native American attorney and descendant of Chief Standing Bear, the first Native Indian to win civil rights in the US.“Everything centers around it. Many claim to appreciate and respect Native history yet know nothing about it. Let’s not act like he’s some lone wolf out there on this.”The Cherokee writer Rebecca Nagle pointed to CNN’s lack of Native American commentators, while giving a platform to Santorum, who has previously made offensive and false claims about other minority communities.On Monday, the Native American Journalists Association cautioned Native American and Alaska Native reporters from working with, or applying for jobs, at CNN in the wake of continued racist comments and insensitive reporting directed at Indigenous people.Last week, a CNN host incorrectly identified Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, as a white woman. The network has yet to correct its mistake.Politicians also weighed in. “Seriously is anyone surprised to hear this hot garbage coming from Rick Santorum?” Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) said in a tweet. “Nothing was here?! No native American culture in American culture?! America hasn’t changed?!”Mark Pocan, Democratic congressman for Wisconsin, was even more critical. “Native & Indigenous nations lived, governed, and thrived here before their land was stolen and they were murdered in a mass genocide, you ignorant white supremacist,” he wrote.Meanwhile, Nick Knudsen, executive director of DemCast USA, a digital hub of Democratic opinion and online activism, said it was “long past time” for CNN to cut ties with Santorum, whose extreme views have become a lightning rod for controversy in recent years.In 2015, he insisted the US supreme court would not have the final say on same-sex marriage, the same year he said he regretted his comments from a decade earlier comparing homosexuality to bestiality.In 2018, shortly after a former student killed 17 teenagers and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, Santorum taunted survivors who formed themselves into gun reform campaigners.“How about kids, instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that?” he said on CNN’s State of the Union.The politician, who claimed the survivors’ March for Our Lives group was supported by “Hollywood elites and liberal billionaires”, later tried to distance himself from his comments, claiming that he misspoke.In a statement, the National Congress of American Indians, the nation’s largest organization representing American Indian and Alaska Native groups, criticized the former senator.“Rick Santorum is an unhinged and embarrassing racist who disgraces CNN and any other media company that provides him a platform,” Fawn Sharp, the group’s president, said.She said Santorum’s assertion that settlers birthed a nation were wrong. “What European colonizers found in the Americas were thousands of complex, sophisticated and sovereign Tribal Nations, each with millennia of distinct cultural, spiritual and technological development,” she said.“Hopefully, sophisticated and humane Native American philosophy will win out over the caveman mentality of people like Rick Santorum.”CNN did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.In a brief statement to the Guardian issued through a spokesperson on Monday afternoon, Santorum said: “I had no intention of minimizing or in any way devaluing Native American culture.” More
When she took her oath of office, the first Native American cabinet secretary also took a stance for self-expression.Forget pantsuit nation. The Washington dress code is changing, one swearing-in at a time.On Thursday, Deb Haaland made history when she began her job as Secretary of the Interior, becoming the first Native American member of the cabinet. And she did so not in the recent uniform of many female politirati — the fruit bowl-colored trouser suit — but rather in traditional Indigenous dress.Standing in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to Vice President Kamala Harris to take the oath of office, Ms. Haaland wore a dark jacket over a sky blue, rainbow-trimmed ribbon skirt embroidered with imagery of butterflies, stars and corn; moccasin boots; a turquoise and silver belt and necklace; and dragonfly earrings.Against the flags and dark wood, the former Democratic congresswoman from New Mexico stood out, her clothes telegraphing a statement of celebration and of self at a ceremonial moment that will be preserved for the record. It was symbolic in more ways than one.According to an Instagram post from Reecreeations, that company that made the skirt for Ms. Haaland’s swearing-in, the ribbon skirt is a reminder of “matriarchal power”: “Wearing it in this day and age is an act of self empowerment and reclamation of who we are and that gives us the opportunity to proudly make bold statements in front of others who sometimes refuse to see us. It allows us to be our authentic selves unapologetically.”This is yet another break from the four years of the Trump administration, when the West Wing aesthetic could best be described as “Fox wardrobe department, the D.C. version.” Think primary-colored sheath or wrap dress, high heels, Breck hair and lots of false eyelashes.And more broadly, it’s a break from the prevailing wisdom regarding female dress in the corridors of power, which dictated safety in a dark suit — with maybe the occasional red jacket for pop. The point being to look like the (male) majority that ruled; to be a company woman and play the part of the institution. Not any more.In 2019, when Ms. Haaland was sworn in as a congresswoman representing New Mexico, she also chose native dress, including a red woven belt more than a century old. Joshua Roberts/ReutersWearing traditional dress has become something of a signature for Ms. Haaland during big public moments. In 2016, she wore a classic Pueblo dress and jewelry to the Democratic National Convention; in 2019, when she was sworn in as one of the first Native American members of Congress, she did the same, including a red woven belt that was more than a century old. And in January, at President Biden’s inauguration, she also wore a ribbon skirt, one in sunshine yellow, with a burgundy top and boots.As she told Emily’s List on her first day in Congress: “I just felt like I should represent my people. I thought it would just make some folks proud out there.”Indeed, when Ms. Haaland posted a photo of herself at the inauguration on her Instagram feed (she has 124,000 followers), it was liked more than 45,000 times, with many comments applauding her attire. Not in order to diminish her achievements, the charge often leveled at commentary on a female politician’s wardrobe choices, but to underscore them.Similarly, after a video taken by her daughter of Ms. Haaland getting ready for her swearing-in began to circulate online Thursday, users cheered. “Ribbon skirt, moccasins, hair down — Deb Haaland inviting all the ancestors to her swearing in ceremony,” tweeted one user.Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, called it “my spiritual lift for the day.”Ms. Haaland is not the first or only female politician to use dress to express identity at moments of guaranteed public scrutiny, but she is part of a new generation of women in Washington that is increasingly, and intentionally, individual in their choices.Rashida Tlaib, the Democratic congresswoman from Michigan, for example, wore a traditional Palestinian thobe to her swearing-in, and Ilhan Omar, the Democratic representative from Minnesota, became the first woman to wear a hijab in Congress when she was elected in 2019.And though Vice President Harris has largely adopted what seems like a sea of dark trouser suits for her everyday work life, the fashion choices she made during the inauguration, focused on the work of young, independent designers of color, suggest that she is more than aware of the way carefully calibrated imagery can resonate with viewer — and is more than ready to deploy that tool with calculated precision.As Ms. Harris said after Ms. Haaland was sworn in, “History is being made yet again.” It’s only fitting to dress for it. More
Deb Haaland, seeking to make history as the first Native American to hold a cabinet secretary position in the US, has weathered a torrent of hostile questioning from Republicans during her confirmation hearing as secretary of the interior.In a striking opening statement, Haaland, a member of Congress for New Mexico, said: “The historic nature of my confirmation is not lost on me, but I will say that it is not about me,” adding that she hoped her elevation would “be an inspiration for Americans, moving forward together as one nation and creating opportunities for all of us”.A Laguna Pueblo member, Haaland, 60, said she had learned about her culture from her grandmother’s cooking and participating in traditional ceremonies, and had learned about the importance of protecting the environment from her grandfather. Haaland said “our climate challenge must be addressed” but conceded that fossil fuels would play a role in the US for “years to come”.Haaland is considered a progressive on the climate crisis and has spoken out on the impact of fossil fuel development upon the environment and Native American tribes, positions that Senate Republicans were keen to attack during a sometimes contentious confirmation hearing.John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, criticized Haaland for a tweet from October 2020 in which she stated that “Republicans don’t believe in science”. Barrasso, who has incorrectly said the role of human activity in climate change is “not known” and that ambitious climate action in the form of the Green New Deal would mean “cheeseburgers and milkshakes would become a thing of the past”, said the tweet was “concerning to those of us who have gone through training, believe in science, and yet with a broad brush, we’re all disbelievers”.Haaland responded to Barrasso, a surgeon, saying: “If you’re a doctor, I would assume that you believe in science”. Scientists have repeatedly said that the US, and the rest of the world, needs to rapidly reduce planet-heating emissions from fossil fuels in order to prevent disastrous heatwaves, flooding and societal unrest associated with runaway climate change.The early exchange set the tone for more than two hours of questioning where Republicans repeatedly assailed Joe Biden’s decision to pause oil and gas drilling on federal lands as calamitous for jobs. As interior secretary, Haaland would oversee the management of lands that make up nearly a third of America’s landmass, including tribal lands.At times the questions were extremely pointed, with Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, asking Haaland: “Will your administration be guided by a prejudice against fossil fuel, or will it be guided by science?” Importantly for the chances for Haaland’s nomination, Joe Manchin, a Democrat who represents the coal heartland of West Virginia, said that he wanted to see the “evolution, not elimination” of coal mining.Haaland said: “We want to move forward with clean energy, we want to get to net zero carbon” but also struck a conciliatory note with her questioners. The nominee said that changes to energy use “are not going to happen overnight” and that she looked forward to working with the senators. At one point when Steve Daines, a Montana Republican, asked why she supported a bill protecting grizzly bears, Haaland responded: “Senator, I believe I was caring about the bears.”Haaland had to repeatedly correct Republicans who said Biden had scrapped, rather than paused, oil and gas leases but acknowledged her role as a progressive champion would have to change somewhat if she were confirmed. “If I’m confirmed as secretary, that is far different role than a congresswoman representing one small district in my state,” she said. “So I understand that role, it’s to serve all Americans, not just my one district in New Mexico. I realize being cabinet is very different; I recognize there is a difference in those two roles.”During later questioning, Haaland raised the disproportionate impact of the Covid-19 pandemic upon Native Americans and raised concerns over tribes such as the Navajo being subjected to polluted water. In a response to a question from the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders about the opening up of an area sacred to native Americans in Arizona to mining, Haaland said she would “make sure that the voice of the tribal nation is heard on the issue”.Haaland’s nomination has been vigorously supported by environmental and Native American groups as a landmark moment to confront the climate crisis while addressing widespread inequities experienced by tribes.Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the steering committee for the Gwich’in people in Alaska, called Haaland a “visionary leader who knows we must protect places sacred to the American people like the Arctic national wildlife refuge.“Our way of life, our survival is interconnected to the land, water and animals. Today we honor the woman set to be the first Native American in history to fill a presidential cabinet position, and look forward to working with her to ensure that indigenous voices are heard and our human rights respected.”Nick Tilsen, president and CEO of the NDN Collective, a grassroots indigenous organization, said: “Today we watched Senator Daines mansplain and whitesplain to the Honorable Deb Haaland about public lands and the impacts of poverty – issues he knows nothing about and that Haaland has actual lived and professional experience addressing. These microaggressions and racism on full display only further solidified the need for strong Indigenous Women’s leadership in the highest places of government.” More
