Native Privilege
Native Americans have experienced a great deal of historic tragedy, but that does not merit extraordinarily special treatment in the present.
There are many things which, in the modern progressive worldview, are the original sins of the United States of America: chattel slavery, racism, imperialism, militarism, and more. But perhaps the one with the most actual historical backing is the treatment of American Indians by the European colonists and their descendants. To be clear, I do not buy the idea that Native Americans were actors without agency in this conflict, nor do I believe that the large-scale depopulation faced by the continent’s pre-contact inhabitants should be considered a genocide. The first is disproven by the multisided melees that characterized the complex relations between settlers and natives, while the second is shown to be untrue by the fact of novel disease transmission – something not understood by either party at the time.
Despite the falsity of these major claims, there is some truth to the idea that American Indians have been ill-treated by our nation in the past. We have broken treaties, forced internal migrations, and engaged in shady dealmaking. None of these are good, even if they are not as evil as what progressives contend. Making amends for these wrongs and treating Native groups as equal members of American society is what has been and will continue to be done. It is also key to deal with official tribes as the semi-independent nations they are – hence the treaty-making. All of these things are happening and have been for decades. This has been a bipartisan effort through the legislature, the executive branch, and the courts. In fact, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Republican appointee, has been one of the most stalwart defenders of Native treaty rights in the entire judiciary.
But this is not enough for progressives, who seem to want to undo centuries of history and return to an idyllic pre-contact utopia that never existed. In support of that quest, they are using government and cultural institutions to privilege American Indians in a manner that cements them at the tippy-top of the intersectional hierarchy and caters fawningly to their every desire.
This obsession on the political left with a conjured ideal of the Native – primitive yet genius, pacifistic in the extreme, living in bountiful harmony with the environment and each other, being fully in communion with the natural forces that move the universe itself – is not at all new. It goes at least as far back as the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that the natural state of mankind was one of total concord and perfection, sullied by the development of Western civilization. His view was one of unbridled, deeply naïve, optimism about the human condition, which has characterized the progressive movement ever since. [This is contrary to the Hobbesian (and conservative) view of the intrinsic state of nature as a war of all against all, one in which human life is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” Let the reader decide which is more compelling.]
Evidence for Rousseau’s contention was marshaled from the New World and its indigenous inhabitants, often portrayed as the archetypal ‘noble savages’ whose values and societies were purportedly the most natural and moral in existence. This claim, however, is utterly false. Native Americans had complex civilizations that involved broad abstractions from the natural world, if not outright manipulation thereof. Groups like the Maya, Azteca, and Iroquois were just as societally innovative as were Europeans in terms of their governance structures, religious rituals, civilizational lore, and intercultural politics. They were often far more bloodthirsty than their European contemporaries, engaged in chronic and brutal intertribal warfare, and forcibly subjugated their weaker neighbors – in the case of the Azteca, often ritually sacrificing them (we have the skull pyramids to prove it). And their ability to adopt novel technologies for warfare was truly astounding: just look at the rapidity by which the Comanche became expert horsemen and gunslingers. Clearly, these are not “noble savages,” but humans just like the rest of us.
American Indians aren’t any different from anyone else – whether in 1493, 1799, or 2024. Modern leftists, despite the plethora of evidence to the contrary, disagree. In their progressive worldview, Native Americans are not only special, they’re downright sacred.
This has come up over and over again in the recent past, particularly since the so-called ‘racial reckoning’ of 2020. Over the past few years, the leftist reverence for indigenous peoples (note: offer does not apply to Israeli Jews) has kicked into overdrive. Tropes that had previously been siloed on the esoteric fringes of the Academy moved into relatively mainstream discourse. Land acknowledgments – without any action on return, naturally – became necessary before every corporate meeting or academic seminar. North America has been rechristened “Turtle Island” to privilege indigenous parlance. So-called ‘Indigenous Ways of Knowing’ have been taught as legitimate science, despite the fact that they are entirely unscientific. These ridiculous virtue signals adopt the vagaries of indigenous religion, often claiming that the pre-contact tribes lived in their land since “time immemorial.” Those exact words have been repeated ad nauseum by politicians, professors, and pundits who seek to ingratiate themselves with the leftist blob and the few Native Americans who make a living off of progressive guilt.
But these magical words aren’t actually magical at all; they’re not even historically correct. They completely ignore the fact that the tribes which ‘owned’ the land immediately prior to European contact often conquered it from other tribes, sometimes only a few years earlier. The “time immemorial” claim is a directly spiritual one, taken from oral legends and native religion. “Time immemorial” isn’t a thing in a scientific or historic world; if we argue that Young Earth Creationists are silly for believing that Earth is a mere 6,000 years old, we should not accept even more bogus claims from a different minority group. Even if one takes the claim at face value, it is incorrect. Genetic and archaeological evidence shows that modern Native American populations were not the first humans on the American continents, displacing the original inhabitants about 15,000 years ago after migrating across the Bering Strait from Asia.
In the leftist worldview, indigenous peoples are the perfect antithesis of what they despise about Western society: egalitarian versus hierarchical, pacifist versus militarist, environmentalist versus destructive, anti-capitalist versus capitalist, oppressed versus oppressor. Again, these are factually lacking. Native societies were just as hierarchical and militarist as their European contemporaries, engaging in widespread internecine warfare under the auspices of powerful chieftains. They engaged in significant trade before European contact and completely depopulated “Turtle Island” of the unique megafauna that lived in the Americas before modern Native Americans crossed the Bering land bridge. The most egregious of these claims comes with respect to the popular oppressor/oppressed binary that progressives seem to live by. Native atrocities, like large-scale massacres of neighboring tribes and literal towers of skulls are ignored or questioned, while the supposed crimes of white settlers are exaggerated or invented entirely.
A major controversy in Canada exemplifies this specific sacralization of indigenous peoples and their histories. You probably read the breathless coverage in mainstream outlets back in 2020 and 2021, including this headline in the New York Times: “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.” Claims by indigenous activists and their handpicked academic followers were the only evidence for the horrific accusations of a mass murder cover-up against Catholic faithful who ran government-sponsored residential schools for Native peoples. There were abuses in these schools, including insufficient sanitation, poor medical care, corporal punishment, and sexual violence, but the issues were similar to those found in other rural communities, if more profound. And none of these abuses were the deliberate covering up of mass child death.
Despite that, this allegation became The Truth within no time at all. Those who questioned the veracity of these wild claims were labeled “denialists” and “deniers” so as to align them with the antisemites who deny the Holocaust. Canada canceled its national day festivities, flew its flag at half-mast for nearly a whole year, and made obsequious apologies to the entire Native community for causing its ‘genocide’. The problem for this narrative is that (thank God) it isn’t even remotely true. Yeoman’s work has been done by actual journalists to debunk these spurious claims, showing conclusively that: 1) there have been no graves discovered, merely some underground anomalies caught on ground-penetrating radar, 2) residential schools kept good track of their charges, making hidden mass death an unfathomable possibility, and 3) Native parents cared for their children and chose to send them to these schools.
Have Western media outlets, the Canadian government, or indigenous activists repudiated their false claims? Of course not. That would undermine their narrative, which is far too important to be bothered with trivial little things like facts and evidence.
Just in the past few weeks, we have seen even more examples of the unique, spiritual reverence granted to indigenous peoples by progressives in government, cultural institutions, and academia. These events cement the idea that Native Americans are deserving of special treatment and should be given superior status whenever their parochial group interests – as defined by the permanent activist class, obviously – are even remotely implicated.
The first is a story that particularly peeved me, as it has to do with some of my favorite places on the planet: historical museums. According to new rules and regulations promulgated by the largely unaccountable federal bureaucracy, museums and other cultural institutions may not display, handle, research, or study Native American cultural artifacts without the express consent of specific tribal leaders. This means that activists have total control over what is viewed, studied, learned, and taught about indigenous cultures in the United States. They can shape the narrative at their whim, refusing to allow warlike items to be displayed, for instance, to undermine the truth of internecine indigenous conflict. They can force institutions into lengthy appeals processes which have activists as judge, jury, and executioner. The advocates who would hear these appeals likely have no direct connection to the source of the artifacts given that most of the items are centuries-old and cannot be traced to a specific lineage.
Museums are hardest hit by these ridiculous new regulations. Not only are they forced to either cover up and hide their collections of Native items or face hefty fines, they may not even be allowed to display photographs or digital versions of the artifacts for fear of offending powerful tribal activists who have the ear of the Biden administration. Native religions are privileged beyond belief by these rules. Native ‘elders’ can refuse to allow females to handle specific items because of cultural differences, an excuse these same people would find insulting if it came from a priest or rabbi. Benign burial goods can be labeled as sacred relics on the mere say-so of an indigenous person, ensuring that they will be strictly off-limits for anyone outside of the chosen few who fit the woke criteria. Note that none of these grand gestures are made for ancient Egyptian funerary goods, Medieval Catholic reliquaries, or Viking burial hordes, despite the fact that these items were just as religiously important to their owners. Native artifacts are essentially venerated by the government’s new policy, one that has been adopted with relish by museums and the universally-progressive curators who run them.
This pales in comparison to the most preposterous issue that has come out of the religious fixation progressives have with Natives: the potential limitation or ending of Moon missions. The problem arose in the past few weeks, as the first private lunar mission was slated to land on Earth’s permanent satellite and deposit the cremated remains of 70 people (and one dog), along with important NASA scientific equipment, on the surface. The mission failed, but the company in charge, Astrobotic, has vowed to try again. The fact that America has created the opportunity for entrepreneurs to create viable space businesses is amazing – a private company built a lander and sent it to the Moon! – but the focus of the left’s sacred cow (buffalo?) is on the fact that the mission would be “a profound desecration.” According to leaders of the Navajo Nation, any permanent human presence (alive or dead) on the Moon is an attack on traditional indigenous spiritual beliefs, which view the celestial body as “an ancient relative” known as “Grandmother Moon.” (Never mind the fact that many Native Americans are not at all affiliated with these particular beliefs – a full 20% are Catholic, for instance.)
Instead of brushing these concerns aside as the parochial worries of a small religious minority group – imagine how a similar Mormon claim would be treated – the federal government under Joe Biden has embraced and centered them. The administration has constantly validated bogus qualms like those expressed by a Navajo activist PhD student in the pages of Nature magazine, who worried that downplaying indigenous ‘ways of knowing’ “can materialize in acts of colonization and might even cause collective hurt.” Oh no! “Collective hurt?!” Such an enormous worry should really be considered as on par with important scientific and national missions like returning to the surface of the Moon.
Obviously, I am not serious about that, but unfortunately the government seems to be. They have had a number of meetings with these activist factions, signed regulatory memoranda validating their concerns, and promised to consult on any further such missions. This, however, isn’t enough for the progressive class. Going forward, “Indigenous Methodologies” and religious ceremonies should “lead the way to healing and partnership,” alongside “NASA delegates participating in person and following the guidance of Native American leaders.” This is not simply consulting with Native representatives, but kowtowing to leftist indigenous activists. Allowing such a minor group to control major efforts that implicate our economy, our security, and our future is completely insane. And all it does is serve a rank partisan purpose.
Native Americans are revered as secular saints in the progressive pantheon, even if the demographic itself is far from universally left-wing (40% of American Indian voters in 2022 supported Republicans). But just as with other favored minority groups in the broad Democratic coalition, the most radical activist voices are the ones that are heard the loudest in the halls of power. African-Americans and Hispanics are often socially conservative, yet those who purport to speak for those communities in political settings more often than not espouse the extreme opposite positions. Still, the invented ideal, extrapolated from these loud voices, is what sticks in the progressive mind. That goes double for Native Americans, who have the added benefit/curse of the ‘noble savage’ mythos/stigma, which activists use to their advantage. And the left-wing base – made up almost exclusively of white people – just eats it up. In order not to offend this important group of funders and voters, the Biden administration has played up its pet issues, including the reverence given to progressive Native causes.
An anecdote about an event for a “Native-led future” to heal “Turtle Island” from the “ongoing trauma of colonialism in North America” is instructive here. In the article, the author writes (without a hint of understanding) that “there were over a thousand people attending, mostly white allies.” This is the key: these events and ideas are not meant for Native Americans – just as ‘white privilege’ talk isn’t meant for minorities – but the white progressive elites who largely control the levers of cultural and social power in the US. These are the folks who populate government bureaucracies, staff Democratic administrations and legislative offices, run the hiring and marketing efforts of major corporations, and hold sway over America’s top universities and public-school systems. And they deify the radical ideas of Native populations, teach their opinions as fact, promote minority religious beliefs on par with reality, and worship the figurative ground they walk on.
If that’s not the very definition of racial privilege, I don’t know what is.