The move to strip Native Americans of their birthright citizenship has become quiet as the administration carries on campaigns to punish black and brown people of other places in other ways. The Indian issue seems to have gone away or never been—as Trump and Musk move on quickly to other people of color in myriad ways:
The campaign promise of a border war and the mass removal of the undocumented is exercised with ICE visits to homes and schools, the removal of protesting students, the enlargement of Guantanamo and other holding facilities, and the ongoing removal of thousands of Hatians and 700,000 Venezuelans who will lose their Temporary Protective Status in April. Visas and plane tickets for the Afghanis who worked for the US through years of war have been revoked.
The purging of special recognition at the Pentagon of Black and Brown heroes, and of notable women of all colors is new news as all notions of equity and inclusion are erased from the Defense Department. “References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and the first women to pass Marine infantry training are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content,” according to a database obtained by The Associated Press.
Shutting off USAID aid for AIDS in many African countries is already, as NY Times columnist Nicolas Kristoff tells us, killing people, and the death numbers are likely to rise to the millions of Black Africans in a few short years.
The special refugee status offered white South Africans contrasts starkly with the victims of AIDS and other infectious diseases who will die. And the $5 million Visa leading to quick citizenship paints the new Trump World as rich and white.
The Trump world sees Gaza as a new Mediterranean resort, presumably for the affluent whites of America and some favored places in Europe and the British Isles—or as a space for new Israeli settlements. Both requiring the removal of 1.5 or 2 million brown Palestinians. Note that Netanyahu and most of the power in Israel is in the hands of Jews of European ancestry, and not those of the browner Jews who have lived in the Middle East and North Africa centuries longer.
Whatever else is going on in the world, the fear of “replacement” seems to be a primary factor in the Trump-Musk dismemberments of public programs and private efforts towards diversifying the work force and promoting equity in education and society. It’s only a few years ago that we started hearing about a “tipping point” in US demographics that will occur when whites become a majority minority. What is happening seems a desperate operation out of fear by white America, especially male white America.
And Native Americans are troubling. They are not white or considered white, although many over centuries have assimilated and hidden Native ancestry until recently, when the country’s majority has in large part embraced Native cultures and expressed guilt over an often vicious past. Now, many presumably white Americans claim a Cherokee or other tribal grandmother. And, in fact, there is rumor or research that says that any family that has been in the country for some long length of time, say 200 or 300 years, is bound to have Indian blood. (We don’t say that about Black blood, although the stories of the offspring of masters and slaves go back to Jefferson.)
Indians are once again in the middle, not white, but admired by many, as they were by the French philosopher Jacques Rousseau, who called them “noble savages,” or by the hippies of the 60s and 70s, who were often called “wannabe Indians” with their beads, feathers, and sweats.
Today, I think, Tribes and Tribal people are admired in a more knowing way. Native Americans have held onto language and customs as much as they have, against policies and leaders bent on destroying them. It’s amazing that they hold small pieces of their once enormous land bases still, that wars, lies, and allotment policies did not obliterate land tenure. And Interesting because we have finally—finally—admitted that original peoples KNEW things about land, water, and fellow creatures. That a hundred years of Euro-American forestry practices have left us on fire’s edge. That we are coming to see that salmon are part of an intricate ecosystem that can—if we let it—sustain us all.
On the one hand a multi-colored world that has deep problems with water, weather, hunger, immigration, and fights over old lands in too few hands. On the other a technological world that has produced relatively few—although the US now counts 750 billionaires—very rich mostly white men, and a country that finds millions of white men and some white women worried that their grandchildren might be black or brown.
And in the middle, holding onto firmer ground and culture than they have held for centuries, are Native Americans, envied and even feared still for their knowledge, their history, and their place in an America that some imagine—but know it’s not true—has always been white.
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