Chief Arvol Looking Horse, the 19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe and a spiritual leader of the Sioux Nation, offers a prayer at the U.S. Supreme Court on December 7, 2015. Photo by Indianz.Com
Did anyone ever tell you that tribes lost all of their lands after being "defeated" in wars? Or that they lived in "primitive" societies? Even the U.S. Supreme Court perpetuates stereotypes and myths about indigenous peoples, Steve Russell, a member of the Cherokee Nation observes:
[Justice John] Marshall offends me not when he makes up a story, but when he makes up facts. The “facts” he makes up have little relationship to the truth. The U.S. was never “the conqueror” of all Indian tribes because it was never at war with all tribes. As important, Marshall rests his story on the fiction that all Indians were hunter-gatherers. Had Marshall not made up the story he did, he would still have to make up some story, because the case needed decision. What story would or could be told by a storyteller tethered to the truth? Instead of Indians as bloodthirsty savages who took war as their idea of a good time, he could have adopted the modern stereotype that Indians were innocent of the whole idea of land titles. That one is as nonsensical as all Indians as defeated warriors. The biggest obstacle to crafting one story to govern Indian land titles is that no such story existed that could account for all the facts on the ground. History is chock full of incidents where colonists told to buy the land from the Indians went out and paid the first Indians they found in the vicinity. Sometimes those Indians were in fact hunter-gatherers who were just passing though and more than happy to accept the gifts offered in exchange for not molesting some farmers they had no plans to molest in the first place. There were more sinister transactions where settlers would bribe Indians who had no standing in tribal government to sign away land.Get the Story:
Steve Russell: The Limits of Counterfactuals: What If? (Indian Country Today 8/6)
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