Social Justice for Indigenous Americans
Many of the people I talk to are very concerned with social justice. I hear a lot of talk about racial justice, gender justice, and sexual justice. I don’t hear a lot of talk about social justice for Indigenous Americans.
When the Indigenous American problems do reach a wider audience, it’s normally about something like Halloween costumes or the Washington Football Team. While I would agree that those are issues, they pale in comparison to the much larger problems that Indigenous Americans face. These problems are so large that it is a bit surprising how little they are discussed.
Racial justice is often seen as the single biggest social justice issue in the United States. The extreme wealth gap, fueled by and in addition to the mass incarceration that disproportionately targets Black Americans alone marks racial justice as a major topic, even before discussing the very recent and historic extreme deprivation of Black Americans of their life, liberty, and property. Similarly, gender justice is regarded as a big deal because of the grand historical nature of patriarchy — the social system where men are the head and women follow — in Western societies. In their 1869 book The Subjection of Women, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill observed that women have been forced into such subjection that it’s impossible to say that they wouldn’t equal men if given the freedom to develop their capabilities. While we’re in a much better place with regards to gender justice than the Mills were, we aren’t quite there yet. Complementarian ideas which accord primacy to men are still common, and for many Americans it’s not too important to them if women and men have equal rights.
The problems Indigenous Americans historically have had and presently have rival racial justice and gender justice in magnitude. Indigenous American tribes were victims of genocide in the European colonization of the Americas. Christopher Columbus himself led mass rape and murder of Indigenous Americans. The Trail of Tears in the 19th century forced many tribes out of their homes and led to the deaths of thousands of Indigenous Americans, simply because the U.S. government wanted to take over where they were currently living. Boarding schools across the country intended to “kill the Indian [to] save the man” aimed to blot out any trace of Indigenous culture, forcing them to cut their hair, take on American names, speak English, and adhere to Christianity. This is only a very short summary of the immense cruelties that Indigenous Americans have historically faced.
Such devastation could only be fixed in two centuries with a concerted campaign, and there has been no national desire to do so. Today, Indigenous Americans face incredible impoverishment: About a third of Indigenous Americans live in poverty, compared to the national average of around 10% pre-COVID. Over half of the people in some reservations are unemployed, and Indigenous American reservations frequently appear in lists of the poorest counties in the United States. Violence against Indigenous women is astronomically high: Around one in three Indigenous women will be raped, and very few will find justice. (I actually found the inspiration for this article when reading about sexual assault among transgender people. Well over half of Indigenous American transgender people were sexually assaulted or subject to intimate partner violence in their lifetime, a greater rate than any other ethnic or racial group.) Indigenous Americans are also wildly overrepresented in prisons; in South Dakota, for example, 9% of the population is Indigenous American, but 29% of the incarcerated population is Indigenous American.
This is just a snapshot of some of the problems that Indigenous Americans face. So long as people in general and political leaders in particular do not care about Indigenous problems, it will be very difficult to make serious headway. A prime example of how little people in power care is McGirt v. Oklahoma. 5 justices, a slim majority, ruled that because Congress established that much of Eastern Oklahoma is a Indigenous reservation, and it never reversed this, it has to be treated like a Indigenous reservation. The remaining 4 justices dissented, saying that it would be too much trouble to follow the law, and nobody’s followed it anyways so why should we? This complete lack of respect for Indigenous Americans is a common attitude, and it helps perpetuate their current troubles.
Indigenous American issues are a big deal. They stand alongside racial justice and gender justice as massive problems longing for prompt responses. It’s past time that we start caring about them.