Last year
in Nov of 2013,
President Obama welcomed for the fifth time 566 federally recognized tribal
leaders to the White House Tribal Nations Conference. As early as 2009
Obama showed an honest interest in not only the Native American vote, and his next
re-election bid, but also in re-building a positive connection between the
original American indigenous population, and the traditionally mistrusted by
Native Americans - American Federal
Government.
The American
President of the past mirrored the common white settler or
soldier's overly negative mistrust and blatant dislike for the Native
American. George
Washington compared them to wolves and as beasts. Andrew Jackson
was quoted as saying the Native American had neither intelligence nor moral
habits. With such presidential condoning of racism and fear mongering towards
the original inhabitants of North America, it’s plain to see how easy it was
for the governments of the time to remove, eliminate a perceived threat from
the Indian, and exterminate when necessary the Native American peoples’ in such
a grand scale that Adolf Hitler would certainly truly appreciate its evil
magnitude.
Of course
it would take decades and even centuries for an American president to
acknowledge the simple fact that Native Americans were the only ones
technically here first when President
Franklin Roosevelt said that only full blooded Indians were native to this
country, and everyone else was basically an immigrant or a descendant of
immigrants. As you can imagine, at that time in history Franklin Roosevelt was
certainly courting the immigrant vote and not the Indian one, but at least it
was a nice mention.
By the late
forties and early fifties, American Indians had become an American Christian
duty to civilize the old perceived savage into a non-scary educated member of
society. Unfortunately again for the Native American, this new
found white Christian perception of the Native American Indian was nonnegotiable by
the Indians themselves. Once more Native Americans were forced into unbearable
circumstances in the form of religious boarding schools in order to let Christ himself
cast the savage demons from them. Decades of this practice were echoed in President Harry
Truman’s words on the American
Indian when he stated:
"The United States,
which would live on Christian principles with all of the peoples of the world,
cannot omit a fair deal for its own Indian citizens."
Truman seemingly was
tired of the old Indian Office’s bureau style education and land use
regulations perpetrated on the Indians under their supposed care, but President
Truman was still of the popular belief at the time that total assimilation was the
only hope for the survival of the Indian race. As a consequence of this
misguided perception of what the American Indian’s true needs were, many
reforms and subtle breakthroughs in Indian rights and recognition were swept
aside to accommodate Truman’s way of thinking towards Native Americans.
Forms of this assimilation
theory towards the North American Indian populous remained all the way into the
Reagan years when then President Ronald
Reagan, obviously in his “clueless years”
stated that maybe America had made a mistake and shouldn't have humored
the American Indian in their wanting to stay in such a primitive lifestyle – Why didn't they just come out of the reservations and join us in the cities and
be good citizens right alongside us?
To re-iterate the
Republican perception of the plight of the Native American Indian some years
later, with a quote from the incredibly knowledgeable on the subject, George W. Bush:
"Tribal
sovereignty means that. It's sovereign. You're a… you're a… you've been given
sovereignty and you're viewed as a sovereign entity."
Which otherwise means
they basically got nothing coming from the Bush administration.
Barack Obama
has at least seemed to have ironically fulfilled one of his promises in both
his presidential terms, the promise of choice in American inclusion, rather
than past forced exclusion, assimilation, or threatened extermination for the
Native American.
"We also recommit
to supporting tribal
self-determination, security, and prosperity for all Native Americans.
While we cannot erase the scourges or broken promises of our past, we will move
ahead together in writing a new, brighter chapter in our joint history." -
Barack Obama
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