Politics

McGirt v. Oklahoma

My doctoral mentor, the magnificent John Wunder at at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has not only a Ph.D. in history, but also a J.D. in law.  And so even though my own research under him centered on Native political history, you can bet I was given a reasonable dose of Indian legal history along the way. That being said, I graduated 20 years ago, I have not done much legal history research since then,  and there are many people out there much better qualified than myself to explain the ins and outs of today’s historic United States Supreme Court decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma.  Rather,  just hours after the decision I would like to offer some context. The Supreme Court is no stranger of Indian law cases.  It hears them regularly.  However, McGirt  is probably the most important federal case since Cobell v. Salazar, which was filed in 1996, never reached he Supreme Court, and was settled with the Obama administration in 2009.  And McGirt is probably the most important Native lands case in at least half a century. But first things first.  The real importance of this case has nothing to do with the plaintiff Jimcy McGirt, who was sentenced to 1000 (yes, a thousand) years for raping a four year old. 

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Native Lives Matter

Two months ago, a college student in my Native American history class was perturbed. How it could be that during her K-12 education she never learned about the 1890 massacre of nearly 200 Native people at Wounded Knee? She was incensed and incredulous, and understandably so. It’s an important question, a frustrating question, and a depressing question. In other words, it’s the kind of question anyone who teaches Native American history is all too used to. My students typically begin the semester with a vague sense of “we screwed over the Indians,” and are quickly stunned to discover the glaring depths of their own ignorance about the atrocities that Native peoples have endured: from enslavement, to massacres, to violent ethnic cleansings, to fraudulent U.S. government actions, to child theft and the forced sterilization of women, to a vast, far-reaching campaign of cultural genocide that continued unabated well into the 20th century. I started slowly, explaining to her that one problem is the impossibility of covering everything in a high school history class. Even in a college survey, which moves much faster, you just can’t get to everything. There’s way too much. A high school curriculum has no chance. But, I said, that begs the question, both for college and K-12: What gets in and what gets left out?

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The Mythological President

Lies and mythology are related, but they’re not the same thing.  One person can lie to another, whereas mythology exists and functions across society.   I can tell you a lie, but a myth is something we tell ourselves.  A myth is made up of many lies that magically add up to a higher “truth.” Donald Trump lies.  A lot.  Clearly more than most people, and probably more than any other president.  Arguably professional journalism’s greatest failing of the last several years has been its reluctance to label him a liar or to even identify his lies as such.  Instead, they almost always play it safe, on the grounds that they cannot read his mind, and so they settle for euphemisms. He is “incorrect.”  He “exaggerates” and “misstates.”  His statements are “inaccurate.”  Respected, professional news outlets almost never call him a liar.  They never say he lies.  Of course it isn’t always a lie.  Some if it is just gross stupidity.  But he also intentionally lies.  Many thousands of them. This is very important.  When we fail to challenge Donald Trump’s countless lies, they are allowed to form a larger mythological whole that is greater than the sum of its individual lies.  The result is The Mythology of Donald Trump. A myth is full of statements that are “inaccurate” or “incorrect.”  A society bundles up these individual lies and transforms them into a mythological truth.  Take for example story of Pocahontas.

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Death Becomes Us

It seems likely that over the next year or so, perhaps a million Americans, mostly the elderly, will die from Covid-19 (Corona Virus).  A variety of models are predicting that perhaps one-half to two-thirds of Americans will become infected; somewhere between 200,000 and 1.7 million Americans will die from these infections; upwards of 21 million patients (about 6% of the population) will require hospitalization, overwhelming the healthcare system, and thereby increasing fatalities. Much of this is no one’s fault.  Viruses mutate constantly, becoming exceptionally lethal when a mutation allows one to jump species.  Say, from pigs (eg. swine flu) or from chickens (eg. bird flu)  That’s because the new host species (eg. us) has had no prior contact with the new virus and must develop antibodies more or less from scratch.  That takes a while, and the first pass can be exceptionally lethal. This process of viral mutation and virgin pandemics has been happening in the eastern hemisphere for millennia.  By contrast, it happened relatively infrequently in the Americas prior to Columbus because by and large Native Americans did not domesticate many animals, and thus did not create many opportunities for viruses to jump species.  This is why the long history of epidemiology is largely a history of Eurasia and Africa, where people have long domesticated a large variety of food and work animals. So to a large degree, the sudden emergence of Covid-19 is humanity’s fault at large for continuing to domesticate animals, particularly in close quarters and in unsanitary conditions. This was going to happen. But how it plays out, exactly, is another matter.  And we can identify one man in particular, whose own ignorance, stubbornness, irrationality, pettiness, incompetence, selfishness, and gross irresponsibility will greatly worsen Covid-19’s impact in the United States: Donald Trump.

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Trump Take Note: That Time Richard Nixon Visited Nebraska

By 1971, President Richard Nixon’s name was mud on most American college campuses.  The Watergate scandal that would prove his ultimate undoing was still a year away from its early rumblings.  Rather, it was Nixon’s Vietnam policies that had rendered him persona non grata among students. Nixon tried to ease domestic unrest over Vietnam by greatly reducing U.S. ground forces, down from over half-a-million when he took office in 1969 to only 69,000 by the end of 1972.  But he also wanted to win the war, so he countered the troop reduction with a massive increase in bombings and other clandestine and special operations.  Thus, while fewer Americans were now dying in Vietnam, the bombings, assassination programs, etc. only highlighted the barbarity of American violence on a relatively tiny nation that had committed the “crime” of fighting off French colonial rule to achieve independence and establishing a leftist government. So despite the lessening of the draft during Nixon’s tenure, student protests only increased.  As the “Law and Order” president he was displeased.  In May of 1970, he called student protestors “bums.” Two days later, 4 students on the campus of Kent State University were murdered by the Ohio State National Guard.  On May 15, Mississippi police murdered another 2 students at Jackson State University in Mississippi. By 1971, there were few campuses where Nixon could go without facing massive demonstrations.  He had to pick carefully. 

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Small Fractures on a Large Piece of Curved Glass

It doesn’t take much.  A small piece of gravel, spit out by a truck’s wheel, ricochets off the windshield, taking a tiny chip of glass with it.  A microscopic divot and discreet little lines, like crow’s feet at the corner of an eye.  Barely noticed for months, the accordion of heat and cold compress and expand, adding and relieving pressure.  Then finally, the scratches spread out across the glass like an avant garde spider web. The windshield has not fractured into zagged plates or smashed into a thousand glass pebbles.  Perhaps that is its future, but for now it is merely degraded and slightly obscurant.  Yet it was never true.  Tinted, laminated, curved, and often dirty, the windshield always presented a slightly skewed image of the outside world.  Not grotesquely wrong, but fundamentally distorted in minor ways difficult to detect from inside the car.  Now, however, the little cracks have suddenly made you aware that the image it upon the glass is subtly warped. * As in many countries, if not most, American school children are indoctrinated with nationalistic history that incorporates heroic narratives and stirring interpretations.  From kindergarten through high school, state sanctioned curricula present a range of facts and viewpoints that coalesce into what can fairly be called imperial mythology.  Most of it is technically correct, but the total image produced is often heavy on the rah-rah and short on critical self-examination.

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Start Punching

We’re 3 years in. It’s long past time we stopped devoting so much public attention to rationally analyzing Trumpism.  Just (proverbially) punch him in the nose already. That’s how this works. The more you fact-check his endless lies; the more you claim “optics don’t matter because The Mueller Report says A, B, and C,”; the more you try to play some game of Gotcha! or adamantly defend reasonable political stances in the face of his irrationality: then the more you allow the political discourse to flounder into intellectually-respectable-but-politically-flaccid territory. I’m sorry, but this isn’t 2015.  Political norms have changed.  A lot.  It’s happened.   Trump and his cavalcade of sycophants and enablers have pulled it off.  I know how much you like “Normal,” but that horse is out of the barn and over the hills, and it’s  gonna take years to drag it back.  And in the meantime, there’s an election just around the corner. So you’ve got a choice.

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