Six on Native Americans: A Killing at Donkey Creek; Trump takes a hard line on tribal health care; The Brutal Origins of Gun
philip panaritis
A Killing at Donkey Creek
Jimmy Smith-Kramer, a basketball legend on the Quinault Nation reservation, was 20 when he was mowed down by a white man in a pickup truck. The decision not to charge a hate crime, and recent talk of a plea deal, has re-opened ancient wounds.
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"This week, the Trump administration made the remarkable step of asserting that tribal citizens should be required to have a job before receiving tribal health care assistance. Several states are seeking to force the requirement on tribal health care systems that have always operated within their sovereign nations. The Trump administration contends that tribal members should be considered a race, not a political class, as courts have always viewed them, and should not be exempted from state regulations, Politico reported on Sunday.
"Native Americans, she said, had themselves been enslaved, even before African-Americans, and the two groups “were enslaved for approximately 150 years in tandem.” It wasn’t until the mid 18th-century that the bondage of Native Americans began to wane as Africans were imported in greater and greater numbers. Increasingly, where white colonists viewed Africans as little more than mindless beasts of burden, they saw Native Americans as something more: “noble savages,” unrefined but courageous and fierce.
Perversely, Native American ownership of black slaves came about as a way for Native Americans to illustrate their societal sophistication to white settlers. “They were working hard to comply with government dictates that told native people that in order to be protected and secure in their land base, they had to prove their level of ‘civilization,’” Miles explained.
How would slave ownership prove civilization? The answer, Miles contends, is that in capitalism-crazed America, slaves became tokens of economic success. The more slaves you owned, the more serious a businessperson you were, and the more serious a businessperson you were, the fitter you were to join the ranks of “civilized society.” It’s worth remembering, as Paul Chaat Smith says, that while most Native Americans did not own slaves, neither did most Mississippi whites. Slave ownership was a serious status symbol."
