A common phrase used to describe minority or underrepresented populations is "people of color." American Indians are not, to quote Elizabeth Cook Lynn, a member of the Crow Creek Sioux tribe and founding editor of Wicazo Sa (a leading journal in American Indian Studies), "people of color." Cook-Lynn writes:
Native populations in America are not "ethnic" populations; they are not "minority" populations, neither immigrant nor tourist, nor "people of color." They are the indigenous peoples of this continent. They are landlords, with very special political and cultural status in the realm of American identity and citizenship. Since 1924, they have possessed dual citizenship, tribal and U.S., and are the only population that has not been required to deny their previous national citizenship in order to possess U.S. citizenship. They are known and documented as citizens by their tribal nations. (1)She goes on to say that placing us within a multicultural or ethnic studies category has a negative effect because those categories obliterate our political difference. The political dimension she refers to is our status as sovereign nations, a distinction based on treaty and trust agreements made between early European nations who came to what we now call the United States, and, later agreements made between the United States and Native Nations. Those agreements are diplomatic negotiations that take place between heads of state.
The idea that American Indians would engage in diplomatic negotiations may seem ridiculous to those who were taught to think that American Indians were primitive nomadic peoples who roamed the earth (just like animals) and didn't "properly" use the land they lived on! In fact, Laura Ingalls Wilder says precisely that in Little House on the Prairie, when the character named Mrs. Scott says on page 211:
All they [Indians] do is roam around over it like wild animals. Treaties or no treaties, the land belongs to folks that'll farm it.Truth is, Native peoples--including the Native Nations in Indian Territory that Mrs. Scott derides--had been farming for centuries. And after being removed to Indian Territory through the Trail of Tears, the Cherokees built "the finest system of public education in all America, for men and women." (2)
These diplomatic negotiations took place amongst the Pueblo Indians, too. The nineteen Pueblo Indian tribes of what is now known as New Mexico had agreements with Spain in the 1500s, Mexico in the 1820s and then the United States in the 1840s. Leaders of each one (Spain, Mexico, U.S.) marked their recognition of our sovereignty with a silver headed cane that symbolized that recognition. The last cane was from President Lincoln. Today, the three canes at each Pueblo are held by the individual who is serving as the current governor. (3) You can see a 1936 photograph of the governor of Zia here. He is holding the three canes.
Generally speaking, schools in the United States do not include instruction about tribal nations and our sovereignty.
Native children, however, who grow up on their reservations, know a lot about such matters. They know, for example, that we elect our leaders and have our own police forces and court systems.
Understanding sovereignty can help people understand why the phrase "people of color" doesn't work when describing American Indians, and I believe that reading AICL will help understand sovereignty and a great many dimensions of who we were, and who we are in today's United States.
Works cited:
(1) Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. "Scandal," in Wicazo Sa Review, Spring 2007, page 86.
(2) See "New Cherokee Territory" (segment eight) in We Shall Remain: Trail of Tears.
(3) Sando, Joe S. (1992) Pueblo Nations: Eight Centuries of Pueblo Indian History. Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers.
4 comments:
Hi! I have been looking around your blog and found some wonderful posts. Can you explain to me in what way you are defining "People of Color?" It seems as if you are using to describe people from racially dominated ethnic groups who have been disempowered. If this is not what you mean, could you please explain what you do?
I'm guessing you know there's lot of discussion about who "minority" populations are in the US, or, who "multicultural" might include.
Too often, in my experience, people will say "multicultural" and use it to include anyone who is "other" to mainstream Americans. That means it includes African Americans, Latino/a Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians, BUT, to them, it also includes Spanish people from Spain who are not "Spanish American" etc. People from Spain who are living here do add a dimension of diversity to American society, but my emphasis is on US-based populations who have experienced oppression, particularly at the hands of the power structures, in the past or present. I mean specifically the four groups I mentioned earlier: African Americans, Latino/a Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians.
You make a good point. The only way I learned about tribal sovereignty (and by that I mean the general concept, certainly not specifics, which I still am learning about) was by randomly reading books and watching movies that may have dealt with that in part. Schools should teach that as a part of American history, and maybe some do - I never had a decent history teacher in K-12 ed (I reject any classes that require rote memorization and don't give you context until years later, which is why I was also terrible at science), so I really don't know much, which is sad.
But as far as the actual term "people of color," which I totally get in the quote you put, wouldn't it still be accurate in the social sense, since white Americans still put you in the same otherized box as Latin@s, Asians, and black people and as a result, native people are still subject to the same lack of privilege and understanding as other PoC? So kind of like what we were emailing about, the term is a necessary evil that we should be working to eradicate?
Except I don't see anything wrong with being nomadic, and I see a lot wrong with farming, starting with the deforestation (or destruction of prairie, as on the Great Plains) required, continuing with issues and conflicts around "land ownership" and "private property", and ending up with the land erosion involved.
Mary Brave Bird, I think it was, used to say the Lakota didn't want to farm because they felt it was tearing into the body of Mother Earth. (I've read her, but it's been years--I may be misattributing.) And some other groups, Native American or not, felt it was silly to put that much work into obtaining food when you could just go hunt it or pick it off the trees.
It doesn't make a culture a bad culture if they don't choose to put that much complexity and extra work into staying alive. Actually, a capitalist would call that "working smarter, not harder."
I'm not romanticizing nomadic foraging--it comes with its own set of challenges, not the least of which being that you have to move around a lot. But don't we frequently complain that we're too sedentary anyway?
One final note: It is my impression that some scholars distinguish between horticulture (gardening, usually with multiple plant species, i.e., "three sisters") and monocrop agriculture. While lots of Natives did indeed garden, I doubt any of them maintained vast fields of nothing but corn as we do today. And the ones who came closest to that sort of behavior, and also city-building, tended to be nuisances to their neighbors. Exhibit A: the Aztecs.
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