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Diversity and Value
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Indians know diversity, and knew it before Columbus got lost. My people, woodland hunters and farmers, traded with coastal tribes in one direction and in the other direction copper ornaments smelted in Cherokee country turned up in Southwestern pueblos, where they grew the Three Sisters crops on dry land farms and built with stucco. When the Spanish proved unable to keep track of their livestock, many tribes took up the buffalo culture on the Great Plains. Athabascan speakers live in icy Alaska and desert Utah. We know diversity.
To the colonists, we are all “Indians,” one of the most exotic minorities in modern politics. We all have this experience at some point if we leave home: “Do you want to be called Indian or Native American?” Tribal identity requires explanation, and it does get tiresome.
African-Americans, by the tragedy they have endured, bigfoot any discussion of diversity in the United States. The Civil War was, much as the Confederates denied it afterwards, about slavery.
The Civil War added three amendments to the Constitution, 13 to 15, but it was the Fourteenth Amendment that most clearly imported into law the statement of faith in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.”
