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“On the steps outside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, a white teenager sporting the red cap accoutrements of the Trump campaign stands nose-to-nose with a bespectacled Native American elder singing and playing a hand drum. The teen is smirking – his expression, for me, oozes entitlement. Behind him an unruly crowd – all male, all white, many also wearing the conspicuous Maga apparel – is jeering the elder in a frenzy of Lord of the Flies privilege. (In another video, some of the boys can be seen cackling while war-whooping and making the tomahawk chop gesture popularized by sports teams with Native American mascots like the Atlanta Braves.)
Against the rabble, the old man is steadfast. In the stare-down, he never breaks eye contact. He just keeps singing. Off-camera, you can hear one or two voices rising with his.
You probably didn’t recognize the song the elder is singing against the fracas, but I did: it’s the anthem of the American Indian Movement. We used to gather around the drum to sing it after powwow dance practice every Thursday night at the Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland, California. Some say it was composed to honor the life of Raymond Yellow Thunder, an Oglala Lakota beaten to death by two white men in Gordon, Nebraska, in 1972. Our elders told us to carry forward the legacy of the men and women who sang it.”
– The Guardian, The US is still not ready to look at the ugly racism against Native Americans.
““I know that look,” says Megan Red Shirt-Shaw, who is Oglala Lakota and a PhD student at the University of Minnesota. “I have seen it my whole life. I don’t need 500 camera angles or 15 articles to tell me what it is. This is a lived experience.”
The video was met with immediate outrage and condemnation from people who called the behavior of the “Make America Great Again” hat-wearing teenagers an example of “Trump’s legacy.” But the problem lies not simply with the president, his supporters, anti-abortion activists, or elite private schools. The problem is with America.
For Red Shirt-Shaw, racism is a daily experience. She says she and some friends were pulled over by police when they were in high school, and they were asked to prove they were United States citizens. Then, on a later cross-country road trip, she and her partner were pulled over and interrogated by police.
“In those moments it doesn’t matter that I am in a PHD program,” she says. “I’m treated by how people perceive me, as a Native woman.””
– Bustle, Racism Against Native Americans Is Happening Daily & You Need To Know What We Face.
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country. Follow the series: Indian Country 52
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