Waziyatawin on President Obama and the difference between racism and colonialism

As an indigenous person from occupied territory in Minnesota, Obama fever has eluded me. In fact, I find little in Obama’s rhetoric or proposed policies that indicate his presidency will be substantially different from the long list of white guys who have occupied the office before him.

My hope for the future, then, does not stem from my belief that President Obama will address the ongoing denial of freedom to indigenous peoples within our own homelands. Indeed, while many Americans are celebrating what they perceive as a victory over racism in the election of a black man to the White House, my only hope concerning his election is that it will clearly elucidate the difference between racism and colonialism in America.

As he invokes the memory of America’s founding fathers and refers to Americans as the “heirs of those early patriots,” he reminds indigenous peoples that America was built at our expense. We paid the price of America’s nationhood with our blood, our lands, and our resources. America lives because indigenous populations were exterminated and dispossessed of much that was dear to us.

WAZIYATAWIN, GRANITE FALLS, MINN.; RESEARCH CHAIR, INDIGENOUS GOVERNANCE PROGRAM, UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA

Waziyatawin Angela Wilson is a Wahpetunwan Dakota from the Pezihutazizi Otunwe (Yellow Medicine Village) in southwestern Minnesota. She received her Ph.D. in American history from Cornell University in 2000 and spent seven years teaching in the history department at Arizona State University. After earning tenure and an associate professorship at ASU, she left the academy in 2007 to work as an independent scholar.

Waziyatawin’s interests include projects centering around Indigenous decolonization strategies such as truth-telling and reparative justice, the recovery of Indigenous knowledge, and the development of liberation ideology in Indigenous communities. She is currently living, working and writing on her home reservation with her husband and three children.