The left has romanticized and claimed guardianship over Native American peoples for years.
Anecdotally, most of us who know Native Americans know they can't stand it.
But now we are seeing a lot of instances of Native Americans pushing back at their cloying 'guardians' on the left who are starting to get overbearing.
Here's their latest outrage, according to Ethan Brown, writing at RealClearEnergy:
On June 2, the U.S. Department of the Interior blocked oil and gas leasing for the next twenty years within a ten-mile radius of Chaco Canyon — the site of a Puebloan civilization in now-northern New Mexico dating back over a millennium. Despite some support from people within the Pueblo tribes and Navajo Nation which surround the land, the vast majority of Navajo leaders have opposed these drilling restrictions.
It's their land. Why shouldn't they be able to develop it as they see fit? Why is it that Joe Biden and all his lackeys in government can't trust the Native Americans to keep the operation on reasonable environmental standards, conserve the Earth (people with ownership don't trash their own properties), and be able to earn money from it to serve their very large tribal family?
Maybe they don't want to be constantly in hock to the government for handouts because having their own money is better. Maybe they would like to raise their standard of living same as city people do. Maybe it's none of the government's business.
According to Brown, who apparently believes in global warming nonsense, but nevertheless has his heart in the right place, it is an economic matter:
Navajos are no stranger to climate change. The American Southwest is experiencing its worst drought in 1,200 years, and peer-reviewed research in Science found human-caused climate change accounted for 47% of 2000-2018 drought severity. Navajos have been hit especially hard — Navajos use 8-10 gallons of water per day (about a tenth of the average American), and 30% of Navajos have no running water.
So when they express opposition to a drilling ban on their land, we can trust they’ve weighed the pros and cons. Within the Navajo Nation, 35.8% of households have incomes below the federal poverty threshold, and about 10% live without electricity. The Chaco Canyon drilling ban would strip an energy source from the Navajo Nation, and could cost Navajos an estimated $194 million over the next two decades.
That's a lot of money for them to leave on the table so that white tourists can come to their lands and marvel at its natural beauty instead.
Brown goes into dreamy stuff about how climate activists are trying to co-opt them into win-win situations. Good luck with that. The bottom line here is that they own the land and can do with it what makes sense to them to do with it and if the United Nations doesn't like it, too bad. Autonomy means autonomy. The U.N. can go start its own tribe if it doesn't like it.
This is far from the first recent instance of the left stomping on Native American interests.
Most recently, Paiute tribal police in the West's high desert, known as the Nevada Rangers, took care of business when a bunch of pasty-skinned white environmentalists, the kind who glue their hands to art gallery floors, decided to mess with tribal land autonomy by blocking a highway.
Andrea Widburg wrote about what went down here.
That's another instance of Native American people having enough of these jackasses. The lefties were much surprised to find that tribal justice isn't quite the same as what they might find in a San Francisco courtroom.
Still another instance of Native Americans getting fed up with white liberals was in the recent case of Native Americans signing a massive petition, with some 300,000 names, calling for the restoration of the old-fashioned Washington Redskins team name. These Native Americans understand how team names go and that nobody names their teams after things they don't like. There are no teams with names like 'the skunks.' They name their teams after things they admire, things that are fierce, things that win, and that is why the Washington team ended up with the admittedly rough-sounding Redskins name that they understood the context of, something that is utterly opaque to snowflakes.
That's a lot of culture clashes around Native American peoples from Joe Biden and his army of lefties. When Native Americans complain about white supremacy, we all know who they are talking about because we don't like them any more than they do.
It rather suggests that Native American people may be coming over to the MAGA movement just as many Hispanics, blacks, and Asian-Americans have. It's noteworthy that Native Americans are traditionally Democrat voters, but it's been fairly interesting to see a few of the big Native American counties in Arizona going red in recent elections.
It would be nice to see a poll about how such things are going. They're starting to give MAGA vibes these days because Joe Biden and his white leftist army is just so odious.
Image: Twitter screen shot