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Double Cross in LaCrosse: More Discrimination against the Original Americans
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The Creator’s Game, that is what lacrosse is called by the Iroquois and Huron peoples who began playing it around a thousand years ago. The game was played in lieu of war, for healing, and to train Iroquois youth in survival skills. Perhaps most importantly, it is played to honor the health and joy the Creator has made possible for the people. Today, according to Sports Illustrated it is the fastest growing sport in the United States at all levels of competition. Its current name, given to it by French explorers who watched the nations play, is lacrosse.
The world championships in the sport were held in Britain this week with 30 nations competing. The Iroquois team, though ranked 4th in the world, was not there to compete since the governments of the United States and Great Britain denied them travel visas. It seems that their identification and passports from the sovereign nation of the Iroquois Confederacy were not sufficient proof that they would not engage in terrorist activities. The U.S. Secretary of State’s office held the requests up for 12 days, relenting with less than 48 hours left to depart. A onetime waiver granted to a nation that is constitutionally recognized as sovereign? After the U.S. relented, the British denied the visas on their end. The Iroquois teams have been traveling to tournaments on sovereign Iroquois visas for more than 25 years.
In 2007 the United Nations passed the long awaited Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Britain voted for and the U.S. Secretary of State has issued a year-long series of forums to consider finally supporting. This resolution purported to recognize the rights of indigenous peoples to their existence as sovereign entities with rights to their identity as peoples. Yet in an international sporting event, the indigenous peoples who invented the game are denied the right to participate because their identity is in question. The U.S. and Britain suggested that the players simply get U.S. or Canadian passports. In order to play the game they originated, they were asked to give up their identity as Iroquois. This was a price too large for the players. It was regarded as a simple request by the State Department. Simply deny who you are and we will let you play. That has been the message from the U.S. government since its inception, to all people of color.
In a previous blog post on this site, I discussed the skepticism in Indian Country about promises from the government which never seem to yield actual results. The Secretary of State studies indigenous rights and denies passports. The Administration promises swift settlement of Cobell and it still languishes awaiting payment at a bargain rate. Leonard Peltier was denied parole last summer. The current administration has issued many press releases promising a new era in relations with Native Americans. So far, it is business as usual: make promises, get support from Native peoples, stall on delivering promises, change the rules that govern the promises and finally ignore the promises.
And, the original players of the Creator’s Game are playing it at home in Indian Country, where it has been played for a thousand years.
Arizona Native Americans Oppose New Nativist Law
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I’ll bet Arizona’s mostly white nativists, including right-wing Republicans, did not see this one coming. Native American groups in Arizona have made it clear they will not enforce the new Arizona anti-immigrants law. An Arizona Capitol Times report by Evan Wyloge states:
Native American tribes are charging that the law was written without considering their unique circumstance and that it will violate their sovereignty and their members’ civil rights. Despite a request by Gov. Jan Brewer’s office to comply with the new law, Native American tribes will continue to oppose it and seek ways to avoid its implementation, said John Lewis, executive director of the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, which represents 20 tribes in the state. [and a fifth of the lands]
One reason is that the new law will
lead to disproportionate stops and detentions for tribal members, violate their sovereignty and negatively impact the tribal economy.
Police officers, especially white officers, are likely to target Native Americans, because they often look Latino. I wonder why that is? Could it be because a majority of Mexicans and Mexican Americans have substantial Native American (indigenous) ancestry?
And that raises another point. Aren’t most European Americans in Arizona and elsewhere the descendants of undocumented immigrants who came into a country without the permission (and often against the opposition) of the existing indigenous inhabitants? (We had no general exclusionary immigration laws until 1920-1924, so requiring immigration documents for all is fairly new in this country’s history.)
Hmmm. Does that also mean that a majority of current Mexican immigrants have deeper historical and ancestral roots in North America, and in what used to be northern Mexico (e.g., Arizona), than European Americans?
Navajo Nation Councilmember Delegate Kee Allen Begay Jr. has commented on the implications of the law:
“What if we had a law that said whenever a white person is traveling through the Navajo Reservation, we have reasonable suspicion that they’re carrying drugs? Where would the outcry on that be? ….We were here before anyone else, before any white people, and now we’re going to be questioned about being here legally?”
What if, indeed!
No Native Americans among our 860 Federal Judges
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Faith-based thinking about racial matters in U.S. society is quite common these days, including much data-less nonsense about this being a “post-racial society” and about “Obama’s election meaning racism is dead” or “minorities are now taking over,” and similar such sentiments. One recent MSNBC report on the recent Supreme Court hearings of Ms. Elena Kagan provides substantial data refuting such notions.
Were you aware that the National Native American Bar Association and the National Congress of American Indians, major Native American organizations, had sent letters to President Obama asking that he consider distinguished and accomplished Native Americans for a position on the Supreme Court, since no Native American has ever served there:
While other ethnic groups and women have made strides in reaching the federal bench, there has never been an American Indian appointed to the Supreme Court or the federal appellate bench, and out of the nation’s more than 860 federal judgeships, not one is currently occupied by an American Indian.
Not a single Native American is serving. We are indeed an exclusionary, highly segregated society still. In our entire history, according to the Federal Judicial Center, only two Native Americans have ever served as federal judges.
The implications of this are obvious:
“There’s just a lack of representation and that lack of representation leads to no voice, no voice whatsoever in the decisions that are being made about Natives,” said Richard Guest, a senior staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, one of the Indian groups that have been meeting with White House officials in recent months, urging them to consider an Indian for the Supreme Court vacancy and for other federal judgeships. Heather Dawn Thompson, the immediate past president of the National Native American Bar Association, calls it a “rather frustrating” situation. “For over two hundred years, the United States Supreme Court has sat in judgment over us, over our lands, over our treaties and over our families. Not one single day have we ever had a voice in those decisions,” Thompson’s group said in its letter to Obama.
I remember something in the old American set of ideals about “no taxation without representation,” and revolutionary anger over lack of representation more generally. Well, here is a complete lack of judicial representation.
On 24 June 2010, encircled by a substantial police presence, 1,500 indigenous activists and their allies marched through downtown Toronto under the slogan “Canada can’t hide genocide,” openly contesting Canada’s authority in negotiating on the global stage. Shouting “No G20 on stolen native land!” the marchers carried placards, banners, Mohawk Nation flags, and an inverted Canadian flag. The group altered the Canadian national anthem’s opening lines “O Canada! Our home and native land!”, singing instead “O Canada! Our home on native land!” They hoped to bring international awareness to aboriginal issues via media coverage of the G8 and G20 summits. The demonstrators urged the Canadian government to investigate the disappearance of some 500 aboriginal women , demanded self-determination, complete political recognition of past treaties, and nation-to-nation negotiations with Canada on equal terms.
On 25 June 2010 ‘Shout Out for Global Justice,’ sponsored by the Council of Canadians, organized an incredible line-up of speakers to challenge the G20 and demand trade, water, and climate justice. The event was sold out. 2,700 people attended, as well as many others who watched the forum by web-cast in communities across Canada and at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit. The line-up of speakers included Clayton Thomas-Müller of the Mathais Colomb Cree Nation in Northern Manitoba and tar sands campaigner with the U.S.-based organization Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN).
The five First Nations in the region of the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, rely on traditional food sources, like moose, fish, beaver, and muskrat, all of which have become contaminated by mining pollution. A community of only 1,200 has seen more than 100 deaths in the last decade from rare cancers and autoimmune diseases. The tar sands leases also breach aboriginal treaty rights; they were sold by the provincial government without the prior informed consent of local communities.
There is no scarcity of examples of native resistance in recent Canadian history. In 1990, an historic armed standoff between Mohawks and the Canadian army near Oka, Québec lasted more than two months when the provincial government tried to convert a native burial ground into a golf course. Five years later, the Canadian government employed helicopters, armoured personnel carriers, improvised explosives, and more than 77,000 rounds of ammunition during a three-month standoff over land title at Gustafsen Lake in British Columbia. In 2007, the Mohawk community at Tyendinaga, 200 kilometres east of Toronto, blocked the trans-continental rail line, and Canada’s largest highway, in protest at the government’s failure to address land rights and basic issues of survival within First Nations – including safe drinking water, which the community lacked. Despite the exposure of such injustices, a foremost concern in 2007 appeared to be how to circumvent a roadblock. (See here and here.)
Aboriginal peoples living in Canada have lower life expectancy, less access to education, a much lower average income, and a much higher suicide rate than the rest of the country. The UN has stated that if Canada were “judged solely on the economic and social well-being of its First Nations” peoples, the country’s human development ranking would drop from 7th to 48th out of 174 countries. Organizations like Amnesty International have sharply criticized Canada’s treatment of aboriginals, calling the country’s reserves a third world problem in one of the world’s richest countries.
One final thought. Press coverage of issues related to aboriginals clears the way for government actions that “reproduce material and social inequality between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people” (including subtle sanitized ethno-genocide). This is a major cause of concern because it promotes an environment in which social injustice is tolerated and Canadians are less likely to be sympathetic to aboriginal resistance movements.
Tessa M. Blaikie, Nicole R. Gordon, and Natalia T. Ilyniak are sociology honours students at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. Kimberley A. Ducey is a faculty member in the Department of Sociology, University of Winnipeg.
No Post-Racial America: Racial Inequalities in US Medicine
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Over at diversityinc.com, Gail Zoppo has an important post—“Is There a Black, Latino Doctor in the House?”– on the huge problem of lack of people of color in U.S. medical schools and professions. Racial inequality remains central in the medical professions and facilities in this “post-racial America.” We still have relatively few black, Latino, and Native American medical students across the country. Zoppo underscores the slow pace of improvement, noting that three years these groups made up only 15 percent of the 40,000 applicants to U.S. medical schools, even as they make up a third of the U.S. population in their typical age range. (She does not discuss data on Asian Americans in her post.) This is a key result from this longterm reality:
That same year, only 8.7 percent of doctors were from these underrepresented groups, according to a study published in the Journal of Academic Medicine.
She then discusses where we are at in the recent American Association of Medical Colleges data, just slight changes since 2006:
Among the 42,269 med-school applicants in 2009, only 16 percent were Black, Latino or American Indian.
Other medical professions are also characterized by a lack of black, Latino, and Native American personnel:
… a mere 6.9 percent of people from underrepresented groups ended up as dentists in 2007, only 9.9 percent were pharmacists and just 6.2 percent were registered nurses.
One national issue is also that white medical personnel are much less likely to work in undeserved communities of color:
Black, Latino and American Indian/Pacific Islander physicians are nearly three to four times more likely than whites to practice in underserved communities, reports the AAMC.
On the positive side, Zoppo does discuss some important attempts to deal with this underrepresentation in medical schools and professions, such as the Rutgers University Office for Diversity and Academic Success in the Sciences (ODASIS)
U.S. Takes a Step Towards Righting the Wrong
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On September 17, 2007, after 30 years of debate and discussion, the United Nations passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Only 4 countries voted against the resolution, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Since then New Zealand and Australia have endorsed the resolution. In March, Canada’s Governor General, in the Speech from the Throne (the Canadian equivalent of the State of the Union) endorsed the resolution and committed Canada’s official support.
The United States, now the only nation still in opposition, has announced a series of hearings through the Secretary of State’s office to review the U.S. position. These hearings began June 21 and will continue through October. After three plus decades, one has to wonder what there is left to discuss for the better part of another year. Every nation in the U.N. has now conceded at least a neutral position on this basic affirmation of human rights to indigenous peoples. Eleven nations abstained on the original vote and most of these have since expressed support.
The hearings target tribal leaders, non-governmental organizations and federal agencies for input. There is no explanation as to why NGO’s should be consulted on granting basic human rights to an entire group of people. For that matter, the question remains as to why federal agencies should have the power to withhold those rights or abridge them.
It is fashionable in liberal circles to blame so many things on the Bush Administration, and they rightfully deserve much of that blame. However, these tactics began long before that and continue beyond it. The current progressive leadership in the House, Senate and White House have certainly drug their feet in righting the wrong where indigenous people are concerned. Last fall, the Interior Department announced the settlement of the Cobell case for mismanagement of Native funds. The suit was settled for less than 10 cents on the dollar of what was owed and still has yet to be paid out.
Now, the United States, standing alone in opposition to human rights for First Nations wants another year to discuss the resolution. My friends in Indian Country are cautiously hopeful. They are also cognizant of the propensity for this country to issue politically correct press releases while withholding meaningful action.
This review is a long overdue step in the right direction. It is, however, only a step. It must be followed by many more steps. As the ceremony season continues across Indian Country many prayers and sacrifices are being offered up for a sincere and true completion to this matter.
Arizona’s SB 1070 and the State’s Minimum Wage
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U.S. citizens uncertain about Arizona’s new immigration law would do well to remember who has been doing the actual hard labor under the hot desert sun long before Arizona became a state in 1912. Like the rest of the U.S., Arizona was initially Native American land. It used to be part of the Territory of New Mexico. During Lincoln’s administration, Congress made it a separate territory in 1863. Both Arizona and New Mexico have been territories of the U.S. since 1848, following President Polk’s two-year war with Mexico. At that juncture, Arizona had less than 1,000 Hispanics, 4,040 “Indians,” and 2,421 whites. 1848 was the same year the famous Kit Carson rounded up the Navajo with the help of American soldiers and the Ute. After, 8,000 Navajo were forced to undertake the Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo Reservation in New Mexico. The Navajo were permitted to return in 1868, but the Apache continued to resist until the Chiricahua were forcibly relocated to Florida in 1886. Today, more than 14 tribes live on 20 reservations, and Arizona reminds us of Geronimo and Cochise, the great chiefs who fought Indian removals. Although initially sparsely populated, Arizona has been slowly transformed from the wild, unbearably sun-scorched terrain it used to offer residents to the moment the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix air-conditioned the hotel in 1962. Indeed, the air-conditioner is most responsible for turning Arizona into a tourist destination, enhancing the state’s economic engines in copper, cotton, cattle, citrus, and electronics. Two-thirds of the U.S.’s copper is still mined there, and mining has been king since gold and silver dwindled and electricity gave the metal value in the 1870s.
When mining, cotton, cattle and citrus were introduced, who largely provided the work force? Arizona’s economy has always depended on the region’s minority people for cheap common labor, on Native Americans and on the Spanish-speakers who have lived in the desert long before Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821. Arizona has always offered more work opportunities than residents can handle, and for that reason it used to welcome and even encouraged Mexicans to cross the border to help upgrade its ranches and farms. That commerce progressively altered Arizona from a suffocating wilderness used by outlaws into a chic, spa-and-golf environment used by movie stars and the rich since Marilyn Monroe lounged at the Biltmore.
That is why Arizona’s recent SB 1070 law is so stunning and incomprehensible. Arizona, of course, is not the only state or part of the country that has relied on immigrant, cheap labor to turn our economies into global world market leaders. Texas, California–name most states or U.S. regions–and economists will tell us that cheap, foreign-hands labor has been in there doing the hard manual work needed to transform society’s infrastructure, promoting and giving visibility to “Progress.” Since many “illegal aliens” historically leave their countries to throw in their fates and the futures of their children with the regions that have employed their skills and talents for generations, isn’t it rather thankless now to disinvite and actually to throw them out of the U.S.? These workers have long survived on pauper’s wages. Our country has labeled them “illegal,” allowing our citizens to pay the “aliens” whatever we have wanted. But since January 1, 2009, Arizonians have had to pay them at least $7.25 per hour of work, too. Illegal workers interviewed by Univision now say that not enough people are hiring them off the curbs where for years they used to be picked up to cut grass, repair homes, and provide other services. How fair is it to use language–to mix our good, reliable workers with “terrorists” and “drug gangsters,” as Arizona’s new immigration law does? What SB 1070 underscores is that whites who voted for it enjoy being domineering.
Marco Portales is a Texas A&M professor and author of Why Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata Wore Cananas: A 100th Year Photo History of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1928. (Copies available from mportales@tamu.edu)
Pressing for Enforceable Human Rights in All Nations: The 2048 Rights Project
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I just learned today about the 2048 project on international human rights, which has bold goals that in my view would make for a much more human, humanitarian, rights-oriented world:
Our mission is to educate students and the public about the evolution of human rights, and to provide a process to draft an international framework for enforceable human rights that can be in place by the year 2048, the 100th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
There is lots of good stuff on the site about human rights, and about teaching about human rights issues, nationally and internationally.
The site also has some excellent links to many good resources on U.S. and international human rights issues, like this listing on the U.S.’s spotty record on signing and not signing (or signing with major reservations) various important international rights agreements.
Interestingly, too, the U.S. government under President Obama is just now rethinking our official and hostile position (developed under George W. Bush and other previous administrations) against the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Indian Country Today summarizes our “outlaw state” record:
UNDRIP was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly Sept. 13, 2007, in a historic vote by an overwhelming majority of 143 states in favor to four against, with 11 abstentions. Canada, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand – all countries whose sizeable indigenous populations can claim large areas of land – were the only four states that voted no.
Interesting: 143-4! Here is the Obama administration recent statement:
Welcome to the Department of State’s website for the U.S. review of its position on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Administration recognizes that for many around the world, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples provides a framework for addressing indigenous issues. Tribal leaders and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have recommended that the United States reexamine its position on the Declaration. In response, the Department of State and other Federal agencies will be conducting a review of the Declaration’s provisions.
Cherokee Nation Leader Wilma Mankiller Dies
Posted by: | CommentsThe Tulsa World reports the death of Native American leader, Wilma Mankiller,
the once dirt-poor Oklahoma farm girl who grew up to become an activist for American Indian causes and women’s rights, an author and the first woman to hold the Cherokee Nation’s highest office, died Tuesday. She was 64.
President Barack Obama lauded Mankiller’s legacy. “As the Cherokee Nation’s first female chief, she transformed the nation-to-nation relationship between the Cherokee Nation and the federal government, and served as an inspiration to women in Indian Country and across America,” Obama said. “A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, she was recognized for her vision and commitment to a brighter future for all Americans. ”
In the 1960s, married by then with two children, she took an increasing interest in Indian affairs. When a group of tribal activists took over Alcatraz Island in 1969, occupying it for more than a year to protest U.S. government treatment of Indians, Mankiller visited them and raised money for the effort. … Mankiller used her fame and position to speak out on cultural issues, something she never shied from. She once said that white culture was to blame for the sexism of Cherokees, who were traditionally more matriarchal, and that Thomas Jefferson deserved as much blame for the Trail of Tears as the more often villified Andrew Jackson. When she slammed country artist Tim McGraw’s hit song “Indian Outlaw” as racially offensive, many state radio stations stopped playing it at her request.
She will be greatly missed.
William Kunstler and the Active Voice to Discuss Racism
Posted by: | CommentsI saw a new documentary called “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” about the civil rights lawyer. the film was made by his two daughters from his second marriage, Sarah and Emily Kunstler. it was interesting and much of the film was about racism, although none of the promotional materials hint at this. In this way, it’s much like the documentary “The Weather Underground,” which also focuses a good deal on racism.
One of the things that struck me most profoundly about the Kunstler film was the way that the language about institutional racism in the late 1960s early 1970s is so strikingly different from the way we talk about race and racism today. What I mean about the language around institutional racism is that Kunstler would say things like, “the white power structure” or “the racist court system” and “all whites are racist” and “we (whites) are responsible for letting this racist power structure continue.”
This language and way of talking about racism is all in the category of “stuff you just don’t hear anymore.”
The power of calling out the white power structure and the way that individual whites participate in this racism was clearest for me in the film when they were exploring the issue of the uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Kunstler got called in as a negotiator for the prisoners. This attempt failed and dozens of people – both inmates and guards – were killed by the state who went in and shot them. after the uprising was put down, there’s this amazing archival footage of one of the white soldiers (national guard?) who went in to the prison, and he’s got his fist in the air, pumping it victoriously and he says, “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about…. white power!” it’s just a chilling moment that also perfectly illustrates what Kunstler’s been saying throughout the film.
Following soon after that, Kunstler went to the seige at Wounded Knee to serve as a negotiator for Native Americans in AIM who were staging a protest there, demanding that the U.S. Government honor centuries of broken treaties. Kunstler was able to help avoid a massacre there and successfully defended Russell Banks and Dennis Banks, two of the leaders of the protest, at their subsequent trial in federal court.
Kunstler’s daughters (the filmmakers) were thoughtful about racism and their father’s struggle against it. I especially liked when they went back and tried to find out how their dad began to be conscious about racism. They included a brief section in the film that addressed this issue, noting that Kunstler’s race consciousness certainly didn’t come from his parents, who had black servants that used separate toilets and ate apart from the family in the kitchen. This is illustrated by home-movie footage of one of the nameless-black-servants in the family serving the grandmother and one of the filmmakers when she was a child.
The filmmakers were less thoughtful, in my view, in exploring their own racism around their objection to their father’s defending Yusef Salaam, one of the alleged “Central Park jogger rapists.” Years later, of course, Salaam’s conviction was overturned, and thus Kunstler’s defense of him was vindicated, but I wish the filmmakers had done more with this.
Returning to my point about the language around racism, the way the film is advertised and promoted and discussed (i heard a long interview with the filmmakers in which they never mentioned racism even once) is more typical of the way racism gets addressed today, which is in this oblique, passive-voice kind of way.
Today, to the extent that experts and non-experts even acknowledge racism, they may refer to “structural racism” or (in the world of public health where I work) “racial disparites.” But these all happen in the passive voice. Racial disparities just “happen.” There are no actors in today’s language of racial inequality. In Kunstler’s heydey (the civil rights era), there were clearly people who were responsible for the oppression of people of color, and it was white people acting in the interest of a white power structure. Losing that language, we’ve lost some clarity about what is at the root of racial inequality. Today, it seems, no one’s responsible as we live in this ‘racism without racists’ post-civil rights era.
