Finding the American dream on the bodies of Indians and immigrants
By Professor Elizabeth Cook-LynnNative Sun News Today Columnist
nativesunnews.today In spite of the attack by the current administration on people coming across borders there is nothing new about this hostility toward immigration in the U. S. It’s just that the Trump administration has taken it to new heights. In truth, Indian Nations lived on this continent for thousands of years and were among the first to look upon the influx of strangers (immigration) with hostility and anger. And to study the events of how Europeans came into Indian country may help us toward understanding our present dilemma with Mexico. It is not that newcomers have always been prowling new lands with violence in their hearts. It’s not that ways of newcomers are instinctively disruptive. It is what they do after they get to a new place, how they look upon what they find in their new circumstances and how they handle their unaccountable and persistent aggressions toward those with long placed histories. Historical records are full of transgressions that tell us transitions brought about through immigration are filled with awful responsibilities for both the newcomers and the indigenes. Today, Americans are looking at our current president and his “base”, and are resentful of their commentaries and actions about who got here first and what our national origins might have meant, who deserves what. Indian people in this country more than most have struggled for three hundred years with the reality of how the mixture of “unassimilable and disharmonic races” has gone against the echoes of any claimed possibilities. For most of the U. S. tribal people there is the recognition that the brown people from the southern hemisphere have always been crossing borders and not until the US claimed homelands by law and war has the stirring we see now gotten smug, sacrificial.
History matters. For historians who look back into the 1920’s, as just one small example of how the influx of newcomers can cause great argument, it was in those our early years of the 20thcentury when our parents and grandparents were living sparingly and precariously, many of them jobless and impoverished, there was little support for the notion that the new America could say to other nations “bring me your poor.” Neither could US politicians agree that a true democracy could live up to that mantra of what is often called the “American Dream” though they continue to give it lip service. Why do you suppose churches became sects and KKK rose? Even a brief study of Indian History of that era is revealing. It shows what happens when Immigration and Democracy and Colonization and Aggressive Christianity become the watchwords for a national policy of White Supremacy. Who knew that these four seemingly patriotic strategies would set up barriers to “the American dream” an ideology of dominance in a so-called democratic world? Who knew that in the face of these overwhelming powers and strategies, the liberties of a new world would face a dangerous new radicalism based in ignorance? In the 1920’s, there was the possibility that great forces would forever divide the people of this country. To achieve justice much of the growing population of newcomers paid little attention to what was really happening to treaty tribes in the West. Displacement. Extinction of Indian economic strength (killing resources and environment.) Constant conflict and war. Insight into these extraordinary moments in American History are only now becoming understood as indispensable elements in future developments of what newcomers desired to become a great country of their own making. Many events come to mind, but it was during those years that a most notorious, unconstitutional and racist legislation called The Dawes Severalty Act was passed in the US Congress. This legislation furthered the notion that solemn treaties with the first nations could be ignored, the theft of thousands of acres of Indian homelands could be said to be legalized “for the common good,” and the people of the first nations could be forever made beggars in their own homelands. It paved the way for Statehood as elitist ideology.
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