And it wasn’t half bad. Sure, she oversimplified the Pocahontas story considerably, and in ways that would give historians of the Powhatans and early Virginia pause, but she raised some critical points. “Indigenous people have been telling the story of Pocahontas–the real Pocahontas–for four centuries. A story of heroism. And bravery. And pain,” Warren said. And, she added correctly, “for almost as long, her story has been taken away by powerful people who twisted it to serve their own purposes.”
The Clown Prince of Mar-a-Lago, of course, has been referring to Warren as Pocahontas every time he speaks of her, an attempt to debunk Senator Warren’s claims to Native American ancestry. And Warren addressed those claims directly. She did not back down. She was unapologetic.
“I get why some people think there’s hay to be made here. You won’t find my family members on any rolls, and I’m not enrolled in a tribe.
And I want to make something clear. I respect that distinction. I understand that tribal membership is determined by tribes — and only by tribes. I never used my family tree to get a break or get ahead. I never used it to advance my career.
But I want to make something else clear too: My parents were real people.”
It was good that Warren drew that distinction, and it was good that she stuck to her guns. Senator Warren told the audience her parents’ story.
My parents struggled. They sacrificed. They paid off medical debts for years. My daddy ended up as a janitor. They fought and they drank, but more than anything, they hung together. 63 years — that’s how long they were married. When my mother died, a part of my daddy slipped away too.
Two years later, I held his hand while cancer took him. The last thing he said was, “It’s time for me to be with your mother.” And he smiled.
They’re gone, but the love they shared, the struggles they endured, the family they built, and the story they lived will always be a part of me. And no one — not even the president of the United States — will ever take that part of me away.
In many ways, it was a beautifully written speech.
Our stories are deeply woven into the fabric of who we are. The stories of immigrants and slaves, of explorers and refugees, have shaped and reshaped our country right up to the present day. For far too long, your story has been pushed aside, to be trotted out only in cartoons and commercials.
So I’m here today to make a promise: Every time someone brings up my family’s story, I’m going to use it to lift up the story of your families and your communities.
Your story is about contributions. The contributions you make to a country that took so much and keeps asking for more, contributions like serving in the military at rates higher than any other group in America.
It is a story about hope. The hope you create as more Native people go to college, go to graduate school and grow local economies.
It is a story about resilience. The resilience you show as you reclaim your history and your traditions.
And it is a story about pride and the determination of people who refuse to let their languages fade away and their cultures die.
I honor that story.
But it was not the only story. Warren wanted to talk about obligations, and morality, and the “story of our country’s mistreatment of your communities.” This was, for Warren, more than “a story about casual racism–war whoops and tomahawk chops and insulting Facebook memes.” It was, rather,
a story about greed. For generations — Congress after Congress, president after president — the government robbed you of your land, suppressed your languages, put your children in boarding schools and gave your babies away for adoption. It has stolen your resources and, for many tribal governments, taken away the opportunity to grow and prosper for the good of your people.
Even today, politicians in Washington want to let their Big Oil buddies pad their profits by encroaching on your land and fouling your rivers and streams. Meanwhile, even as the economic future of your communities hangs in the balance, they want to cut nutrition assistance, cut Medicaid, and cut other programs that many Native families rely on to survive.
It’s a story about violence. It is deeply offensive that this president keeps a portrait of Andrew Jackson hanging in the Oval Office, honoring a man who did his best to wipe out Native people. But the kind of violence President Jackson and his allies perpetrated isn’t just an ugly chapter in a history book. Violence remains part of life today. The majority of violent crimes experienced by Native Americans are perpetrated by non-Natives, and more than half — half — of Native women have experienced sexual violence.
This must stop. And I promise I will fight to help write a different story.
Warren, sounding like a Senator fully informed on issues of concern to native communities and, perhaps, a presidential candidate hoping to secure Native American votes in an existentially important election next time around, spoke of the obligations of the United States government to help native nations “build stronger communities and a brighter future–starting with a more prosperous economic future on tribal lands.” Where the Trump administration, and especially Secretary of Interior Ryan “Kill and Drill” Zinke can speak only of mineral extraction and bringing in outside corporate development, Warren spoke in essence about economic sovereignty.
Banking and credit are the lifeblood of economic development, but it’s about 12 miles on average from the center of tribal reservations to the nearest bank branch. Meanwhile, Native business owners get less start-up funding than other business owners.
And when it comes to crucial infrastructure, Native communities are far behind the rest of the country. Rural broadband access on tribal lands is worse than anywhere else in America, and more than a third of those living on tribal lands don’t have high-speed broadband at all. Without it, Native communities are simply shut out of a 21st century economy.
It’s time to make real investments in Indian country to build opportunity for generations to come.
And that’s only part of the real change we can make.
• We can stop giant corporations from stealing your resources.
• We can expand federally protected land that is important to your tribes.
• We can protect historic monuments like Bears Ears from companies that see it as just another place to drill.
• We can take steps to stop violence against Native people – including passing Savanna’s Act to fight the plague of missing Native women and girls.
Most of all, we can fight to empower tribal governments and Native communities so you can take your rightful seat at the table when it comes to determining your own future.
And we can fight to make sure that all Americans who have been left out in our economy, left out in our democracy, and left out in our history can take their rightful seat at that table.
Warren’s speech, I suspect, accomplished much of what it was intended to do. Some of her supporters have been uncomfortable about her claims to Native American ancestry. Like them, I wanted Warren to address the controversy directly, and to not allow Our Bronze Creon to define her as an ethnic fraud. Warren likely answered her critics in Democratic circles. As for the Racists and the Dingbats and the Deplorables, they will never let the issue rest, but Warren showed that more than any of the potential Democratic nominees in 2020, she understands the issues afflicting Native American communities, and that she is publicly committed to confronting directly the most racist presidential administration in the last fifty years.
I am teaching this semester a freshman writing seminar called “The Lost Colony.” The students are reading an e-book version of David Beers Quinn’s The Roanoke Voyages, 1584-1590, which is now available from Routledge, and a copy of my book, The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand.
For the first week of class I wanted the students to recognize the extent to which our understandings of the Roanoke ventures, and of early European expansion generally, are encrusted with a deep layer of myth. In the past, I had the students read Paul Green’s play The Lost Colony, published by the University of North Carolina Press. If you are on the Outer Banks in summer, by all means, slather up with bug spray and head on out to catch a performance. It has changed over the years. But the original 1937 version has not aged well, and I just could not subject myself, or the students, to that dreadful thing again. So we talked about “In Search Of,” a show I watched as a kid and that was hosted by Leonard Nimoy, and the recent “American Horror Story” series that connected some way back to Roanoke. Not much of an improvement, but I think they caught my drift. Usually I mention David LaVere’s book on the goofy Dare Stones excitement in the 1930s, The Lost Rocks. It’s an entertaining read, even if I do not agree with everything in the book.
Virginians claimed credit for the first successful settlement on American shores. They arrived in the muck they called Jamestown in 1607. The Pilgrims who set their feet on dry land at Plymouth Rock in 1620 received lots of attention, too. But North Carolinians, late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries, argued that they deserved some attention, too. It was at Roanoke, as speaker after speaker, and writer after writer claimed, where the first English child was born on American shores, and where the first baptism to English Christianity took place. (To suggest that Americans look at the history of St. Augustine during these years was unheard of). So I had the students read a collection of speeches that dignitaries delivered on Roanoke Island in 1907 to commemorate that glorious history, Thomas Pasteur Noe’s Pilgrimage to Roanoke Island.
According to Francis Winston, the lieutenant-governor of the Tarheel State and the event’s headliner, Roanoke was the opening chapter in “the story of the human race seeking liberty.” While nobody who has looked at the surviving documents from Ralegh’s Roanoke ventures would agree that freedom mattered to the colonial promoters at all, Winston asserted that “the people who laid the foundations of colonization in this New World, were nearly all refugees, exiles, wanderers, pilgrims. They were urged across the ocean by a common impulse, and that impulse was the desire to escape from some form of oppression in the New World.” And, of course, to escape that oppression, Winston wrote, the freedom-seeking adventurers encountered the region’s native peoples, “the savage red man, happy and free, in possession of fields, forests and streams.”
He roamed at large, a king among the beasts of the forest, but at best himself only an improved animal. Before this all-conquering race, he is gone and gone forever. He fulfilled none of the divine commands. He did not hunger and thirst after righteousness; he was not poor in spirit, nor pure in heart, nor meek, nor merciful. He could not inherit the earth. God’s law is a law of service. That race shall survive and inherit the earth, which renders to the earth the greatest service: service of daily lives employed in useful labor, of hearts filled with love and unselfishness, of souls inspired with noble ideals, of heroic self-sacrifice and devotion to the higher interests of humanity. The Indian is gone. The Negro is going. The white man will survive in fulfillment of the laws of God. There is no room on earth today for vicious, incompetent and immoral races. White civilization is triumphant, because it is best; Christianity will rule the earth because it is a religion of love and service. The cannibal races of Africa, the idolatrous races in Asia, the savage Indian and the semi-civilized negro in America must all learn the laws of God, and fulfill them in their daily lives, or else pay the penalty of decay and final extinction.
That’s pretty racist, right? But not all that far removed from the sort of stuff that those of us who teach Native American history hear all the time. Listen to your favorite right-winger on the radio talk about Columbus Day. Or listen to Ben Shapiro, the knucklehead-hipster-conservative-pundit, who said as much about Native American cultures last October. These views are deeply held, deeply entrenched, widely-believed. That Indians are doomed to disappear, are already gone, or are somehow inauthentic when they remind white Americans that they still are here, are beliefs too many Americans share. What Lt. Governor Winston said in 1907 about the Indians who once had lived on Roanoke Island has been said about Indians nearly everywhere throughout American history. Including Virginia. (Check out Brian Dippie’s old book, The Vanishing American, for examples of what I am talking about).
The same week that my students read Noe’s collection of speeches from Roanoke Island, came word that Congress, after many, many, years, had enacted legislation to extend federal recognition to six Virginia Indian tribes. Congress passed a law in 1978 providing a process for recognizing and acknowledging Native American tribes, and that process is described in Native America, but Congress, with plenary authority over Indian affairs, can also enact specific legislation recognizing an American Indian community. The Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act of 2017, which Congress sent to President Trump on 13 January, extends “Federal recognition to the Chickahominy Indian Tribe, the Chickahominy Indian Tribe–Eastern Division, the Upper Mattaponi Tribe, the Rappahannock Tribe, Inc., the Monacan Indian Nation, and the Nansemond Indian Tribe.” This is significant legislation, and I am hopeful that the Crown Prince of Mar-A-Lago will find time in his busy schedule to sign it into law. But he might do even more.
Several decades ago, the great anthropologist Helen C. Rountree (nobody has written more on the Powhatan Indians of Virginia and their descendants) titled one of her studies Pocahontas’s People, a history of the Powhatans. The six tribes named in the Thomasina Jordan bill are all part of that broader community. President Trump, as readers of this blog will understand well, has regularly referred to his opponent Senator Warren as “Pocahontas.” It is racist and unacceptable. As I wrote in February of last year,
For President Trump, it seems, Native American identity can be determined by a quick glance. He looked for certain characteristics and did not see them in the Pequots, or in Senator Warren. Centuries of intermarriage, enslavement, and the complex, messy, and tangled history of native peoples mattered in his determination not a bit. For him, native peoples were individuals with certain easily distinguished racial features, and not members of political entities that possessed an inherent but limited sovereignty that predated the creation of the United States.
But here’s the thing. Too many Americans share Trump’s views about who Indians are and what they ought to be. Too many Americans view Indians as part of the past. Think about the most commonly held stereotypes about Native Americans: What images enter your mind? Ask your friends what they think. Chances are a lot of those images come from the past.
And when we speak of Native Americans as being part of the past, we are aiding in an ongoing colonial project which erases native peoples in the present. And if they are viewed as part of the past, or inauthentic, it becomes easier to dismiss the legitimacy of Native Americans, as individuals and as members of semi-sovereign nations, as being out of time and place and, as a consequence, irrelevant. It becomes easier to ignore the very real problems of inequality and injustice in Indian Country; it becomes permissible to cheer for a football team with a racist name; or to silently assent to a President’s decision to authorize a pipeline through lands that a Native American community deems sacred. It also makes it possible to call into question the sovereign right of native nations to develop their economies, protect their lands, and against immense odds preserve their cultures. When the President casts Indians as part of the past, he makes it more difficult for many Americans to recognize the importance of native peoples’ calls for justice today.
I wonder what the President will say if he holds a signing ceremony. I wonder what words his speechwriters will place in front of him. Will he invite representatives from the tribes to the White House? President Trump has been in office for just over a year, but the contempt he has shown towards native peoples is unmistakable. He has an opportunity, should he choose to use it, to explain that his name-calling was destructive and racist, that native peoples are still here, that they are still an essential part of the fabric of American life, as vital and important to this nation’s past and present as they ever have been. He can explain to Americans that native nationhood matters. He can show that the views expressed by Lt. Governor Winston, so widely shared 110 years ago, and shared still by too many Americans and by himself, were wrong and remain wrong. He can show the American people that native peoples are still here, and that their historical experiences matter. I am not optimistic that he will be able to do that.
On Halloween, a really bad day for the dumpster fire that is the Trump Presidency, Our Bronze Creon issued his proclamation that November is Native American Heritage Month. Traditionally this proclamation is made on the last day in October, and usually it garners little attention.
Little Hands, No Plans
Still, other than his announcement several months back that he had decided to reverse the Obama Administration’s belated halt to the Dakota Access Pipeline, President Trump has had nothing to say about Native American issues. At a certain level, that is understandable. The entire presidency is wobbling under the existential threat posed by the Mueller investigation. But here, as elsewhere, it is worth looking at what Our Bronze Creon has had to say. And here, as elsewhere, his words and his deeds pale in comparison to those of his predecessors.
Trump’s proclamation begins with a bit of meaningless fluff, noting that “American Indians and Alaska Natives are inextricably linked with the history of the United States.” Ignoring the many earlier efforts at settlement throughout the Americas, including the Jamestown settlement beginning in 1607, Trump strangely chose to open with the assertion that “Beginning with the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth Colony and continuing until the present day, Native American’s contributions are woven deeply into our Nation’s rich tapestry.” We will give him a pass on that misplaced apostrophe–it is a frustrating mistake my students make as well. But it is odd, isn’t it, that a President who has expressed such fascination with the Senator from Massachusetts who he has derisively dubbed “Pocahontas” would ignore the English efforts to plant a colony in Virginia? There was a time in American historical writing when New Englanders, Virginians, and North Carolinians all competed to make their state the birthplace of the United States. Trump apparently and uncharacteristically has come down with Massachusetts.
His proclamation honored “the contributions and sacrifices” made by Native Americans. Those contributions included military service, assistance to the first European settlers and, in a sideways glance at the discredited “Iroquois Influence” thesis, the gift of “democratic ideas to our constitutional Framers.” Trump’s predecessors also occasionally mentioned the notion that the United States Constitution and American democracy were influenced or shaped by Native American antecedents, but the number of published scholars who find this view persuasive can be counted on one hand.
As far as his own administration’s policies, the President claimed that
my Administration is committed to tribal sovereignty and self-determination. A great Nation keeps its word, and this Administration will continue to uphold and defend its responsibilities to American Indians and Alaska Natives. The United States is stronger when Indian Country is healthy and prosperous. As part of our efforts to strengthen American Indian and Alaska Native communities, my Administration is reviewing regulations that may impose unnecessary costs and burdens. This aggressive regulatory reform, and a focus on government-to-government consultation, will help revitalize our Nation’s commitment to Indian Country.
This is all highly general. Nothing specific here at all, and little awareness of what the words he used mean. Self-determination? Not much of that thus far, except for a commitment to allow those tribes interested in developing their coal resources, like the Crows, to start digging. There is scant evidence that the Trump administration has any interest in tribal sovereignty, and Interior Department press releases say little more than the President did here: that the government will cut regulations that hold Indian country back. If you find this a paltry solution to the challenges native peoples face, and the wide range of issues with which they contend, you can request a meeting with the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs by filling out this form right here. You might want to be a bit flexible in scheduling, as Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke’s choice to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs has only been on the job for two weeks.
You can look over the posts on this blog, and it will not take you long to see that I have been very critical of the President. But I wanted to be fair on this, so I read earlier proclamations by Trump’s predecessors of Native American Heritage Month.
Long ago, the first President Bush noted that “before European explorers set foot on the North American continent, this great land has been cultivated and cherished by generations of American Indians. Unbeknownst to their fellowman halfway around the world, these Native people had developed rich, thriving cultures, as well as their own systems of social order. They also possessed a wealth of acquired wisdom and skills in hunting, tracking, and farming — knowledge and skills that would one day prove to be invaluable to traders and settlers from Europe.” The elder Bush provided some specific examples of great Native American leaders, including Sacajawea, Sequoyah, and Charles Curtis. And he spoke of his administration’s signal accomplishments in Indian affairs, the founding legislation for the National Museum of the American Indian. And he looked to the future, too:
During the National American Indian Heritage Month, as we celebrate the fascinating history and time-honored traditions of Native Americans, we also look to the future. Our Constitution affirms a special relationship between the Federal Government and Indian tribes and — despite a number of conflicts, inequities, and changes over the years — our unique government-to-government relationship has endured. In recent years, we have strengthened and renewed this relationship. Today we reaffirm our support for increased Indian control over tribal government affairs, and we look forward to still greater economic independence and self-sufficiency for Native Americans.
Unlike President Trump, Bill Clinton in the final year of his presidency remembered both the accomplishments of native peoples and the consequences they had suffered as a result of the nation’s past policies. “This month,” he said in November of 2000, “we celebrate the culture and contributions of the first Americans,” but also “remember with sorrow the suffering they endured because of past Federal actions and policies that had long-term and often devastating consequences for Native Americans and their culture.” Clinton’s presidency was one of importance for native peoples, and he looked forward. “As the new millennium dawns, there is reason for optimism,” he stated. “During my 1999 New Markets tour of the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota and my visit to the Navajo Nation in New Mexico in April of this year, I saw firsthand a strength of spirit and hope sweeping through Indian Country.” He said his administration had worked hard to help native communities “through economic development initiatives and improved education and health care.” His tone was retrospective. He was proud of what his administration was done but, conscious that its time was coming to an end, that there was so much more he wished he could do.
We still have much to accomplish, however. While my Administration has worked hard to bridge the digital divide and bring the Information Superhighway to Indian Country, some areas still do not have telephone and power lines. We continue striving to provide American Indians with the tools they need to strengthen family and community life by fighting poverty, crime, alcohol and drug abuse, and domestic violence, and we are working with tribes to improve academic achievement and strengthen tribal colleges.
We are also seeking to ensure that tribal leaders have a voice equal to that of Federal and State officials in addressing issues of concern to all our citizens. I reaffirmed that commitment to tribal sovereignty and self-determination by issuing this month a revised Executive Order on Consultation and Coordination with Indian Tribal Governments. This order builds on prior actions and strengthens our government-to-government relationship with Indian tribes by ensuring that all Executive departments and agencies consult with Indian tribes and respect tribal sovereignty as the agencies consider policy initiatives that affect Indian communities.
This year, my Administration proposed the largest budget increase ever for a comprehensive Native American initiative for health care, education, infrastructure, and economic development. Just last month, as part of the Department of the Interior appropriations legislation, I signed into law one segment of this budget initiative that includes significant investments for school construction in Indian Country and the largest funding increase ever for the Indian Health Service. These are the kinds of investments that will empower tribal communities to address an array of needs and, ultimately, to achieve a better standard of living.
Back in 1994, when I first met with the tribal leaders of more than 500 Indian nations at the White House, I saw the strength and determination that have enabled Native Americans to overcome extraordinary barriers and protect their hard-won civil and political rights. Since then, by working together, we have established a new standard for Federal Indian policy–one that promotes an effective government-to-government relationship between the Federal Government and the tribes, and that seeks to ensure greater prosperity, self-reliance, and hope for all Native Americans. While we cannot erase the tragedies of the past, we can create a future where all of our country’s people share in America’s great promise.
It is, quite simply, a statement that stands in stark contrast to the Trump administration’s perfunctory proclamation. George W. Bush’s proclamations, similarly, were brief, but managed to avoid the mailed-in, bored tone of the Trump announcement. Bush could point to some minor legislative accomplishments, and pledged to preserve the “nation to nation” relationship between the United States and native peoples and sovereignty and self-determination.
His successor, Barack Obama, whose presidency was indeed significant for its accomplishments in Indian Country, used his proclamations to set an agenda and highlight all it had done. In 2012, for instance, President Obama mentioned the Cobell settlement and the Hearth Act, important achievements. In 2013 he recognized native contributions and accomplishments, but also “the painful history Native Americans have endured — a history of violence, marginalization, broken promises, and upended justice. There was a time,” he continued, “when native languages and religions were banned as part of a forced assimilation policy that attacked the political, social, and cultural identities of Native Americans in the United States.” Despite these hard-hearted policies, and “through generations of struggle, American Indians and Alaska Natives held fast to their traditions, and eventually the United States Government repudiated its destructive policies and began to turn the page on a troubled past.”
It is not enough to argue that these differences are matters of style. They are. But they reflect differences in policy as well. All presidents state their support for self-determination. They all work to uphold tribal sovereignty, they say. But few of them think through what those words mean, and contemplate meaningful policies to honor these pledges. Obama himself was slow to act in important areas. He acted on Dakota Access only at the last second, and arguably too late to implement policy changes that would not be so easily set aside by President Trump. But he did have much to point to, and he did so in his last proclamation in 2016.
Over our long shared history, there have been too many unfortunate chapters of pain and tragedy, discrimination and injustice. We must acknowledge that history while recognizing that the future is still ours to write. That is why my Administration remains dedicated to strengthening our government-to-government relationships with tribal nations and working to improve the lives of all our people. Three years ago, I issued an Executive Order establishing the White House Council on Native American Affairs to help ensure the Federal Government engages in true and lasting relationships with tribes and promotes the development of prosperous and resilient tribal communities. Last month, I hosted the eighth Tribal Nations Conference and brought tribal leaders together to identify key issues we still face. We have worked to better protect sacred lands and restored many acres of tribal homelands, as well as supported greater representation of indigenous peoples before the United Nations and called for further implementation of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And we have taken steps to strengthen tribal sovereignty in criminal justice matters, including through the Tribal Law and Order Act.
Through the Affordable Care Act and permanent reauthorization of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, we empowered more Native Americans to access the quality health care they need to live full, healthy lives. Throughout their lives, 84 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls will experience some form of violence, and in 2013, I signed the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which allows tribes to prosecute non-Native individuals who commit acts of domestic violence in Indian Country. And through the North American Working Group on Violence Against Indigenous Women and Girls, we are strengthening regional coordination on the rights of women and girls from indigenous communities across the continent.
In recognition of the immeasurable contributions that Native Americans have made to our Nation, we continue to advocate for expanding opportunity across Indian Country. We have supported tribal colleges and universities and worked to return control of education to tribal nations — not only to prepare Native youth for the demands of future employment, but also to promote their own tribal languages and cultures. We are investing in job training and clean-energy projects, infrastructure, and high-speed internet that connects Native American communities to the broader economy. We are connecting more young people and fostering a national dialogue to empower the next generation of Native leaders through the Generation Indigenous initiative. Through www.NativeOneStop.gov, we have also worked to improve coordination and access to Federal services throughout Indian Country. Indian Country still faces many challenges, but we have made significant progress together since I took office, and we must never give up on our pursuit of the ever brighter future that lies ahead.
I have written on this blog about how consequential a presidency I thought Obama’s was for Native American communities. His accomplishments, compared to that of his predecessors, were significant. He was entirely justified in talking about them in his proclamation. But now, sadly, as we struggle through the first year of a presidency that has been mired in crisis and scandal from the moment it began in January of 2017, that has stirred up racial division in the country and apologized and excused public displays of white supremacy, and that has shown outright hostility to the causes and concerns of peoples of color, the pursuit of that “brighter future” mentioned by President Obama seems to have been set aside.
And that is just one more tragedy of the presidency of Our Bronze Creon, one more component of the electoral nightmare that began last November. It is one thing for a President to be “unconventional” and, as his dwindling number of supporters argue, to be unconcerned about being “politically correct.” It is another matter entirely to show, through sins of omission and commission, that he could not possibly care less.
The recent story that appeared in The Intercept about the private security firm Tiger Swan, its cooperative intelligence-gathering with local, state, and federal law enforcement authorities, its propaganda work in behalf of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the sometimes-brutal tactics it used to protect the corporate “assets” of Energy Transfer Partners, the Fortune 500 company behind the construction of the DAPL, should be a much larger story than it is. The Tiger Swan story reveals the rottenness that lies at the core of America’s continuing treatment of native peoples and their allies.
Tiger Swan, as revealed in the documents obtained and published by The Intercept, produced intelligence briefings for law enforcement agencies, kept close tabs on the Water Protectors at Standing Rock, and may have infiltrated the protesters’ camp. They spread disinformation on social media,
Police guard a bridge near Oceti Sakowin Camp on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on December 3, 2016 outside Cannon Ball, North Dakota, as Native Americans and activists from around the country gather at the camp trying to halt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. / AFP / JIM WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
measuring the influence of their posts and stories, and may have kept something like an “Enemies List” to trace leaders of the protest movement. All of this in the name of a corporation, the business interests of which they protected against an overwhelmingly peaceful protest movement run by people worried that the DAPL could jeopardize waters flowing through the Standing Rock Reservation. To the mercenaries at Tiger Swan, the protesters were “jihadists” and they should be countered using similar tactics.
Fort Apache, the Bronx. You remember that. Or American soldiers in Vietnam marching out on patrol into “Indian Country.” The supposedly warlike qualities of native peoples and the supposedly violent lands on which they lived have been transposed time and again as a way for American soldiers and officers to comprehend whatever conflict they engaged in. These soldiers enter the theater in Apache helicopters, following the Tomahawk cruise missiles that preceded them.
Here, the scenario is flipped. The Jihadists that American forces fight in other parts of the world provide the language for Tiger Swan’s understanding of the #NoDAPL movement and, in effect, their lens for understanding native peoples at home attempting to protect their quality of life. The language of war, of insurgency, has returned to Native America.
I have written about Standing Rock and the #NoDAPL movement before, so you know how I feel about it. If you are reading this blog, chances are you read about the protests, watched the DIY reporting from the protestors themselves, or saw the courageous on-the-ground journalism by Amy Goodman, her colleagues at “Democracy Now!” and other media sources. Some of those reporters put their bodies on the line to bring this story to you and me.
You also will remember, no doubt, the images of private security forces roughing up the Water Protectors. Painful images. Disturbing. Police dogs. Military vehicles. Body armor, automatic weapons, violence.
IF YOU WATCH or listen to right-wing media, you will learn that left-leaning college students, protesting on their campuses, are the major threat to freedom of thought, speech, and expression. Coddled and intolerant, the story goes, these fragile snowflakes will not expose themselves or allow others to be exposed to ideas with which they disagree. They will drown out the voices of those whose ideas they oppose. You read about the protests at Middlebury. And maybe you saw the recent news coming out of Evergreen State College in Washington. Be afraid of the students, we are told, and too many people seem willing to comply.
I am going to use this Intercept piece in my Native American history class in the fall. I may use it the first day, or I might assign it at the end. Whichever, I feel my students need to see this stuff, think about it, and remember that the power of history can hang heavy on the backs of too many Americans. It might rile the students up. Maybe they will protest. Maybe they will get pissed and start breaking shit. More likely, if they are good history students—and most of them are—they will see this story for what it is.
In recent weeks, David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon has gained a lot of attention. He tells the story of the murder of oil-rich Osages in the early twentieth century. It is a riveting story. Historians have known about the Osage murders for a long time, but it is good that Grann brought it to the attention of a broader public. Its significance should be clear.
From Jamestown to Standing Rock, from the Virginia Company of London to Energy Transfer Partners, the partnership of corporate and business interests with the forces of the centralized state has been a constant in American history. This is not partisan. Tiger Swan was doing business during the Obama presidency. It continued its work under Creon Trump.
I reason here from the premise that no corporate asset is more valuable than a single human life. Yet, as I write, I read about how state after state is trying to enact measures to criminalize protest. I listen to the recording of Montana’s new congressman pummeling one reporter (who cannot fight back) and read how the tough-guy governor of Texas took a break from tormenting LGBTQ kids to joke about shooting others.
It is abundantly clear that the forces of suppression and violence that have been part of the lived experience of peoples of color on this continent for centuries are now threatening to affect non-native peoples in unprecedented and alarming ways.
There is a wonderfully revealing passage in Vine Deloria’s famous book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. “When the Kennedys and King were assassinated,” Deloria wrote, “people wailed and moaned over the ‘sick’ society. Most people took the assassinations as a symptom of a deep inner rot that had suddenly set in. They needn’t have been shocked. America has been sick for some time. It got sick when the first Indian treaty was broken. It has never recovered.”
Dakota Access, and the sorts of collusion between law enforcement, corporate interests, and for-profit armies like Tiger Swan, show that the sickness Deloria described is still here. Indeed, it has festered, become malignant, and done its damage in new ways in this new world order. Tiger Swan did its work during the Obama years. It continues its work now. It continues to protect ETP’s corporate assets. The sickness runs deep. The rottenness is profound. If, as Felix Cohen once wrote, native peoples, “like the miner’s canary,” mark “the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere,” then “our treatment of Indians…reflect[s] the rise and fall in our democratic faith.”
Let’s not forget Tiger Swan. Let’s remember that history is not only part of the past.
I recently was invited to speak at a Teach-In on my campus. The purpose of the gathering is to support student-activists interested in countering the policies of the Trump administration. At the time that invitation was extended, some weeks ago, the Dakota Access Pipeline and the #NoDAPL movement were still very much in the news. Since then, the Trump administration has fulfilled its promises to the oil men and the businessmen and fossil fuel addicts among us, and the pipeline is sadly looking like a done deal. I have written about the process here and here and elsewhere on this blog.
But there are still plenty of other issues to talk about.
This piece, for instance, has been circulating quite widely. It is produced by Alaska Indigenous, in order to provide “critical commentary on the pertinent social, economic, and political affairs of Indigenous peoples in Alaska.” The Trump Administration, and its policies, has awakened quite a bit of passionate writing, and those who feel that they stand to lose something from Our Bronze Creon’s policies, or who have the humanity to sympathize with those who might, are on high alert. That is a good thing, in my view. This particular post has shown up in my various newsfeeds a couple of times. And, earnest as it is, it did not sit well with me.
Yes, Donald Trump has shown that he is no friend to native peoples. His administration is staffed by men with little awareness or understanding of the problems faced by Native Americans and other peoples of color in the United States (or worldwide, for that matter, but I can only cover so much). His visit to the grave of Andrew Jackson makes that clear enough. In my view, we must remain vigilant with regards to the actions of this administration. We must stay informed. We must be critical. We must continue to demand to see the evidence, and to continue to ask tough questions, even when it seems we are being ignored. That is what intellectually courageous students do. But let’s not fly off the handle.
The author of this piece worries that the Trump presidency could result in a return to the failed and discredited federal policy of termination, a multi-faceted program driven by Congress aimed at eliminating any relations between the United States and native peoples as parts of sovereign political communities.
Termination was catastrophic for those native communities that fell victim to it. But only a tiny percentage of the nation’s native population went through termination: indigenous activism and protest slowed and ultimately stalled the policy, and led to its replacement with a federal commitment to “self-determination,” a phrase used both by presidents Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1968 and Richard M. Nixon in 1970. That is an important part of the story that is too often ignored: native peoples defeated the policy of termination.Their actions led the government to this historic shift in policy.
And termination is not coming back. Take a look at the Republican and Democratic party platforms from the last election season. They differ more in style than in substance, with the Democrats celebrating with good cause the achievements of Barack Obama’s consequential presidency. But both claim to support self-determination and tribal sovereignty. Trump’s administration might be bad for Native Americans, but it is hard to tell: we have as yet no Under-Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs. But as I have pointed out elsewhere, Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has shown his commitment to learning about Native American issues in his home state of Montana. One could argue, moreover, that Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, has a better record on Indian rights cases than the Notorious RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs has a good record for working together in a bipartisan manner, and there are significant challenges ahead in Indian Country where Republicans and Democrats might come together. Sure, Trump’s supporters say some crazy things, but we should read these statements critically and carefully.
The author of the blog post concentrates much of his or her ire on Oklahoma Republican congressman Markwayne Mullin. Mullin is, the author contends, a “pretendian” who favors the privatization of Indian lands. Statements to this effect were attributed to Mullin during the transition, but his actual position was a bit more complicated. As an outsider, I do not engage in questioning claims to Native American identity. Mullin is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation (and for the complexities tied into this, see Circe Sturm’s brilliant Becoming Indian, a book which might work well in your courses). And Mullin’s charge–that the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the federal bureaucracy in general stifle enterprise and economic development in Indian country–is nothing new. “Red Progressives,” like Charles Eastman, Carlos Montezuma, and Arthur Parker, made similar arguments frequently during the early twentieth century. (For this subject, I use in my courses Frederick Hoxie’s Talking Back to Civilization, but you might like as well David Martinez’s The American Indian Intellectual Tradition, a more voluminous edited collection of writings). There is nothing at all progressive in any of the policies Representative Mullin supports, but his complaint has been around for quite some time.
And economic development in Indian country and energy policy are complicated things. Coal, for instance. Donald Trump has made a lot of noise about bringing coal mining jobs back to the United States. The experts who I have listened to see this as a forlorn hope: coal is a dirty fuel with falling prices and a finite future. Coal increasingly looks like it is part of the past, whatever the claims of the Trump administration.
Zinke came from Montana. He favors increasing coal production in Montana, and he would like Indian lands to be a part of that effort. He said this as a congressman and he is saying it now as Secretary of the Interior. Environmentalists have legitimate reasons to be concerned about this. But here’s the thing. The Crows, whose story I tell in Native America, are of course well aware that some of the richest coal seams in the American west are located on Indian land. The Crows’ tribal leadership has looked to develop its own energy resources on their own land. Sovereignty and self-determination, right? Even though in recent years coal prices have fallen and opposition to coal as a “dirty” fuel has increased, the Crows see coal development as a means to combat poverty. Coal revenue could pay for schools and for roads. Noting that his people have survived warfare, epidemic diseases, and attempts to assimilate them and eradicate their culture, Crow tribal chairman Darren Old Coyote told an industry journalist late in 2015 that “we’re going to continue moving forward to survive, and the only way I know how now is to develop our coal.” The Crows, he said, “have the manpower,” and “we have the capability of being self-sufficient. There is no reason why we should be this poor.” The Crows’ efforts to develop their resources, to exercise their economic self-determination, was affected negatively by the policies of the Obama administration directed toward reducing America’s reliance on coal. We might not like coal mining as an economic activity, but it is worth debating how far we are willing to go when we speak of self-determination. The third article to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, after all, guarantees to native peoples the right to self-determination, and with that the right to “freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development.” Does that include coal-mining on indigenous lands, when that nation’s leadership favors coal mining?
I have made it very clear on this site how I feel about the actions thus far of the Trump Presidency in the realm of education and Indian Affairs. But we must couch our opposition in the evidence, especially when we are contending against the policies of an administration that plays so fast and loose with the truth. We should take nothing on faith, and always read and listen critically. Ask tough questions. Look alive. Stay informed and stay on your toes. Hell, study history. That is sometimes easier to do if we keep ourselves firmly grounded in the evidence, and with an openness to the complexities of the issues that concern us.
I have told myself that I would not write about Donald Trump, but the guy is the gift that keeps on giving, if by gifts one means a series of outrages that forebode some national or global calamity.
This week, on the Ides of March, our Bronze Creon visited the grave of Old Hickory, Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States. Trump’s affection for Jackson is clear–a portrait of Jackson hangs in the Oval Office and, in a tweet, our current president thanked #POTUS7 for his service to the country. New Orleans? The slaughter of Creeks at Horseshoe Bend? Perhaps. Or was it Jackson’s distaste for the 1st Amendment in the form of his support for the congressional “Gag Rule,” or restricting abolitionist materials from the US Mail? Did Trump like Jackson’s desire to go medieval on the Nullifiers in South Carolina? Maybe it was because Trump embraced the myth that Jackson was an outsider, the people’s candidate, a kindred spirit of sorts, even if based on a flawed historical analogy. Or the ruinous Bank War? Or Jackson’s brutal embrace of majority rule whatever the consequences?
For students of the Native American past, Andrew Jackson is identified with the policy of “Indian Removal.” (God, I hate that euphemism.) More than any of his predecessors, Jackson advocated removal as national policy toward native peoples. His supporters included many southerners and westerners who wanted Indian land. He called for removal in his first annual message. He signed the Indian Removal Bill into law in 1830. He argued that removal was not mandatory, but that native peoples who remained upon their lands must subject themselves to the laws of the states in which these lands were located. Those states offered no protection for the persons and property of native peoples. Earlier in his career, Jackson negotiated massive land cessions with southeastern Indian nations, and he appointed during his presidency the commissioners who used all means fair and foul to obtain signatures on removal treaties. During his presidency, thousands of native peoples left their homes in the east for new homes in the west. There is no doubt that thousands of native peoples died as a direct result of the policies pursued by Andrew Jackson.
Our Bronze Creon told one interviewer that though he is very busy doing tremendous things to make America great again, he did find some time to begin reading a book about Andrew Jackson. I doubt that he learned much. The same day that Trump visited Jackson’s grave, a federal court in Hawaii struck down the president’s second attempt to ban Muslim immigrants from a handful of countries. Mike Huckabee, the Le Fou of GOP politics, said that like Jackson when confronted by a Court that challenged a fundamental assumption of his Indian policy, Trump should resist the judicial branch of the federal government. Huckabee became, in effect, the first person in the 21st century to see Jackson’s dismissal of the Court’s authority as admirable, and created the impression that this is a presidency run by men who have little knowledge of this nation’s past and less regard for the historic sufferings of its people of color.
I have written about all of this before. Jackson is a bad guy. He ruled by anger. He shot people in duels. He menaced his enemies. He held grudges with such ferocity that he makes Nixon seem chill. He trashed the economy, and seems not to have understood banking. We should not shed a tear that he is slated for removal from the twenty-dollar bill. He is rightly associated with America’s long history of ethnic-cleansing.
But here’s an unpopular point. Removing Jackson from our currency, or denouncing him as the author of a genocide against Native Americans, does not absolve any of us of the sins of our nation. Removal is a fact of life in Native American history. It began before Jackson took office, and continued long afterwards. (If you have not seen it, take a look at Claudio Saunt’s interactive map illustrating Native American land loss). I teach, for instance, at a college called Geneseo. I routinely drive through or visit places called Canandaigua or Irondequoit, and pass by on the highway places called Onondaga and Canajoharie and Nunda and Cohocton. The place names remain, after the people were removed, or consolidated on reservations in remote corners of New York state. A half dozen archaeological sites, all previously Seneca towns, are within a half-hour’s drive of where I sit. I walk along the old path of the Erie Canal, that symbol of New York’s rise as the Empire State that could not have been constructed without Iroquois dispossession. Both its original path and its current path pass by within a half mile of my house. In other words, look at the ground beneath your feet. It was once Native American land, and if you live in the east, like me, you likely have benefited from the relocations and removes that turned native peoples into refugees and exiles.
A more astute politician, not to mention a more sensitive human being, might have acknowledged the costs of Jackson’s policies–policies that were popular at the time, and from which millions of non-Indian Americans continue to reap the benefits. A more historically aware President might have talked about the complexities of the past. But that is not Donald Trump’s style. He is not a deep thinker. A man who recently congratulated the long-dead Frederick Douglass for the good work he is doing, Trump has shown no signs that he has any interest in or knowledge of America’s troubled past. And that is especially the case when it comes to the victims of American history.
A Discussion Forum for Teaching and Writing Native American History
