THE FIRST NATION
The Hope of Greater Unity Continues Racial justice protests unite Indigenous and Muslim Americans through their forgotten histories BY RASHEED RABBI Flag of the American Indian Movement
already have higher rates of infectious disease severity and death compared to any other U.S. population group (Johns Hopkins Center for Native American Health). And along with this, their rate of youth suicide, being killed by police, illiteracy and unemployment has traditionally been higher than those of any other racial minority.
NATIVE AMERICANS: FORGOTTEN COMMUNITIES
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ast year’s racial justice protests brought visibility and awareness to the Indigenous community’s centuries-long fight against oppression, violence and discrimination. Many of these long-term movements, coincidentally, started bearing results while bidding farewell to the pandemic-ridden 2020 resonated loudly with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. One such historic success was the U.S. Supreme Court’s July 9, 2020 (McGirt v. Oklahoma) ruling that more than half of Oklahoma, almost 3 million acres, would remain American Indian reservation land, as originally designated in 1866 (https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/07/16/native-american-lives-matter). Another was the court’s decision to deny Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to permit TC Energy Corporation’s Keystone XL Pipeline, which would carry slurry crude from the Alberta tar sands to Nebraska through reservation lands (https://www. cnn.com/2020/07/06/politics/keystone-xl-supreme-court-pipeline/index.html). These victories exude hope. But they also highlight the danger of relying on this country’s courts and/or legal system. Much more work is needed before the Indigenous community can attain real sovereignty and environmental justice. These few successes at the outset of the BLM movement merely indicate the wider population’s impending awareness. A rather embarrassing case in point is the Redskins’ decision to change its 87-year-old nickname and logo, dismissing owner Dan Snyder’s previous vow to “never” do so. Even Darrell Green, the team’s most celebrated player during his 20-season career (1983-2002), was unaware of the controversy over a term considered just as offensive as the N-word (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/ us-news/native-americans-see-hope-day-reckoning-s-20-generations-making-n1233736). Ironically, a June 2017 Supreme Court judgment had handed Snyder a key victory: Justice Alito and all of the other justices reasoned that the government cannot remain in compliance with the First Amendment if it picks which speech is offensive and which speech is not. Hidden by sweeping unawareness, such discrimination transcends sport logos or court victories. In reality, such embedded images continue to dehumanize minorities. The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the consequences of such structural inequality via its clearly disproportionate impact on Native Americans, who 22 ISLAMIC HORIZONS MAY/JUNE 2021
Indigenous communities constitute about 2% of the U.S. population, including the 6.7 million Native Americans who belong to the more than 565 tribes holding sovereign governmental status by law (https:// www.ncai.org/about-tribes). Their invisibility has a long history: genocide, dislocation, and various forms of physical, mental and social abuse, first at the hands of the military and then of law enforcement agencies at all levels. Furthermore, it is a direct outcome of deep systemic bias. Native Americans have a median income of only $23,000 a year, just one-third of the $68,703, the U.S. median household income. Their collective historical trauma and socioeconomic conditions have a direct correlation with substance use, poor education and high mortality rates. Over the recent decades, 78% of them were forced to migrate and assimilate into urban or suburban areas. The American mainstream and many Muslim Americans remain largely unaware of these peoples ongoing struggle to preserve their tribes and cultures. Thus they remain stereotyped and considered people of the “past.”
THE DEPTH OF FORGETFULNESS
During the recent turbulent weeks, many Native American activists beheaded several Christopher Columbus statues. The national symbol, celebrated for centuries, is ironically connected with the history of racism (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/christopher-columbus-statue-boston-beheaded-confederate-monuments-torn-down/). Many Native Americans view Columbus as an originator of genocide and conquest. Ironically, unmindful of his atrocities, some Muslim Americans continue to take pride in the fact that Columbus employed a Muslim navigator.
