AMERICA:The signing by the US of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is one of the few promises Obama has been able to keep
EVERY fan of cowboy and Indian films knows that native Americans of the 19th century referred to successive US presidents as “The Great White Father”. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed by then president Andrew Jackson, dispossessed millions.
Many more betrayals would follow. Along with the perpetuation of slavery, the mass expulsion and decimation of the country’s first inhabitants remains America’s original sin.
Now the US’s first African-American president is making amends.
Barack Obama reminded leaders from 565 tribes at the Tribal Nations Conference this week of his campaign promise: “I would make sure you had a voice in the White House. I said that so long as I held this office, never again would native Americans be forgotten or ignored.”
Native Americans are one of the few constituencies to whom Obama has been able to keep his word. The annual pow-wow he’s established with tribal chiefs is unprecedented. When Obama strode onto the stage at the department of the interior on Thursday, hundreds of cell phones were raised above cowboy hats and feather headdresses to snap photographs of the Great Black Father.
Obama reminded the Indians that the Crow Nation adopted him in Montana two years ago. “My Crow name is ‘One Who Helps People Throughout the Land’ . . . I’m working very hard to live up to that name.”
Fawn Sharp of the Quinault Indian Nation said that “thanks to the leadership of President Obama” native Americans will be able “to live as the creator intended, on lands belonging to us since the beginning of time.”
This year, Sharp said, each season brought good news: the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act in spring; the Tribal Law and Order Act in summer; a $760 million settlement over water rights in October. Only last week, President Obama signed into law $3.4 billion in compensation, because the US government had since 1887 short-changed Indians on accounts held in trust for them.
But Obama gave the biggest gift on Thursday, when the US became the last of four countries – which opposed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – to reverse its position. “Today I can announce that the US is lending its support to this declaration,” the president said to cheers and a standing ovation.
Native Americans number fewer than three million, and the vast majority are of mixed blood. Hunter Street, the schoolboy who chanted the plaintive, haunting Flag Song at the beginning of the ceremony, wore a suit and tie, with long, jet-black plaits.
Governor James Lujan of the Taos Pueblo read the Invocation to the Great Spirit, a blanket draped over his shoulders. “I hear sounds of water and wind and the softness of Mother Earth,” Lujan said. All heads were bowed in silence.
Tex Red-Tipped Arrow Hall, the 6 foot 4 inch chief of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara nation of North Dakota and a former basketball player, towered over other guests, in his cowboy boots, cowboy hat and blue jeans. “It’s my go-to-town stuff,” Tex explained.
He opened a rucksack to show me the eagle feather war bonnet he’d worn the previous day, when he was one of 12 chiefs received by Obama at the White House. “Us Indians were cowboys before John Wayne, because we were here first and we rounded up buffalo,” he continued. “I’m a cowboy. I run about 40 head of horses and about 300 head of beef.”
Before Obama arrived, I struck up a conversation with five Navajo Indians from Arizona, all veterans, four of them code-talkers who confounded the Japanese with their language during the second World War.
They wore rows of medals on their bright yellow shirts, and string ties with sterling and turquoise clasps. The eldest, Bahi Ketchum, from the 6th Marine Division, was 91 years-old.
Gunnery Sgt PJ James, a Vietnam veteran, was the youngest of the bunch at age 68. Was it not ironic that so many native Americans fought in the white man’s wars? I asked him. “We fought for our land back home,” PJ said. “A lot of people have a mistaken idea the Indians were pastoral people. They were warlike.”
President Obama was about to speak of “the sad and painful chapters in our shared history – a history too often marred by broken promises and grave injustice against the First Americans”. Unlike many tribes, PJ told me, the Navajo were able to return to their ancestral lands. “We were interned from 1864 until 1868. People still remember it. We were forced to march more than 300 miles from the reservation to Fort Sumner. They call it the long walk.”
As Obama left the auditorium, Indians shouted, “We love you.” Tex Red-Tipped Arrow joyfully called Obama “this great president”. Tex’s tribe has gas and oil reserves on their Fort Berthold Reservation. US acceptance of the UN declaration meant that henceforward, they must give their consent to exploitation of Indian resources.
Not since the 1975 Indian Self-Determination Act had his people known such a watershed.
