Commentary

Be Bolder, White People

Thank you, all you non-Natives, for your fearless online posts on our behalf, says Terese Mailhot:

This is dedicated to the brave white people on Facebook who are sharing various articles about Standing Rock. You could have been on the front line, in the marches, putting money where your mouth is. But you had the foresight to know that real change happens on the Internet.

We Natives know it’s not posturing. Authenticity is your mantra. If someone tests your authenticity, just show that picture of you meditating on a mountain with the caption “Serenity.” What is more authentic than your Facebook posts, the ones that you block your racist uncle from reading? It would be so inconvenient to challenge him online. You are constantly doing us a solid.

I’ll be honest: You still have time to prevent further mistakes. Your white tears after this election have only sidetracked real activists from doing the work we need to do. We can’t console you right now, and it’s time to boss up.

Can you do us a solid one more time? Have those conversations you’re having outside of your liberal online friendships. At the Thanksgiving table, talk about the Dakota Access pipeline and how ironic your feast is when you look at American history. Talk to your bosses and coworkers when they discriminate. Help refugees, because there is no such thing as natural born citizens. Even Native people feel displaced in their own country. The disenfranchisement of our most vulnerable community members cannot continue.

Put your money into this, and your time, and every ounce of your compassion. Be braver. http://bit.ly/2g4lHfZ

Rethinking First Principles

Defeating bad ideas about colonization is best achieved by scrapping the original arguments in its favor, argues Steven Newcomb:

Chief Justice John Marshall admitted to the lie at the root of federal Indian law in Johnson v. M’Intosh when he wrote of the “pretension of converting the discovery of an inhabited country into conquest.” Adam Smith admitted to the falsehoods built into the colonizers’ narratives when he pointed out that colonizing countries that arrived at the “Americas” had merely declared a “fictitious title” to the lands. And Joseph Story asked, “How did the British colonies acquire title to the soil of the continent? His answer was “discovery.”

However, the correct answer, from the viewpoint of the pre-America Nations, is based on the principle of void ab initio i.e. “to be treated as invalid from the outset.” The crown and the colonies never did acquire a valid title to the soil of the continent. They pretended to have acquired a valid title by means of the fictitious claim of having “discovered” lands that belonged to our Original Nations.

Yet we have been acting as if the colonizers’ ideas and arguments are valid. They were not valid then and are therefore not valid today. To the extent we have accepted “federal Indian law” lies as valid, we have been living a self-subordinating delusion. It’s a self-imposed bad dream from which, fortunately, we have begun to awaken.

We’ve been going about this all wrong. We need to develop counterarguments that make clear the nature of the colonizers’ narratives. We need to be calling into question the false assumptions upon which U.S. federal Indian law was founded. http://bit.ly/2eZBhr7

Strength Through Native Identity

Faced with a Trump administration, says Gyasi Ross, the original inhabitants of Turtle Island should embrace unity and recall past triumphs over adversity:

Donald Trump poses a unique threat to Native people because of our relationship with the federal government. Not to be dramatic, but one bad federal administration can literally end the legal and political status of Native nations as we know it. That’s called “plenary authority.” Put bluntly, we will not make any positive strides during the Trump administration. It is naïve to believe that we will. Instead, we will need to work together, strategize and execute how to work together in a way that mitigates damage.

Tough times are nothing new to Native people. While many liberals are questioning their existential position on this continent and making plans to go to Canada, Native people have faced exponentially worse from racist white men. We’ve faced extinction, termination and genocide. We’re tough as nails and our history tells us that if we work together we’ll be okay. We’re going to survive. Will it be ideal? No. But we will be here at the end of that time.

We will make it as long as we’re willing to work together—to collaborate and understand that what affects one literally affects all. Even though it is legally incorrect, the United States does not deal with any Native nation as an individual nation. It deals with all of us as a group, a whole. Therefore we must be willing to stay away from a lack of cooperation, infighting, lateral violence and not seeing the bigger picture. Those things are counterproductive and will weaken us.

We need each other, more so now than ever. http://bit.ly/2g1iH6C