Nations Within A Nation, The Politics of American "Peoplehood"
Photo by Rachel Brooks. A burial mound of the ancient Adenda Hopewell culture (Roman era) in Oregonia, Greater Dayton, Ohio. Remants of ancient culture remain in modern America for the seeker to visit.
Many of the forgotten dead have been discovered at residential schools. As Canada repeatedly discovers mass graves of residential students, the United States pledges to search the campuses of its residential schools. American society braces for the truth and depth of failures to coexist with its First Nation counterparts. Among these were the nations whose law of Great Peace shaped democracy.
The political pageantry of former American leadership crumbles as exposed human rights atrocities demand answers. America is forced to recognize its disgraceful maltreatment of the First Nations, whose culture and society lent a great deal of influence on how America came to exist in the first place.
The U.S. owes so much to and has taken so much from its First Nations. As a whole, the U.S. can no longer hide under narratives of feigned Indigenous support systems that fail to spark the reintegration of First Nations as Nations within the Nation.
The U.S. must address its failures to end violations of Indigenous rights as well as enforce Indigenous equality. The government as a Federal-to-States whole must address how it undermines the concept of American liberty from inception to the present with continued abuse of First Nations.
The preamble of the Constitution, America’s opening statement for civil liberties, simmers under this controversy. “We the People,” opens the Constitution, but the affirmation of the “People” is what remains undermined. This is due to leaders failing to adhere to checks and balances and pursuing their agendas over the law.
The First Nations’ politics set forth the process of individual national rebuilding. In this endeavor lies an answer to the questions of pan-American peoplehood. The individual Nation’s pursuit is one that the American Nation can learn from and must engage with. Through this process, American governance comes to understand how people can be self-governing microcosms within a legally unified binding law
A Look Into History
American leadership's abuse of power and peoplehood throughout history serves as a litmus test for the nation's problems of self-violation. Legal bounds of American Treaties and negotiations with congruent nations were an absolute need to prove America's commitment to its values. The nation's inability to coexist with its preexisting "People" makes it impossible to ensure the peoplehood of its other minority communities.
Examples of American leaders undermining the political process with First Nations are exemplified during Andrew Jackson’s presidency. In the 1830s, the United States and the Cherokee Nation, a member of a Five Nation confederation, fought a legal battle over Cherokee national sovereignty within the shared territory of the United States.
In 1832, Chief Justice John Marshall submitted a written opinion on Worcester vs. The Cherokee Nation that dictated the Cherokee were sovereign people with inalienable rights. Andrew Jackson ignored Chief Justice Marshall’s legal opinion and proceeded with the Great Removal. The Cherokee and their federation of Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole peoples were inhumanely removed from the eastern territory.
Jackson's actions were a gross undermining of the American legal system by ignoring the courts to avoid working with contingencies that would allow a Federation of Nations and the United States to coexist. There was a manipulation of the system that insists on equal rights for all. It exposes the tendency American leaders had to undermine the U.S. Legal code and courts in favor of a forced enterprise agenda. American leadership violates American ideals by oversight.
Due to their glaring failure, First Nations were constantly overlooked in American public policy initiatives. History gives examples of times when Americans sometimes sacrifice their citizens' rights to pursue ambitious progress.
Lessons Of The Dine
As the modern First Nation seeks political reformations and national rebuilding, it serves as an example of granting peoplehood the right to self-govern under the umbrella of the federation. Ancient First Nation legal codes, such as the “Great Binding Law” of the Six Nations of New York, will be brought to the discussion of peoplehood as First Nations define who they are in postmodern America. The traditional systems along with the modern adaptations work together to reform the way that America looks at its national peoplehood.
This can be seen in the way the Dine people approach the future of their national identity.
Dine nation scholar Lloyd Lee addressed what nationalism means within the First Nations politics. In his essay The Future of Navajo Nationalism, Lee referred to Dine nationalism as devotion to the interests and culture of one's nation and aspirations for national independence in a country under foreign domination. Lee notes that, since 1923, Navajos have been building their nation under western political concepts.
He referred to the interests of Navajo nationalism as the groundwork for “serious discussion” in changing the status of First Nations affairs about cohesion with the United States.
As part of the serious discussions, reflections on American law will also be included, allowing the "indigenous space" to ratify and challenge American leadership from the bottom up. First Nations reformation can spur an American reformation or catalyze a public transformation.
Nation Of Hypocrisy
As First Nations move to argue their right to peoplehood, American political hypocrisy is forced into the spotlight. It addresses the political pageantry of the Clinton, Obama, Trump, and now Biden administrations regarding the priority of Indigenous peoples as America's most endangered minorities.
American leadership has signaled support for Indigenous reformation with little change. This shows the existence of a self-serving populism in these administrations and within these policies. This is a repeated cycle of thinly-veiled populism that has been reflected throughout the last century.
An example of this populism can be seen in the Census Report of Thomas Donaldson in the 1890s. This report described the Six Nations of New York as “contiguous nations” that “must have a respective authority to solve differences between them.” The report describes the Six Nations' view of citizenship at that time as "technical, very vague, and unsubstantial."
The census report described how the white settlers in the shared region would use the forced abandonment of Indigenous self-government as an opportunity to partition off land that they owned.
The Donaldson report referred to traditionalism as “gross paganism” and that the First Nations should be “charitably supported” by those who “are their true friends. In the report, the process for increasing self-reliance among Six Nations of New York was outlined. The tone it uses, however, highlights the fundamental problems of this goal. Indoctrination of homogeneity failed to see the necessity for complex reformation when American enterprise tested professed American values at the ground level.
The census report's findings saw the Six Nations as a problem to be solved by superior western systems. This attitude of superiority shaped the mindset dominating United States’ 19th-century policy. This political superiority drove re-education and the integration of First Nations children into the established society. The unwillingness to coexist with these nations shows the greatest failure of the American socio-political system.
Where To Go From Here
Contiguous nationality and peoplehood of First Nations cannot be averted. The U.S. cannot progress if it continues to ignore this snowballing hypocrisy. Likewise, the U.S. cannot reform if it continues to trap the contiguous politics of First Nations into an echo chamber of American bipartisan arguments. The cycle must be broken and the American people must question a Peoplehood that does not demand and enforce contiguous peoplehood of First Nations. It is necessary for American survival to reform the idea of what unified peoplehood means, and how to empower it.
Deft tactics of populism enforce the idea that a government-imposed policy is superior to the People's will. The act of imposing the federal will on the rights of the people to self-government within the unified legal code is in direct contradiction with American Constitutional values
Andrew Jackson undermined checks and balances when he imposed his will above Marshall's written opinion. He undermined America as a whole by violating the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation within the same geography as his federation. It is up to Americans of all ethnicities and languages to reform this constitutional sabotage.
Developing national individualism within the space of the overall society requires a balance of individualism within a union. The First Nations spread throughout the urban U.S., not confined to reserve lands. Their rights to peoplehood fall under a redefinition of regional confines.
A people can be individual and also live in confederate goodwill with the rest of the populace. Scholars of Indigenous politics, such as Simone Poliandri, note that First Nations call this an “indigenous space” within the rest of American society. If all nations and peoples are allowed to have an individual space within a collective American whole, while being compelled to agree to certain agreements of belonging to a union, then equality becomes attainable. All the individual peoples become willing participants of a confederated peoplehood.
America must look to its First Nations as they lead by their example with national rebuilding. As those who are the cornerstone of this Continent’s society reshape their place in it from the base level, they give the real-time model for a collective reformation to the American people. This is why sovereign First Nation as Nations within a Nation is absolutely necessary and integral to reclaiming the virtues which inspired the American system.
