Well, now this is interesting:

The president has cheered diversity on the Supreme Court with his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, who would be the first Hispanic and third woman to be appointed to the bench. For his next pick, we turned to you in our most recent Whispers poll.

Respondents chose racial diversity over religious diversity or difference in sexual orientation. A whopping 50 percent of those surveyed said they would like to see President Obama choose a Native American for the Supreme Court if the president got a second selection. Nineteen percent said they would like to see Obama appoint an Asian and 16 percent an African-American justice. Only 13 percent hoped to see a gay or lesbian justice as Obama’s next pick. And coming in last, with 2 percent, was a Muslim justice.

As near as I can tell those were the only choices, the implied question being if Obama goes with a minority candidate, which minority group should he select from. Unfortunately the pickings are slim, as right now there are no Native Americans on the federal bench.

I’m baffled by this op-ed by James Abourezk, former Democratic senator from South Dakota, in today’s NY Times:

Fourteen years after the Great Sioux Reservation was established in western South Dakota in 1868, President Chester Arthur issued an executive order creating a 50-square-mile buffer zone on its southern edge, in Nebraska. This was meant to prevent renegade whites from selling guns, knives and alcohol to Indians living on the reservation.

The buffer zone was ratified as law when Congress divided the Great Sioux Reservation into smaller units in 1889. But when Roosevelt became president, the liquor industry convinced him that the buffer zone should be abolished, which he did through an executive order in 1904. This move was, however, illegitimate from the start, because an act of Congress cannot legally be reversed by an executive order.

Today, the tiny Nebraska hamlet of Whiteclay has four liquor stores, ostensibly to serve its population of 24, but really more for the bootleggers and alcoholics living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, just across the border. The result has been murders, spouse beatings, child abuse, thefts and other undesirable consequences of the free flow of alcohol into the reservation.

The long history of alcoholism among Native Americans is well documented. Abourezk isn’t exaggerating about the scale of the problem either, a this woman’s experience and a handful of articles make clear. So I’m trying to be generous, but I don’t see how this article doesn’t merely reflect a similarly long history of patronizing Native Americans. If Natives get drunk…well then take their firewater away from them! To be fair, the sale of alcohol on the Pine Ridge reservation is banned by the tribal government, not the American government, and Abourezk assumes they’d do they same over any area under their jurisdiction outside of reservation boundaries, an assumption that is almost certainly correct. But Pine Ridge is one of the most desolate and hopeless parts of the country; according to this Wikipedia article the average life expectancy for men is 47 years, unemployment stands at around eighty percent, and almost half the residents live below the Federal poverty line. The alcoholism and drug abuse that permeates the reservation is a symptom of the hopeless and despair that is the natural result of over 200 years of material degradation and deliberate cultural annihilation. None of these staggering problems can be fixed by simply making it harder for people to get drunk (and make no mistake it would only be harder, and if they can’t get alcohol they’ll huff paint, or do meth or other harder drugs.) The real solution is money, and time, and something to replace a lifestyle that was lost the century before last (but most helpfully, money.) But none of these are as “easy” as simply getting somebody to undo an illegal executive order that’s over a hundred years old.

I finally sat down tonight to watch the last two segments of “We Shall Remain“, the American Experience program about various critical moments in Native American history. Of the five episodes the final, about the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee, is the best. Though, as usual, the government reneged on it’s promise to investigate the goings-on at the Pine Ridge reservation upon the surrender of the activists, it’s hard to overstate the impact the moment had on Native Americans across the country. Native Americans were already undergoing something of a cultural renaissance, as a consequence of the general flourishing of cultural identity that accompanied the civil rights and countercultural movements. But the siege served as something of a catalyst, as both a focus and accelerator of a pan-Indian movement that saw Natives both embracing cultures that until then had been dying, and embraced a general Native American “nationalism” that brought together in a kind of fellowship members of tribes that had remained divided even during the worst of the European and American onslaught. Nowhere is this more evident than in the various Pow Wows that take place around the country, particularly in the summer months. Members of all of the nation’s tribes come together to celebrate their own and each other’s heritages, in ceremonies that are a mixture of various cultures (though strongly influenced by the Plains Indian cultures.) Though many Native Americans who remain on the reservations are mired in poverty and hopelessness, there is no doubt that tribes in general have experienced a resurgence of political power, and both organized tribes and disparate groupings of Native Americans have worked hard to preserve what culture remains after over five hundred years of cultural annihilation. Little of this is a direct consequence of Wounded Knee; rather, Wounded Knee is symbolic of this re-awakening of Native American consciousness.

MORE Native lawyers please, especially ones like these three women, who overcame adversity to become successful attorneys who fight not only for their clients, but for their tribes. This story is an inspiration to anyone (man or woman of any race) who faces long odds in their quests to do what they want with their lives.

There’s something else about the article that I believe is worth noting:

[Leonika] Charging, 35, grew up in White Shield, N.D., on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Unlike Smith’s tribe, Charging’s people — the affiliated tribes of the Mandan, Arikara and Hidatsa — follow a matriarchal tradition. Women are given more leadership roles and control. That helped spur her to become a lawyer.

When she was young, she heard stories about how the federal government moved her people off their native lands in North Dakota and flooded the reservation to create a lake and park. The move caused decades of trauma that still lasts today, and Charging believes it wasn’t fair.

So she decided to take action to help prevent something like that from ever happening again. She decided to become a lawyer.

It’s not that unusual for minorities who are aware-or particularly proud-of their cultures, to feel motivated to do something on behalf of their ethnic group once they achieve a position of influence in society. Or if not that, then at least to find their decisions in their lives and careers informed or influenced by their own personal cultural experiences, or the experiences of their culture and ethnicity as a whole. Many Native Americans grew up hearing about the history of the government’s mistreatment of their tribes; perhaps as an attorney, this makes someone like Charging sympathetic to those who are mistreated by the government, or employers, or people who otherwise have some measure of unaccounted for power over their client’s life. There’s nothing at all unusual about this, which is why it boggles my mind that someone like Sonia Sotomayor can say that “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life” and then almost immediately be accused of racism (against-presumably-whites) for that statement. All that she meant was that as a woman of her background, she is familiar with ethnic and sex discrimination (and to a lesser degree oppression), certainly moreso than the average white, male judge who has not faced such discrimination in his life, a familiarity that is likely to make her more sympathetic to those who come before her court who are treated unfairly by those more powerful than they. This is not really that remarkable of a proposition; many white people who never face any discrimination are similarly influenced by their cultural experiences to believe that racial discrimination no longer exists in America. But the idea that a minority might have a better sense of fairness and unfairness is apparently a highly offensive notion to (mostly white) conservatives who believe that, all things being equal, racism, discrimination and unfair treatment has all been but oblitereted in our society.

1. More on studies showing that children do not in fact make people happier. I’m not sure how much I can add to what I said last year; children actually make some people happier (as opposed to making them think they’re happier) but yes, children also make a lot of people less happy. I don’t know why we’re pitter-pattering around the obvious truth, which is that there are a lot of people who should never have kids. That does not mean that the people who are having kids are falling prey to a “noble lie.”  

2. Senate Democrats are considering increasing funding to the Legal Services Corporation, which in turn funds legal aid programs across the country. The poor in our country are in desperate need of adequate legal representation. This won’t provide it, but more money is always better than less.

3. Tribal disenrollments over gambling money? Gambling has benefited Native tribes immensely, but it’s hardly made some tribal members less selfish or short-sighted.

4. Disappointingly, the Obama administration indicates no interest in settling the over a decade long case against the Federal government over misappropriated trust funds. The the Federal government’s ineptitude has long been highlighted by this case, officials in the Interior Dept. apparently believe that more time in court is the way to go.

5. Afghanistan: Richard Holbrooke, special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, says we need a “complete rethink” of drug policy towards Afghanistan. No ideas what this means yet, but it’s better than the more of the same approach that’s failed so far. Fred Kaplan breaks down the Obama administration’s war plan in Afghanistan; “counter terrorism plus” but again, nobody seems to know what success in Afghanistan will entail.

Going out for lunch I heard a snippet of today’s “Think” on KERA, the local PBS radio/TV affiliate. On today’s program host Krys Boyd interviews Sharon Grimberg and Chris Eyre, who produced and directed (respectively) three films for the new PBS series “We Shall Remain” that attempts to chronicle Native American history through Native eyes. Listening I was reminded that the University of Texas at Dallas is hosting a preview screening of “Trail of Tears”, one of the films of the series, tonight at 7:30. The film is being presented in Davidson Auditorium in the School of Management building, and will be followed by a panel discussion led by Dr. David Edmunds, professor of history and a member of the Eastern Cherokee. If you can’t make it, the series debuts on public television next month.

I know it’s wrong of me, but I read this news and think “typical“:

A second Mescalero family, also claiming to be descendants of the legendary Geronimo, plans to oppose an attempt to repatriate the Apache warrior’s remains to New Mexico.

Lariat Geronimo, 39, of Mescalero, said Thursday he is a great-grandson of Geronimo, and his immediate family members are the true descendants of the warrior. He said they oppose an attempt by Harlyn Geronimo of Mescalero, who also claims to be a great-grandson of the warrior, to move the remains.

Lariat Geronimo alleged Harlyn Geronimo doesn’t have a valid claim as a blood relative and has filed the repatriation lawsuit to gain publicity for himself.

“Everybody from the original Geronimos are going to fight this; this is a form of identify theft, and we’re going to fix it,” Lariat Geronimo said during a phone interview. “My family, the true descendants, never considered (Harlyn Geronimo) family.”

Native Americans have been fighting each other to the benefit of the white man since about, oh, 1492.