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Presidential Snakes on the Indian Plane
It’s hard to write about presidential politics from an Indian point of view.
If you intend to be honest you have to admit that a candidate who is good for Indian country is not always good for the U.S.A. or vice versa. Richard Nixon is a great example. He abused power in ways that stood out in a pre-Trump world, but he also completed Lyndon Johnson’s turn away from termination and relocation as federal Indian policy and signed the Indian Civil Rights Act.
Mr. Trump, I expect, is waiting for the Supreme Court to effectively kick the Five Tribes as political entities out of the eastern half of Oklahoma in Carpenter v. Murphy. Then we will see Trumpian Indian policy: termination without relocation. Those who know the history will point out that relocation is how the Five Tribes got to Oklahoma and ask relocate where?
Most of Indian country has been and still is rural and economically depressed. That is because reservations were not typically located on expensive land or in places that would force the settlers to socialize with the people they evicted. The great mystery writer Tony Hillerman used to claim that there is more distance between country folks and city folks than between Indians and non-Indians. While he had a good point, there is a lot of overlap between “country folks” and “Indians.”
