Racism in My Experience Part 13
Native Americans
When I was a little boy, my dad took us quite regularly to Serpent Mound, a massive earth works built by Native Americans over 2000 years ago, not far from Cincinnati. My mom, a devout Catholic, was very observant of the rituals of Sunday mass; on the way to summer vacation, we would stop by the little Catholic Church in Garden River, an impoverished reserve of the Ojibway Indians, near the Sault Saint Marie. Dad read James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans to us, where we reveled and despaired in the exploits and travails of Hawkeye and Uncas and then read us to sleep with the rest of Cooper’s series of the North Woods and the Prairie. He had learned canoeing and woodsman skills from a Native American who worked for my grandparents in Canada.
The movies we watched on TV as little boys nearly always portrayed the whites as heroic and outnumbered defenders defending their lands, their families and their honor, and the Native Americans were portrayed as savage attackers, except of course for Jay Silverheels. In school, we learned about the kindness of the Indians in welcoming the Puritan immigrants to their shores and virtually nothing about the genocidal campaigns from the 1600’s to the 1890’s to exterminate them. The Battle of Little Big Horn and the Trail of Tears were all that I remember from our elementary and high schools. We learned of the steady push to move the Native Americans from their lands and confine them on reservations, but nothing about the efforts to deracinate them from their culture in English-only boarding schools and foster homes and forced adoptions.
I certainly was not aware until recently that Native Americans were denied citizenship in their own country until 1924, and were denied voting rights in many states until the 60’s with the passage and implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. https://www.history.com/news/native-american-voting-rights-citizenship Native Americans’ difficulties in registering and voting persist to the current day in some states still engaging in voter suppression of Native Americans. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/voting-rights/how-the-native-american-vote-continues-to-be-suppressed/
When I was living in Boston, I dated a woman from the Passamaquoddy tribe for a time in the late 60’s. She introduced me to the concept and protective shield of “invisibility” and its value in protecting members of tribes from rampant societal discrimination. She introduced me a bit to the unseen world of Native Americans living in and around Boston and Maine.
When I traveled west in the mid 70’s with a legal colleague and we met with an old friend then working as a lawyer with AIM for beers and dinner, she asked that we go across the Missouri River to a restaurant in the next state to avoid the expected surveillance and harassment from the local authorities – quite the flip side from invisibility.
When we drove down through New Mexico and Santa Fe, we saw the strong, proud, resilient Native American cultures that flourish there. I became enamored of the black on black pottery of Maria Martinez and over time learned of the many unspeakable tragedies her family experienced. During the 80’s and early 90’s, we spent a great deal of time in New Mexico, visiting and attending ceremonies in Native American pueblos in Arizona and New Mexico and learning a bit of the spiritual practices, the artistry, and the esthetics. I tried to get a challenging job there designing health reform, to no avail. We bought a vacant lot with no water or electricity in the high desert, thinking to relocate. On the flip side, the poverty, the lack of resources, the alcoholism, the addiction, and the societal neglect, fraud and abuse of Native Americans by the majority are stunning, relegating the original residents of the America’s to third world living conditions in the middle of a first world nation. Gallup, New Mexico sticks in my memory as the worst examplar, and it was ravaged by Covid 19 earlier this year.
“Currently, the Navajo Nation has the highest infection rate in the country,1 greater than that of the worst-hit state, New York; it is even greater than that of Wuhan at the height of the outbreak in China.2 Native people make up only around one-tenth of New Mexico’s population but more than 55 percent of its coronavirus cases; in Wyoming, AI/AN people are less than 3 percent of the state population but make up more than one-third of its cases.3” https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2020/06/18/486480/covid-19-response-indian-country/
President Reagan signed the Indian Gaming law in the late 80’s assuring tribes their sovereignty over gambling on their own lands. In California, Native Americans have cornered the casino gambling trade due to their tribal sovereignty, and two thirds of the Indian tribes now own their own casinos. https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/gambling/GS98.pdf They have been able to maintain their franchise despite persistent efforts of out of state gambling interests to enter the lucrative California market by all means possible.
New Mexico has now elected a wonderful Native American woman and our friend Debra Haaland to Congress; she gave a marvelous speech at the Democratic convention this year.
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 9/18/20