Five Things: Brat Summer at the LBJ Library. My Best Tweet. A Racist Argument Against Harris. An Original Guest Essay. Biden at the DNC.
Five Things: Brat Summer at the LBJ Library. My Best Tweet. A Racist Argument Against Harris. An Original Guest Essay. Biden at the DNC.
BRAT SUMMER AT THE LBJ LIBRARY
Pairs well with “Carol doesn’t like to wear shoes.”
MY BEST TWEET
As you can imagine, I’m (not) inundated with job offers from Harris HQ.
A DESPERATE, RACIST ATTEMPT TO STOP VP HARRIS FOR RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT
Breathtaking. They're trying to argue that Kamala Harris is ineligible to be president by citing Dred Scott. In other words, Republicans are saying that Black people were not and could never be citizens of the United States.
GUEST ESSAY
Dr. Mary Klann, a dear friend from graduate school, has just published her first book. Sally Klann, one of her sisters, illustrated my first book. I’m all in on Klanns.
I could do a hard sell, but I think Mary does it best, so I asked her to write a guest essay. (Past contributors include Mike Duncan.) If you like what you see, buy the book. Academic books can be pricey, but there’s a way to read it and help Mary and the subject: Ask your library to buy it so you and other patrons can read it.
Without Giving Us a Guilty Conscience
By Dr. Mary Klann
In 1946, President Harry Truman acknowledged that the United States had “made some mistakes and occasionally failed to live up to the precise terms of our treaties and agreements with some 200 tribes.” The non-Native media hardly covered him signing the bill creating the Indian Claims Commission (ICC), which Native activists had been calling for since the early twentieth century. (The New York Times made sure to mention that four of the Native representatives present wore “tribal costumes” and printed a photo of Truman being presented with a “pipe of peace”). The ICC promised to settle outstanding Native claims based on treaty violations, but significant structural limitations and government negligence prevented the ICC from realizing its sweeping goals.
The ICC wasn’t created to fulfill US treaty obligations towards Native nations. It meant to, like most historical Indian policies, resolve the “legal conscience” of the United States.
It wasn’t enough. In the wake of World War II, Americans felt guilty. Native peoples’ poverty was weighing on the conscience of the nation. The nation should do something about it, and by nation, they meant the federal government. (After all, the US had made “some mistakes.”)
The archives at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library are filled with letters from non-Natives who urged the president to take responsibility for Native peoples’ welfare, especially with news of planned aid distribution to post-war Europe. A 1947 letter from Mrs. W.C. Bolan in Plains, Kansas read:
“These Indians are our responsibility—we took everything away from them and pushed them out on reservations so arid that it takes 10 acres to graze one sheep, and expect them to eke out an existence…Now I do not know to whom to appeal for help, but it should be forthcoming. We have sent millions to Europe to feed the destitute and now we should send aid to our fellow Americans who are just as hungary [sic] and cold as they are in Europe. Besides they are our responsibility.”
An article in the Cincinnati Enquirer from the same year also drew a connection between the aid provided to Europe and the US’ responsibility to provide aid to Native people. This article, like many of the same era, were focused on Navajo and Hopi people in Arizona and New Mexico:
“Certainly we have some measure of responsibility in caring for Europe’s unfortunates. But do we not have a prior responsibility toward the unfortunates in New Mexico whose plight arose from policies and programs which have enriched us?”
To help ease American guilt and his own critics, Truman had to do better than the ICC. He urged Congress to provide emergency relief to the Navajo and Hopi in December 1947 and approved long-range funding in the Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act of 1950.
But were ideas about conscience and guilt helpful for gaining real insight into the long, complex, and ongoing political relationships between the US and sovereign Native nations? Could the conscience of the nation be “cleared” with one legislative action? And maybe more importantly, should it?
A 1958 paper tucked into the Truman Library’s archives in the papers of William Brophy, one of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs under Truman, revealingly asserted how imperfect it is to use non-Native guilt to drive Indian policy:
“Always the desire of the United States has been that the Indian would become more like us, that is like the predominant culture, or, failing this, that he would at least become enough like us so that he could live among us without giving us a guilty conscience.”
What the ICC and other mid-century Indian policies revealed was that non-Natives’ discomfort with guilt mattered more than their full understanding of Native nations’ relationships with the US.
Instead of listening to Truman and his compatriots on this matter, we should instead heed the warning of Cherokee activist and educator Ruth Muskrat Bronson, who wrote these words during her tenure as treasurer and consultant to the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians:
The average American is noted for his sympathy for the underdog. He is also apt to have romantic sentiment for the American Indian. These two admirable qualities, combined with a vague sense of guilt for having ousted the original inhabitant of a naturally rich land because of his own need for a new world, a heritage of guilt, too, for the long and shameful history of broken treaties with those he dispossessed, conspire to foster impulsive action, based on a desire to make amends but founded on superficial or inaccurate knowledge rather than on thoughtful study or familiarity with fact and reality. This is serious, indeed, for the Indian since it jeopardizes his very existence and unquestionably would lead to his eventual—literal—extinction.
BIDEN AT THE DNC
On Sunday, the night before the DNC, I spoke to Errin Haines of the 19th, and she published the piece on Monday morning. After his 50-speech on Monday, a decent number of people emailed to ask me if I stood by it.
I told Errin:
“No matter what you want to say about him, Biden’s legacy is linked to the first Black president and the first Black woman on a major party ticket,” said presidential historian Alexis Coe. “That is a remarkable legacy for any president, let alone a White man of his age. By choosing Kamala Harris, he’s also made the issue of age and his insistence that he was still running a chapter, at most, in his biography. … Everything else will fall into this long shadow of this.
Let’s be clear: Like Abraham Lincoln and FDR, Biden inherited a nation in full-blown crisis, and he’s done an extraordinary job in four short years. He’ll join an elite group of presidents in our collective memory, and in the years to come, my kind will be invoking his name often.
Nothing has changed. Like the majority of pundits who praised Biden’s speech, I thought he did a fine job. It could have been shorter, for sure, and emphasized Vice President Kamala Harris more. I wonder if we’ll learn, in the years to come, how much of it was written before he stepped aside…because it felt like a lot.
Errin asked me about Anita Hill, among other gender issues:
“When you look at Joe Biden’s record on gender, it’s not perfect, but what’s remarkable is that he takes these stances, he’s called out for it, he thinks about it, and he comes into the light,” said Coe. “It doesn’t undo what has been done, but this is a man who, even at this point in his life, is always trying to be better.”
During his speech, Biden spoke to this issue:
I've made a lot of mistakes in my career. But I gave my best to you. For 50 years, like many of you, I've given my heart and soul to our nation. And I've been blessed a million times in return for the support of the American people. I really have been too young to be in the Senate because I wasn't 30 yet, and now I'm too old to stay as president. But I hope you know how grateful I am to all of you.
There’s one obvious mistake: Free speech is a vital part of democracy, and I'm glad I read Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman’s speech.
See you soonish! In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram and my books on Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookstore or library. If you’d like me to sign or personalize my books, purchase copies from Oblong.