A Small Detour
My access to internet this week was limited since I was in Colorado, so this week took a turn from the normal chronological progression I started last week and will continue this coming week.
A mural I found in Telluride, Colorado that says "What we do to the mountain we do to ourselves"
What I focused on, rather than the next chunk in time, was starting one of my books for this project. The book is Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America by Robert A. Williams Jr. The book looks at the language of racism within the Supreme Court decisions about American Indian issues and the underlying ideas many Americans still hold about Native Americans being savages, less civilized.
I think it is quite interesting how the book focuses on how the Supreme Court writes about Native Americans and the racist stereotypes the language of the decisions carry, along with the implications of a decision. The book starts off with the author, Williams, telling of how he likes to show people a political cartoon about the sale of Manhattan to the Dutch by a tribe, a widely known treaty because the land was sold for only twenty four dollars, back over 200 years ago, though. The author discusses how many people find the cartoon funny only because of their deep down underlying assumption that Native Americans are savages. Instead, the political cartoon is meant to point out that we carry those underlying assumptions, and it plays on that instead. It shows that while we may think we have progressed past the point of seeing indigenous peoples as less than or needing to learn, the idea that American Indians are just as intelligent and competent hasn’t fully taken hold. We still hold the outdated beliefs somewhere within ourselves because we haven’t seen much on the contrary.
What I took from that is the disconnect between the average American knowledge of American Indian affairs and realities and what has and is actually going on. The history that many students learn does not paint tribes as equally intelligent and competent beings. We learn that they were manipulated and taken advantage of, almost as if they had no idea what was happening. In addition, Native Americans do not receive a very bright spotlight in the popular news, and that leads to a general lack of knowledge about tribes and the challenges they face. It doesn’t help in the fight against these ideas that Like a Loaded Weapon points out.
It’s definitely true that most people are probably only vaguely familiar, if at all, with the struggles tribes have faced within the past three decades with regards to religious freedom. I’ll admit it myself; before this project, Native American rights were not at the forefront of my mind the way the Black Lives Matter movement or the immigration ban was. However, as I learn more, my hunger for more knowledge only grows, and I realize that a greater news spotlight is deserved. As I move into this coming week, I’ll go back into my chronological progression of research, and I’ll read more from this book to see what other thoughts it provokes.