The U.S. senator who fought for Native causes
James Abourezk didn’t shy from a fight. The South Dakotan not only won a Senate seat in a conservative rural state, he did so as a staunch liberal backing higher taxes and more federal regulation. The first Arab-American senator, he made waves by frequently criticizing Israel, leading a two-week filibuster against natural-gas deregulation, and bringing South Dakotan basketball players on a goodwill trip to Havana to play the Cuban national team. Abourezk did more than agitate, though. As first chair of the Senate Indian Affairs committee, he created a commission to address Indigenous issues and authored bills extending Native American rights, including one restricting adoption of
Native children by white families. He attributed his red-state success to his brash populism and lack of concern about giving offense. A constituent refrain, he said, was “I don’t agree much with Abourezk, but by God, he’s honest.”
He was born to Lebanese immigrants who ran a general store on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, giving him a window into the “hardscrabble life of Sioux Indians,” said The Dakota Scout. After serving in Japan during World War II, he married and sought a career, trying ranching, judo instruction, and bartending. A family doctor changed his life by introducing him to The Nation and The New Republic; voracious reading stoked his “left-wing political ideology.” Abourezk earned a law degree from the University of South Dakota and started a practice in Rapid City. In 1968, he made a losing bid for state attorney general, said the Associated Press; in 1970, he narrowly won a House seat held for decades by Republicans. Two years later “he jumped to the Senate,” replacing a four-term Republican who’d suffered a stroke.
When his term ended, he declined to seek reelection, griping about the need to settle for “marginal victories.” Instead, he served as counsel for the Iranian Embassy, said The New York Times, and founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. In later years he “enjoyed holding court” at a restaurant his third wife ran in Sioux City, airing his views on politics, including his support for term limits. Where but the Senate, he wrote in a 1989 memoir, can you “have your bad jokes laughed at and your boring speeches applauded? It’s the ultimate place to have one’s ego massaged, over and over.”