Honest politics practiced between the Indian nations and the colonists must always be, or should always be, coalition politics. This is necessary not only because we are less than one per cent of the US population, but also because we are not now and never have been a united one per cent, more’s the pity. Our most obvious partners are the mainstream civil rights movement, mostly African-American, and that’s why the Cherokee Nation’s actions in revoking the citizenship of the Cherokee freedmen is politically disastrous as well as morally reprehensible. This would be true even if, by unilaterally abrogating a treaty obligation, the Cherokee Nation did not license the countless abrogations to which we have been subjected. We have much in common with Hispanics from Latin America as well, as they have been subject to legal disadvantages and their blood is about eighty per cent indigenous. The Hispanics of Spain or Portugal, not so much. Like all persons subject to color prejudice, we sometimes turn it around to demonize the aniyonega, to claim we have no friends among the colonists. That’s simply not so, and never was so.Get the Story:
Steve Russell: How Many Minorities Make a Majority? (Indian Country Today 6/18)
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