Different Peoples but a Common Cause With the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, former professor Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma notes the historical oppression that both blacks and Natives share: After the Civil War enabled the defeat of the Plains Indians, the promise of freedom for African slaves died with Abraham Lincoln and with the neutering of the 14th Amendment by the Supreme Court. The promise of an Indian Territory for the “civilized” Indians died with Oklahoma statehood in 1907. Henry Dawes had passed the General Allotment Act in 1887 to destroy common landholding among Indians and enable vast tracts of formerly reservation land to be declared “surplus.” The Dawes Act destroyed tribal economies and put Indians who had previously been prosperous back under the economic thumb of white settlers. This economic raw deal for blacks and Indians continued to be enabled by color prejudice. Indians could often “pass” after three generations of exogamy; blacks remained subject to the “one drop rule.” It was economically convenient for the settlers that one drop of black blood rendered a person black and fit only for manual labor. It was similarly convenient that any intermarriage by Indians rendered the offspring white, and therefore ineligible for what compensation was offered when Indians were separated from their property. Because of tribal traditions, this never blossomed into a “reverse one drop rule,” but the federal government did what it could by using Indian blood quantum to determine which tribal citizens would “qualify” to sell their allotments. This was American prosperity: labor stolen from Africans bringing wealth from land stolen from Indians, peoples who were kept at the bottom of the education and economic ladders with the easy metric of color prejudice, and kept from doing anything about it at the ballot box with laws that declared them unfit to vote. bit.ly/13Pdezi 0
Posted on: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 21:59:18 +0000
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