So ISFFās post was saying indigenous Americans are not meaningfully oppressed and ābenefit from living in the imperial coreā despite being actively colonized, on the basis that some of them join the military and āa yank is a yankā.
It is incredibly racist to claim that the people who are being victimized by current domestic imperialism are āreaping the spoils of American imperialismā abroad.
The thing about the US is it doesnāt function with regard to Native Americans according to the Third-Worldism āimperial coreā paradigm (which BTW is a shit model that frames China and Russia as non-imperial and claims only Europe and the US can be imperial powers) because the US was a colony before it was independent, and its indigenous people were and remain colonized.
For them, they are not āin the imperial coreā in most meaningful ways, they are in a colony which has taken over their land, segregated them to tiny reservations, continues to fail to provide for basic human rights and support like clean water and basic security while allowing colonizers to commit violence against them on reservations without consequence because itās ānot their problemā if non-Native US citizens go onto reservations specifically because they know they can rape and murder women. Their lands were and are still being plundered for oil pipelines, coal trains, dams which cut off access to fishing, all sorts of shit.
Think the way Puerto Rico is functionally in a colony, or Guam, the āUS territoriesā. These are not groups of people who take land, take oil, take money from other countriesāthough they are sometimes forced to depend upon the leavings of what Americans have stolen and profited from, itās usually the worst and the dregs of these things, keeping locals in poverty and taking land for mainlanders to vacation in while giving people who live there basically no say in any of this despite some significantly-limited citizenship rights.
Native American nations are their own governments which are still bizarrely subject to both control from and neglect by the US, the much more powerful nation which exists all around them (in terms of attempts to grab their land, pushing private investor to build on it, etcāhence we have a āBureau of Indian Affairsā to manage relations between tribal nations and the US federal/state governments on which they are located).
Native Americans on reservations live within the bounds of the continental United States and hold dual US and tribal citizenships (they were the last group of Americans to get full voting rights BTWājust over 70 years agoābut have always been subject to our draft, you know, like colonial governments do to their colonized people). So for example someone who is DinĆ© could be a citizen of both the Navajo Nation and the United States of America, as well as a resident of the state of Arizona, because Navajo territory exists partly within Arizona (and therefore US) borders. But reservations under tribal governments are not āpart of the imperial coreā in any meaningful way. To say that they are is basically just saying Native nations/governments are illegitimate and āall just part of the USā which is about the most racist you can possibly get against Native Americansāechoing the original sin of treaty-breaking and territorial theft by British colonists. It is delegitimizing the very existence of these nations as nations with their own governments, laws and economies, however much the latter can be forcibly entwined with the American one in certain ways. It is literally denying indigenous sovereignty, period.
Tribal nations are not colonizing other places, starting foreign wars, and reaping the spoils of American empire of their own accord anything like the US is going, even if some members of them join the US military. That would be like saying British India was āan imperial core colonyā because Indians sometimes volunteered to fight in the British army. Itās nonsensical.
thank you for this very thourough breakdown on why she was wrong to say what she was saying (and since i havent seen any posts about her going back on what she said i assume she still stands by it).
