Native American Racism in the Age of Donald Trump: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

By Darren R. Reid

This book examines the resurgence of anti-Native Americanism since the start of Donald Trump’s bid for the US Presidency. From the time Trump announced his intention to run for president, racism directed towards Native Americans has become an increasingly visible part of cultural and political life in the United States.  From the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline to the controversies surrounding Elizabeth Warren’s identity, to open mockery by teenagers wearing MAGA hats, anti-Native Americanism is now at its most visible in the United States since the early twentieth century.  This volume places this resurgent anti-Native Americanism into an appropriate contemporary context by demonstrating how historical forces have created the foundation upon which many of these controversies are built. Chapters examine three key processes in US history and how they have shaped today’s political climate: violence as a force of attitudinal change; the root issues at the heart of Native American identity politics; and the dismissal of modern Native American inequalities through a prolonged European American fascination with the imagery of the noble savage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Release date: Oct 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030587185

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© The Author(s) 2020

D. R. ReidNative American Racism in the Age of Donald Trumphttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58718-5_1

1. Introduction

Darren R. Reid¹  

(1)

School of Humanities, Coventry University, Coventry, UK

Darren R. Reid

Email: [e-mail]

Those that deny their history are doomed to repeat it!

—Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump ‘THOSE THAT DENY THEIR HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT!’ Twitter, June 11th, 2020: https://​twitter.​com/​realdonaldtrump/​status/​1271082251791499​267)

Abstract

From the time Trump announced his intention to run for president, racism directed towards Native Americans has become an increasingly visible part of cultural and political life in the United States. Like many, Trump’s relationship with Indian Country is shaped by the tension which exists between perceptions of the past, such as his apparent interest in Andrew Jackson, and the actual historic processes such memories so often obscure. This introductory chapter provides a brief overview of the nature of those tensions, as well as providing an outline of this volume, its scope, and its purpose.

Keywords

NavajoCode talkersAndrew JacksonSecond World War memory

On November 27, 2017, President Donald Trump hosted a ceremony at the White House to honour a group of Navajo code talkers who served in the Second World War. The veterans chatted comfortably with the president, who, for his part, was convivial, earnest, and, in his own way, charming. Speaking for the veterans, Peter MacDonald delivered an eloquent account of the code talkers’ role in the Pacific theatre. Hundreds of Navajo had provided the United States with a code that the Japanese could not break—their language. From Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima, American marines relied upon the power of Navajo, to keep their secrets and coordinate complex manoeuvres in the notorious deadly theatre.¹ It was a power the US military had learned to value since the advent of complex communication technology and the industrialisation of warfare. The Choctaw and other Indians had served as code talkers in the First World War, using their language to foil their German adversary during an era in which US domestic policy sought to eradicate Indigenous languages.² During the Second World War, the Cree, the Comanche, Mestaki, and other Native American peoples likewise lent their languages to aid the allies in the war effort.³ Contrary to the contemporary racist caricatures, Indian Country sat at the heart of the US's ascendancy to the status of global superpower.⁴

After MacDonald’s speech, Trump took to the podium to heap praise on the code talkers, calling their exploits ‘fantastic’ and ‘beautiful’. The code talkers were, Trump acknowledged, ‘amazing’. General John F. Kelly, Trump’s then Chief of Staff, praised the ways in which Indigenous languages had allowed the Marine Corp to ‘outwit the Japanese’, echoed the president’s message:

[W]hat these men did, the advantage they gave our Marines when they invaded Iwo Jima was really, and I think it was pointed out, was one of the very few factors that allowed us to be successful on [Iwo Jima] island…We lost 6,000 Marines and 25,000 wounded on that island in 28 days of battle. It would have been a lot worse had we not had the Navajo Code Talkers.

Kelly emphasised the community and common cause that bound the code talkers, not only to each other, but to the wider military complex and, through that, to the nation itself: ‘being associated with United States Marines, it’s as much a cult as it is a service. And we never forget.’ He signed off with the motto of the corps—semper fidelis: always faithful.⁵ According to Kelly, the code talkers were indisputably a part of the larger American experience, integral actors in a shared national drama, and active participants in the construction of the United States as a global superpower. Symbolically, it was an important moment.⁶

It was also a problematic one. Hanging directly behind the president’s podium was a portrait of the seventh president, Andrew Jackson, the man who had championed Indian Removal and, through it, the ethnic cleansing of the eastern United States (Fig. 1.1). Before Jackson had left office, the Choctaw and the Creek had both been removed from their lands. About 2,500 Choctaws died on the march west, compared to the 9,000 who reached their ultimate destination.⁷ This mortality rate does not include the deaths suffered by the survivors in the immediate aftermath of their arrival. It is comparable to the impact of the Plague on medieval and early modern Europe.⁸ It was an act of genocide—negligence, indifference, and the deployment of specific policies designed to attack Indian lives, bodies, and cultures en masse.⁹ And it was recognised as such by many of its contemporaneous critics.¹⁰ From the second half of the twentieth century, it has been more emphatically (though certainly not universally) identified as an act of genocide.¹¹

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Fig. 1.1

This portrait of Andrew Jackson, seventh president of the United States, by Ralph E. W. Earl (c. 1835) was hung in the Oval Office within days of Trump becoming president. When the Navajo code talkers were honoured in the White House, this image (which measures 30 by 25 inches) was a prominent feature of the occasion, hanging prominent behind the president’s lectern

Andrew Jackson, Trump declared the year before he met with the Navajo code talkers, ‘had a great history’. As a candidate for the Republican nomination, he responded indignantly when the Department of the Treasury announced a plan to redesign the $20 bill and replace the image of Jackson with that Harriet Tubman, the Black activist, and abolitionist who helped to smuggle dozens of people out of slavery (Fig. 1.2). Responding almost immediately to the announcement, Trump called it an act of ‘pure political correctness’.¹² Once in office, Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart editor-turned-political adviser, championed the hanging of Andrew Jackson’s portrait in a prominent place of honour in the Oval Office.¹³ Shortly after the portrait was given its place of honour in the White House, Trump visited Hermitage, Jackson’s Tennessee plantation, where he celebrated his ‘glory and greatness’, declaring Jackson to be ‘one of our great presidents’. He went on to draw an explicit connection between his and Jackson’s administrations: ‘It was during the Revolution that Jackson first confronted, and defied, an arrogant elite. Does that sound familiar to you?’¹⁴ Months later, he was honouring Navajo code talkers in the White House, seemingly unaware of the contradictory symbolism of the event. Indeed, he appears to have developed a genuine and lingering respect for the Navajo code talkers at this meeting.¹⁵ If Trump was unaware of the problematic imagery of the event, the same cannot be said of Bannon. When an op-ed appeared in the New York Times in 2018, purporting to reveal the existence of an internal ‘resistance’ within the White House, the (now) former advisor would appear on Fox News with a message for the president: ‘do what Andrew Jackson did’.¹⁶

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Fig. 1.2

The design for the Harriet Tubman $20 was completed by the summer of 2019. It will not now be minted before 2026. (Alan Rappeport, ‘See a Design of the Harriet Tubman $20 that Mnuchin Delayed’, The New York Times, June 14, 2019: https://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2019/​06/​14/​us/​politics/​harriet-tubman-bill.​html)

Trump’s engagement with the historic processes he celebrates (and perpetuates) is limited and inconsistent and, when it suits his needs, cruel. Little more than a year after the code talker ceremony, Elizabeth Warren announced her intention to run for the Democratic presidential nomination. After repeatedly referring to Warren as ‘Pocahontas’, he vowed to see her ‘on the campaign TRAIL’, an apparent reference to the genocidal product of Jackson’s Indian Removal policies.¹⁷ Three months after Warren’s announcement, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that the Tubman bill would be delayed a staggering six-to-eight years (2026–2028), meaning that Jackson’s portrait would remain on the front of the $20 bill until at least two years after Trump leaves office. When questioned about the delay, Mnuchin implied that the Tubman bill might never make it into circulation, only that he had ‘made no [final] decision’. Nor would one be ‘made until 2026’.¹⁸ Honoured Navajo on the one hand and jokes about genocide on the other, Trump’s relationship with Indian Country requires much contextualisation.

History and Memory

Decades before Trump celebrated the Navajo code talkers at the Whitehouse, he faced a very different type of Native American. As he assumed the heirship of his father’s business empire, Trump found himself frequently surrounded by the many Indian busts and statues his father had collected. In Fred Senior’s basement, statues were, as Trump’s niece would later put it, ‘lined up against the far wall like sarcophagi’. In the family patriarch’s private office, busts of ‘Indian chiefs in full headdress [were] scattered about’, a silent celebration of empire and colonialism.¹⁹ Fred senior’s reason for collecting these objects is not clear but, if they conformed to typical European American depictions of Native Americans, they almost certainly celebrated, using western artistic traditions, the plains cultures most closely associated with the invasion and conquest of the far west.²⁰ Their headdresses and silent gazes likely spoke not of the complex, ongoing histories of Native Americans but the imagined and fantastical exploits of their pop-culture counterparts. The tension between perceived historic memory and the socio-historic realities such fantasies disguise was evident throughout Trump’s presidency.

Trump is a historian of convenience, interpreting the past and drawing upon historic memory when it suits his policy and agenda, but discarding it when the complexities of a given historic narrative threaten to undermine his position.²¹ He has repeatedly demonstrated that he possess only a tenuous grasp of history, American or global. When he visited Pearl Harbour, he reportedly had to ask John Kelly what had occurred there. In France, his attendance at a Bastille Day military parade prompted him to comment to his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, that he had not previously realised that the country had ‘won a lot of battles’.²² According to John Bolton, his onetime National Security Advisor, Trump believed the Tiananmen Square massacre (1989) had occurred sometime around 2003.²³ According to Trump himself, no one in his administration had heard of Juneteenth, the holiday that celebrates emancipation, until one of his (Black) Secret Service agents explained it to them.²⁴

The administration’s ideological engagement with the past largely comes not from the president himself, but advisors such as Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Steven Mnuchin, whom he trusts to interpret it on his behalf. Trump, for his part, appears broadly disinterested in history—until an interpretation emerges which justifies his policies or personal belief system. When that occurs, history (or Trump’s preferred interpretation of it) finds itself at the centre of the administration’s decision-making processes and rhetorical mechanisms. Problematic interpretations are treated like established facts and loaded assumptions espoused as if they are self-evident truths. For many in Trump’s audience, his presidency represents a potent vector to the past in an era of perceived ‘fake news’ and rampant post-truth interpretations of humanist fields.²⁵ Like it or not, Trump’s historic pronouncements carry weight, reliable scholarship be damned.²⁶ In the context Native American or colonialist issues, that collision is particularly problematic: Elizabeth Warren is mocked with war whoops, and protesters are mocked with tomahawk chops.²⁷

Native Americans are particularly vulnerable to inconsistent, incomplete, or inadequate readings of the past. The American frontier has been widely mythologised, used to tell stories of grand adventure, endeavour, and enterprise. The frontier mythology is a place where larger than life heroes have dwelt for centuries, from Daniel Boone to Davey Crockett to George Armstrong Custer. These characters are folkloric, exemplifying larger themes connected to the evolution of American identities. They, and many others besides, are the protagonists in a great drama, told in countless books and media artefacts. Explicitly and implicitly, Native American peoples are the adversaries in so many of these narratives, standing between a pantheon of seemingly relatable heroes and the emergence of the modern United States. The colonising process has cast them as freedom's antagonists.²⁸

Tension exists between the multifaceted realities of American history and the ways in which it is remembered, memorialised, or forgotten. Having been marginalised politically and culturally from the founding of the Republic, Native Americans have frequently been subjected to colonialist re-imaginings of their histories, lives, intent, and participation in (and resistance to) the national project. Their role in the United States has been interpreted and consequently shaped by men like Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, the breadth of their experiences limited by colonialist constructs such as ‘Manifest Destiny’ or myths such as the ‘vanishing Indian’.²⁹ Theodore Roosevelt was fully invested in the myth of the ‘savage’ who could be killed without remorse. Decades later, John F. Kennedy seemed to lament the apparent mysteries that surrounded a set of peoples who, in reality, had been active agents throughout the nation’s history.³⁰ Imagined Indians frequently adorn the iconography of the country’s history; real Native Americans helped to shape it.

In the modern era, Native Americans are frequently marginalised, often to the point of invisibility.³¹ Their identities are contested and presumed characteristics are frequently projected onto them. New stereotypes have emerged to compliment the old: drunkenness, pan-Indian spirituality, and a non-specific connection to the natural world. Trans-national construction projects, such as the Keystone XL pipeline, are prioritised whilst Indigenous concerns are, by default, laid aside. Stereotypical Native American iconography is celebrated whilst Indigenous cultures are appropriated and misused.³² For many, the distance between a meaningful understanding of the relevant historic processes and the resultant historic memory is substantial; and historic narratives related to Native Americans abound in the White House, now as they have done throughout the presidency’s history.

This book aims to provide context, as well as a corrective perspective to the Trump administration’s reading of the past as it relates to Native Americans. Donald Trump and his advisors are not historians, but they nonetheless look to the past, drawing from it lessons which perpetuate longstanding (and very destructive) processes rooted in centuries of colonisation, forced cultural changes, exploitation, and exclusion. Likewise, the administration’s supporters similarly draw upon historic memory to frame their understanding of modern issues related to Native Americans. This book will analyse the contours of that shared memory as well as the tension that exists between it and evidence-based readings of the past.

To that end, the scope of this work will be narrow. It has been written to provide context on Trump’s and his supporter’s interactions with (and perceptions of) Native Americans during a period where deeper understanding of those issues is essential. Ideally, this work would have been written following the conclusion of the Trump presidency, a retrospective investigation into the changing nature of his engagement with Indian Country over the course of his career, from businessperson to the White House. With a thorough understanding of Trump rooted in a complete one or two term stay in Washington, his intentions could be judged more fully and his administration’s engagement with Native American and colonialist history understood more completely. The nature of his presidency, however, requires something of an intervention. Journalists, students, professors, researchers, and other commentators must confront language, actions, and policies that are immersed in much broader historic processes than might appear evident at first glance. Much of the media was outraged by Trump’s use of ‘Pocahontas’ as a slur for Elizabeth Warren but few seemed to be able to place this episode into the appropriate context. There are