A Liberal
Dose
November 24,
2022
Troy D.
Smith
“Let’s be
thankful to Native Americans”
Happy Thanksgiving. I love this holiday -the chill in
the air, the comforting traditional foods, the emphasis on family.
A lot of my Native American friends are not as fond of
it, for obvious reasons, and I understand. Around this time of year I get
contacted by radio stations across the state wanting me to speak, in my
official capacity as a historian, about the origins of the holiday. I always
try to explain the political nuances of the tense relationship between the
Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Confederacy, but that always gets edited out so I
can answer the question “Yeah, but did they have pie?” This is because most
Americans only want to take a quick, surface look at history, and that only to
reinforce their feel-good myths. American Indians do not exist to them except
as artifacts frozen in amber.
But they DO exist, and are going strong. They are
about 2% of the U.S. population. That may not sound like much, but it is
slightly more than the number of Mormons, almost the number of Jewish people,
and twice the number of Muslims.
They are not just part of our past, they are part of
our present and our future. And we owe them a lot. We owe them for all the
contributions their cultures have made to our own. We owe them for all the
agreements our ancestors made with them, all the promises broken. We owe them
for all the contributions they continue to make. Did you know that Native
American Indians are, by proportion, the group with the highest volunteer
military enlistment in every American war for the past century? I am thankful
for Native America, today and every day. We all should be.
There are several ways to show that gratitude. One is
by learning about their history and culture, and appreciating it. Another is by
honoring them. There’s a caveat to that last one, though. If you choose to
honor Native Americans -without asking them -in a way that most of them find
offensive, you are not honoring them at all. It is not really about them, then,
it is about you and what you want. For example, most every indigenous person I
know is offended by their image being used as a sports mascot. Especially
“redskin,” that one is the very worst. It is an insult equivalent to the
n-word. Yet there are still schools in Tennessee that use it.
Another way to show gratitude to American Indians is
by learning about their present-day concerns and issues, and doing our part to
support them. Did you know that until the 1970s Native children were still
being taken from their parents and sent to boarding schools where they were not
allowed to practice their culture, and where many died, or to orphanages where
they were adopted out against their parents’ wishes? Did you know Native
Americans were not free to fully practice their traditional religions until the
1970s, or that many states prevented them from voting well into the 1960s? Did
you know that indigenous women are far, far more likely to be abducted, raped,
and/or murdered than women from any other group -primarily because tribal
police have no authority over non-Natives who come onto the reservation and
commit such crimes? Did you know the Supreme Court recently reversed two
hundred years of precedent and gave the state of Oklahoma criminal jurisdiction
over reservations, or that a case is working its way to the court that would
reverse the 1970s law that ended the practice of taking Indian children away
from their tribes and putting them up for adoption?
Native Americans are not our mascots, or our Halloween
costumes. They are our brothers and sisters, our fellow citizens. We may not be
personally responsible for what happened to them in the past -but we can stand
with them in the present.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
Thanks for posting this
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