Statement by Native Youth Ambassador Jordan Burkart:
“We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture,” said Rick Santorum.
Former United States Senator Rick Santorum’s comment on the lack of influence of Native American peoples on American culture is not only inaccurate, but deeply insulting and derogatory. First, Santorum does not realize that there is no set “American culture” in the United States because of the diversity of people and belief systems in America. Second, he neglects to recognize the contributions of Native people to the survival of Europeans when they first came to North America and were offered nutritious and medical benefits of the diverse types of plants and foods that had been cultivated by Native nations for thousands of years.
Santorum reinforces the white colonial narrative of manifest destiny in saying that “there was nothing here” prior to Europeans invading and stealing this land. He also stated that white-American culture was never influenced by Native American culture, which is inaccurate. White peoples’ stereotypical ideas of Native culture can typically be seen in everyday American life. In fact, these Native cultural stereotypes can be seen in pop culture; through racist mascots paraded by sports teams, movies such as Pocahontas depicting racist and sexist ideas of Native women, and in the ‘Native’ fashion trends where traditional patterns are stolen from various tribes in order to make a profit through cultural appropriation.
“We came here and created a blank slate. We birthed a nation from nothing,” said Santorum, displaying the colonial Manifest Destiny narrative he and many other white Americans maintain. Europeans invaded America, bringing death and destruction to thousands of Indigenous nations through massacres and disease, ultimately resulting in genocide. European Americans stole and continue to destroy our land, decimate and co-opt our languages, and culturally appropriate and stereotype our culture in an effort to make us invisible.
When speaking of ‘”faith and freedom,” Rick Santorum is talking about the faith and freedom a white man is privileged to have when benefiting from white supremacy. If people could freely practice their faith in the United States, people who practice Islamic and Jewish belief systems would not be the main targets of religious hate crimes today. If people could truly be free in America, BIPOC children would not be locked up in cages, Black people would not be murdered by the police, and the annihilation of Native American cultures never would have happened in the first place.
