Charles Trimble: Racism should be behind us all in Indian Country

Monday, November 8, 2010

In the November 3, 2010, issue of Indian Country Today I read a very interesting and moving column by Dr Shonda Buchanan, whose ancestry includes Choctaw, titled “Being a Black Indian at a Chickahominy Pow Wow.” She tells of an interesting custom or regulation at the Chickahominy Pow-Wow that allows only persons carrying a “tribal card” to participate in the dances.

Not having such a card as she danced, three Indian men, presumably of the Chickahominy Tribe, very rudely accosted Ms Buchanan, and the circumstances she describes suggest racism rather than merely tribal pow-wow rules or custom.

There is, to be sure, much racism in Indian country, mostly against Blacks, although it is also against whites and mixed bloods of marginal Indian blood quantum. There is also discrimination against members of non federally-recognized tribal groups, and this is often based on Negroid features of some of their members.

Some of the racism against mixed-bloods on the part of full-bloods or traditionalists is more resentment than anything – resentment over mixed-bloods getting the lions share of opportunities set aside for Indians generally. Racism against Blacks lingers from portrayal of Blacks in movies and books.

For example, at the Indian boarding school I attended on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the 1940s and 50s, some of us high school boys put on a minstrel show. It was a typical minstrel show, the format of which we had gotten from some movie. There was Mister Interlocutor, of course, who wore a top hat and was the boss and the emcee. The rest of us were all in black face makeup. Our small jazz band, in black face also, was called “the Darktown Strutters.”

The show was a hit, not only at the school but also in several villages on the reservation. I recall one show held by lantern light because the electric generator was down.

We didn’t see ourselves as racist, and we hadn’t meant to be racist. But we thought nothing of making fun of the accents and features we thought were typical of Black people. But now we recognize that that is racism, especially when it was so ingrained and common that we never gave it much thought.

Actually, back in the 1940s and 50s, we didn’t give much thought to the grunting stereotypes of American Indians, and how the movies made them look dumb and vulnerable and always the losers. When all that gets so deeply embedded in society, that is real racism of the dirtiest kind – the kind we experienced in the reservation border towns or in cities where numbers of Indian people came to find work.

As Indian people, we tend to see ourselves on the lower rungs of society’s pecking order or, more likely, the food chain of bigotry. But we ourselves see others as beneath us. And we never see ourselves as bigots, although too often that’s what we are. As victims of discrimination down the years, we don’t see our own racist bias. Us Indians racist? You’re crazy!

I have been bothered by the disenfranchisement last year of the Freedmen from the Western band of the Cherokee in Oklahoma. I have refrained, like we too often do in the Indian press, from expressing dismay at this unfortunate decision on the part of the Cherokee nation leaders.

It was my fear – or my excuse – of compromising the outcome of legal actions against the Cherokee Tribe, or of jeopardizing their sovereignty, and the sovereignty of all tribes down the line. But that should not keep any journalist worth his salt from speaking out against what bothers him or her as racist or otherwise wrong.

I have studied the circumstances following the Great Civil War that forced the Cherokees to put their emancipated black slaves on their tribal rolls. This was done as punishment for the very effective actions of Cherokee militia in the ill-fated Southern cause. No consideration was given by the North to the fact that many Cherokees died fighting against the South and even against their brothers in the Confederate Cherokee militia. Clearly it was not the Federal Government’s right to force the Tribe to accept freed slaves or anyone on its rolls; it was an invasion of the Cherokee’s sovereignty.

But I still think the latent action to disenfranchise the Freedmen was wrong. Although politically it took some polish off the Native American cause by showing that we are just as hard as the whites when it comes to race. More importantly, I feel it was morally wrong – racist, if you will. Sovereignty is a powerful thing, not a fragile state of purity. But sovereignty can and should have “soul.”

True, as a sovereign nation, the Tribe alone determines its qualifications for individual membership. But it can accept anybody as a member, and that person or group of persons alone become part of its citizenship – no one else. And the Tribe can do this without losing any of its sovereign rights. Many Tribes have done so, albeit accepting mostly whites into the Tribe.

Racism has shown its ugliness in the 1960s and 70s when small tribes in the Eastern United States began to demand recognition by the Federal Government. There can be little or no question that they are tribal groups of Indian people who have endured over the years despite their abandonment and displacement by the expanding nation. They have kept precious stories and customs of their ancestors, and have carefully pieced them together.

But in their quest for recognition, most of the small tribes were opposed by leaders of larger federally-recognized tribes; whose opposition was based ostensibly on the rationale that the federal budget was already too small to serve the recognized tribes, let alone adding new ones. But much of the underlying reason was racism. Some of the small eastern tribes were ridiculed with jokes about Negroid facial features of some of their members. There was a standing joke that the flag song of one of the larger unrecognized tribes was “Short’nin’ Bread.”

Indian Country racism is something that we should recognize and do something about, just as we have fought the age old battles against racism in the border towns just off the reservations, and in the cities where many of our people went as part of the federal relocation program. Racism is beneath us, or should be.

Years ago, I was told a story by an alumnus of one of the Oklahoma Indian boarding schools about an old Black man who worked as a janitor at the school. Some of the older students called him “Midnight” because he was so dark. One day he had had enough, and he called the young men over and gently told them, “You, know, I never liked being called Midnight, and I wish you wouldn’t do it anymore. After all, you guys are all about 11:30 PM yourselves.” Thereafter, I am told, he was called by his surname, with Mister at the front.

There’s a wonderful lesson in that story.

Charles “Chuck” Trimble, Oglala Lakota, was principal founder of the American Indian Press Association in 1970, and served as Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians from 1972-78. He may be reached at cchuktrim@aol.com. His website is iktomisweb.com.