From the Editor's Desk: Privilege Isn't What You Think

For many in the Native American

community, both on the reservation and in the urban setting,

privilege is something that we see as the cause of our oppression.

It’s a catch-all for the discrimination we face individually and

collectively. Growing up in rural South Dakota, my parents and I were

followed around in retail stores in Rapid City, Pierre and Sioux

Falls. As tribal nations, we are not consulted in a meaningful way on

environmental, legal and cultural issues by governmental powers that

have made treaties, compacts with us and exercise authority over us.

For non-Natives, the concept of

privilege is one that is easily dusted off shoulders with the

argument that they – personally – have done nothing to Natives

that damage us individually and collectively. And for the most part,

they are entirely correct. Most of the time, the privilege that most

of us fight are the privileges of class and economics. However, those

privileges do tend to follow color lines, arbitrary as they may seem

in this modern age.

Pipelines that cross Anishinaabe,

Dakota, Lakota, Apsáalooke and Assiniboine territory – if

approved, constructed and expanded – will ultimately make a profit

for the multinational corporations that build them and for the fossil

fuel industry that will transport through them. Unfortunately, for

those tribal citizens who live with the reality of those pipelines in

their sacred ground, little to no profit will be seen and even if it

is, it will be little comfort when water becomes undrinkable and land

becomes sterile from the inevitable spills that do and will happen.

Five of South Dakota’s tribes have

submitted applications to the federal government to establish, fund

and exercise their sovereignty where the Indian Child Welfare Act is

concerned, hoping to create tribal agencies that handle adoptions

before the state of South Dakota becomes involved. While the

governor’s office has publicly supported this move, the progress of

these efforts will see if the state is sincere in its desire to see

Native children raised by Native families on the reservation. While

the right of tribes to foster and adopt its own children has always

been a matter of law, the privilege has generally been exercised by

the state.

Those are the direct effects of the

privilege of class and economics. The indirect effects of privilege

can be seen in incidents like the Hennepin Theatre Trust’s production

of “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” wherein Cherokee, Creek and

Choctaw historical figures were portrayed by non-Native actors and

written as two-dimensional caricatures of the complex reality upon

which, they were based. While early press information described the

production as a “South Park”-like ironic musical that pokes fun

at the tragedy, not one Native person in the audience laughed, few

and far between as they were.

New Native Theatre’s Rhiana Yazzie

attempted to articulate – in English, the lingua franca we Natives

adopted so as to explain to non-Natives why we have a right to exist

– that the privilege the authors, directors and audience members

enjoy is not one that we Native folk don’t ever get to experience.

That privilege is not that we take the musical at face value, we are

not idiots, we too know that our Cherokee brothers and sisters did

not speak in pidgin English. The privilege enjoyed by everyone else

in the theater was that they didn’t have the collective, generational

trauma weighing upon them when we saw those caricatures. When we see

a fashion model wearing a headdress, a non-Native person playing

Native or even a sports team with a mascot, we ask ourselves, “What

do they know about us?”

When the U.S. Patent Office canceled

the Washington football team’s trademark, cheers arose from all

corners of Indian country. Consequently, non-Natives around the

country continued to bemoan the march of progress for our cause by

saying political correctness had – yet again – gone too far.

Comments under the stories predictably began with, “I’m not racist,

but … ” or “All the Native Americans I know … ” and

ultimately, “I’m Native American and I don’t mind at all.”

The gap in between reason and opinion

is one where most non-Native people fall deep. When a group of people

say something is offensive, repeatedly and with conviction – so

much so that national advertising time is purchased to emphasize that

position – it follows general reason that what is called offensive

is actually offensive. When one has to seek out history or one

individual who agrees with a prejudiced position, one is no longer

reasonable, one is opinionated.

When one is opinionated and foregoes

reason for prejudice, it’s a short trip to othering a group of

people. When a group of people is othered, they begin have

effectively lost their humanity in the eyes of the prejudiced. We who

are othered become less than, we become inhuman and when we become

inhuman, it becomes easy to discriminate.

Discrimination then leads to all roads

of oppression where might is right and majority rules. And when one

is part of the majority, one enjoys a privilege that they never have

to think about.