Racism is an ugly social disease, not unique to America, but still as powerful and evil as ever in the lives of many Native Americans. Racism is a self-inflicted debilitating affliction seeking to deprive one group of people of their humanity over the self-assumed superior humanity of another. America has suffered from this disease long before its founding and continues today, despite the best attempts of government and institution to overcome it. For Native Americans, racism continues to ravage the humanity aboriginal people. It remains ugly, unabated and an relatively uncensored in a society where stereotype and myth have become cast in concrete imagery and denial.
The roots of racism against Native Americans are, perhaps not as well known as one may think. While America's love for tradition dictates a ritual of thanksgiving feast every year, replete with Puritan folklore and Indian caricature, for Native Americans, the feast is sullied by the Puritan massacre of the Pequod Indians, in the so-called Pequod war. Mostly forgotten in accounts of our nation's early history, the Puritans of the Massachusetts and Plymouth Colonies combined their forces, surrounded the sleeping Indian village and ruthlessly proceeded to slaughter the men, women and children. Those they didn't murder in the name of God, they enslaved.
European enslavement of aboriginal people wasn't as unusual an occurrence as one might think. As early as 1502, the Spanish governor of Hispaniola at that time, Don Nicholas de Orvando, had prepared a fleet of thirty ships bearing stolen gold and aboriginal slaves for sail back to Spain. After the fleet set sail, 25 sank in the winds of a Hurricane somewhere between the straits of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Over the coming centuries, the Spanish conquerors ravaged the islands and their inhabitants, doing the same to the Inca and other indigenous nations throughout Central and South America. Little remains of these once great nations, and much of the truth remains buried forever in social prisons of denial.
English and French racism towards the Native American Tribes continued throughout the colonial period. As the Monarchies of France and England grappled with each other over who would rule the world, Native Americans, especially the powerful Iroquois, Huron and many other nations were forced into a deadly struggle for survival. French and English governors and their proxies alike manipulated the Iroquois Confederacy into a deadly game of choosing sides. Behind the treachery of the French was the formidable Catholic Church. Likewise, the English colonial governments were motivated by the ambitions of wealthy trading companies and their belief in divine conquest and supremacy.
The American Revolutionary war threw off the shackles of monarchy and gave rise to democratic principles characterized by the sharing of power among a union of independent states. Not knowing what to do with the Indian nations, the government simply left the matter to the congress to decide. Slavery was accepted as a necessary condition for growth and prosperity and continued until the question was ultimately decided at great expense to society through civil warfare.
Following the Civil War, Native Americans, already relegated to reserved lands created through a series of land-grabbing treaties, were successfully compartmentalized and left to the whims of an unconcerned and expansion minded congress. In 1869, President Grant created the Board of Indians Commission. Comprised of a group of self-serving evangelical Christians, the Board was intended to oversee corrupt Indian Agents, government appointed administrators responsible for the care and feeding of their new government wards. At the time, there were 73 different Indian Agencies struggling themselves to balance the demands of white settlers with the desperate needs of the impoverished Indian nations.
Thirteen different Christian denominations were given nearly absolute administrative power over the reservations, many of which had previously been (mostly) converted to Catholicism. The heart and soul of Indian humanity were nearly stomped out by this time, as Indian ceremonies, language, culture and identity were supplanted, sometimes by force, by the fire of Christianity, greed and hatred. The Catholics responded by creating their own Indian Commission.
As a result, Indian Residential Schools throughout the United States and Canada began to experiment with the mind and spirits of thousands of aboriginal children. What followed was decades of mental, emotional and sexual abuse of innocent children accompanied by the devastation of Indian humanity back on the reservations. Ultimately, after over a hundred years of shame, the experiment ended. Today, the government of Canada has recognized its role and responsibility for this great tragedy. In the United States, Indians are still stereotypical vestiges of their grand history, largely dismissed from the national consciousness until the annual thanksgiving feast in November rolls around.
Racism can take many forms, the cruelest of which is ignorance accompanied by willful neglect. Racism thrives when it is silent, and it spreads quickly when it becomes the mantra of greedy administrators and corporations. It comes in many disguises and forms, the latest being a horror called "ethnic cleansing" by a traumatically stressed media. For Native Americans, racism has relentlessly tried to redefine aboriginal humanity for half a millennium, without success. Racism cannot stand in the face of history and truth.
Sources: Emanual, Kerry. Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes. 2005. Oxford University Press: New York