Trump the Indian fighter
It’s no surprise that the president would insult Native Americans
Emblazoned across the image of the Native American face on the T-shirt I bought in Oak Bluffs on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard are the words “Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.”
The presence of terroristin-chief Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. president, enforcer of the Indian Removal Act, was not the only thing that tainted the White House ceremony honoring World War II Navaho code talkers last month. The portrait of the slave-holding husband of a bigamist presided in the background as the 45th president, Donald Trump, embarrassed his way through the event by gratuitously labeling Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas,” disrespecting her American Indian pedigree and all Native Americans.
Increasingly, we may attribute Mr. Trump’s idiotic utterances to mental disturbances. Decades earlier, he verbally ventured into Indian territory for an old-fashioned purpose: greed. His pronouncements against the Pequots of Connecticut were noless ignorant.
The long-suffering Pequots were once the richest, most populous and largest landowners in southeastern Connecticut. By the mid1600s, an inexorable Pequot decline had begun its morbid march. Smallpox brought to them by diseased Europeans reduced their 16,000 population by 80 percent. Wars with other tribes in cahoots with Colonists took their toll as well. But the signal outrage against the Pequots was the Mystic Massacre of 1637. On the night of May 26, the English and their native allies launched a deadly raid on Pequot villagers. Some 700 men, women and children were murdered and their dwellings burned to the ground.
That horrifying event ended the Pequot Wars, but not the land grab. Over more than 330 years, the tribe shrunk into near extinction on no more than 200 acres. By the 1970s, sisters Elizabeth and Eunice George were all that remained of the tribe on its original land near Hartford.
ThePequot sisters were elderly and impoverished, but savvy. Elizabeth George telegraphed the message throughout the nation for members to return to their tribal land before the state of Connecticut claimed it after she and her sister died. And come they did, mostly African-American Pequots — black Indians — as well as a sprinkling of Caucasian Pequots.
Elizabeth George’s grandson, Skip Hayward, was among the early arrivals, and became chairman of the Mashantucket Pequots, achieving recognition for the tribe by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Pequots convinced Congress to give the tribe gaming rights and developed what became Foxwoods Casino in 1986. Foxwoods today is the world’s largest casino. It has enjoyed years of huge profits from its voracious slot machines, thereby enriching those Pequots who were smart enough to return to their Connecticut tribal home lands.
This would not have happened if Donald Trump had gotten his way in 1993. He conspired with longtime sidekick Roger Stone to discredit the Pequots in a failed attempt to drive them out of the Eastern casino business because they competed with his Atlantic City gaming enterprises. He also sought to advance his own pending Connecticut casino in partnershipwith another tribe.
Mr. Trump appeared before the House Natural Resources Committee, castigating its members for certifying the Pequots to operate their casino. He falsely accused the Pequots of being tools of the Mafia. He dismissed them as fake Indians, infamously proclaiming, “They don’t look like Indians, and Indians don’t think theylook like Indians.”
On June 6, 1993, he appeared on the “Imus In the Morning” radio show, and racist misogynist Don Imus egged him on, describing the Pequots as “drunken Injuns” trying to run casinos and characterizing the Pequots as Michael Jordan Indians, referring to the dark complexion of numerous Pequot citizens. Replying to the obvious set-up, Mr. Trump mentioned that he had challenged a Pequot to admit having less Indian blood than Mr. Trump.
Neither Donald Trump nor his allied tribe prevailed. Today, the tribal council running the Mashantucket Pequot is a team of black Indians leading the wealthiest Native Americans in the country.
Less well off are the Delaware and Oklahoma Cherokee, whose ancestors were forced westward from the southeastern United States under Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act, resulting in the Trail of Tears, over the protests of Rep. Davy Crockett and others.
Elizabeth Warren and her brothers claim both tribes in their maternal heritage. During the 2012 election in which she relieved Sen. Scott Brown of his seat, Mr. Brown accused her of inventing her native background to achieve some imagined advantage in life. During the presidential election wars of 2016, candidate Trump began referring to Ms. Warren as Pocahontas to insult her and all native peoples in reaction to her withering criticisms of him.
In the wake of the president again deriding Ms. Warren as Pocahontas last month — at a ceremony to honor Native Americans, no less — White House dissembler Sarah Huckabee Sanders moronically opined that the public disdained Ms. Warren’s claim of Native American ancestry rather than addressing Mr. Trump’s racist slur.
During the past quarter century, Donald Trump has dismissed Pequots who are Pequots. He has mocked a distinguished senator who expresses pride in her Native American heritage. He has challenged the birthright of his African-American predecessor. And he lauds the good in white supremacists, leaving no doubt that he is one. He keeps faith with his predecessor, Old Hickory.