Erasure is how anti-Indigenous racism works

 

Erasure is how anti-Indigenous racism works by Rebecca Nagle

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Have you ever heard that icebreaker–if you had to pick one superpower, would you fly or be invisible? I always pick the power of flight. I already know what it’s like to be invisible. In this country, it is not a form of power.

Once, I was at a grassroots social justice convening in Florida. On a break while people made small talk, a white woman came up to me and said, “I thought we killed all of you.” As in, she thought Native Americans were extinct like the woolly mammoth. It is a bewildering stereotype to encounter. The stereotype that you no longer exist. 82% of adults in the U.S. cannot think of a single, living, famous Native person. 98% cannot name two.

When you scroll through your phone, read the news, or watch TV, statistically, it is very unlikely you will see a Native person. Of the 2,336 regular characters on TV from 1987 to 2009, only two were Native.  A recurring character on Northern Exposure.  And a contestant on the reality show Survivor.

On the rare occasion Native people are portrayed in the media, we live in the past. In one study, researchers typed “Native American” and “American Indian” into the Google image search bar. 95% of the results were “antiquated portraits.” Once, someone told me that, even though she didn’t believe that I was Native, she knew that my ancestors were. Conveniently for a country built on our land, all of the real Indians are dead and gone.

In 2018, U.S. voters elected the most diverse Congress in our country’s history. For the occasion, USA Today made an infographic. The 116th Congress included two Native women–the first ever elected to the body. In their infographic, USA Today put the Native representatives in the “other” category. In the 2020 election, Native voters helped Biden win the swing state of Arizona. On election night, CNN published an exit poll capturing how people voted in the state. On it, Native voters were called “something else.”

Native people are not simply left out of the story. We are written out.

We don’t learn about most people through direct social interactions, but from things like movies and the internet. I have never been to France, but I have an idea in my head that French people like wine and cheese. When a group is negatively represented, that can lead to stereotypes and prejudice, like the idea that women are bad at math. What Native people face is different. The media, pop culture, and school curriculum do not just represent us poorly. It represents almost never. Our existence is erased from the public eye. Americans don’t think about our absence. They don’t think about us at all.

This erasure harms Native folks. Our near-total absence from the media Americans consume creates a stubborn prejudice in the minds of non-Natives. Over time, they see us as less real and even less human. Research has found that less exposure to contemporary Native people correlates with more prejudice against us and less support for tribal sovereignty. One study found that the more contemporary Native people were omitted, the more participants agreed that the U.S. should nullify all treaties, eliminate all reservations, and abolish tribes’ right to self-govern. It is active erasure.

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What does Manifest Destiny mean?

How Manifest Destiny Stretched the U.S. From Sea to Shining Sea

Of course, there's more to Manifest Destiny than some woman in white or the encouraging hand of the Almighty. The concept was inextricably tied into the politics of the time, which were (as now) fueled by something decidedly unholy: money.

What Lies Behind the Woman in White

America's land-lust was driven, first and foremost, by the thirst for more wealth for its settlers. But distributing that often ill-gained bounty was not easy. In a time when the scourge of slavery already was beginning to rip apart the nation, the issue of how to divide the newly acquired land — which states-to-be would allow slavery, and which would not — became a political hot potato.
Declaring the land grabs a divine right seemed, if nothing else, a nice cover story for expansionists of the time. But even more than money, politics or religion, Manifest Destiny demonstrated something else about the mindset of many Americans.
"Implied in the notion of Manifest Destiny is that we know best," says Don Haider-Markel, the head of the department of political science at the University of Kansas. "And basically, when we say 'we,' we mean sort of Anglo-Saxon Protestant, otherwise known as sort of white.
"That's telling Native Americans, that's telling Mexicans, that's telling Africans we kidnapped and used as slaves that we are superior. Our way is superior.
"I don't see how you can escape from the notion," Haider-Markel says, "that this is a form of white supremacy."

President James Polk was a champion of Manifest Destiny and built his presidential campaign around the idea.

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Did People Really Accept the Idea?

Certainly, many people at the time believed in Manifest Destiny; that God wanted the newcomers to take over the continent, to work the land, to bring Christianity to the Indians and Mexicans, to be Biblically fruitful and multiply (as O'Sullivan put it), and, if God found it within His grace, to grow rich while doing it. Expelling more than 100,000 Native Americans from their homes in the American South, murdering thousands of others, and taking land from Mexicans was not simply accepted as a divine American right to these people. It was a duty.
But not everyone bought into that notion. Not by a long shot. Many saw the idea as little more than a dodge.
"There were people, for example, who thought that the drive to annex Texas was a ploy to gain more land to create more slave states, because eastern Texas was suitable for growing cotton," says Harry Watson, a professor of Southern culture at the University of North Carolina. "Even then, there were people who were bitterly opposed to slavery and desperately wanted to abolish it, and the first step to abolishing it might be to prevent it from growing. They did not want to admit Texas, they did not want to fight Mexico to get Texas, they did not want slavery to be allowed to spread. All of this was fought out very bitterly in Congress."
Still, politicians like President James K. Polk found it politically and economically favorable to press onward. His call to annex both Texas and Oregon (which would appeal to both Northern and Southern states) helped win him the presidency in 1845 over anti-expansionist Henry Clay, even though Polk's drive threatened war with both Great Britain and Mexico.
By the time Polk left office in 1849, Manifest Destiny was all but complete. America, barely 60 years after the U.S. Constitution was ratified, now stretched from sea to shining sea.

Keep reading

Founding Fathers attitudes about Native Americans

Many of the founding fathers believed American Indians would die out within a few generations.

Founding Fathers' attitudes toward Native Americans:

From the very beginning of US history, the founding fathers believe they are at a higher stage of Adam Smith's "four stages of history" than American Indians. George Washington favors treaties over force, writing that when forced off his land, the "savage," like the wolf, always seeks to return.


Johnson v. McIntosh determined that American Indian's land title could be extinguished "by purchase or by conquest."

February 28, 1823|  In a land dispute, the Supreme Court determines that titles purchased from tribes do not supersede titles awarded by the federal government, because the indigenous occupants lost their "right of occupancy."



Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion calls American Indians "fierce savages," stating: "Discovery is the foundation of title, in European nations, and this overlooks all proprietary rights in the natives."


Even now, this "Doctrine of Discovery" continues to creep into the policies and mindset of today.


Chief Justice John Marshall composed several early and influential opinions on the relationship between American Indians and the United States.


Chief Justice John Marshall's majority opinion states that the tribe is not an independent nation, but a "domestic dependent nation" with a relationship to the United States "like that of a ward to his guardian." This ward-guardian mindset has carried into modern-day American Indian-US relations.


Congress passes the General Allotment Act, authorizing the president to divide up tribal land and parcel it out to individual American Indians. In the process, tribes are dispossessed of 90 million acres.


Meanwhile, American Indian children are forced to assimilate at mandatory boarding schools. (And Indian Adoption Programs would also begin)


Col. Richard Pratt, founder of the first off-reservation Indian Boarding School, gives a speech in 1892 where he adovcates to "kill the Indian in him, and save the man."


(Videos: UAF Tribal Management Program)

In this video, American Indian scholar and advocate Ada Deer calls the terminations a "cultural, economic and political disaster" for American Indians.
Congress terminates tribal status for more than 100 tribes in the 1950s. When tribes lose their status, their lands become subject to taxation and members lose access to federal programs and services. The government further weakens tribes by relocating American Indians from reservations to cities and expanding state jurisdiction over reservations.

TRIBAL NATIONS - The Story of Federal Indian Law
More Info: https://www.tananachiefs.org/about/our-history/


READ MORE HERE