Of all the groups in the modern world Indians are best able to cope with the modern situation. To the non-Indian world, it does not appear that Indians are capable of anything. The flexibility of the tribal viewpoint enables Indians to meet devastating situations and survive. But this flexibility is seen as incompetency, so that as the non-Indian struggles in solitude and despair, he curses the Indian for not coveting the same disaster.” —Vine Deloria, Jr. We Talk, You Listen.
Nathan Phillips, Omaha Nation elder and Vietnam-era veteran, has become the most recent face of indigenous resistance in the present-day United States. As reported in multiple news outlets, Phillips was harassed by a group of white high school students wearing MAGA hats, an incident that was caught on video and has since gone viral on the internet.
Nathan Phillips, honoring his fellow soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery.
Phillips has been lauded as a hero and his recent experience, an example of “discourse in Trump’s America,” but what is also true is that he has been an activist in the arena of tribal sovereignty for a very long time. Phillips is former director of the Native Youth Alliance, served as a Water Protector in the DAPL standoff, and visits Arlington National Cemetery every Veterans Day to honor his fallen comrades.
He is in many ways the embodiment of the “tribal viewpoint” Standing Rock scholar and activist Vine Deloria, Jr. spoke of in his 1970 book, We Talk, You Listen. When faced with adversity, Deloria argued, the Native person invested with a tribal viewpoint not only stands up as a protector of land and community, but also as a teacher and healer, exposing the dominant society’s own “solitude and despair.”
When viewed against Mr. Phillips’ steadfast singing in the face of ridicule and the threat of physical violence, the students’ smirking and chanting (“Build that wall, build that wall”) is laid bare as a kind of whistling in the dark. Adrift in a world where they have no real roots or beliefs, these young people vent their hatred on those who hew to a deeper sense of belonging to this earth and its peoples. The ridiculousness of chanting about immigration to a Native American veteran seems to have been lost on these high schoolers and their would-be defenders, who here and there in comments sections of news reports claim the footage has been edited to put the young people in the worst possible light. In fact, expanded video clips of the scene show that Mr. Phillips had taken up his drum and began walking toward the young people and another group they had clashed with. He began to sing, as he said, “to sing a song to hopefully change something.”
“as the non-Indian struggles in solitude and despair, he curses the Indian for not coveting the same disaster.”
For his part, Nathan Phillips remains philosophical about the incident. Speaking to a reporter from the Washington Post, Phillips said, “That energy could be turned into feeding the people, cleaning up our communities and figuring out what else we can do, . . . We need the young people to be doing that instead of saying, ‘These guys are our enemies.’ ”
As Vine Deloria, Jr. said, “To the non-Indian world, it does not appear that Indians are capable of anything.” Yet here is Nathan Phillips standing up against bigotry alone, even as the senators, congressmen, and judges of the president’s party disappear into the woodwork of “plausible deniability” and a silent tolerance for hatred that has only served to encourage the misguidedness of young people like those Kentucky students who sought to belittle a man from whom they could learn a great deal.
Sources:
https://www.indianz.com/News/2019/01/19/video-omaha-elder-taunted-by-maga-youth.asp
