Editor’s note: I am very excited to welcome White Papers’ first non-White contributor who will go by Anishinaabe Man for the time being.
Had the catastrophic demographic change brought on by the post-1965 immigration mania never occurred Indigenous Americans would be the third or fourth largest demographic group in the United States today. Instead, the Indigenous people of the modern United States have been surpassed in number by any manner of foreign ethnic groups ranging from five-plus million subcontinental Indians, to six million Puerto Ricans, 4.2 million Chinese, and more than 37 million Mexicans. Our modest population of 3.7 single-race native Americans stands little chance of asserting its political interests in this hyper-diverse America where larger, richer, foreign ethnic groups are continually imported in an effort to change the nature of the country.
What little representation is left for Indigenous Americans has already been relegated to generally college-aged women of a radically left-leaning orientation. Women who have rarely stepped foot on a reservation, and remain largely ignorant of their cultural histories despite dawning seemingly endless amounts of traditional garb and regalia in order to show off their uniqueness among the growing tide of diversity.
It is palpably ironic, at least to this author, that these youngsters are attempting to push what they view as legitimate Indigenous political interests at the same time that they support seemingly endless mass migration into the continental United States and thereby contribute to a quieting of Indigenous political voices on at the state and national level.
Indeed, if the mass migration continues at its current pace Indigenous Americans will be re-relegated to the status of second-class citizens in a country where we were beginning to make political, social, and economic gains amidst a change in White attitudes in the middle of the 20th century. We could have formed a much more robust ethnic lobby (perhaps the best-funded in the nation) that would have expanded our sovereignty and rights, but this is impossible in an ever-diversifying America.
The logic here is quite simple: In the pre-1965 demographic mix of the country, there were three predominant demographic groups led by Whites, then African Americans, and finally Indigenous Americans. As a minority we were in a position to negotiate directly with the large White majority and, perhaps to the surprise of many White readers of this publication, could have (and still should) formed a series of strategic alliances with White Americans on social issues such as mass immigration and opposition to the growing power of the LGBTQ lobby over public policy in this country.
Instead Indigenous nations and the reservation populations they rule over risk becoming an irritant to the increasingly diverse ruling class of the United States. How long will it be before the newly imported diverse populations either begin demanding that reservations be abolished (to redirect resources to their ethnic groups) or that they be given similar reservation-style arrangements? While the reservation system is far from perfect it does serve to ‘reserve’ significant amounts of land, natural resources, and sovereignty to Indigenous Americans and we would stand a far better chance of reforming it were we the primary or tertiary ethnic group in the country.
It is here I should note for the typical White Papers’ reader that I bear little animous toward modern Whites. A series of Supreme Court rulings since the 1970s have significantly expanded sovereignty rights for Indigenous nations in the United States and White Americans today support Indigenous self-determination, tribal sovereignty, and expansion of tribal authority by large margins.
78% of (generally White) conservative Americans support teaching Indigenous history in schools, 75% support preventing non-native governments from interfering in child custody cases within tribes, and 58% of conservative Americans support increasing funding for native tribes.
With this in mind, I would like to shift focus and look at the areas where Indigenous American and White American political interests (at least those of right-wing Whites) converge to a significant degree.
Indigenous Americans are, according to a 2022 Global Affairs poll, the racial group most likely to oppose the increasing diversification of the United States, with 33% of Indigenous Americans saying that increasing diversity is making the country a worse place to live.