What Native American political systems can teach us about power and truth telling
My Choctaw ancestors understood the cost of lies.
When my father was born, he was not an American citizen. He was a Native American, the descendant of a people who had lived on this land for thousands of years. But until June 2, 1924, when the federal government bestowed citizenship on Native Americans, he was politically disenfranchised. He could not vote. He could not hold office. He could not help to determine his own future in his own homeland.
Many people are surprised to learn how late it was in America’s history when Indigenous people were finally able to exercise any political rights. The truth of America’s colonial past is that both Native Americans and enslaved Africans were denied access to political freedom. Their fates were determined by others behind closed political doors. Women were denied the right to vote until 1920. Enslaved men received the right to vote only after the Civil War, and even then, that right was harshly limited until after 1965. Native Americans had to wait until 1924, when it was assumed that they would soon become extinct, before they could go to the polls.
This historical fact, as unjust and unsettling as it is, has been largely hidden from the political consciousness of most Americans. It is an embarrassing truth for the land of the free and the home of the brave, so it is left out of the national story. Like many inconvenient truths, it is swept under the carpet of history. To see it clearly, it is necessary to examine the true relationship between political systems and the truths they seek to either embody or obscure.
