American Indians deliver blistering statement asking CNN to fire Rick Santorum

The National Congress of American Indians’ (NCAI) president, Fawn Sharp, released an official response to Santorum’s grotesquerie. She did not hold anything back. Sharp began her statement by saying she would cut to the quick: “Rick Santorum is an unhinged and embarrassing racist who disgraces CNN and any other media company that provides him a platform. Televising someone with his views on Native American genocide is fundamentally no different than putting an outright Nazi on television to justify the Holocaust.” The Native American Journalists Association came out with a statement that “strongly cautions Native American and Alaska Native reporters from working with, or applying to jobs, at CNN in the wake of continued racist comments and insensitive reporting directed at Indigenous people.” They also called for CNN to immediately dismiss Santorum, saying this was an issue of accountability and ethics in journalism.

Nick Estes, host of the Red Nation podcast and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe, wrote that this is not the first time CNN has “espoused anti-Indigenous racism” He cited different cases of on-air misidentifications and erasures in the network’s news reporting and pointed out that part of what is at stake here is our country’s ability to fully reckon with its history:

Although the United States quickly accuses other nations of genocide, it hasn’t acknowledged its own genocide against Indigenous people. To affirm it would mean to take measures to prevent it from happening again. That would mean halting ongoing theft and destruction of Indigenous lands, cultures and nations. A process of justice would have to follow suit. An entire legal order that underpins the backwards racist views and practices towards Indigenous people would have to be overturned. Indigenous land and political rights would have to be restored. A savage nation built of untold violence would have to be finally civilized and make amends with the people and nations it has attempted to destroy. After all the elimination of Indigenous nations was not only about taking the land, it was also about destroying an alternative – a world based on making and being in good relations versus that of a racialized class system based on property and conquest. 

People like Santorum don’t just simplify history in a racist way because it suits them and dealing with the messy complications of history are too difficult for their little brains to manage. They oversimplify things in the most racist way possible because ultimately they believe that their small identity is the only worthwhile story to tell, and anything that adds even the tiniest bit of moral complexity to their lives threatens to tear apart the fabric of how they see the world. And they are not wrong. Their moral superiority, like almost any construct of moral superiority, is paper thin, and with under-developed theocrats like Santorum, the term “faith” has less to do with having faith in a Judeo-Christian God and more to do with having “faith” in not thinking about why the world is unequal.

You can read the entire statement from NCAI President Fawn Sharp below:

Before I correct the record, let me address Rick Santorum directly without mincing words: Rick Santorum is an unhinged and embarrassing racist who disgraces CNN and any other media company that provides him a platform. Televising someone with his views on Native American genocide is fundamentally no different than putting an outright Nazi on television to justify the Holocaust. Any mainstream media organization should fire him or face a boycott from more than 500 Tribal Nations and our allies from across the country and worldwide.

Make your choice. Do you stand with White Supremacists justifying Native American genocide, or do you stand with Native Americans?

To correct the record, what European colonizers found in the Americas were thousands of complex, sophisticated, and sovereign Tribal Nations, each with millennia of distinct cultural, spiritual and technological development. Over millennia, they bred, cultivated and showed the world how to utilize such plants as cotton, rubber, chocolate, corn, potatoes, tomatoes and tobacco. Imagine the history of the United States without the economic contributions of cotton and tobacco alone. It’s inconceivable.

As far as contributions to American culture, it is impossible to capture the significant influences from individuals with Native ancestry. How do you quantify the impact of Will Rogers in film and popular culture? Maria Tallchief, the country’s first major prima ballerina? How do you ignore Olympic gold medalists like Jim Thorpe and Billy Mills, who changed sports forever? How ignorant do you have to be not to realize the impact of Native American art on every imaginable facet of American culture, from architecture to furniture making to painting, sculpture, and writing?

But most importantly, how can anyone ignore what is arguably the single most important philosophical development of human history: environmentalism. The very concept of man as but one animal within a complex ecosystem, needing to live in harmony with nature and sustainably use natural resources. No idea is more fundamentally Native American and more explicitly spread by Native American peoples. There would be no National Park system without Native American influence.

Suppose we have a prayer of confronting climate change and centuries of selfish destruction of our planet. In that case, it is due to the wisdom of leaders like Tecumseh, Chief Seattle, Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull and so many others burning into the minds and hearts of generations of American citizens until it finally changes the way people look at the entire world.

Hopefully, sophisticated and humane Native American philosophy will win out over the caveman mentality of people like Rick Santorum. Then the survival of the human race itself will be one more contribution that Native Americans made to the world.”