NY Dispatch: Today is Indigenous People’s Day when we celebrate and honor First Nation people, their distinctive and ancient cultures, and to correct history. The Native People of this continent have been misunderstood, misrepresented, maligned, and murdered for centuries. As they say, history is written by the victors and we have glossed over or ignored ignoble acts perpetuated by settlers and the government. For instance, most of what we know to be true about Christopher Columbus is a lie. We believe him to be an adventurer who opened the door to an undiscovered continent, but even in his day he was known as a cruel tyrant who was responsible for genocide. He exploited the native populations, enslaved and tortured them, and stole their land. This is why people are pulling his statues down.
Almost all of our relationships with Native Americans can be boiled down to stealing their land for our own. Conflict over land management can be traced back to the colonization of North America. The pioneers pushed the boundaries of their frontier and showed little respect to the environment as they developed. The indigenous people were viewed as an obstacle to progress. Native people were cast as the other, and were dehumanized, systemically slaughtered, and finally segregated onto reservations. For example, the land that the Standing Rock Sioux fought to protect from the Dakota Access Pipeline had been legally granted to their Nation in the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. When gold was discovered in the Black Hills region 6 years later, the U.S. Government ignored the treaty and tried to forcibly remove them. When the Sioux refused to leave their ancestral land the U.S. Army cut the tribe off from the world and starved them into submission.
The Sioux were the victims of the “resource curse”, first with gold and more recently when new technologies enabled extraction of oil from bedrock by way of fracking. Already wealthy businesses worked with politicians to reap all the profits from the extraction of resources and leave behind an impoverished nation that must live with the environmental damage.
It took over 100 years of courtroom battles before the Sioux received restitution. In 1980 the Supreme Court made a determination in favor of the Sioux requiring the U.S. Government to compensate the tribe for the land that had been taken illegally. The Sioux Nation was awarded $17.5 million for the original value of the land plus $88 million in interest. The Sioux have refused payment and the money remains with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where it has accumulated to more than $1 billion. Declining the compensation despite extreme economic hardship, and their current stance on protecting the sacred rights of land and water, suggests that if the Sioux had retained legal rights to the land they would not exploit it for resources.
The Standing Rock Sioux, and all other nations, have suffered in the same ways for centuries. This is just one of countless stories in which history has been rewritten by the victors to edit out their crimes, and their actions have long term consequences. Today many Native American populations are more susceptible to COVID-19 because of the legacy of oppression, leaving generations impoverished, living without adequate healthcare and in some places even basic needs like clean water. Since many have had their lands taken from them, along with their traditional way of life, they have lost access to their traditional diets. We should take a moment to honor our hosts, who have tried to live in tandem with nature and shown us the way to a more sustainable future; we need to pay attention to their knowledge now before it is too late.
Today I am grateful for Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland. They were the first Native American women to be elected to Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo from New Mexico, and Sharice Davids, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation from Kansas who is gay, were part of a wave of Democratic candidates who are more representative of our diverse population. Native American women had traditionally held power in pre-colonial times, but have been systemically pushed to the back through centuries of oppression. Native Americans were not allowed to vote in some states until 1948, but now these women are taking their rightful place at the table. They are also part of a movement among indigenous people to decolonize, reclaim their traditional languages and customs, and heal the intergeneration trauma.
The Green Economist 