Steven Newcomb: Focusing on the independence of our nations

Attend a local pow wow and you’re definitely going to hear quite a bit of patriotic fervor expressed toward the United States. This patriotism is being expressed toward the very same country that has imposed a well designed system of domination on our nations, and thereby deprived us of the use of the vast majority of our traditional territories, massacred our ancestors, stolen Native children from our families, our communities, and our nations, worked to destroy our languages, cultures, and spiritual traditions, etc. After all that mistreatment, oppression, and destruction, how sad that most of our own people never focus on the original independence of our nations.

That colonized peoples end up feeling deeply patriotic toward the empire that colonized them is, unfortunately, a fairly typical result of the psychological damage inflicted by colonialism. It is doubtful that those expressing that patriotism are particularly aware of or care that it was an American empire that George Washington, John Marshall and other elite white men of their time were envisioning and creating. That empire has been used in a successful effort to overrun the lands and territories of our nations (See Richard Van Alstyne’s The Rising American Empire, 1962).

I never hear the original independence of our original nations acknowledged or recognized at pow wows. Perhaps this is because the American empire has worked so hard to rub out and expunge our original independence from our own hearts and minds. To expunge is “to treat or cause to be treated as nonexistent.” How did Chief Justice John Marshall and the rest of the U.S. Supreme Court start treating the original independence of our nations as nonexistent?