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I am a native American.
The chances are that you are, too. If you were born in the United States, you are -- by definition -- a native of this country, i.e., you did not immigrate to these shores.
This most fundamental understanding of the concept "native," of course, is not the meaning the "diversity"-devoted, politically-correct intelligentsia want you to recall. In their attempts to push their agendas upon an unsuspecting populace, the collectivists and statists continue their unremitting assaults upon our language.
Such egregious distortions as "gun violence," "assault weapons," "discrimination," wars on drugs and poverty and terrorism (that are really wars on people), and the overall blurring of concepts (or the denial that such even exist) are all designed to blunt the conceptual, i.e., cognitive, i.e., thinking tools individuals need if they hope clearly and accurately to ponder and discuss the issues of the day.
When the media and academia refer to "Native American," they are not -- as one could logically conclude -- talking about you and me. No, they inform us, they are referring to the "indigenous" peoples of this country.
But, of course, American Indians are no more "indigenous" than are you or I, i.e., neither currently living Indians nor their oh-so-distant ancestors originated in North America. Like anyone living in the United States -- whether native or immigrant -- the ancestors of American Indians emigrated, in their case, from Asia. Depending upon which research you care to believe, the ancestors of those primitive peoples may have been immigrants to Asia, as well. Some anthropologists maintain that the predecessors of us all first reached a "human" level on the plains of Africa.
What does all this wrangling over words matter? The point is really not about "respect" or "dignity" or any of those nice-sounding diversions behind which the collectivists like to hide. As such disagreements frequently do, the bottom line devolves to an issue of power...and I am not referring to that near-cliche, self-empowerment. Those who push the misnomer "Native American" seek power, i.e., coercive control, over other citizens.
One of my great-great-grandmothers or so was an American Indian. That fact and a dollar will get me a cup of coffee. Somehow I don't think that tiny bit of genetic inheritance will convince the Indians running profitable gambling operations here in Iowa to fork over a percentage of their substantial earnings. Nor should it.
There is nothing wrong in having an interest in those from whom we are descended. Genealogy can, for many, be a fun and diverting hobby that provides a wider and deeper context for appreciating those who worked so hard to create the conditions we now enjoy (or don't, as the case may be).
To rely upon a hazy or even nonexistent connection with men and women dead for thousands of years, however, in order to claim special privileges and influence today is morally and intellectually dishonest and despicable.
I want to make one thing clear: not all Indians embrace and espouse such sleazy behavior. Like those American Blacks who refuse to adopt the PC nomenclature of "African American," many Indians see through the hidden machinations of those promoting this nonsense and reject them.
But there are definitely some Indians who do champion the fiction of them as the sole representatives of "Native Americans" so they can obtain what they want.
According to a story by Brad Knickerbocker of the Christian Science Monitor News Service, Indians "are pushing for new laws that would give them what could amount to veto power over certain development projects (mining, housing, shopping malls, etc.) impacting what are considered historically sacred sites."
When I lived in Arizona, Indians combined with eco-fascists to oppose the construction of a telescope observatory atop a peak they considered "sacred." (The eco-fascists expressed concern for the safety of a squirrel species on the designated site.) Knickerbocker offers an example from near Flagstaff where Indians objected to the possibility of artificial snow being made on another "sacred" mountain. He also cites cases of Indians opposing the examination of prehistoric skeletons by anthropologists and archaeologists, maintaining that the bones are those of "ancestors" and that disinterring and studying them would amount to "desecration."
Some of the Indian activists, however, resist any investigations designed to determine if the remains were, in fact, even members of their own tribe. When one such man was asked during a television interview whether it would not be better to know for certain the origins of the skeleton, the Indian said "no." He had no desire to discover the truth. The truth might have weakened his position to dictate to others what they may or may not do.
Such reality-impaired Indians have powerful allies. For instance, United States Congressman, Nick Rahall, wants to pass national legislation to "protect" "sacred sites." He seems puzzled that "...often non-Indians have difficulty giving that same reverence to a mountain, valley, stream, or rock formation" that is afforded such things as the Sistine Chapel or steepled, country churches.
Perhaps the Congressman is conceptually unable to distinguish between something produced by human intellect, human choices, human effort and that which simply exists sans those factors in nature. Humans create value, i.e., they take the things found in nature and craft them to human purposes.
Or how about the "minor" fact that churches are owned by somebody, i.e., are property, while the natural formations and prehistoric skeletons the Indians seek to control are not owned by them?
Knickerbocker says that, "The U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld a lower-court ruling that prohibits logging of a site the Hoopa tribe in northern California considers sacred -- even though a private, nonnative person owns the land."
Property rights? Well. It hardly comes as a surprise that on a fundamental level, legal protection of property rights long ago disappeared in this country. Special interests -- especially PC-favored ones -- trump ownership on a regular basis.
Knickerbocker writes about "a growing...consensus" that we should atone for "a long history of government-sanctioned cultural, social, and economic losses" suffered by Indians. This "consensus" would sanction such laws as the one proposed by Rahall. It's an attitude with an eerily familiar ring to it.
Yes, Indians were regularly shafted by the United States government: killing innocents, stealing land, and abrogating treaties. (Though let it not be forgotten that many Indian tribes throughout the Americas committed similar kinds of offenses when they moved into previously-occupied territory.) But that sad fact of past injustices should not be used to grant present-day Indians special State-enforced favors any more than the disgrace of slavery justifies "reparations" to currently living black citizens.
But to a statist or collectivist, old transgressions by the State can only be "corrected" by the State. The pointless exercises in "reform" by communist governments or even our own affirmative action programs do nothing to dissuade statists from their folly in turning instinctively towards their idol, the State, for solace.
Given the sorry history of federal mistreatment of Indians, for the latter to seek closer ties with a government that once sought to "terminate" them is, to say the least, ironic...and yet more evidence that the real issue at stake here is not, in the words of the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, freedom "to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religions," but rather a bald attempt to violate the rights of other innocent people and coercively to impose the Indians' religious beliefs on others.
Why should the culture or beliefs or sensitivities of Indians -- or Blacks or Jews or Mormons or Druids, for that matter -- take precedence over the rights of the "mainstream" culture and especially over the property rights of landowners? Tyranny of the minority is still tyranny. Repugnant actions are no more palatable or moral if perpetrated by a small group than if conducted by a large group.
The State should take no official notice of nor legally favor one religion above another. Indians are not somehow "more equal" because of the troubled history of their ancestors. Everyone everywhere can detail outrages from the past if they look hard enough.
Indians would be much better off if they severed all ties with the United States government and truly became the independent nations they supposedly already are. Their situations would be improved even more if they simultaneously abandoned their collectivism, their statism, their mysticism.
Tribalism is barely a step up from racism. Ayn Rand described the latter as "...the most crudely primitive form of collectivism...ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage..." in which a person "is to be judged...by the character and actions of a collective of ancestors." ("Racism," Ayn Rand, in The Virtue of Selfishness.)
People who subscribe to this deterministic travesty of morality subvert reason and free will. Like Nazis and Klanners, Indians who advance tribalism are in "a quest for the unearned." Operating from a sense of innate inferiority, substituting "a tribal self-esteem" for individual confidence and worth, tribalists prosper in an era of expanding collectivism. (Quotes from "Racism.")
Today we have Indians pitted against whites, Blacks and minorities against whites, women against men, the elderly against the young, the poor against the rich, the sick and the handicapped against the healthy and the able, the envious and the lazy against the producers and the workers, the frightened against the courageous, the advocates of mysticism against the followers of reason, the lovers of the State against the defenders of freedom.
On and on, spiraling out of control, the struggles rage, with the State benefitting above all others. The warfare of group against group is a reality while the individual is relegated to the trash can of intellectual and political respectability.
The situation is a disgrace.
It is tribalism triumphant.
Knickerbocker, Brad. "More rights for sacred sites?" Arizona Daily Sun. 9/04/2002. http://www.azdailysun.com/non_sec/nav_includes/story.cfm?storyID=48108
