Week 10

I have found in my previous discussions of race, Native Americans are often discounted. They are completely erased from the picture and their struggles, and more importantly, their genocide is rarely discussed. This creates a problematic discourse considering the magnitude of the marginalization of the Native American population. This is why the readings for this week are especially important in dismissing the notion of the black-white binary and reintroducing the plight of Native Americans into race discourse.

The blatant racism and apartheid created by the government, as evidenced in The Birth of the Reservation and Rape of The Land, were conscious decisions to either wipe out or completely assimilate the population into white capitalist society. Whether through deliberate modes of subjection or through hazardous environmental conditions imposed on the Native Americans, the actions employed by the state had the intended deleterious effect, almost completely abolishing the Native American population.

One thing in the Biolsi reading particularly struck me: the association of “good” qualities of the Native American with whiteness, where if a Native American displayed intelligence or prudence with money, they were considered “in every aspect a white man, other than his Indian blood” (39). This association of “goodness” with whiteness perpetuates the notion of white supremacy and maintains the highly racialized social order that has become so normalized.

Another particularly important aspect of the readings was the “colonial/patriarchal mind that seeks to control the sexuality of women and indigenous peoples also seeks to control nature” (Smith, 55). By creating a link between sexual repression of Native Americans and racial oppression, Smith emphasizes the intersectionality of sexuality and race and other modes of oppression.

Why have these practices, simply because they primarily affected Native Americans, been completely removed from any critical discussion about racist governmental policies and essentially erased from history?