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Racial policy in a larger context


               Elizabeth Cook/Lynn

The thinking about Race or anything else for many of us   in Sioux Territories,   has always been Tribal.  We do NOT use that word as a negative, a pejorative.    For the indigenous people who learned how to live in this geography a thousand years ago,  Tribalism has never had a negative or degrading  effect even though a policy called “peace” plans by the treaty-signing US have tried to convince us otherwise.

Every now and then,  and especially in 2020 when the “land back” movement again stirs our young leaders here in the reddest state in the nation,  it is useful to look up and let ourselves know that the world created by Trump-ian Republicans  wants us to  believe  that we are too weak to resist.  They know little about the meaning of Tribalism.  They know even less about our long history of survival as a nation!

We listen to the global news  on television and are horrified when we see that the US administration has “sanctioned” another beleaguered indigenous nation  thousands of miles away (the Palestinians),  even while  out of the other side of their mouths they are   slyly moving  the US  embassy to its colony Jerusalem.  Meanwhile, they kill the commander of Arab forces in neighboring Iran in an attempt to shape the Middle East to their colonial ways.

The subject of world geography is not something we take up much in Indian country (though maybe we should).    When we think of it at all it reminds us of the 1880 War Department and the contemporary Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Most of the racial problems on Indian lands have gotten worse and we are not talking just about the Covid virus which is shocking enough.   The police problems in and around native homelands, the  mass shootings and  the endemic racism,  the rejection of our brown neighborhood refugees  and immigrants,  the denial of climate change tells that we need to isolate ourselves  and negotiate quietly when and where we can.

A return to White Supremacy  in America which we thought had been given a rest during the middle decades of the 20th century,  even though it may have been an illusion, brings about another backlash and we’ve “been there,  done that! “   This means that RACISM and its legacy has shaped and enforced a white racial hierarchy.

We thought we were making progress, and that worldwide populations   had at last begun to understand what America had done to its First Nations and what it might do again.  The influence toward defining the nature and the scope of the problem might take on substance.

America’s overseas partnerships gave us hope in an effort to rewrite the damaging history of many prior colonizing regimes (England vs. East India, Europe vs. fascism, Algeria, Arab revolutions.)   But Europe and Asia started moving away as trump moved away from the Paris climate accord and the Iranian Nuclear deal.

Yet, there was still the promising of a reckoning.

It was all about RACE, we thought, and I still think so though many would like to argue that it is economics and Wall Street that drives the authority.   Others blame Constant War.

There was little consensus until along came Donald Trump.   He gave fire to the embers of a religion, a doctrine, falsified origin myths and traditions of Slavery that no nation had really challenged seriously for 200 years.  With Trump, a political system was risen to protect all of that, and he has tapped into the pockets of the discontented second and third white immigrant relatives.

It was becoming clear that White Supremacist visions of America have always stood at the brink of American democracy.

No population is surer of its hidden agenda than Indians.

Even Russian interference in America’s attempts at developing a modern non-racial democracy hasn’t stopped Trump and that has meant that American allies have begun to withdraw from America and seeds of doubt have grown.

What this might mean to Indians and other disenfranchised groups is still to be known.  But, one thing is obvious.  On Indian Reservations, in particular, more and more ordinary voters are working hard to make sure their rather tribal substantial voting block is visible.

I had a grandmother who had never voted in any venue except a tribal election.  First of all, she was a denied the electoral process until 1924.  Today,   I think she would be one of the first in line because she, like many of her generation would be able to see quite clearly that her VOTE MATTERS.

She would be horrified at the separation of parents from children at the borders because she would remember when her sons were swept up from her front yard at the Crow Creek into huge US army trucks from Rapid City and taken without her permission to the boarding school two hundred miles away.

Her family was never the same after those years of loss, just as she would be troubled by a widespread fear among her tribal people that America will probably never change unless different policies and tools are put in place to remove one of the most powerful white supremacist presidents this country has ever known.

Trump is a dangerous man and History has it made it possible for American Indians to view the prospect of his continued autocratic and corrupt rule a clear signal that changes are overdue.

 

(Contact ecooklynn@gmail.com)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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