Native Americans: Original Southerners
The people clamoring over whether to keep or remove Confederate monuments agree on one thing: This is a blackwhite issue. Last month, a graduate student doused the University of North Carolina’s Confederate monument in a mixture of her own blood and red ink. The monument, she said, “is the genocide of black people.”
I recognize my blood on these statues, too.
When people see Southern history in black and white, where are American Indians? Most people believe that the American Indian genocide took place long ago. But it wasn’t successful. There are over 6.5 million American Indians, and many of them live in the South. North Carolina is home to the Lumbee Tribe, the largest tribe of American Indians east of the Mississippi (55,000 strong), of which I am a member. We are the original Southerners, and we shaped and continue to shape Southern history.
And yet even the most progressive Americans don’t seem to realize this. The coalition organized to oppose the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., last August did not invite any representatives of Virginia’s seven American Indian tribes to participate.
When asked about his tribe’s exclusion, the chief of the Monacan Nation, Dean Branham, seemed to confirm the general view when he said, “I don’t have any problem with those statues.” He continued, “I just don’t think it’s an Indian issue.”
The “Indian issues” he deals with include how to protect his people’s lands from mining and drilling, how to promote economic development, health and education, and how to obtain, after 10,000 years of tribal history, the federal government’s acknowledgment of the Monacan as a sovereign nation (this was finally achieved in January).
Like Branham, I used to believe that the monuments had nothing to do with me, because American Indians often confronted both the North and South as enemies. Usually the last mention of us in K-12 classrooms is the Trail of Tears, when five Southern tribes were forced West in the 1830s. Even though a small elite group of these Indians owned slaves, their nations had to be removed so that whites exclusively could profit from slavery.
White civilization, as the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, said, depended on the subjection of black people. He might have added “and the erasure of Indians,” but his audience didn’t need to hear that; they had already done it.
In Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), the Cherokee tried to remain neutral, but Confederates threatened to foment insurrection if they didn’t join the cause. Members of the Creek Nation who tried to flee to Kansas were chased down. Those who made it out of Confederate territory were left to starve by Union troops.
Meanwhile, in Minnesota, the Union furthered the quest for Manifest Destiny by executing Indian resisters. In Arizona and New Mexico, the Union Army forced Indian men, women and children to march 400 miles to an internment camp. The Confederacy’s commitment to slavery and the Union’s commitment to expansion were different versions of the same story of imperialism.
Tribes that remained east of the Mississippi approached the war with ambivalence. Eastern Band Cherokees formed a Confederate Army regiment, but a small group of Lumbee men led a multiracial gang of outlaws to violently resist Confederate assaults. Known as the Lowry War, this uprising helped send the Confederates packing and continued into Reconstruction.
When Radical Republicans gained control of the government in North Carolina, they came courting sympathetic Lumbee voters. Yet Republican authorities executed my great-greatgrandfather for a murder he did not commit that was connected to the Lowry War. By hanging him, Republicans proved they cared more about their “law and order” reputation than they did about justice for their Lumbee constituents.
When slavery ended, it took a widespread counterrevolution — election fraud, segregation laws and lynchings — for whites to reestablish control. In Oklahoma in 1898, a howling mob burned two Seminole teenagers alive after they were falsely accused of murdering a white woman. In North Carolina, my parents went to segregated Lumbeeonly schools.
Indian communities defied the logic of racial segregation; their very existence belied whites’ insistence that there were two races, never to be mixed. In 1924, the Virginia legislature passed the Racial Integrity Act, which outlawed interracial marriage, in part by reclassifying American Indians as “colored.”
A Virginia doctor led the effort; like the Nazis, he believed that biologically inferior children emerged from racial mixing. State governments agreed and forcibly sterilized Indian, black and poor white women thought to possess these “polluted” genes.
Over the same years that Indians became invisible, many of the Confederate monuments went up, in an attempt to rewrite history and make the Civil War about states’ rights and happy plantations.
We talk about how these monuments exclude black Americans. But they also erase Indians — as well as Asians, Middle Easterners, Jews, Latinos and other diverse peoples who call the South home.
Those who wish to keep the monuments argue that tearing them down would erase Confederate history. But the distorted history that Confederate monuments symbolize will always be with those it did not favor. American Indians will never forget it.