WHEN IT COMES TO INTERRACIAL dialogues, Native People are often the last to be heard. We don't have the numbers. We don't have the economic or political muscle. When the subject is racism, we are never the first community of color to come to mind. And yet we have an absolutely fundamental experience that must be taken seriously.
The Native experience of racism is the foundational experience for all that has occurred in this hemisphere over almost 500 years. In 1992 we will mark 500 years of colonial rule in our homeland. That track record alone gives us a critical insight into the function of Western racism. We've endured it longer than anyone else. The wisdom of Native People on this subject is the key, the source for developing a strategy to overthrow both Western racism and Western colonialism.
The most virulent form of the disease of racism has been used against Native America. Like other oppressed people, we have known slavery, poverty, and political conquest. We have also known something else - genocide. The greatest mass extermination of any race, any culture, any people happened here. It happened to us.
Western colonialism may speak of an American history. Native People speak of an American holocaust. If racism is the mathematics of hate, then genocide is its ledger book. How many Native People died in the American holocaust? Thirty million? Forty million? Fifty million? How many were slaughtered? How many were sent to concentration camps? How many died of diseases they couldn't even name? The American holocaust is our experience. It is our testimony.
The testimony of Native People to this genocide is rarely heard because Native People have been trivialized by Western propaganda. If all those millions perished in a holocaust, why has so little ever been said about it? The answer is simple: You cannot have a crime if you do not have a victim. A concerted, intentional, methodical effort has been made by the West to erase the memory of Native America. As a people we have been the objects of one of the most successful racist propaganda campaigns in history.
From the very beginnings of Western colonial expansion right up to the present day, we have been trivialized. The dominant society has used every means at its disposal: the dime novel, the Wild West show, the Saturday matinee, the Western television serial, textbooks, the Sunday sermon, cartoons, the editorial page, the congressional record; they have all been pressed into service to denigrate and diminish our stature as witnesses to the truth of the holocaust. This process of trivialization is not accidental. It is the intentional, racist process by which the nightmare of the American holocaust is transformed into the reassuring image of the American Dream.
THE TRIVIALIZATION OF Native America through the medium of Western colonial propaganda replaces Native People with a pantheon of mythical colonial heroes. As the memory of the holocaust is obscured, new images of the American Dream are pushed forward into the national consciousness: faithful Pilgrims; brave pioneers; founding fathers; gentle missionaries; a new world; a wilderness; exploration; discovery; and the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.
Racist propaganda always seeks to divert attention. All of us, Native and non-Native alike, who look the other way, who accept the myths of the dream without question, who endorse the assumptions laid before us by colonialism, are guilty of perpetuating Western racism. We give tacit approval to the myths of colonialism.
Think about Columbus Day. How many of us have been raised to accept the doctrine of discovery? Think about Thanksgiving. How many of us accept the image of smiling Indians surrounded by smiling Pilgrims? Smiling victims embracing their smiling executioners? In light of the holocaust, it is a macabre image. In light of racist propaganda, it is a powerfully effective image. If we believe it, we are part of it. We are part of the dream.
The central purpose of diverting our attention is to keep us from focusing on the real reason for the American holocaust. Western racist propaganda has told the American public that the conflict between Western colonialism and Native America was a conflict over "things" - land, gold, or furs. Western colonizers needed these "things," and Native People had them but were supposedly too primitive to use them. The struggle over possession of them was tragic but necessary, we are told.
This is the logic of racism, and it has been widely accepted as historical fact. In truth, however, the holocaust was not carried out for the sake of "things." It was the result of the longest continuous religious war in human history. Native People were slaughtered because they did not share "the dream."
The West has conducted a capitalist jihad against Native America. It has sought to convert Native People to the doctrine that Western capitalism is the best of all possible worlds. In response, Native People have maintained a guerrilla war against their oppressors. They have resisted conversion and held fast to the traditional spiritual center of their own way of life. They have kept an alternative alive.
The alternative of Native America is the alternative of the tribe over against the capitalist state. It can be symbolized as the horizontal against the vertical. Native civilization in North America represented a political, social, and economic system that radiated out from a religious center through the communal network of extended family and kinship.
In contrast, colonial capitalism represents a vertical hierarchy of economic and political privilege exclusive of spiritual values that places men and women in an artificial competition based on race, class, and gender. The choice offered to Native People by capitalism was clear: convert or die. The grim statistics of the American holocaust bear silent tribute to the decision made by generations of Native People.
THE LESSON TO BE learned from the Native experience is that all of us still have a choice. Native America still stands. It has survived the holocaust. It has endured the propaganda. It continues to resist the American Dream state. The religious war goes on, and Native People are in it for the duration. As veterans of the struggle against colonialism, capitalism, and racism, they are still in the field. Though few in number and often without allies, they represent an unbeaten alternative to business-as-usual in the great American technocracy.
When people of color gather to discuss racism, they should consider the men and women who have sacrificed so much to keep this alternative alive. Native People do not share the assumptions and mythologies of their oppressors. They do not simply want a higher place on the pyramid of capitalism; they do not want a bigger piece of the action for themselves; they do not aspire to joining the middle class. They do not want more. As the tribe they want enough for all to share equally.
The tribe as a metaphor for community is dangerous. It is dangerous to colonial capitalism. It is dangerous to racism. It is dangerous because it is a symbol for the strength of the oppressed. It is an inclusive symbol for all men and women who want to wake up from the dream. It says to people of all colors and cultures: There is a better way. Let go of the myths and the images and the empty promises. Join hands in the strong bond of kinship. Become a tribe. Fight back. Let the victims be redeemed and the survivors set free. The struggle will soon be 500 years old. Now is the time to decide.
Steve Charleston was director of the cross-cultural studies program at Luther-Northwestern Theological Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota and was an Episcopal priest at the time this article appeared. He is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation.
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