What’s next in Indian Country #2

I thought I should follow up the last blog post, a musing—and hope—that there will be Natives sprinkled across government no matter the new regime. And I should have added that the sprinkling will be in local and state as well as the national government, and that the watering of Native knowledge and values will continue to go beyond government.

Why?

The fine work of the Biden appointees in high positions will leave a mark. Many Natives they brought into government and programs they started and fostered will still be here. Read Rich’s Post →

Indigenous Peoples’ Day

I and my peers grew up with Columbus Day, not a big holiday, unless you lived in an Italian neighborhood, but a middle of the run holiday that meant bank closures and a day off from school. There was little thinking about it—beyond hackneyed stereotypes of Columbus landing in the
“new world,” and thus “discovering” America.Read Rich’s Post →

Vanishing Indians and Wounded Knee

There’s a new history book that is rattling across the best seller lists. It’s a collection of essays called Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies about Our Past. There are 20 chapters on everything from “American Exceptionalism” to the “New Deal” and the “Southern Strategy.” The third chapter is “Vanishing Indians.”Read Rich’s Post →

“Caste” omits Indians

I’m half-way through Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, and while the writing is superb, and the argument that Caste is a more accurate description and useful tool than Race is in assessing American history, I am once again disappointed in a major historical text that does not directly address Indians in America.Read Rich’s Post →

Assimilation of African Americans and American Indians—some notes for discussion

One of the first axioms of White-Indian relations I remember hearing from Alvin Josephy was that from the moment Europeans hit the North American shore, indigenous peoples had three choices: they could move away; they could become white; or they could die. Assimilation—becoming white—has been the alternative favored most often by governments and by popular opinion. Read Rich’s Post →