Looking at Racism through Native American Eyes

Robert Two Bulls, an Episcopal priest and member of Oglala Lakota tribe remembers from his childhood:

“The little white girl grabbed my hand and held it. She points at my dark skin, the skin of my ancestors, (the Oglala Lakotas,) and says, "Dirty” She immediately turns my hand with my palm open and says, "Clean” My seven-year-old mind says, "But I washed my hands." Dear God help us to clean our hearts and not to dirty the minds of our young…”

I begin with that story, because it is a simple story, but one full of implication, about what is clean and dirty. It begins in childhood and leads to this story, also from Robert Two Bulls: “When I was called to be the curate in an all white church, someone asked: ‘Why is he here?’”

Sovereignty vs. Stereotype
BY JACQUELINE KEELER (Navajo/Yankton Dakota Sioux) 

Sometimes people claim there are “more important things” in Indian Country than the mascotting of Native people. These folks can run the gamut from hardcore Redsk*n supporters from team owner Dan Snyder who famously told USA Today in 2013, “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER. You can use caps,” to Native people for whom this racism is manageable. This despite the fact every other ethnic group in the United States has already rid themselves of the scourge of mascotry 40 years ago during the Civil Rights movement. For me, this argument really promotes an acceptable level of racism for Native people that is greater than that any other ethnic group must endure. This higher bar of racism is matched only by the higher rates of suicide, murder and rape of Native people – higher than the any other ethnic group in the United States.

Wilma Mankiller, former principal chief of the Cherokee Nation – and an inspiration to me as a leader and as a woman–said it best when she told an audience at a CSU Sonoma lecture in 2008, “The lack of accurate information about Native people leaves a void, which is often filled with stereotypes that sometimes romanticize Native people and sometimes vilify Native people, and I think a few misinformed people apparently believe tribal people still live and dress as they did 300 years ago.” The reason these stereotypes matter on the “more important issues” is because they feed into misconceptions about Native people that can lead to wrong conclusions about what is best for us on the policy level. These wrong-headed ideas are held by politicians and encouraged by the American electorate and creates U.S. policy that threatens our sovereignty, reduces funding for needed programs, schools, housing and health care.

And when held by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts can lead to the theft of our children as witnessed in 2013 in the case of Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, when he repeatedly questioned the blood quantum of the child in question as negligible despite repeated reminders by Justice Sotomayor that the Cherokee Nation does not use blood quantum to determine citizenship. These questions revealed his state of mind regarding who he thought was “Indian” and who was not based on stereotypes, not law. This ignorance on who we are even feeds anti-sovereignty groups. When I reported on the Baby Veronica case I found that many of the anti-Indian Child Welfare Act groups also had a long-standing ties with this political movement and with former Sen. Slade Gorton (R-WA), who was a leading voice in the 1990s for the termination of tribal sovereignty “for their own good.”

Our status as citizens of sovereign nations that pre-existed the United States and continue to exist is completely obscured by the mascotry and this leaves Americans unable to comprehend what tribes are doing as nations. Mankiller touched on this a bit in her lecture, “The dozens of anti-sovereignty groups who argue that tribal people should not have ‘special rights’ fail to understand tribal people sacrificed billions of acres of land and millions of lives to retain our right to self-governance.” And Native youth? With three times the rate of suicide of all other youth in this country? Studies show that after being exposed to Native mascots their self- esteem plummets even if they say they are OK with Native mascots.

Meanwhile, studies also find that exposure to Native mascots actually increases non-Natives’ self-esteem. This shows that this form of “entertainment” is shown to be not harmless at all, but constitutes a real taking from the most vulnerable population in the country. As real as the theft of land, culture, language and of our children. And that it is done for profit, Snyder’s Washington, D.C., NFL franchise is valued at $1.8 billion dollars, and in our children’s schools is completely unconscionable. “The idea of ‘context is everything’,” Mankiller said, “basically grew out my belief that even after hundreds of years of living in our former towns and villages too few Americans know much about our history, culture or our contemporary lives and issues.

And it’s my belief that it is almost impossible to understand the challenges tribal people face in the 21st century without placing those issues within a cultural and historical context.” The “more important issues” argument is a trap that misses this larger context Mankiller eluded to. This blindness endangers us as a people and cannot be passed on to the next generation, some as young as 6 years old who could live well into the next century. We need to fully comprehend the damage these stereotypes do and the ways in which they make Native people unreal and invisible today. 

Jacqueline Keeler is a writer living in Portland, Ore., and is a founder of EONM.org (Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry).


No Room at the Church 
By Kaitlin Curtice

On Sundays, I take my Citizen Potawatomi coffee mug to church. I wear my beaded jewelry, a reminder of who I am and the people I come from. As a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, my faith isn’t only rooted in the Christian tradition that I claim, but also in the traditions of my ancestors who came before me, a combination of the two coming alive in my everyday life, the constant work of decolonizing my spiritual identity.

But as I drink coffee out of my mug and listen to the worship team play song after song, I begin to question myself. Should I have left my nativeness at the door?

Read more of her commentary here.

Kaitlin Curtice is a Native American Christian author and speaker.