#indigenousness

I think a contributing factor--a small one, maybe, but still existent--as to why leftists who are all in favor of indigenous rights feel the urge to add a postscript of "Except the Jews" is because we did it without them. They want to get the feeling of helping, of being an Ally. But we already were sovereign in our own nation before they really got going.

They want to see indigenous people as oppressed and poor, so they can altruistically help them. And it sometimes feels like it gets baked into their definition. Indigenous people must be poor and oppressed and dominated by others. That's why most indigenous peoples in Europe typically aren't acknowledged. Is it because, say, Greeks aren't indigenous to Greece? No--it's because Greeks are sovereign and break the pattern they want of indigenous people needing help.

It's not a coincidence that the European groups who are sometimes recognized as indigenous--Sami, primarily, but occasionally Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Basque, and occasionally even Breton, who fled as refugees from the British Isles to France during Anglo-Saxon colonization (the name Breton and Brittany are related to Briton and Britain)--are those who have historically been subjected by other groups. The model of indigenousness the West developed was defined by being oppressed historically and, ideally, needing help.

And we were definitely oppressed--but not quite as much in the West when that movement for indigenous rights was starting to emerge. We were, generally, middle-class in the West, more easily identifiable as oppressors than oppressed.

And, of course, we had established a state, re-established our sovereignty, before the indigenous rights movement really got going. We could have been an accomplishment, but we did it without them.

And this poses a problem. If your view of indigenousness is based on indigenous people being oppressed and needing help, and Jews are, in the West, not nearly as oppressed and we have our own country, well, this poses problems. The simplest solution?

Wounded Knee, the Ghost Dance, and the Native American  Movement

“The white man says that the 1890 massacre was the end of the wars with the Indian, the end of the Ghost Dance. Yet here we are at war, we’re still Indians, and we’re Ghost Dancing again.”

-Russell Means, Pine Ridge Reservation, 1973

On this day in 1973, Native American activists surrendered to government officials, ending the Native occupation of the Pine Ridge reservation and Wounded Knee. Though the American Indian Movement was founded in 1968 to support the Native American community, the path to the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee started long before the 1960’s. In 1890, approximately 300 Lakota men, women, and children were killed by American troops at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. The 1960’s and 70’s saw a rising Native activism, what one historian called the shift from termination to self-determination.

The National Guardian was a radical leftist weekly newspaper published in New York City between 1948 and 1992. The Tamiment Library holds the photography files for the publication, which are a rich source of materials on activism, civil rights, politics, and Cold War America. The newspaper published many stories on AIM and the occupation of Pine Ridge, following the activists through the 1960’s into the turbulent 70’s and beyond. By 1970, few businesses and little farmland on the Pine Ridge reservation were Lakota-owned. Partly as a result, poverty rates were high for the Lakota on the reservation and national AIM activism sparked local action. On February 27, 1973, several hundred Native people, Oglala Lakota leaders, and AIM members made demands at Wounded Knee on the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation as a part of what is known as the Trail of Broken Treaties, a traveling American Indian protest that started on the west coast in 1972 with a 20 point manifesto to be delivered to the United States Government.

The points were largely aimed at the restoration of Native American land, the enforcement or repeal of previous treaties, Bureau of Indian Affairs overhaul in light of corruption, and other legal safeguards to ensure Native sovereignty and authority. The federal government did not acquiesce to AIM’s 20 point manifesto, but instead rejected the organization’s claim to speak for Native American interests.

A 71-day standoff between activists and the United States government ensued, during which scores of Native activists were arrested on criminal charges such as arson and theft. Russell Means, an Oglala Lakota and one of the activist leaders prosecuted by the US government as a result of the events, stated during the Pine Ridge occupation that, “The white man says that the 1890 massacre was the end of the wars with the Indian, the end of the Ghost Dance. Yet here we are at war, we’re still Indians, and we’re Ghost Dancing again.”

The 1890 Ghost Dance was a syncretic Native American prophetic religious practice that spread throughout the West and the reservation system, in many ways uniting American Indians in a common tradition in the face of a tide of settler colonialism aimed at dispossessing many peoples. In a time of the aggressive widespread implementation of the reservation system, assimilation programs, and tragic massacres throughout the west, the Ghost Dance provided and, as this quotation shows, continued later to provide a spiritual language of resistance and solidarity.

The lasting impressions of pan-Native identity began with a Nevada-born Numu man whose message would spread across Native America and extend to this day. On January 1, 1889, the Ghost Dance prophet Wovoka experienced his first vision during a solar eclipse. He began to preach across the west and his teachings, historians have noted, were adapted by different Native peoples to incorporate traditions from any Native group. Though regional interpretations of Ghost Dance prophecies differed, some people believed that they heralded the end of Euro-American settler colonialism. Gregory Smoak, Historian of the Ghost Dance and Native identity found that an American investigator recorded a Paiute’s Ghost Dance-based belief that when, “Old Man [God] returned, all the Indians would climb up into the mountains to escape the flood that killed all the white people.”

A poster held here at the Tamiment from the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne included a similar sentiment in a run of identity politics-oriented publications during the 1970’s and 1980’s saying that, “There will come a time when we will take refuge in the mountains to escape the burning fires on the plains and there we will plan our return to that charred ground.”

Smoak argues that the Ghost Dance, the massacre at Wounded Knee, and larger continuing trends of Native American identity and ethnogenesis are inextricably linked, saying that, “The Ghost Dances and Wounded Knee have become synonymous. Yet the Ghost Dances did not necessarily lead to Wounded Knee, nor did they die there. The religion was far more than a tragic coda to the autonomous life that native peoples enjoyed before their dispossession. Ghost dances became part of a common process of identity formation that took place at different times and in different ways in Native communities across the United States.” In 1973 at Wounded Knee, AIM and the Pine Ridge activists invoked the language of the Ghost Dances to assert Native American identity and sovereignty.

On May 8, 1973, the protesters at Wounded Knee surrendered to federal officials. Trials and protests continued, but the occupation ended in a ten point treaty. The effects of Native activism from the 1960’s and 70’s, notably the continued imprisonment of AIM activist Leonard Peltier, reverberate to this day. Peltier was convicted of killing two federal officers in a standoff at Pine Ridge two years after the occupation. Activists argue that evidence was tampered with in the case and the trial itself was unfair. Peltier’s case remains a rallying point and symbol for AIM and for their supporters everywhere.