On Native Americans, because no one is talking about them right now

 The question I try to ask is the question others do not ask.  The place I look is the place others do not.  The argument I test, at least provisionally, is the argument dismissed without consideration rather than rejected on the basis of logic or evidence.  Once upon a time, during the early days of the emergence of critical race theory into the public eye, I participated in a forum in which a CRT advocate spoke in very black-and-white terms, so to speak, and she was pressed by someone in the room who happened to be Native American.  The model does not address the position of Native Americans in society, which is not to say that it cannot, but rather that it does not.  Native Americans do not present the same kind of theoretical or conceptual problems for CRT that some other minority groups do, but Derrick Bell was not thinking about Native Americans, and most CRT advocates do not.  It is too narcissistic an ideology for that.  Most Americans do not think about Native Americans either.  Let's do that.

I wish I knew who that audience member was.  Whoever that was, I remember you.  Your question stuck with me.  You mattered to me.  A leftist would say, "I saw you, I heard you," or something like that.  I prefer to say something like, "you made me think, question and challenge."

One need not recount the history of what Europeans, colonists and their descendants did to Native Americans.  It would be inaccurate to describe all indigenous societies as peaceful and idyllic.  There was wide variation, of course, and I doubt that anyone today would really want to live in Aztec society and be ritually sacrificed.  Just as an example.  Yet there was variation, and their societies were killed en masse, relocated and relocated, and those who remain often live on reservations in less than hospitable lands with lives that can be described with the following basic statistics.  Those mortality numbers are horrifying.  The rates of alcoholism, and hence alcohol-induced death are what everyone expects to see, but it goes so far beyond that.  Suicide, heart disease, diabetes, just everything.  We could look at income, educational attainment, or any statistic you like.  Racial dialog focuses on African-Americans and the disparities there, which exist, yes, but they are worse by far for Native Americans.

And we do not talk about them.

Inner cities?  Redlining?  Native Americans frequently live on actual reservations, nowhere near functioning economies.  Hop on a bus from a neighborhood that was redlined decades ago, and you get to a place with economic activity.  Try that from a reservation.  (Pack a lunch.  Maybe more than one.)

Does that mean there is no role for individual responsibility, culture, or anything like that?  I will not go that far, but circumstances and opportunity play a role, and whatever role they play, if anyone is fucked over, and truly still fucked by history, it's Native Americans.

You are on land that was, at one point, stolen.  Maybe bought, under some circumstance, but probably stolen.  Perhaps you bought a house.  If so, good for you.  Do you own that house and land?  Or is it intrinsically stolen because of that history?  Is a "land acknowledgement" good enough for you?  For the most fucked-over people around?  Why is a "land acknowledgement" good enough for you, but not in certain other regions of the world?  How do you determine whether a land acknowledgement is good enough?

If I had the capacity to write fiction (yes, yes, my so-called scholarship is fiction, I know), I would write the following.  The setting:  an idyllic college.  Maybe my own alma mater, of Pomona College.  A group of radicalized Native Americans declare the land to have been stolen from them, generations ago, by settler/colonists.  The occupiers of the land (rich, white kids in keffiyehs) are settler/colonists.  The radicalized Native Americans take back their land, by any means necessary, using the precise, same acts as October 7.  On the keffiyeh-wearing rich, white kids.  (Plot slightly modified from the Season 4 Thanksgiving episode of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer).

You see, for Native Americans, all that seems to be required is a "land acknowledgement."  Why?  A land acknowledgement is costless.  So, too, is wearing a keffiyeh, and screaming on college campuses.  Everything they say and do is costless.  Cheap virtue.

In Midnight Oil's "Beds Are Burning," they sang that the land "belongs to them, let's give it back," singing of the Aboriginals.  Giving land back, though, isn't costless.  It is far easier to demand that someone else hand land over to someone else if you aren't involved.  I'm not even going to comment here on the history of the land, because that isn't the point.  The point is the costlessness of the demand when it is other people and other land.

If a Native American showed up and said, gimme your house, that's my land, would a single one of these protesters say, OK?

The Native Americans have a far stronger claim to your land because they unequivocally preceded you, they aren't engaged in terrorism, and the genocide accusation, historically, was true.  And they're still getting fucked.

But it would be costly to do anything more than a land acknowledgement, so what happens?  Two things.  Jack, and shit.  When you scream and point to another group elsewhere, you can claim that cheap virtue through the acts of a) screaming, and b) pointing.

Solving the historical legacy of fucking over the Native Americans?  Difficult and costly.

Why put in the time, effort or money for real virtue when you can claim the cheap stuff?

Native Americans are not paragliding into Burning Man to rape hippie girls to death for some generational land claim, but this is real, they really were here first, and the numbers are not good.  They're still getting fucked.

What should we do?  I do not know.  I'd rather spend my time, effort and money on that.  That would be real virtue.

As a closing observation, here's a fun homework assignment.  Go and google "pretendian professor."  When you start digging into the moral rot of academia, you never find the bottom.

It was either Midnight Oil, or Bruce.  No, not that Bruce, this one.  Bruce Cockburn, "Stolen Land," live.  Nice guitar solo on this performance.