Jefferson and his cosigners were less coy in finishing that sentence. The Declaration goes on to to say that he (the King) “has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Let us ignore for a moment the striking language about a “known rule of warfare” being an “undistinguished destruction of all” which is so much more apt as a description of the settlers genocidal attacks on Indigenous people. What is equally striking is the complete lack of euphemism in this clause. Indian Savages. More racial language, no?
Well, no. That is actually the point I want to contest. I described racism in the earlier posts as a convenient shorthand for white supremacist rule. I have argued that it misses the power dynamics of exploitation and that it confuses a system of social caste with “hatred.” I also want to argue that it allows people to think they understand the attacks on Native Americans and Mexican Americans because they have this prism of Black-white relations to see them through. I want to argue that we also mislead ourselves in understanding other forms of national oppression in this country when we describe them as racism.
Let’s look at the differences between African Americans and Natives in the history of this country. Most people will say that the US robbed Indigenous people of their land and Black people of their labor. That’s not a bad starting point, although it misses the extent to which genocidal economics and politics robbed them both of their lives. It understates the number of Natives who were enslaved. And it dramatically understates the vast acreage of land that has been stolen from Black people since the end of Reconstruction.
That last point hides an important distinction, though. Native people - like Black people - have been systematically robbed of their individual farms and ranches over the last century and more. But what has been more important to the tribes is the loss of sovereignty over lands. The difference is so important and yet is often lost. I live in a house in the Bronx. My wife and I own it, along with the land it sits on, roughly one-tenth of an acre. But it is still in the Bronx and we are still subject to the laws of New York City and State and of the United States regarding what we do here. I can’t allow my garbage to pile up. I can’t burn it either. I am required to maintain the sidewalk in front so that is safe for others to walk by. I am required to maintain a sewer line running out back and down the street to wear it joins a city line. I know these things because I have been obliged to fix them.
The language of Indian treaties is clear. The tribes ceded land that was under their sovereign rule to the Federal government, sometimes after negotiation, sometimes after a military defeat, sometimes after a military victory. The tribes reserved the balance of the land for themselves, under their tribal government. And - it is critical to add - those cessions were only to the Federal government: the Non-Intercourse Act of 1790 barred either states or individuals from buying Indian land without the approval of the Federal government.
This is a good time to point out a piece of half-understood nonsense that is often trotted out about Native Americans and land ownership. People are fond of saying that Natives believed that land could no more be “owned” than could the air or the rain. And if, by ownership, we mean a title that can be transferred for cash to another person that is certainly true. But if we mean collective sovereignty - that a certain territory is, for example, the land of the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka - then it is patently false. The people of New York and Quebec have always known whose land that was, even when they have needed forcible reminders. The maps of Native territories that have become more popular recently in some circles are actually especially misleading in this regard. They show vague territories, without firm lines for the natural boundaries established by river basins, and they never show permanent settlements. That leaves the viewer with the false notion that the tribes just wandered over an ill-defined space. Historic atlases that mark Native towns are, sadly, very rare. Atlases that mark particular spaces like farms, springs, quarries, clam beds, fishing stations, and hunting surrounds with the tribes (or families) responsible for them are even rarer. But let us be clear. The enemies of those Natives knew exactly where those properties were.
In 1779, George Washington ordered Major General John Sullivan to take four brigades to the Susquehanna Valley to “destroy and devastate” those of the Six Nations who were allied with the British. Sullivan’s troops torched forty towns, burning the homes and town walls, the crops, the fruit trees, and the food and seed barns. They killed or captured as many Haudenosaunee as they could. And these were towns, not camps. At Gayagaanhe, on Cayuga Lake, Sullivan’s scouts described fifteen large longhouses, along with fields running to the forest a few miles away. Chenussio, on the Genesee River, had 130 wood houses, many with glass windows. The Americans called Chonodote “Peach Town” because the Cayugas who lived there maintained orchards of over 1000 peach trees. When the American troops destroyed Tionondorage, on Schoharie Creek, an officer of the New York regiment wrote that the Mohawk inhabitants lived much better than the white farmers of nearby Fort Hunter, each family with “plenty of grain, several horses, cows, and wagons.” I doubt his favorable impressions were much comfort to those families when all their possessions were destroyed and they were taken prisoner. But my larger point is that everybody in those towns knew whose house was whose, whose corn was whose, whose trees were whose. So did the neighboring white farmers. Towns in the Mohawk Valley were typically moved every ten years or so to a nearby place with fresher resources, but that didn’t mean that the people were “roaming over the land” with “no idea of ownership.”
There are two absolutely essential points here. The first is that Indians are not another “race,” but members of political units other than the United States, whether one calls them tribes or nations. The Constitution excluded Indigenous people (“Indians not taxed”). The 14th Amendment, extending citizenship to everyone born in the United States, nevertheless excluded Natives. Even the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 did not extinguish the tribes; Congress didn’t try to do that until later. So to be Indian is not to have some particular ancestry or skin color. It is to be Cheyenne or Shawnee, Seminole or Seneca.
The second is that Native people have rights that are reserved to them by their treaties with the United States. Some of those rights are the lands that they reserved to themselves in those treaties. Others are for annual payments in return for the lands that they ceded to the United States in those treaties. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that Congress has the power to unilaterally change the terms of those treaties. But the Court has also ruled - repeatedly - that those treaties remain in force until or unless Congress does explicitly change them… regardless of the passage of time or changed practice.
Why is the first point so important? Among other reasons because you don’t get to decide who is or is not Mohegan, for example, anymore than the British Parliament (or some random person in, say, Sweden) determines US citizenship requirements. In 1993, Donald Trump testified in Congress against allowing the Mohegan Tribe to open a casino in Uncasville, Connecticut, largely because he saw it cutting into his then-still-profitable Atlantic City casinos. He argued that the Mohegans aren’t Indians at all, famously telling the committee: “They don’t look like Indians to me.” When Representative George Miller (D, CA) told him that tribal citizenship wasn’t determined by a Trump “look test,” the future President fired back, “Why don’t you approve it for everybody, then, sir?” Which kind of goes to the precise issue: Tribal sovereignty means that state governments can only regulate what happens on a reservation to the extent that Congress has explicitly given them that power. (Bryan v. Itasca County, 426 U.S. 373 (1976)) Meaning that the anti-gambling laws which most states still had in the 70’s and 80’s did not apply to reservations.
It also begs the question “What should an Indian look like?” If we try to imagine an answer in racial terms we can - I suppose - visualize some sort of idealized Indian, maybe Siŋté Máza, and Oglala Lakota performer with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, who was reportedly a model for the old nickel. But if we imagine an answer in political terms, (an Indian is a member of an Indian tribe) he or she could look like anybody. Saying to a tribal member, “You don’t look Indian,” becomes as stupid as saying to a person of any descent other than Native, “You don’t look American.” We are American by virtue of being born here or naturalized, regardless of our ancestry. Membership rules vary from tribe to tribe, but they are their rules. And, I should add, a Navajo who “looks Indian” to you (or the President) doesn’t thereby become a Choctaw.
More tomorrow.
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