White Supremacist Land Theft

Our minds focus on stories. 

Consider this: Fifty hooded white men surrounded David Walker's farmhouse and demanded that he come out for a whipping. He refused and fired a warning shot. They torched his house, burning one son alive and then shot Walker, his wife, and his other four children when they escaped the fire. Walker's two-and-a-half-acre farm was resurveyed into his white neighbor's property. A white lady owns it today.

We read this and are horrified. But when we read that 15 million acres of Black-owned farmland dropped to 1 million over the course of the 20th century, they are very big numbers and harder to assimilate and understand. So imagine instead 153 families whipped out or burned out or murdered out of their little farm every day... for a hundred years. That is what those numbers mean.

Consider this: Ernest Burkhart, a white Texan, moved to Oklahoma to get a job on the oil rigs. He married Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman. Burkhart's uncle then contracted the murders of Mollie's sisters, Anna and Minnie, her mom, her cousin Henry, and her brother-in-law, which made Mollie the owner of all their oil-rich land. Meanwhile Ernest was poisoning his wife so that he and his uncle could take it all.

We read this and it is hard to imagine the calculation and cruelty that allows people to be intimate over a protracted period with those they are robbing and killing. But it is harder still to multiply that by the millions of white people who swindled and murdered and robbed millions of Native people of their farms and ranches. Not treaty land; privately-owned, deed-recognized land that had been assigned as compensation for the previous theft of treaty land. 

Consider this: Texas Rangers under the command of Captain James Fox searched the village of Porvenir for stolen property of which there was none. They confiscated two firearms and arrested two men, who they eventually released. Two nights later the Rangers returned with a posse of white civilians and eight US Cavalrymen. They pulled everybody out of bed, then marched 15 men and boys to a nearby hill. They murdered Manuel Morales, Román Nieves, Longino Flores, Alberto García, Eutimio Gonzales, Macedonio Huerta, Tiburcio Jaques, Ambrosio Hernández, Antonio Castanedo, Pedro Herrera, Viviano Herrera, Severiano Herrera, Pedro Jiménez, Serapio Jiménez, and Juan Jiménez. The deed for 1600 acres of land held by Manuel Morales vanished and the land became the property of one of those possemen. 

This is a grotesque atrocity, finally commemorated by a historic marker a hundred years after the fact. But it is one atrocity. It has to stand in for the remarkable fact that millions of acres of land that was privately owned by Mexicans when the United States assumed government of the US southwest is now owned by Anglos or by the US Forest Service. Some was taken by murder, as at Porvenir. Some was taken in fraudulent title transfers. Some was simply reassigned by the Supreme Court from its owners to the federal government as in United States v. Sandoval, 167 U.S. 278 (1897).

People are in the habit of looking at white supremacy as prejudice backed by power. They look at job discrimination and housing discrimination. They look at the way children are treated in school. They look at portrayals in TV and movies. They look at differences in the way people are policed based on their race. And all those things are real. All those things are serious.

But white supremacy is also about a violent expropriation of wealth. It is also about murder and theft. In the cases I allude to above, only Ernest Burkhart and his Uncle William Hale were ever charged or tried. Those two were sentenced to life, but they were paroled. In the cases of millions of other thefts and beatings and swindles and killings the white neighbors who were sheriffs and prosecutors and judges and jurors either participated in the crimes themselves or looked away. All those heirs who like to talk about the "hard work" of their forebears who did things the "right way" are either still in possession of the property or they benefited from its sale. When historians look for the archives so they can trace the title transfers they are met - again and again - with "unfortunate fires" or "tragic flooding" that destroyed those records, way back long ago. 

When people say that US wealth was built on theft and murder it is not an exaggeration. Nor is it ancient history. This all took place in the lifetimes of people still living. The stolen wealth is the property of individuals who are alive today. Is it a wonder that they don't want to discuss it?

How can a pro-tribal decision (McGirt v Oklahoma) rely so heavily on an anti-tribal decision (Lone Wolf v Hitchcock)?

How can a pro-tribal decision (McGirt v. Oklahoma, 591 U.S. ___ (2020)) rely so heavily on an anti-tribal decision (Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 553 (1903))?

Because the settler state is so contemptuous of its treaties that it can't even be bothered to follow its own rules for breaking them.

In 1867, the Kiowa and Comanche tribes signed the Medicine Lodge Treaty with the United States. They surrendered claims to 60,000 square miles, reserving to themselves 3 million acres, or about 7.5%, in what is now Oklahoma. By 1892, the United States had decided that that fraction was still too much, and asked the tribes to renegotiate the treaty, ceding most of the reservation, but keeping 160 acres each for individual members of the tribes. The Kiowa refused. The negotiators, nevertheless, reported back to Congress that they had been successful and Congress opened up the reservation for white settlement. The tribe sued.

The Court's decision is remarkable for the contempt it shows for both the Kiowa and the promises of Congress. It says that Congress has the power to unilaterally abrogate the treaties because Indigenous people are "wards of the nation."

These Indian tribes are the wards of the nation. They are communities dependent on the United States. Dependent largely for their daily food. Dependent for their political rights. They own no allegiance to the states, and receive from them no protection. Because of the local ill feeling, the people of the states where they are found are often their deadliest enemies. From their very weakness and helplessness, so largely due to the course of dealing of the Federal government with them and the treaties in which it has been promised, there arises the duty of protection, and with it the power.

In Justice Gorsuch's decision last month he doesn't challenge a word of that. He merely notes that the Mvskoke Creek reservation was never extinguished by Congress, and concludes: 

Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word.

This verbal magic, by which a treaty is no longer a treaty, has been bothering me for a long time. In fact, I find it at the heart of the essay I wrote forty years ago to earn a Masters in history and the article I subsequently published based on that paper. I want to review the opinions of the first two commissioners of the Bureau of Indian Affairs about this question. In most respects, commissioners themselves could not have been more different in their backgrounds. But their views on tribal treaties were remarkably alike.

Eli S. Parker was a member of the Tonawanda Seneca tribe, holding the title Donehogawa, or Keeper of the Western Door, in the Haudenosaunee confederation. As a young man he worked as a translator for tribal leaders in Washington, DC. After completing his legal studies he was denied membership in the New York State Bar on the grounds that he was an Indian. He then studied civil engineering at Rensselaer Polytech and worked on the construction of the Erie Canal. Despite his considerable skills, Parker was rejected from the Army when the Civil War broke out. But he was a personal friend of Ulysses Grant and became his adjutant. With Grant's rise to lieutenant general, Parker became a brigadier general. 

Lately people have made some rather strange assertions about Robert E. Lee, claiming that the general of the Confederate Armies was not a racist. When he met Grant at Appomattox Court House to surrender in 1865 he froze at the door when he saw General Parker sitting at a desk prepared to take meeting notes. Grant had to reassure Lee that Parker was a Native, not an African American, before Lee would enter. 

When Grant became President in 1869 he promised a policy of peace with Indigenous peoples and made Parker his Commissioner of Indian Affairs. He served in that position for two years before his enemies managed to drive him out.

He was followed by Francis Amasa Walker, another breveted brigadier general from the Civil War, but otherwise with a very different background. His dad was a professor of economics at Oberlin, Amherst and Harvard, as well as a Member of the US House of Representatives. Walker used his political connections to get himself named head of the US Census. He later served as president of MIT for fifteen years. He became Commissioner of Indian Affairs as a political maneuver to keep him paid to finish his work at the Census when that became overly politicized and ran overly long. Accusations by his enemies that he was corrupt didn't stop him joining in the (false) chorus of accusations against his predecessor at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

I will begin with Walker. What was his view of treaties? Only a few years after he left government service he wrote the atrocious The Indian Question. Here is a brief sample:

It should be remarked that there can be no question of national dignity involved in the treatment of savages by a civilized power. The proudest Anglo-Saxon will climb a tree with a bear behind him, and deem not his honor, but his safety, compromised by the situation. With wild men, as with wild beasts, the question whether to fight, coax, or run, is a question merely of what is easiest or safest in the situation given. Points of dignity only arise between those who are, or assume to be, equals. Indeed, nothing is at times so contemptuous as compliance. It indicates not merely a consciousness of strength, but of strength so superior as to decline comparison or contest. Grant that some petty Sioux chief believes that the government of the United States feeds him and his lazy followers out of fear, or out of respect for his greatness: what then? It will not be long before the agent of the government will be pointing out the particular row of potatoes which his majesty must hoe before his majesty can dine.

 I don't know what needs explaining about this. I will just say that he clearly doesn't believe that agreements made with the Sioux deserve to be treated as anything other than momentary necessities, not deserving compliance by "proud Anglo-Saxons."

But what about Parker? He was a Seneca himself. He had been a member of treaty delegations. He had also - repeatedly - experienced the unwillingness of "proud Anglo-Saxons" to accept him professionally, despite his qualifications and accomplishments. General Parker wrote a manuscript autobiography which his nephew, the historian and archeologist Arthur Parker, presented to the Buffalo Historical Society. In it, the Seneca chief made these comments on treaties:

And just here I may mention the absurdity of the United States Government making treaties with the Indian tribes of the country, tribes that number all the way from 500 souls to 25,000. They have all been declared the wards of the Government, and they all live within its jurisdiction, and yet these dependent people are treated as though they were independent, sovereign nations. Every contract or agreement made with them, whether few or many, is subjected to the same form and ceremony of consideration, ratification and proclamation as is a treaty with Great Britain, France or any other great independent power. I, perhaps, ought to be the last person to find fault with such a condition of things. I suppose that I ought to be very proud, I ought to swell out as a turkey-cock, that, with a few hundred ignorant Indians at my back,I can consider myself the head of a strong, independent sovereignty, and treat with the great United States as if I were Russia, or Germany, or China, or Japan. But I have no such feeling. On the contrary I am humiliated. For I know too well the great wrecks of violated Indian treaties that are strewn in the historical pathway of the United States. 

The similarities of this statement with that of Frank Walker are more noteworthy than the differences. Sure, Parker is upset at the history of broken treaties. But his words convey the same contempt: wards, dependent, ignorant. He clearly believed that Congress should not be making treaties with the tribes. Walker found treaties to be acceptable contingencies: no dishonor in making them; none in breaking them, either. Eli Parker considered them a humiliation... dishonoring indeed. Neither considered them binding or a blueprint for a future relationship.

But the tribes have not gone away. The tribes have not surrendered. Maybe Frank Walker imagined that the white Americans possessed "strength so superior as to decline comparison or contest." Maybe Eli Parker believed, as he wrote, that the treaties were like a jug handle with all the benefit and all the power on one side. But the tribes have found power and benefit even in the one-sided decision of Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock. Because Congress couldn't even be bothered to extinguish its post-Civil War treaties with the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee and Seminole, they now find that the reservations comprising the entire eastern half of Oklahoma are still in effect. Because Congress couldn't even be bothered to extinguish the treaty rights of the Lakota to the Black Hills of South Dakota, those rights are still being litigated today. (The tribes have yet to accept the cash awarded in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980) and the amount has grown with interest to over $2 billion.)

 

 

And what about "Hispanics"?

These people who are so fond of erasing Native treaty rights love to claim that "we are all immigrants." Challenged on their facts they go on to make the bizarre claim that people whose ancestors have occupied this continent for at least 14,000 years must also have come from somewhere. This just hollows out any meaning of the world immigrant at all. It also stuns me to imagine that they consider people who were kidnapped from their homes and shipped in chains across the Atlantic to be immigrants. It also raises questions when we consider groups of people who - in some part - trace their ancestry to Europeans who arrived here before Jamestown.

But they are perfectly content to discuss all these questions using the language of "race." The contradictions emerge immediately when we start looking at the peoples variously denominated as “Hispanic” or “Latino” or some variation of those. How is it possible that people can be assigned a biological category, like race, because they speak the same language? How is it possible that people can be assigned to the same race when a cursory physical examination shows that individuals in this “race” appear to be of different races? How is it even imaginable that the Indigenous people of Mexico, Central, and South America magically become Hispanic or Latino upon arrival in the United States when they speak Indigenous languages like Mixtec or Q’eqchi’ or Aymara instead of Spanish? Since 1980, the US Census has finessed these questions by treating “Hispanic or Latino” as separate from “race” and asking everybody both questions: What is your race? Are you Hispanic, Latino or Spanish? But Americans are in the habit of seeing those as a race. People who are familiar with the predominantly Mexican-American character of the Rio Grande Valley may be surprised to see that Hidalgo County, for example, is listed by the 2010 census as being 88% white. But then they look further and discover that the same census says it is 90% Hispanic or Latino. 

Since race is a social construct anyway it may be easier to just say that Mexican Americans or Chicanos are considered a “race” in the United States. But then what about Puerto Ricans? What about Dominicans? What about Central and South Americans? Are they members of the same “race”? That’s why I think it is useful to look at the forms of domination white supremacy (and US imperialism) has imposed on the peoples. They are clearly not all the same.

Mexican Americans alone, excluding all the other “Hispanic or Latino” peoples, make up 11.3% of the US population, almost as much as African Americans, who are 12.3% of the population. Since World War 1 popular white supremacist thinking has treated them as immigrants and as crossers of the river or desert that makes up the roughly 2000-mile-long border between the United States and Mexico. This particular prejudice presents a kind of cognitive dissonance because it contradicts the basics of US history that every American child is supposed to learn in elementary school. Between 1845 and 1853 the United States took over more than half of the territory of the Republic of Mexico, about 950,000 square miles: More than the Louisiana Purchase. More than the entire United States before the Louisiana Purchase. Look at California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas on a map of the US. You’ll see.

There were plenty of Mexicans living there, too, in their own country. Many of their descendants are still there today. White people in the southwest like to pretend their "Hispanic" neighbors snuck across the border yesterday, even though the families of these Mexican Americans have been there for generations. Some people's grandparents and great grandparents did cross that border before it became militarized during the First World War but many come from families who have been crossing the river or the survey line in the desert for many generations, long before it became a border. (The Apaches, O’odham, and other Native peoples of the area had of course been crossing that non-existent border for hundreds of generations.) So that border is a historical imposition and Mexican people in the area often say: “No cruzamos la frontera; la frontera now cruzó.”

White supremacy has acted on Mexican Americans both by encouraging them to identify as white themselves and by suppressing them as members of a Mexican “race.” We can look at a few examples of white identification first. 

In New Mexico especially there is a long history of people of Mexican descent calling themselves “Spanish American” or “Hispano.” They like to trace their ancestry to the first conquistadors who arrived in the late 16th century. Until two years ago, the city of Santa Fe held an annual pageant called the Entrada to celebrate the reconquest of the city in 1692 and the defeat of the Pueblos who had kicked the Spanish out in 1680. The Native people of New Mexico had been protesting this for years. White-identifying Mexican Americans treat that Native opposition as an insult and a denial of their heritage. Last month statues of the conquistador Juan de Oñate were removed in Albuquerque and in Rio Arriba County during the current reconsideration of monuments to white supremacy. Oñate, if you don't know, headed a band of Spanish soldiers who entered New Mexico in 1598. They massacred 1000 Natives at Acoma Pueblo and destroyed the town. At Okhkay Ohwingeh Pueblo he and his men enslaved and cut the toes off 500 people. White-identifying Mexican Americans were so incensed at the removal of the statue in Albuquerque that an armed right-wing militia showed up to protest and a member shot a counter-protester!

In the early 20th century, purveyors of racist pseudoscience ridiculed the claims of New Mexicans to whiteness. Madison Grant, for example, said that Spanish American was a “courtesy title” for detribalized Indians. I am not going to jump on any bandwagon with racists like him. I will point out, though, that towns like Belén, Tomé, Socorro, San Miguel de Vado, Abiquiú, Taos, and Chimayo were largely or wholly founded in the 18th century by people - many of them from other tribes - who had been taken captive by Comanches or Apaches and subsequently ransomed by the Spanish in Santa Fe. They were placed under indenture by the Spanish governor to pay off their ransom and then settled in these outlying villages to function as military outliers for Santa Fe. 

The other long-time centers of Mexican Americans in the region, California and Texas, each have distinctive histories. For this discussion, though, it is worth looking at the struggle to desegregate schools. Texas was a Jim Crow state right up into the 1960’s. School law mandated the segregation of whites from Blacks, but custom in most places segregated Mexican Americans as well, although in many places that meant denying them schools at all. In 1930, Mexican Americans sued. The basis of Del Rio ISD v. Salvatierra was not an opposition to segregation at all, though. Instead, the attorneys of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) argued that Mexicans are white and should therefore attend white schools. The Texas courts rejected this argument, creating a judicial precedent for three-part school segregation where it did not exist in the State Constitution. LULAC relitigated the issue after World War 2 in the case of Delgado v. Bastrop ISD. This time the court ruled that segregation of Mexican American children was illegal. The argument again was that this segregation was illegal because they were white.” 

In California, a landmark case, Mendez v. Westminister School Dist., 64 F. Supp. 544 (S.D. Cal. 1946), challenged the segregation of Mexican American children by the school districts of Orange County, but the plaintiffs took a different tack. California law allowed the segregation of Chinese, Japanese, and Native children, but did not mention Mexicans. In fact, the Orange County schools didn’t formally establish “Mexican” schools; they simply created the subterfuge of “remedial” schools. The only test they used, though, to determine which children were needed remediation was their surname. Regardless of academic aptitude, regardless of fluency in English (regardless, in fact, of whether they spoke Spanish at all!) children with Spanish surnames were assigned to those remedial schools. No Mexican children in Orange County were admitted to “white” schools. No Anglo children attended the remedial schools. The parents in this case argued that the discrimination against their children was a violation of the 14th Amendment. Favorable rulings by the Federal district and circuit court judges made an important precedent for Brown v. Board of Education. Nevertheless, the judges at both levels made a point in their decisions of saying that Mexicans are white. The decision in the 9th Circuit says: “Nowhere in any California law is there a suggestion that any segregation can be made of children within one of the great races.” (My emphasis.)

However one chooses to read all this history, though, the US presence throughout the Southwest has been undeniably antagonistic to Mexican Americans. They were stripped of their land and political rights and reduced to a caste of laborers. On occasion US citizens of Mexican descent have been deported from the US, even those who were born here! That is why it certainly looks as though Mexican Americans have been treated as a race.

But we must not fail to see the history of conquest.  Tomorrow I will try to make time to write about how the land was stolen from people who actually held formal title.

Still more: Treaty Rights

Why does it matter that we understand questions of Native rights as treaty questions instead of racial questions? Because the white supremacists all want to portray treaty rights as violations of equality! One of the first post-World War 2 struggles for Native rights concerned fishing in Washington State. When Washington became a US territory in 1853 the tribes were forced to sign treaties ceding about 90% of the land. But they insisted on retaining the right to fish “at all usual and accustomed grounds” regardless of whether those fishing grounds were on or off the reservations. Migratory fish are both staple and sacred foods for the Indigenous people of the Northwest. Fishing for salmon and steelhead is a central community ritual and it is just as central to providing protein for the year.

After the Second World War both the commercial fishery and sport fishing took off, increasing the size of the non-Native catch. At the same time the paper industry and other polluters were degrading the quality of the water in the rivers. The state fish and game authorities decided to take action against tribal fishing by arresting Native fishermen and seizing their equipment. Because it was off the reservation, the locus of the conflict became Frank’s Landing, a “usual and accustomed ground” of the Nisqually Tribe on the Nisqually River near the south end of Puget Sound. If white sport fishermen were outraged at the Nisqually (and other tribes) for defying the authority of the Department of Fish and Wildlife, then they were apoplectic when the courts sided with the tribes. I suppose they felt that the Natives had gone off-script in the great pageant of Manifest Destiny by refusing to play the role of Vanishing Indian. But today the  Northwest Indians Fisheries Commission, representing 20 local tribes, manages the tribal fishery, in cooperation with the State of Washington. It operates hatcheries, monitors water quality, and keeps tabs on the size and genetic diversity of the fish when they return from the Pacific. The tribes themselves ensure the sustainability of the harvest.

White tantrums about a “double standard” for Natives only make sense if you forget the treaties, ignore tribal sovereignty, and choose to see Indigenous people as a “racial minority.” It tracks precisely with Donald Trump’s bitterness: He got into Atlantic City soon after New Jersey began issuing a limited number of casino licenses with the only other legal gambling in the United States 2500 miles away in Nevada. He thought he was sitting on a monopoly in the middle of the 50 million people of the Boston-Washington corridor. Four years later the Supreme Court ruled that the states could not regulate Native gaming. Six years after that the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe opened Foxwoods in Connecticut, roughly the same distance from New York City as Atlantic City. This is why the last words I quoted from Donald Trump’s 1993 tantrum in Congress - “Why don’t you approve it for everybody, then, sir?” - are so very significant. Because immediately after whining that he didn’t think the Connecticut tribe members “looked Indian” he switched to whining about the very notion of treaty rights, couching his complaint in the language of “equality” and “individual rights”:

Why don`t you approve it for everybody, then, sir? If your case is non-discriminatory, why don`t you approve for everybody? You`re saying only Indians – wait a minute, sir. You`re saying only Indians can have the reservations, only Indians can have the gaming. So why aren`t you approving it for everybody? Why are you being discriminatory? Why is it that the Indians don`t pay tax, but everybody else does? I do.

Let’s ignore his risible claim about paying taxes. The very substance of this is his complete rejection of treaties. He makes the truly bizarre complaint that “only Indians can have the reservations.” On this, as on so many issues, our current President has long articulated the resentment against people who he considers subordinate when they stand up for themselves. This is, of course, a characteristic feature of the ideology of white supremacy.

I hope I have not given the impression that the US government has remained true to the treaties it signed with the tribes. The Supreme Court ruled in 1903 (Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 553) that Congress has the absolute authority to unilaterally abrogate the treaties. The reason these treaties keep coming up in court is because those treaties were broken by the states where the tribes resided without even asking Congress to change them or because Congress itself broke them without changing them. 

Two weeks ago the Court agreed with the Creek Nation of Indians (McGirt v. Oklahoma, 591 US ___) that most of eastern Oklahoma is still Indian territory because Congress never extinguished the reservations of the Five Tribes. It means that the state of Oklahoma has no jurisdiction over criminal cases involving tribal members on tribal lands, which amount to roughly half the state!

In 1980, the Supreme Court found in favor of the Lakota tribes in a suit about the Black Hills of South Dakota. (United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371). The Court ruled that Congress had ordered the Lakota tribes to sign a new treaty ceding the Black Hills but that the tribes had not signed it and were therefore eligible for compensation plus 104 years of accrued interest. (Now 124 years and up to approximately $2 billion because the tribes reject the compensation and demand the return of the Hills.) So despite what is often called a Trail of Broken Treaties, the tribes and their members retain significant treaty rights.

I could go on at much greater length. But I provide these cases - casinos, fishing, criminal jurisdiction, land rights - to make a point. People who think they understand racism because they are familiar with shape it takes in oppressing and exploiting African Americans may themselves be falling victim to white supremacist thought. Systemic racism in schools, courts, banks, and jobs; denial of civil rights; police violence… these things effect Native people in similar ways to their effects on Black people. But that is not the end of it. And so, just as Natives have frequently been willing participants in anti-Blackness, African American people can participate in the opposition to treaty rights that is a hallmark of white supremacy. In some circles there is an unquestioning adulation of the role that Buffalo Soldiers played in suppressing the tribes (along with striking mine workers and Filipino freedom fighters). That does not endear those people to the current members of the tribes they fought.

More! Race and Blood Quantum

Comparing how the US racially defines the category “Indian” with how it racially defines the category “Black” reveals another difference. The Dawes Act of 1887 created racial definitions for tribal members by introducing the notion of “blood” and proportion of “blood” which it called “blood quantum.” Senator Henry Dawes (R, MA) was chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in the late 19th century. Considering himself a great “friend of the Indian” he advocated measures designed to speed their detribalization and assimilation to the American mainstream. The Dawes Act took land from the various and assigned it piecemeal to individual tribal members as their personal property.  (And, because it was an Act of Congress, the Courts have accepted this unilateral treaty abrogation as legitimate.) This had the immediate - and not coincidental - effect of reducing the Native land base by two thirds, because the “surplus” was sold to non-tribal members after allotments were made. Later studies have said that this was the most destructive piece of Indian policy in a long history of genocidal policies. 

The Act also introduced the classification of tribal members by ancestry. In other words a person was full-“blood” if both parents were full-“blood.” They were three-quarter “blood” if one grandparent was white, one-quarter “blood” if one was full-“blood”, etc. Of course the commission members couldn’t always consult accurate genealogical charts, so they sometimes went by eye, applying the Donald Trump “look test,” regardless of their commitment to tribal culture. In addition, an individual who was more assimilated might be designated half-“blood” because of their language, clothing, or employment… regardless of actual ancestry or racial features. Similarly a person could be designated full-“blood” because of their lack of assimilation into white social norms. So even as it introduced a racial system of classification - using the imagined “blood” - it was relying on cultural criteria to assign people to a group. “Blood” quanta are used by some tribes to this day to determine eligibility for membership. The minimum quantum varies from nation to nation. They have also become more complicated over time and require excellent skills in adding fractions. (Diego grew up in a sheep camp west of Kaibito. Diego’s mom is 7/16 Navajo and 1/2 White Mountain Apache and his dad is 3/32 Navajo and 11/16 Miccosukee. Is he eligible to be Navajo?)*

By now you may have noticed an oddity in all this talk about blood. Let’s set aside the realization that citizenship is not biology, that people of all colors can be subjects of HRH Elizabeth II, that - as I mention above - only the most extreme white supremacists argue out loud that “American” is a race, rather than a matter of birth or naturalization. Let’s return to the question I asked about the American understanding of an Indian “race” versus a Black “race.” In the case of Indigenous people this blood quantum serves to “dilute” ones “Indianness” over generations for children of people who marry outside that “race” and regardless of political and cultural belonging. For Black people, there is no such “dilution.” Historically, this was called a “one-drop rule” and it dates back to the early 20th century, not to the institution of slavery. If the Jim Crow laws introduced at the time were to segregate Black people from white people, then they demanded a definition of who was who.** Initially, some states decided at first that persons with one Black great great grandparent (or one Black great great great grandparent) were White, but eventually all states that had laws on the subject defined any person with “one drop” of “Black blood” as “Negro.” They also insisted that the Census Bureau drop the category “Mulatto” as a racial category.***

A moment’s reflection will explain every bit of this. Again, drop the notion that this is about white people’s discomfort with being around Black people or some sort of essentialism about biological characteristics inhering in people of European or African descent. Go back to the designation of “a class of people with no rights that a white man was bound to respect” and the exploitation of others that it allows. Before the Civil War, when chattel slavery was legal, the simple rule was that the child of a person held as a slave was also a slave. That meant that the children of the kidnapper himself - if they were mothered by the Black woman he raped - were also his property by law! The 20th century brought Jim Crow. Miscegenation was made illegal. But the exploiters of labor certainly did not want any “dilution” of the class of people they meant to exploit. Hence a “one-drop” rule. 

Natives, on the other hand, held treaty rights that the settler state aimed to extinguish. So if white supremacy could convince itself that Native blood was, indeed, “diluted” by admixture of white “blood”, then eventually the Indigenous people would disappear, and with them their treaties. The “vanishing Indian” was a great trope of white supremacist art and literature. Think of titles like “The Last of the Mohicans.” (I imagine when Donald Trump was trying to block Mohegan Sun he was really disappointed that the fictional character Chingachgook was not, actually, the last. Or would have been if he read books.) Think of all those popular Edward S. Curtis photographs that show Native people in soft focus moving away from the camera. If your main goal is to exploit people, a one-drop rule. If your main goal is to rob people of their treaty-reserved land and other rights, a blood quantum rule.  It is worth remembering that Hitler’s Nuremburg Laws were modeled after American racial laws. Jews with four Jewish grandparents were stripped of their citizenship. People with one Jewish grandparent were still considered Jewish, but remained citizens (at least in 1935) unless they participated in Jewish communal and religious life, in which case they, too, were stripped of citizenship.

What about tribal members with some African ancestry? The one-drop rule kicks in for them. Senator Dawes conducted separate censuses for the Oklahoma tribes: one for “Indians by blood,” another for “Freedmen.” As anti-Blackness spread among the Oklahoma tribes in the 20th century this led to moves to exclude descendants of people on the second roll from membership and thorny legal questions about who gets to determine that membership when people are clearly being excluded because they are Black. In the Jim Crow South the state governments tried to redefine virtually every tribal member on the grounds that they were really Black. This gave them the ability both to steal their treaty rights and turn them into members of a permanent class of peons!

*  No, the answer is not 7/16 + 3/32 = 17/32. Children get only half their biological inheritance from each parent. If blood quantum were additive, a child of two full-bloods would be a double blood!? So Diego’s blood quantum is 7/32 + 3/64 = 17/64. This is over the Navajo requirement of 1/4, but just barely. If he wants his own kids to be enrolled in the tribe he will have to be very picky about who there mother is. No, I am not making this up. See the National Museum of the American Indian’s online exhibition: “Reservation Mathematics: Navigating Love in Native America.”

 ** Note that Homer Plessy (the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), which declared Jim Crow to be Constitutional) had one Black great grandparent and would have been taken for white by anybody who didn’t actually know him.

***  People listed in the 1910 Census as “M” are listed in the 1920 census as “B” and in the 1930 Census as Negro. 

Still more: Native Americans

Yesterday's post concluded with the final item in the "bill of particulars" against King George III that made up the body of the Declaration of Independence. It began, “He Has Excited Domestic Insurrections Amongst Us,” which was a kind of coded, or perhaps shame-faced, complaint that the Royal governors and army had threatened to arm captive Africans against their kidnappers. 

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.

Still more on the shorthand use of the word racism

The word “racism” is a convenient shorthand for the white supremacism which still rules our banks, corporations, real estate offices, schools, and government, along with the criminal justice system. But it carries connotations of “hate” and “prejudice” which can be misleading.

Donald Trump advertised his personal racism from the moment he descended his stupid gold escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for President in front of a cast of a few dozen extras who had been paid $50 each. He doesn’t think he’s racist because he loves being photographed with Black celebrities: Mike Tyson, Kanye West, Don King, and - of course - Omarosa Manigault. Trump even dated a Black woman in the late 90’s: a model, of course. If you want to know whether he believes African Americans to be capable of doing what he (stunningly and wrongly) believes he is capable of doing, look at the advisors he surrounds himself with. Also listen to his bizarre and tone-deaf appeals to “the Blacks.” 

South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond may have hated Black people, but that didn’t stop him from raping his family’s 16-year old African American maid, Carrie Butler, when he was 22. He paid for college for their daughter Essie, a teacher in the LA Unified School District and a lifelong Delta Sigma Theta, but he never publicly acknowledged her.

Fans of the reality TV show Survivor will remember Colton from the 2012 “Survivor: One World” season. He famously called his Black tribemate “ghetto trash” and told him to get a real job. (Bill was a standup comic.) But Colton was very clear that he couldn’t be a racist because he was close to his Black housekeeper.

All of this is to remind you that, historically, the most powerful white people in America have not  shunned contact with Black people… not at all. We look at the Jim Crow laws of the early 20th century and believe they were about a white distaste for physical proximity to African Americans. No. White families were happy to have Black people prepare and serve their food. They were happy to have them launder their clothes. If you think white people didn’t like to be near African Americans, you will have to explain why they were happy to have Black women nurse their babies.

The central and essential fact of white supremacist rule is power. It may be the power to exploit by underpaying employees. This was most certainly the reason for slavery, but it was also the reason for sharecropping and convict leasing. Offering disparate pay for the same work is still the practice today. And why do you suppose agricultural labor has always been exempted from minimum wage laws?

White supremacist rule may be the power to exploit employees by driving them into work that they would not otherwise choose to do. Even after the federal government passed equal opportunity legislation this was continued through exclusionary union practices. And please do not underestimate the power of immigration law - both creating special classes of work visas and denying visas to many absolutely-essential workers - to drive people into particular jobs.

White supremacy is the power to exploit people by overcharging them for rent because they are excluded from choosing to live wherever they want. It is the power to exploit people by overcharging them for goods because they have limited choices about where to shop.

Until the Civil War white supremacy was codified in the US Constitution as evidenced by the fact that a 14th Amendment had to be adopted in order to bring Constitutional protection to African Americans. In Scott v Sandford (60 US 393, 1857) the Supreme Court described “a class of people with no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” That is not a hostile summary; those are the exact words of Chief Justice Roger Taney in the Court’s majority decision.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, white supremacy was carried out by terrorist attacks: assassinations of political candidates, shootings at polling places, armed coups d’etat. In Wilmington, NC, a mob led by the white business elite took rifles, shotguns, and a Gatling gun from the National Guard armory. They murdered several hundred Black political and social leaders, burned the offices and presses of the Black newspaper, seized control of the City Hall, and expelled their surviving political rivals from town. At least six members of that mob later served as North Carolina Governors; at least three as US Senators. One became Secretary of the Navy under FDR. And that is just one example.

In addition to political terrorism, white supremacy was reinforced periodically by periodic mass rituals. Lynchings were never “rough justice.” They were always spectacles meant to draw boundaries around and lift up whiteness. When 17-year old Jesse Washington was lynched in Waco, Texas in 1916 he had already been tried in a court and sentenced to death. 15,000 people came out on their lunch breaks (in a city of roughly 30,000) to see him beaten, chained, stabbed, hoisted by his neck and burned alive while the mayor and police observed. When Sam Hose was lynched in Coweta County, Georgia in 1899, two thousand people watched in a town of maybe 3500. Wannabe spectators filled trains to make the forty-mile trip from Atlanta, but they arrived late. Multiply these two examples by four thousand, because that is the number of lynchings of African Americans in the US between the end of Reconstruction and 1950. The detective who investigated the Sam Hose case concluded that the murder he was accused of was actually self-defense and that the rape simply never happened. The spectacle of lynching was calculated to show everybody - Black and white - that Black people had no rights that a white person was bound to respect.  The insistence that the victims were “criminals” (regardless of the facts) will be familiar to anybody today who has seen the “he was no angel” trope that gets dragged out in every case of extrajudicial murder of an African American person in order to try the victims for their own murder. Another trope from that time which is still evident today was the bizarre stories in the local press after so many of these spectacle killings warning frightened whites about the possibility of armed African Americans coming to take revenge. The form this takes today is hysterical stories about demonstrations for justice “turning violent,” as if the actual killing wasn’t the turn to violence.

The other mass ritual of white supremacy was the so-called “race riot.” These were often urban phenomena in which mobs of white people invaded Black neighborhoods, with the cooperation of the police, to murder, burn, rob, beat, and rape. Frequently these pogroms1 followed propaganda campaigns in the local press about “crime waves.” That was coded language because the crimes referred to were those by Black people. Perhaps the largest such mass attack was in the rural countryside of the Arkansas Delta in 1919 where the white mobs - assisted by federal troops - killed hundreds of African Americans. Then they indicted 100 more in the courts and sentenced 12 to death by hanging. That massacre was triggered by the formation of a sharecroppers’ union to collectively seek fair settlements with landlords. The press campaign we are seeing right now about “lawlessness” (meaning gangland shootings in Chicago, demonstrations in Portland, and a tick up in the historically-low murder rate in New York) is directly analogous. Today, of course, anti-Black violence has been largely professionalized and assigned to uniformed agents instead of to mobs

In the first half of the 20th century, white supremacy was once again codified in the laws, although it had to be done by subterfuge. States incorporated poll taxes, literacy tests, and complicated rules for voting (eight-box laws) with the understanding that county clerks would enforce these in such a way as to selectively disfranchise Black voters. 

You cannot understand this if you think a white majority discriminated against a Black minority. Most of the people in the states of Mississippi and South Carolina were African American until well into the 20th century. Twenty-six Mississippi counties, mostly in the Delta, are still mostly black; twelve in South Carolina, both in the Low Country and the Piedmont. The eighteen counties of the Alabama Black Belt remain majority-Black today. Seventeen counties in central Georgia have an African American majority. You get the picture. The white elite was disfranchising a Black majority. 90% of African Americans in the United States lived in the South until 1910. So the Jim Crow South was much more comparable to apartheid South Africa than most people are willing to acknowledge.

Control of elections was the essential backstop to all the other systems of social control. As I show above, the segregation laws were not there because white people didn’t want to be near Black people, they were meant to enforce a hierarchy placing all white people above all Black people. And segregation could neither be implemented or enforced in majority-Black communities without controlling the election of judges, sheriffs, and town councils. Those white courts and cops also made it possible for white people to cheat their Black employees, customers, and tenants with complete impunity. They made it possible to round up young men, charge them with spurious crimes, and put them to work for free on the roads, or rent them to farmers and mine operators.

That is why Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten nearly to death by police and prisoners under police orders in Winona, Mississippi. She had not only beaten a stacked deck by registering to vote; she was encouraging others to do the same. That is why Representative John Lewis was beaten nearly to death in Selma, Alabama. He had brought young people from all over to help with a forty-year long effort to register Black voters in Dallas County. That is why the Alabama State Police shot Deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson to death in Marion, Alabama. He was leading a march for voter registration in Perry County when the police clubbed his grandfather and his mother.2

The murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson and the beatings on the Edmund Pettus Bridge gave enough attention to the issue of disfranchisement that Congress passed a bipartisan Voting Rights Act only five months later. It was introduced by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen and cleared the filibuster attempts of its (bipartisan) opponents.

By 2013 both the political landscape and the Supreme Court had changed. In Shelby County v. Holder (570 US 529) the Court ruled that the law was based on forty-year old facts and declared it, therefore, to be an unconstitutional inference with the states’ administration of their own elections. But the swift and immediate introduction of new laws for voter suppression as soon as the Court announced its decision proved the exact opposite. Over one thousand polling places were closed in the next five years, mostly in Black-majority counties. Texas, Mississippi, and both Carolinas quickly passed voter ID laws, designed to discourage Black (and, in Texas, Mexican-American) voters. Racial gerrymandering is back, although it often masquerades as partisan gerrymandering because that is not illegal. Opportunities to register to vote have been eliminated in predominantly Black counties.

244 years after the Declaration of Independence, the US is still trying to suppress Black political power. Not everyone recognizes how that document already enshrined white supremacy, because it doesn’t actually mention Black people or slaves. But look closely. The main body of the Declaration is a bill of particulars against King George III for all the ways in which he was tyrannizing the signers. The last of these is relevant to this discussion. It begins, “He Has Excited Domestic Insurrections Amongst Us.” This is euphemistic language. Congress is actually complaining here that the King was inciting Black people to revolt. Immediately after the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, Lord Dunmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia, had the gunpowder moved from the armory in Williamsburg to HMS Magdalen in the James River. A series of crowds gathered at the Governor’s Palace to demand its return. He was initially able to reassure them that he had taken it to keep it out of the hands of rebellious slaves. When they realized that he was just saying the one thing that would frighten them more than disarming their militia, he threatened that if they tried to harm him he would “declare Freedom to the Slaves, and reduce the City of Williamsburg to Ashes.” Representatives to the Continental Congress from Georgia and South Carolina expressed their fear of the same thing. Why couldn’t they just come out and say so? Maybe they were ashamed after their bold opening statement about “all men are created equal. Maybe they were reluctant to admit how much of their rebellion was about defending their ownership (and trade in) people.

1. The word “pogrom” originated in Russia (погро́м) in the early 1880’s to describe similar attacks on Jewish neighborhoods there. It was commonly used in the Black press at the turn of the 20th century to describe these “race riots” in the US.

2. It should surprise no one that State Trooper James Fowler claimed self-defense, saying he thought Deacon Jackson was “going for his gun.” It should surprise no one that he was not charged with Jackson’s murder until forty-two years later, and was sentenced to only six months, of which he served five. It should surprise no one that a year after murdering Deacon Jackson he murdered another Black man, this time inside a police station. It should surprise no one that Fowler again claimed self-defense, this time saying that Nathan Johnson “went for his baton.” It may surprise the reader, though, to discover that James Fowler served five years in a Thai prison for heroin trafficking.