Dear Senators Moreno and Husted:
We are generally admonished not to compare every government wrongdoing to Nazi’s and Hitler. As a Jew, I wholeheartedly support that approach. We need to be respectful of the past and of truth, and not in any way diminish the complete horrors and inhumanity of the Holocaust or the Pogroms. Not every evil act is comparable to Hitler. Not every group of hatemongers are Nazi’s.
But in the case I am about to discuss, the comparison is not only apt, it is founded in historical fact. These facts reveal the depths of evil that America perpetrated in our treatment of our indigenous peoples.
You can easily find the original sources from which I am quoting, and there are many more. The subject is not a secret and has been widely studied and written about by scholars in history and political science. It is not, however, widely known, because we use American history in our schools to perpetuate myths about our past, i.e., manifest destiny. Our popular culture reinforces these myths. We manage these facts in the same way we avoid teaching about Thomas Jefferson regularly shtupping a slave and having children with her. And we are now in an era where we whitewash history to not hurt any white children’s feelings. Just ask any school librarian what I mean. If we could kill an Indian fifth grader at a boarding school, every fifth grader in the country is old enough to learn about it.
Heads up … try to hide the truth, and hocus, pocus, we’re going back to being Nazi’s.
Please bear with me as I quote from a few of these references. It is important that you understand this foundation, before I suggest why you should care, why you are involved in all of this, and how our history with Native Americans is important in your current process of dismantling our government, our democracy and our country.
Most Americans would be shocked to learn that in the 1920s and 1930s Adolf Hitler and Nazi scholars, lawyers, and officials were studying United States law while developing Germany’s policies and laws concerning Jews and the conquest of Eastern Europe. Most Americans would also be surprised that, as the leaders of the Third Reich were turning racist ideas into official German policies, Nazis were carefully studying United States federal Indian law and state laws that discriminated against Indian nations and American Indians.
Nazi scholars and officials paid serious attention and gave careful consideration to the United States when they drafted and enacted the Third Reich’s racially oriented agenda. Surely, “research unmistakably reveals . . . that the Nazis did find precedents and parallels and inspirations in the United States. What is the message then? Euro-Americans and the United States pursued ethnic cleansing and even genocidal actions against the Indigenous peoples and nations in North America. They enacted race-based laws and denied minorities basic rights. The Nazis did the same, and far worse, against Jews and other peoples. In closing: how intriguing, and, at the same time, how profoundly disturbing and unsettling, that American race laws and policies, played a major role, some role, or any role at all, in the Nazi formulation of its racist agenda, regime, and genocide. (The United States and American Indians, Robert J. Miller, St. John’s Law Review).
America’s resettlement plans used against Native Americans inspired Adolf Hitler and the Nazi’s starvation and resettlement plans directed at Ukrainians, Russians and Slavic people in Eastern European and Central Asia. Hitler was impressed by U.S. resettlement programs that opened the “West,” as it was called, to white, European settlement and agricultural development. Key among them was the Indian Removal Act of 1830. (U.S. Treatment of Indians Inspired Hitler’s Hunger Policies, Lee Egerstrom, The Circle, June 2020).
From boyhood on, Hitler devoured the Westerns of the popular German novelist Karl May. In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for “living space” in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind.
Among recent books on Nazism, the one that may prove most disquieting for American readers is James Q. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” (Princeton). Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis took inspiration from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes that, in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler praises America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by “excluding certain races from naturalization.” Whitman writes that the discussion of such influences is almost taboo, because the crimes of the Third Reich are commonly defined as “the nefandum, the unspeakable descent into what we often call ‘radical evil.’” But the kind of genocidal hatred that erupted in Germany had been seen before and has been seen since. Only by stripping away its national regalia and comprehending its essential human form do we have any hope of vanquishing it.
How Hitler found his blueprint for a German empire by looking to the American West On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Americans must recognize the ugly history of how the Nazis were inspired by the long and brutal U.S. campaign against Native Americans. (David Carroll Cochran October 7, 2020)
Hitler praised the way the “Aryan” America conquered “its own continent” by clearing the “soil” of “natives” to make room for more “racially pure” settlers. Of course, Hitler never realized his full vision. As the tide of war turned, and the vast former Soviet lands he planned to colonize slipped from his grasp, the Nazi strategy shifted away from the traditional “eliminationist” methods of settler colonialism based on the American model — mass shootings, terror, expulsion and depopulation by disease and hunger — and toward their own innovation of mechanized murder in the death camps, now targeting almost exclusively Jews. Having tried his project in a much more densely populated area, over a much shorter timeframe, and during a war he failed to win, Hitler did manage to kill millions, displace millions more and change the demographics of Europe. Yet, his colonization goals never reached more than around a half million settlers in parts of Poland, most of whom were themselves expelled or killed with the war’s end. In contrast, the United States played a much longer game — a gradual but relentless expansion and depopulation of Natives over wider spaces and more decades, and without rival military powers seriously threatening the project. Like Hitler, the United States killed and displaced millions and changed the demographics of a continent. Unlike the Nazis, the country largely completed the process of racial replacement and continental dominance, while at the same time creating a powerful national myth of frontier heroism and progress. It is a myth Americans are still struggling to come to terms with, and the work of those who spread observations of Indigenous Peoples’ Day is an important part of this task. (emphasis mine, How American Racism Influenced Hitler, Alex Ross, April 23, 2018).
Our evil didn’t end in the 1800s. Our country spent almost all of the 20th century engaged in disappearing our indigenous peoples one way or the other. I implore you to look up the Allotment Act, the Relocation Program and the Termination Act. All these atrocities were passed by Congress and signed by the President. And YOU actually own all of these historical evils, because you are currently serving in Congress and haven’t done anything to either reverse these laws or reverse the atrocities that have resulted from these laws.
For the purpose of the issues I am going to present to you, it is critical that you understand one of the most fundamental dynamics in the relationship between the United States of America and the Indigenous tribes that existed in the Americas before European arrival. These Tribes are entirely different from any minority in America. When the United States was formed after the revolutionary war, we (the new Americans) did not have dominance and military control of these tribes. In fact, in many instances, we feared them. As such, we were motivated to treat each of the tribes as an independent, sovereign nation, which they were. Our agreements with these tribes were based on treaties. As such, what we do for these indigenous peoples are not based on any moral or ethical motivations. What we are obligated to do for these people is based on our treaty agreements.
The treaty period ended in 1871, because the federal government (representing the American people) no longer feared these tribes. We succeeded in tearing their lives apart, destroying their way of life, many of their languages and their food supply, forcing them onto much smaller areas than their native homelands, and making them entirely dependent. But our treaty obligations did not end. Our treaty obligations have never ended.
We forced them onto reservations. We barely saw them as human, with which Hitler became totally enamored. I say barely, because in 1537, Pope Paul III decreed that indigenous peoples were “true men.” The decree was called, “Sublimus Deus,” and Europeans in the Americas screwed themselves into pretzels to ignore it. But the Pope had said it, a lot of these Europeans were Catholics, and so our Native Americans were at least sort of human (and particularly as compared to the Africans we were bringing over as slaves by the shipload).
We paid them for the land we stole in these treaties. Why do I refer to this act as stealing? Well, most of these tribes were not in the best position to negotiate a treaty. Do we really think that we paid them what this land was really worth? The folklore I did learn in school was that we paid the native people on Manhattan and Long Island in beads and trinkets. That sounds about right. The myth implied that we got a great deal. That’s not nice. Or more accurately put, it is stealing.
And most importantly, most of these tribes had no conception whatsoever that a human being could possibly own land. That was an entirely foreign concept and remained so for long after they were told they owned the land upon which these reservations were located. So, what kind of honest negotiation for payment transpires with those circumstances? And in many instances, they were negotiating with people who didn’t know English. How fair could those negotiations have been. Hey, just get their signatures (even though they can’t write) on the dotted line.
It gets worse, if that is even possible. We didn’t give the money to the tribes in these transactions. The federal government kept the money, like these tribes should trust the federal government with their money. After 1871, the federal government took the incredibly paternalistic approach to the tribes and determined what was going to happen to this money. Most of these tribes were forced to adopt various programs designed to transform them into white people. For instance, if the federal government worked to force them into farming and ranching, all the seed, cattle, irrigation canals, fertilizer, tools and equipment … all of it was paid for by deducting the amounts (that the federal government determined – without oversight I might add because paternalism is the oversight) from the treaty money. If the federal government set up boarding schools to educate the children, these costs would be deducted from this money. Never mind that these children were forcibly taken away from their parents, forced to wear western clothing, were punished for speaking their language or trying to practice their religion and culture … they had to pay for it.
Please think about this for a minute. We totally screwed them on these land sales. We kept the money. And then we forced them to pay for a way of life they neither understood nor wanted.
And the people who were responsible for administering these programs were not exactly the cream of the crop of American society. Often, the Indian Agents were crooks and stole more than they handed out. These agents were the federal government bureaucrats assigned the responsibility of protecting the interests of the tribes, the entities under trust status of the government. I would characterize this dynamic as a sick joke if the consequences of this history were not so incredibly tragic. And these people are living with the results of these atrocities today.
These tribes have never dealt with the cream of the crop of American society. If a priest or brother was caught abusing children or women in their diocese, they weren’t thrown out, they were hidden away on a reservation to have their way with the native women and children … and the church knew. What kind of FBI agent ends up being assigned to an Indian reservation? They’ve had to deal with the worst of us … and we’ve known it. If you are ever confused about what I am describing, go visit the children’s graves next to the boarding schools, or go to the diocesan web sites where they list the priests and brothers who committed these atrocities (the lists are the result of lawsuits against these dioceses and the Church).
I am a cultural anthropologist with a specialization in Native American studies. I received my doctorate from The Ohio State University in 1983. I did two years of research on the Fort Belknap Reservation with the A’aniiih (Gros Ventre), Nakoda (Assiniboine) and Metis (French-Chippewa-Cree). I was in Hays, a southern community, on the Fort Belknap Reservation between August 1976 and June 1978. In addition to my research, my wife and I served in the Jesuit Volunteer Corp and worked for and lived at St. Paul’s Mission. I taught history, civics, political science and geography to fifth – eighth graders at the mission school. I drove the school bus. I was the janitor. I took care of chickens and a potato plot. I taught cultural and physical anthropology at a local college run through the College of Great Falls. I taught GED classes in the community. I ran a recreation program in the evenings for older teens and young adults. I served on committees through the school board at the public school. And I taught hunting safety to the children on the reservation through the Montana Fish and Game Department. My wife taught music to the first and second graders, she cooked the hot breakfast program. She ran an arts and crafts program, primarily for women in the community. We both sold bingo cards on Thursday evenings.
What I am writing to you about is based on my years of studies, and my personal observations and experience.
Through negligence and ineptitude and because we just don’t care, the federal government and the American people have relegated these people to live in destitute poverty. In addition to this poverty, we literally beat their traditional culture and language out of them and then failed to offer a satisfying replacement. What has resulted is generations of psychological trauma that has never been addressed. It is barely recognized. The result of this poverty and trauma has been that every social problem known to humankind has flourished on these reservations. From decades of observation, I can tell you that we just don’t care. We’ve moved them so far out of our way that we don’t have to see it. We can thank Andrew Jackson for that hideous atrocity. Who forces grandma to walk from South Carolina to Oklahoma? Jackson was popular because he was for the common man. That’s why he’s one of Trump’s favorite presidents. He borrowed this strategy in his campaigns. It is one of the great ironies of our times that he sells himself as being for the common man. Trump is a populist in precisely the same way as I’m the Queen of England. The only similarities Trump has with the common man is that he is addicted to fast food, and he is obese.
We ignore all this history without shame. And today it is worse, because we don’t want to hurt a white child’s feelings with these truths.
Make no mistake, we own all of it. Stealing their land. Stealing their money. Creating the poverty. Causing all the endemic problems, from teenage suicide to alcohol and drug abuse to every other social ill under the sun.
They have no economy. There is no economic security. We’ve treated these tribes like children for so long that on top of negligence, trauma, and abuse, the paternalism has created a burden that makes positive change and growth difficult. And what exacerbates all of it is that we don’t care. I’m watching you not doing your job as it is. I am trying to imagine that you give any thought whatsoever to what is happening on these reservations. You know, the ones YOU are responsible for because of their trust status. We don’t do anything for these people out of the kindness of our hearts. We are required to act on their behalf out of our treaty obligations.
When I lived on Fort Belknap in the 1970s, there was no economy. There was no tax base whatsoever. If there is no income, there is nothing to tax. In the winter, the unemployment rate for men was about 90%. The poverty and trauma and everything that came with it was overwhelming. It is America’s great tragedy … and we have so many good ones to choose from, i.e., slavery and Jim Crow, Japanese internment camps, our treatment of Chinese when they built our railroads, not allowing Jews into the country during the Holocaust …. All of them suck, but I’m going to vote for what we’ve done to our indigenous peoples because it gave Hitler the blueprint to kill six million Jews and six million more people who didn’t fit his conception of an Aryan race.
I’ve been back to the reservation, the last time in 2017. I didn’t see any factories or commercial buildings and I drove through the entire reservation more than once. I can’t imagine that anything has changed. It looked just like it did about fifty years ago. When I lived there, about half of the A’aniii lived off the reservation. I often thought about the demographics of the reservation, and it sure seemed like it was a place for young people and old people. Working aged people were motivated to leave the reservation to find employment.
A critically important point to make in this regard is that there is one place in the world where a person can be A’aniii, and that is on the Fort Belknap Reservation. Culture is shared and it is shared in a community of people. As a cultural anthropologist, I know this as a fact. An A’aniii can live in Oakland and be an Indian, because there are other tribes represented in the city. They have pow wows and participate in other rituals and activities. But those activities are Indian, not A’aniii. And that matters because we have treaty obligations that require us to make a life for every A’aniii who wants to live on Fort Belknap and be an A’aniii. When we fail to provide them with a secure and safe life, we are failing our obligations. When we fail to allow them the same aspirations we have for our own children and grandchildren, we are failing our obligations. We owe them a good, prosperous, healthy, safe life on the reservation we’ve forced them onto – because we killed their food resources, their dignity and independence and their way of life.
You have made these people entirely dependent on the federal government. You hold their money. You make decisions for them. You are in control, and you are responsible for every aspect of their lives. Over the past two months you have been in the process of dismantling the federal government. One can only imagine that within the next six months, the entire federal government will be somewhere between totally dysfunctional and destroyed.
When I lived on the reservation and I watched a federal government program being cut or reductions in funding, I watched people suffer. There is a direct relationship between these federal government actions, and the quality of life on the reservation. What I am begging you to consider is that while you dismantle the federal government, you accept responsibility for the catastrophic suffering of all these people. These aren’t the black African children that you are starving to death; these are the people whose land and lives you stole from them and then made them entirely dependent on YOU. They are your responsibility. If you cause this suffering, you own all of it. And frankly, the American people own all of it.
There is no economy on the reservation because you have done nothing to build one. Just about every single job on the reservation is tied into and funded by a federal government program. The only incomes people have on the reservation come from these employment opportunities. Many of these jobs are seasonal, so even for those people who have jobs, they are neither secure nor permanent. Consequently, there is no tax base on the reservation to support anything … education, the building of infrastructure … nothing. Everything comes from the federal government.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs manages just about everything. No one is permitted to sneeze without their permission. If you make cuts to the BIA, the impacts will be devastating. Because of the reservation trust status, the federal government is responsible for the well-being of these people. Again, none of this comes from the kindness of your hearts … this is your obligation because of the treaties you signed with these tribes.
There is not enough land for very many of the people to be farmers and ranchers. They need significant investments to build an economy. That is your responsibility. Because of the many decades of cultural, social and psychological trauma, it will take massive investment in support services to result in improvements in people's lives. None of these efforts will be possible until the reservation has a thriving economy where people have financial security and stability. It will take very large investments of money, and it will also take some serious creativity, all of which is your responsibility.
A very large number of people from the tribes have served in our military. I would guess that there isn’t a community in America that has a larger percentage of its members serving in our armed forces. When I lived on the reservation, I knew many men and women who served during WWII. I knew people who served in Vietnam and in Korea. Many of them were exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. I have no doubt at all that this tradition has continued and that many of these people have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is beyond amazing that these people who we have so thoroughly shat upon could be among the most patriotic folks you are going to find in this country. They love this country.
As you go about cutting jobs for veterans, or taking away veteran’s services and benefits, and reducing the health benefits surrounding agent orange or the exposure to burn pits, you are putting their very lives at risk. And as you reduce veterans’ offices and support services around the country, you are going to limit their access to these services. You are going to very directly cause suffering to the people who have fought for this country. You are going to own all this suffering. To my knowledge, neither one of you has served in the military. I would think that might offer you some additional motivation not to totally screw these people, as it runs contrary to your public pronouncements about being great supporters of our service people.
Most of the people on the reservation get their food from the Department of Agriculture’s Commodity Food Program. There are others who rely on food stamps. Almost every pregnant woman and families with children under the age of five are depending on WIC. If you eliminate or reduce these programs, you are going to cause the same starvation that you caused when we killed the buffalo. If people get sick from the lack of nutrition or if they starve, YOU will own all of it.
Everyone on the reservation gets their medical care through the Indian Health Service (Public Health Service). There is an IHS hospital on the reservation and a clinic. They offer medical care, psychiatric care, rehabilitation therapy, dental, vision, and hearing, wellness care and vaccinations. If more advanced care is needed, people are sent to larger facilities, sometimes as far away as Utah or Washington to undergo surgeries or cancer treatment. All the buildings and the maintenance are supported by federal funds. The IHS covers all these services, because without it, the people would have no medical care. If you reduce these services or eliminate them, people will get sick and people will die. They have no alternatives. And if they do, YOU will own all of it.
The school buildings on the reservation were built with federal funds. Any additional building or maintenance comes from these funds. Administrators, teachers, librarians and aids are paid through federal funds. Any educational programs are supported by these funds. The HeadStart program is supported by these federal funds. There is a college on the reservation that is supported by these funds. People who want to go to a trade school or to college are supported by federal funds.
There is no tax base to support anything. If you reduce or eliminate any of these services, there will be no education for the people on the reservation and YOU will be responsible.
The BLM and Forestry Department provide most of the seasonal jobs on the reservation. The crews care for the forest in the mountains, they build and maintain roads and they have firefighting crews that travel across the country. Your Indian fire fighters are among the best in the country. If you reduce or eliminate any of these programs, you will have close to 100% unemployment of men during the spring, summer and fall. You will not only take away their incomes, you will also take away their dignity and sense of self-worth. You are experts at it, so I’m not holding my breath. But if you take away these programs, this is all on YOU.
The support of the tribal council, the planning offices and the law-and-order offices are all supported by federal programs and federal money. You can bring it all to a screeching halt by reducing or eliminating these programs. It would be a total disaster. And YOU would own all of it.
There are so many other programs that support seniors or provide subsidies for purchasing propane to heat people’s homes in the winter …. It goes on and on. If you are trying to imagine how all this works, please envision a huge umbilical cord between the reservation and the federal government. You control everything because that is the way you set it up. Changing it would require way more creativity, effort and resources than anyone has displayed in the past, but it isn’t too late to start. The reservation isn’t going anywhere, so you might want to start trying. Because it is your obligation! The reservation exists on an alphabet soup of federal government agencies, programs and funds. If you reduce or eliminate any of them, people will suffer. People who YOU are responsible for will suffer.
Why am I writing this? I have my own personal issues with you. While the president and his unelected billionaire buddy totally destroy our economy with their ignorance and greed, I am watching my retirement savings go down the toilet. And they are making all sorts of threatening statements about Social Security and Medicare. I’m 73 years old. I won’t live long enough to recover what you are destroying. If I have to spend my senior years living in a cardboard box under the Broad Street bridge, I’m going to be really pissed as I’ve been working since I was 14 years old.
I am totally freaked out about all the incredibly stupid and dangerous decisions and actions that have been made to isolate us internationally. You’ve relegated us to the axis of evil that hates us and wants to undermine our existence. You’ve done everything possible to cause nuclear proliferation – if I were from South Korea, Japan, Finland and every other country around the globe that we’ve betrayed, I’d sure be thinking about building up a nuclear stockpile as quickly as possible. We’ve isolated ourselves economically with the moron’s trade tariffs. I’m concerned about the next pandemic or how far behind we’re going to be in finding cures for diseases because we’re gutting medical research and our public health infrastructure.
And you have appointed and approved Larry, Curly and Moe as the directors of every major cabinet leadership position. If you wanted to destroy the government with ineptitude, you will have succeeded. None of these people have the kind of background or government experience to do their jobs. And you have ordered them to get rid of everyone in their departments who knows what they’re doing.
How many billionaires are concerned about the lives of Native Americans. The South African billionaire, (the richest man in the world) who told the Germans that they really need to get over the whole Holocaust guilt thing, who backs white nationalists the world over and who thinks the whites in South Africa are being discriminated against; how much is he going to care about Native Americans? Can’t imagine that he even thinks about them or knows they exist.
Trump is merely mentally ill, evil and a moron. He was considering the citizenship status of Native Americans a few weeks ago. That caused both alarm and amusement. That he was thinking about it in the context of rounding up illegal immigrants was the very height of irony, and the consummate reflection of his stupidity. Can you even imagine what this guy’s life would have been like if his daddy hadn’t given him $250 million. What was he thinking he was going to do? Round up all the Native Americans in the United States, put them onto C130s and fly them back to where they came from? Berringa is underwater. And because your ilk are not allowed to acknowledge climate change, the sea levels are moving in the opposite direction. I can’t imagine we will see Berringa ever again. How about we send all these people to Mongolia? We passed a law in 1924 to give all these people citizenship, and not a minute too soon. Could you please let the moron know the next time you are groveling before him.
There are not enough of our indigenous peoples to have the political power that is needed to cause all the changes that are necessary for their well being and their survival. I hope and pray that more and more of these people go to college, become brilliant lawyers and sue the crap out of you. If you are a Native American attorney, I would be happy to share my ideas with you. I don’t believe the Indian Claims Commission settled anything. You need to go after what is yours. They aren’t going to give you back America. But I would suggest starting with all the federal lands and national parks. And if you are on or from Fort Belknap, you need to go after that immoral notch on the southern border of the reservation and force the government to restore the mountains to the way they were before they were desecrated and made into a poisonous mound of toxic chemicals. I hope you are forcing them to clean up the water coming from the mountains.
These people need allies. I am going to try my best.
From my relationship with the people on Fort Belknap, I know that they are more than worth the effort. I’ve never met a more kind and generous people. We all need to care, and we all need to want to make a difference, because if we do the right thing, it is going to cost us a fortune.
The United States only recently (President Biden) apologized for the boarding school atrocities. That apology came unbelievably late, and words will never be enough. We owe these people so much more and better than what we have given them. We owe them dignity and we owe them a future, and all of that depends on YOU.
As a representative of the federal government, you absolutely own all of this. It will get better when you care to make it better. It will remain the same if you do nothing, and it will get much, much worse if you continue to do what you’ve been doing over the past couple of months.
Saving money by destroying these people’s lives so that you can give the billionaires a tax break is beyond shameful. It is immoral, unethical and it is illegal, because you have treaty obligations to these people. Do your job or get the hell out of the way, and we can elect someone who will.